Category: History

Coronapanic five years ago at Penn State

by philg

A reminder that exactly five years ago, the police in Pennsylvania were hunting for college kids who committed the crime of assembly (formerly a “right” protected by the First Amendment). From Life on campus during the plague:

At the same time, the students were reminded “It is better to report someone who’s innocent than to not report someone who’s guilty.” (context: sexual assault, though it is unclear how a sexual assault might occur among students who were following the college’s coronapanic dictates).

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The death of two Harvard undergraduates, William Cowper Boyden III and William Stanley North III

by philg

It’s the Day of the Dead for our neighbors in Mexico.

While cleaning up my mother’s possessions, I found a correspondence between my late father, apparently a friend of William Cowper Boyden III, and the young Mr. Boyden’s father. I couldn’t find much on the Web regarding the sad December 22, 1955 death of two young Harvard men, but the Crimson obliquely referred to them having been killed in a car accident:

The William Cowper Boyden III Scholarship and the William Stanley North III Scholarship, set up in memory of two College students killed while driving home for Christmas vacation, has a combined endowment of over $25,000.

I found the letters interesting because it seemed unlikely that a younger-than-average Jewish scholarship student like my dad (he skipped at least the last year of high school) would have been friends with anyone from such a well-established family, but also for the style of pre-email pre-ChatGPT correspondence. It’s also sad because so little trace is left of these two men.

19560110-bill-boyden-deathDownload
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Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, Maine

by philg

Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day to those who celebrate. In the spirit of the holiday, here are some photos from the Abbe Museum, which is devoted to telling the story of the Wabanaki to anyone willing to pay $18:

Note that a person who is able-bodied and able-minded but who chooses to refrain from work gets in free via his/her/zir/their SNAP/EBT card. The person with a developmental or intellectual disability, however, is charged $16. The museum admits in various places that it occupies stolen land and, to their credit, admits the rightful owners for free (“Tribal ID” is required so Elizabeth Warren would be excluded).

Masks were encouraged on June 10, 2025. Note the fine Maine summer weather (50 degrees and rain/mist all day):

Inside the museum, roughly half of the visitors took the mask encouragement to heart (“to lungs”?), though I also observed a couple of ceremonial chin diapers. In a victory for common sense, a family visiting had 100 percent mask coverage rather than one member wearing a mask and then becoming infected by the non-masked members after returning home.

Two out of three masked in the photo below:

Here’s a Land Acknowledgement, which also informs via Science that the “Native communities [] have lived here for thousands of generations” (even with a Palestinian rate of reproduction, it is tough to understand how “thousands of generations” can fit into the 13,000 years that archaeologists say is how long people have lived in Maine):

And a statement about genocide and decolonization:

Nobody seems to like the idea of giving the land back to its rightful owners and paying rent.

The men’s room was ready for Tim Walz’s visit:

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New York Times offers a new immigrant-rich history of jet engines

by philg

“The U.S. Deported This Chinese Scientist, in a Decision That Changed World History” (New York Times, May 30, 2025):

In 1950, though it didn’t know it yet, the American government held one of the keys to winning the Cold War: Qian Xuesen, a brilliant Chinese rocket scientist who had already transformed the fields of aerospace and weaponry. In the halls of the California Institute of Technology and M.I.T., he had helped solve the riddle of jet propulsion and developed America’s first guided ballistic missiles.

The immigrant invented the jet engine, then? The Wikipedia history of the jet engine credits various English and European engineers, notably Frank Whittle, with most of the “riddle-solving” work done more than 20 years prior to 1950.

I wonder how many more years it will be before all textbooks relate a history of science and technology in which all innovations are from migrants, the 2SLGBTQQIA+, women, and Engineers of Color.

Below, Qian Xuesen’s Gloster Meteor.

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General MacArthur in Manila 1945 and Israel in Gaza today

by philg

I’m been reading The Battle of Manila: Poisoned Victory in the Pacific War (Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College; published 2025 by Oxford University Press (i.e., a military work from a publisher in a country that can’t defend its own border)).

The loss of the Philippines in the first place was due to incompetence, similar to how Japanese success at Pearl Harbor was due to incompetence (failure to heed a radar warning of planes inbound from the NW). Having squeezed and provoked Japan, the U.S. expected attacks in Asia and yet the Japanese caught the Americans by surprise:

Recalled to active duty as the United States was on the verge of war, MacArthur wanted to defend the entire archipelago. “We are going to make it so very expensive for any nation to attack these islands that no one will try it,” he explained. On the first day of the war, the Japanese caught the air forces under his command on the ground and destroyed them. MacArthur then attempted to defend the entire island of Luzon. While his men did well tactically—fighting the Japanese to a standstill—their supplies were in the wrong positions, which sealed their fate as they retreated into the cul-de-sac that was the Bataan Peninsula.

The decision to fight in 1945 to take back the Philippines might also be said to have been an example of American military incompetence. Most of the senior officers wanted to ignore the Philippines and capture Formosa (present-day Taiwan) instead as a more useful base for bombing and invading Japan (USNI article). The Philippines would have been freed from Japanese rule in August 1945 when Japan unconditionally surrendered, though of course it was tough to know that in late 1944.

The book is about the fight for one city, Manila, and as such there are some parallels to the present-day fighting in Gaza. What the two battles have in common:

  • a mostly urban environment
  • the majority of people in the environment were/are not soldiers
  • the army trying to take the city (US in 1945; IDF today) was trying to minimize the number of non-soldiers killed
  • the army defending the city was indifferent to the number of non-soldiers killed and/or actually trying to increase the number of non-soldiers killed

The differences:

  • the non-soldiers of Manila were hostile to the defending army (Japan) and, in fact, was an organized guerilla force against the army whereas the non-soldiers of Gaza are fervent supporters of the defending army
  • the army attacking Manila (US) was trying to minimize damage to buildings and other infrastructure
  • the army attacking Manila (US) wasn’t trying to feed the army defending Manila (Japan) and, in many cases, defenders had to surrender or commit suicide because they’d run out of food and/or water

The book reminds us that war is most glorious when seen in the rearview mirror:

One of the great myths of World War II is that the American public immediately rallied to the cause after Pearl Harbor. The truth is that men had to be drafted, and they did not want to be in either the Army or the Philippines. Willard Higdon was honest about his motivations: “I was 27 yrs old, with a wife and a 5 yr. old dtr. I did not want to go.”

The Japanese actually weren’t that excited about owning the Philippines:

The main reason for their invasion in 1941 and 1942 was geopolitical. The Philippines had few natural resources that the Japanese economy required. What they wanted was to drive the Americans out of the western Pacific and, once that was done, they wanted to liquidate their commitment to the Philippines quickly. The Japanese had little interest in turning the archipelago into a Japanese colony.

The enemy doesn’t always cooperate with one’s plans…

Even as late as February 5 [the battle was February 3-March 3], MacArthur had no plan for an urban battle. “I do not believe anybody expected the Japs to make a house-to-house defense of Manila,” Eichelberger told his wife. The general belief—at MacArthur’s headquarters, at Krueger’s headquarters, and with the press—was that the Japanese would evacuate without a fight. Thirty years later, when he sat down to write his memoirs, Chase could not understand why anyone had made this assumption. “It was counter to everything the Nips had done in previous campaigns.”

The U.S. had almost no experience with the kind of fighting that was to ensue:

Other than some short operations in World War I and a few in the European theater, the last time Americans had fought in cities had been in 1864 and 1865 with the battles of Atlanta and Richmond. There are seven major characteristics of urban warfare. The first is that artificial terrain features constrain and channel movement. Buildings become significant geographical objectives. Roads direct advances in certain directions. Both can be barriers. Depending on the material used in their construction, they might be quite vulnerable to military action or quite impervious. Some weapons have better utility than others in the city, and these issues often influence tactics. Another feature is that ground operations are compressed and decentralized. Engagements are between small, tactical units—squads, platoons, companies—for small, geographic objects—a room, a building, or a city block. A third factor is that combat usually becomes three-dimensional. Soldiers fight ground operations as in any other form of ground combat, but they also advance and fight in sewers and blast holes through basement walls. They also have to fight an opponent that might control the floor of a building immediately above or below them, and they might move from rooftop to rooftop. City combat always consumes more time than other forms of fighting. This factor is relative, though. How slow is slow? The month-long fight for Manila was significant compared to other ground operations fought in the Pacific, but nothing compared to the eight-month-long struggle for Stalingrad or the twenty-eight-month-long siege of Leningrad. A fifth factor in urban warfare is the presence of civilians. There are always non-combatant deaths in urban operations and their presence requires some effort at stability operations afterward, but sometimes also during the period of active combat. Civilians can be assets or liabilities when it comes to intelligence gathering, as both the Americans and Japanese would learn. The ready influence of the media is another factor. Cities by their very nature are media centers and always have resident journalists. Since urban areas are also important population, political, economic, financial, cultural, religious, trade, and transportation centers, their fate attracts the interest of reporters. A final dynamic of urban warfare is the outsized ramification of its outcomes. Location matters, and cities are always more important than undeveloped countryside, and engagements for their control have more influence than engagements in isolated areas. Each of these would be in play in Manila.

As in the Gaza fighting, the army trying to take the city owns the airspace:

The US forces also had total air superiority, and piper cub observation planes loitered over the city looking for targets.

(Note failure to capitalize Piper Cub!)

A civilian population that does not support the defending army makes a city tough to defend:

The Japanese were well aware that the Filipinos on Luzon were welcoming the Americans enthusiastically. They resented this and they had orders—which they implemented willingly—to make the Manileños pay. The Battle of Manila was defined by the methodical targeting of the civilian population. The Japanese historian Hayashi Hirofumi has argued, given where most of the incidents took place, that the majority of these killings were done by the Imperial Japanese Army.1 Their orders, though, came from Rear Admiral Iwabuchi Sanji. He made the determination that there was no difference between Filipino guerrillas and civilians. “When the enemy invaded Manila, the citizens were welcoming the enemy well and disrupted all of our fighting action,” he reported. “The number of citizens is estimated to be about seven hundred thousand, but on the front line north of the Pasig River between 3 and 5 February, the general public carried out the following guerrilla activities: communicate with U.S. troops before our attacks, shoot our soldiers, and report our locations to U.S. troops. As a result, our surprise attack was infeasible, and many of our troops were unable to achieve their objectives.”2 The attitude that all Filipinos were the enemy was widespread among the Japanese defenders. Taguchi Hiroshi, a Navy aviation mechanic who became a prisoner of war, explained to U.S. Army investigators in late March: “The enlisted men in the lower ranks, believed that, since the Filipinos indicated that they were cooperative toward Americans in their attitude and had ill feeling toward the Japanese, because prices of food and other articles during the period when we occupied the Philippines went very high . . . , higher officials ordered the destruction of Manila and the Filipinos.”

Some locals were more creative than others…

“The real heroines at San Agustin were the prostitutes, they were the ones that helped,” Gisbert declared. The Japanese had concentrated them in the Intramuros. Gisbert guessed that their numbers were in the hundreds. They were willing to serve as nurses. They were also quite good at scrounging. They could acquire clean linen, or whisky, which Gisbert used as anesthesia. All of which suggests that they had a way of influencing Japanese supply officers.

Even as American soldiers were getting killed, MacArthur refused to let them fight effectively (i.e., by using artillery) because he doesn’t want his former home trashed:

The general was genuinely horrified by what was unfolding in Manila, and seemingly unable to process it. “MacArthur was shattered by the holocaust,” Lieutenant Paul P. Rogers, the headquarters typist, observed. Everything he had done to spare Manila in 1941 was being undone by his own troops, and the major coup of taking the city intact with its port facilities undamaged was falling apart in front of him. Admitting to that kind of setback was not in him. Suddenly the general and his command had a vested interest in making sure there was as little coverage of Manila—positive or negative—as possible. A press report that declared, “Manila is dying” set him off. MacArthur ordered Diller to block any usage of that phrase. He also ordered the units under his command to refrain from using artillery in the city. “That was most unlike the General, who prided himself on winning victories with minimum loss of life,” Diller recalled.

Eventually the subordinate officers wear MacArthur down:

He appointed a three-man committee to talk with MacArthur about the artillery restrictions. After listening to the three, MacArthur, despite his vehement and emotional initial response changed course completely. His subordinates were making it clear that they were not only taking heavy losses, but at rates they could not sustain. With reporters now in the mix, he could ignore that consideration only so long. He removed all the limits on both the artillery and on the media. His public relations man was happy: “They did start using artillery, and it all worked out just exactly the way I wanted it to.” The removal of restrictions on artillery was the third major event that shaped the battle for Manila. Despite their reputation as being a bunch of “yes men,” the staff had pushed back against the general and gotten him to reverse himself. Robert S. Beightler was happy with this decision: “From this point on, we really went to town.” Beightler was advocating any means which he believed would speed up the tempo of combat and save both American and Filipino lives. After the battle ended, he reported to Krueger: “the fantastic defenses of small pockets of resistance which had been isolated required the employment of all available weapons.” Some of this argument is rather weak. The infantry used indirect fire as a crutch to avoid close combat. The problem: it resulted in the deaths of thousands of civilians. Figuring the exact numbers killed in Manila is a tricky business. It seems

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When a rogue president defied the Supreme Court

by philg

I think that we can all agree that our democracy would be at an end if a president were to defy the Supreme Court. Has it ever happened? I asked ChatGPT. Here are some snippets:

In the early 1930s, FDR removed the U.S. from the gold standard and invalidated gold clauses in both public and private contracts. These clauses had allowed creditors to demand payment in gold, insulating them from inflation.

The Supreme Court heard several consolidated cases, the most famous being Perry v. United States, which challenged the government’s abrogation of gold clauses in government bonds.

There was press speculation that FDR might defy the Court if it ruled against him, especially since the stakes were so high for the administration’s economic agenda.

In a narrow 5-4 ruling, the Court upheld the government’s position, essentially avoiding a constitutional crisis.

Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes wrote the majority opinion in Perry v. United States, holding that while the government’s action was technically unconstitutional, the plaintiff had not suffered a legally redressable loss.

Yes, Franklin D. Roosevelt did prepare a contingency speech in the event that the Supreme Court ruled against him in the 1935 gold clause cases, particularly Perry v. United States.

The speech was drafted in anticipation of the Supreme Court potentially striking down his policies on invalidating gold clauses.

In this prepared address, FDR was ready to assure the public that he would not allow the economic system to collapse, even if it meant ignoring the Court’s ruling. The draft included language that strongly implied he would defy the decision.

According to historical sources, including William Leuchtenburg’s writings and Henry Morgenthau’s diaries, the speech essentially framed any contrary Court ruling as a threat to national survival, and FDR positioned himself as the defender of the people’s economic security over rigid constitutional formalism.

Here’s a paraphrase of the key idea from that draft speech:

If the Supreme Court were to rule that the government must repay debts in gold, then the administration would have no choice but to protect the nation’s economy by refusing to comply—suggesting a potential constitutional crisis.

Henry Morgenthau Jr., FDR’s Treasury Secretary, kept detailed diaries. In entries from January 1935, he discusses FDR’s draft speech and concerns about the Supreme Court decision. These diaries are held at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and are available digitally. Look for entries in January–February 1935 regarding the gold clause litigation.

Secondary source: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 by William E. Leuchtenburg:

“[FDR] had even prepared a radio address for the evening of the day the Supreme Court ruled, asserting that the government would defy the Court if it invalidated the gold policy. But the Court, by a narrow margin, spared him the necessity.”

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Did Albert Einstein ever say anything about empathy?

by philg

Loosely related to Which explorer called the Gulf of Mexico/America the Golfo de Florida? …

David Levitt, a Marvin Minsky PhD student at MIT 40 years ago, posted the following meme on his Facebook feed:

It struck me as odd that Einstein, who died in 1955, would have written or said anything on the subject of “empathy”, a term that has only recently come into vogue as a personal bragging point (“I’m empathetic and you support genocide; #FreePalestine”). Being a horrible person without an AI assist, of course I couldn’t resist commenting with Einstein’s well-documented writing “It would be a pity if these Chinese supplant all other races. For the likes of us the mere thought is unspeakably dreary.” (from 1922-23 diaries), presenting this in a positive light as an inspiration to Harvard University’s admissions office. And I noted that even our AI overlords couldn’t find any source for Einstein having said “Empathy is patiently and sincerely seeing the world through the other person’s eyes”. David responded with a clickbait quote web page, which itself did not cite any source, as proof that Einstein had opined on empathy. (Of course, since those who advocate for diversity can’t tolerate viewpoint diversity, he subsequently defriended me.)

Now I’m curious… did Einstein ever write or say anything on the subject of a working definition of empathy, as in the meme? Most of Einstein’s writings are online, e.g., at https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/, so one would think that ChatGPT would have consumed them. In fact, however, ChatGPT can’t find any instance of Einstein using the term “sincerely” except in closing a letter with “Yours sincerely”. This makes sense to me because bragging about one’s superior fund of sincerity is also a relatively recent phenomenon.

David Levitt has a Ph.D. from MIT. This member of the credentialed elite accepted a combination of meme and clickbait quote web page as proof that a historical event (Einstein writing or saying something) actually occurred. In the bad old days, by contrast, middle school kids were taught that they couldn’t use an encyclopedia as a source. Teachers demanded that they find a primary reference so as to avoid accepting a misattribution. What is a reasonable definition of historical truth in an age where we have an arms race between people with computer assistance putting out falsehoods (possibly just for clicks/ad revenue) and people training LLMs? If Grok says that something didn’t happen can we be more confident in that than in Wikipedia, for example? Are LLMs sufficiently skeptical to cut through what’s produced by all of the cleverest Internet content developers? Or are we doomed to lose access to historical facts? In fifty years will the remnant humans left alive by Skynet believe memes in which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. praises rule by AI?

Separately, never forgot that Albert Einstein is justly famous as a science writer for popularizing the work of physicist Mileva Marić (photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and special relativity, for example). Even if Einstein never wrote or talked about empathy, that doesn’t take away the credit he deserves for his work in assisting Ms. Marić with publishing her research.

The “Capt. Gilbert” quote might be genuine. How about the Hannah Arendt quote? She died in 1975, decades before the Empathy Boom among Democrats. ChatGPT:

No, Hannah Arendt did not say, “The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.”

This quote is often misattributed to her, but there’s no verified source—none of her writings, interviews, or lectures—where she says or writes this exact line.

Finally, let’s look at the Elon Musk quote, taken from a conversation with Joe Rogan (bold highlights are my own potential excerpts to capture the spirit of the Musk-Rogan conversation):

Musk: There’s a guy who posts on X who’s great, Gad Saad?

Rogan: Yeah, he’s a friend of mine. He’s been on the podcast a bunch of times.

Musk: Yeah, he’s awesome, and he talks about, you know, basically suicidal empathy. Like, there’s so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself. So, we’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on. And it’s like, I believe in empathy, like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for, for civilization as a whole, and not commit to a civilizational suicide.

Rogan: Also don’t let someone use your empathy against you so they can completely control your state and then do an insanely bad job of managing it and never get removed.

Musk: The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. So, I think, you know, empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot.

Rogan: Right, understand when empathy has been actually used as a tool.

Musk: Yes, like, it’s weaponized empathy is the issue.

I, of course, will never see eye-to-eye with Elon Musk on the issue of whether every vehicle should have sliding doors… #LongLiveHondaOdyssey

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Book review: The Siege

by philg

If you’re looking for a new book to read that provides some historical context for current events, The Siege (Ben Macintyre, 2024) might be a reasonable choice. It’s about a spring 1980 takeover of the Iranian embassy in London. Why did an Iranian Arab (more on that below) and his Palestinian friends decide that was rational to take hostages?

The plan was undoubtedly risky, but terrorist hostage-taking could yield spectacular results, and there was a precedent. Five years earlier, the Venezuelan terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, known as Carlos the Jackal, led a group of pro-Palestinian militants, the Arm of the Arab Revolution, in an assault on a meeting of OPEC leaders in Vienna. They took more than sixty hostages and killed three people. Ramírez Sánchez threatened to kill a hostage every fifteen minutes unless the Austrian authorities read a communiqué on the radio and television networks every two hours. After complex negotiations and a two-day standoff, the authorities agreed to broadcast the terrorists’ statement, and allowed the gunmen to fly to sanctuary in Algeria and Libya, having secured a large ransom and global publicity for the Palestinian cause. All the terrorists and hostages walked away. The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes Against Internationally Protected Persons subsequently forbade granting safe passage to anyone killing, kidnapping, or attacking a diplomatic official, but, in practice, governments were prepared to negotiate. The assault on the Iranian Embassy was directly modeled on the OPEC siege. For reasons both symbolic and practical, London was selected as the ideal target. Many Iranian Arabs held Britain responsible for their plight: the British government had supported the semi-independent sheikhdom of Arabistan before switching allegiance to Reza Shah in 1925. The group would pass unnoticed among London’s large Middle Eastern population. “British police are not armed,” the Fox assured Towfiq. “They will not attack you.” London was packed with journalists and other members of media organizations, domestic and international, who were not controlled by the government. News coverage would be huge. With his command of English, Towfiq would manage negotiations with the police and the press.

In other words, the West’s previous accommodation of hostage-takers led to additional hostage taking. (Towfiq and the Palestinians circa 1980 probably never imagined that hostage takers would become the most celebrated folks on Ivy League campuses, though!)

The root cause of the 1980 siege seems to be that much of Iran’s oil is underneath a part of a Iran that traditionally contained no Iranians.

The region abutting the Persian Gulf known to its Arab inhabitants as Arabistan, or Ahwaz (which is also the name of the region’s capital), was once the center of an ancient civilization. The majority of its inhabitants are Arabs, Shia Muslims, but they are ethnically distinct from the Aryans of Iran, or Persia, as it was traditionally known (“Iran” is the Farsi word for “Land of the Aryans”). By the mid-nineteenth century, the region had been absorbed into Persia, but its sheikhs enjoyed semi-independence from Tehran. When the shah’s father, Reza Shah Pahlavi, took power (with British backing) in 1925, he set about “Persianizing” the region, a policy his son intensified: Farsi replaced Arabic as the official language, Iranian nationalists settled in the thousands, and senior official positions were filled by Farsi-speaking Persian Iranians. The province was renamed Khuzestan, an Iranian name. Arab opposition was suppressed. This Persianizing policy was motivated by power politics and ethnic prejudice but mostly by greed: for beneath the region’s desert sands bubbled a vast ocean of oil. Had fate dealt differently with the region, it might have become another Gulf oil state, like Qatar or Kuwait, with a small Arab population, and a lot of money. Instead, its oil riches bankrolled the shahs, exploited in concert with the British, then with the Americans. The expensive rugs and chandeliers in Iran’s London embassy were paid for with Khuzestan’s oil. At the height of the shah’s power, some five million barrels were being exported from the province daily, about one-tenth of the world’s entire oil trade.

The Arabs of Arabistan supported the replacement of the Shah by the Ayatollah Khomeini and the establishment of an Islamic Republic, but ended up disappointed.

Most of his fellow Arabs were illiterate, Towfiq complained, workhorses made to toil for their Iranian bosses: “We are very rich in resources, but it is taken away from Arabistan.” Only a handful of Arabs worked in the Iranian civil service; no Arab rose above the rank of captain in the armed forces. Fascinated by foreign culture, hungry for learning, Towfiq won a place to study English language and literature at the University of Tehran. “I am a rare case,” he said. “Out of four million people, we are only four thousand university graduates.” There he eagerly joined the students demonstrating against the shah.

But the ayatollah was no more willing than the shah to countenance self-government for oil-rich Khuzestan. Arabs were not the only ethnic minority agitating for greater self-determination. Kurds, Turkmens, Azeris, and Baluchis all sought to loosen Tehran’s grip, some by democratic means, others through violence. If the Arabs won autonomy, other groups would demand the same, threatening the very integrity of the country. “The new leaders forgot all their promises,” said Towfiq. The ayatollah clamped down on the Arabs, just as the shah had done.

Saddam Hussein, de facto ruler of Iraq since 1968 and president since 1979, spotted an opportunity in the unrest. A secular nationalist with pretensions to lead the Arab world, Saddam saw Iran’s aggressive new theocracy as a threat to his power and ambitions. Inciting rebellion among the Arabs of neighboring Khuzestan was an easy and cheap way to undermine the ayatollah and destabilize Iran, while also demonstrating Saddam’s credentials as an Arab champion. Bands of Iranian Arabs were trained in Iraq, armed, and sent back across the border to attack police stations, military checkpoints, roads, bridges, and above all the oil pipelines carrying Iran’s economic lifeblood. These Arab guerrillas saw themselves as fighters for independence, but they were dependent on Saddam Hussein, pawns cynically manipulated by the Iraqi leader for his own ends.

The conflict was racial as well as political, an ethnic confrontation between indigenous Arabs and Farsi-speaking Iranians introduced by the shahs to Persianize the region. Iranian militiamen flown in from Tehran roamed the streets in search of insurgents. Some fought back. Armed Arabs attacked a naval base, the central police station, government buildings, and shops. Three days of street fighting left 220 people dead and 600 wounded. The ayatollah’s secret police, the successors to SAVAK and no less vicious, set about hunting down Arab activists, many of whom were tried in hastily convened Revolutionary Courts and summarily executed. Ayatollah Sheikh Muhammad-Taher al-Khaqani, spiritual leader of the region’s Arabs and Khomeini’s former teacher, was arrested, along with hundreds of others. Those who escaped fled to Iraq or went into hiding.

The British have to figure out what to do, difficult since they didn’t have a significant stake in the fight and the European track record of dealing with Arab/Muslim terrorists wasn’t great:

In 1972, Palestinian terrorists of the Black September group seized Israeli athletes during the Munich Olympic Games. The West German handling of that incident had been a disaster, ending in the deaths of all the hostages and most of the terrorists.

Looking at the UK today, it’s tough to imagine that Margaret Thatcher ever existed, but of course she did.

As always, Thatcher made her opinions abundantly clear: she had “no intention of allowing terrorists to succeed in their hostage-taking,” as she wrote in her memoirs. “This was no less an attempt to exploit perceived Western weakness than was the hostage-taking of the American Embassy personnel in Tehran.” The Iron Lady was not for turning, in this or any other way, and her mind was already made up. “My policy would be to do everything possible to resolve the crisis peacefully, without unnecessarily risking the lives of the hostages, but above all that terrorism should be—and should be seen to be—defeated.” In any case, the gunmen were demanding something she could not deliver: the release of political prisoners in another, hostile country. The terrorists, whoever they were and whatever the eventual outcome, had committed a crime on British soil, and would be tried under English law.

Thatcher is just the sort of person to call in the SAS (Special Air Service) and a lot of the book covers the glorious history, training, and capabilities of the SAS (tough to imagine today given that the UK has been conquered without a shot having been fired).

The book goes into a lot of detail about the evolution of the relationship among five groups of people (1) hostage takers, (2) Iranian diplomats, (3) Iranian employees of the embassy who weren’t necessarily passionate about the Islamic regime, (4) visitors to the embassy, e.g., from Syria and Pakistan, (5) a few white British people. Most of them can find common ground in shared hatred of Israel/Jews and the hostage takers begin to soften when they realize that, with a couple of exceptions, the hostages aren’t tightly coupled to the new Islamic government in Iran.

Without giving too much of the story away, let me highlight that at least one of the hostage takers survived and was imprisoned.

Nejad was finally released in 2008, having served twenty-seven years. In Iran, he still faced murder charges for the deaths of Lavasani and Samadzadeh. Tehran gave no assurances he would not be tortured and executed if repatriated. He was therefore allowed to remain in the UK, a decision described by Iran as “condemnable and indefensible.” Fowzi Nejad now lives in the UK.

In other words, British law requires that the British welcome as a neighbor a foreigner who was convicted of one of the most spectacular crimes in modern British history. Prior to the siege of the embassy, he had never been to the UK. He traveled to the UK only to commit the crime of taking hostages. He never claimed to have any affinity for British culture, other than its perceived softness on terrorists, or the British people.

More: Read The Siege.

Arabistan/Kuzestan:

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Melrose High School Class of 1951

by philg

I found my mom’s Melrose High School Class of 1951 25th reunion newsletter and scanned it. The high school today is ranked #1,568 in the nation (among public high schools) and #60 in Maskachusetts.

My favorite excerpt from what is presumably a 1976 document is “then I became a baby factory putting out a new model almost every year”:

It looks like nearly everyone who wanted to go to what are today considered elite colleges managed to get in. The former high schoolers talk about graduating from University of California, Cornell, Colby, Bates, Boston University, Tufts, University of Michigan, Harvard, Caltech, MIT, Dartmouth, Amherst, etc.

Here’s something interesting… the document is so old that a white male could be hired as head of what we now call “HR”:

(Boston University today rejects 9 out of 10 applicants.)

Here’s a guy who went from Colgate University (rejects 7 out of 8 applicants today; cost to attend approximately $360,000) to selling fish. The daughter went to Bates, which is today similarly selective to Colgate.

Dartmouth today rejects 15 out of 16 applicants, but plenty of Melrose High ’51 grads got in:

Here’s a guy who seems to have gotten married just as he was graduating from Tufts (rejects 9 out of 10 applicants) and the wife of 20 years had to follow him first to Michigan and then to North Dakota:

The graduates who were most passionate about dogs had the fewest children:

Here’s a guy who achieved what today would be a moonshot:

My mother’s first cousin Ruben Gittes, another moonshot achiever by today’s standards:

She moved to Orlando and loved it:

My take-aways… people were generally married within 4 years of finishing high school. The divorce rate among this high school class was about 10 percent. These folks were born in the 1930s so they didn’t quite make it into this chart (from “Human Reproduction as Prisoner’s Dilemma”), but it looks as though we’d expect roughly 90 percent to be married at a 25th high school reunion:

A brilliant-by-today’s-standards career was apparently achievable for the Melrose ’51 cohort simply by showing up. Not only did these graduates have no immigrants to compete with, but the pay-to-cost-of-living ratio was sufficiently high that a lot of smart well-educated women withdrew from the labor force, thus leaving the field open to others. Example:

Nobody reports having joined the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community. The editor’s introduction does not mention anyone having changed names except for female graduates (a defined term back then) who got married: “We have tried to make an accounting of the entire class. People are arranged alphabetically (girls by maiden name).”

How about my mom’s report?

Zillow still shows the crummy 1953 Cape Cod house in which we grew up (address above) and lists the mansion’s 1,603 square feet of space (we also used the basement, though, and a screen porch that was glassed in and maybe isn’t included). However, it was bulldozed within hours of being sold in 2012 and the Indian immigrants who purchased it built a McMansion in its place.

What were prices like back then? I scanned mom’s 1951 cross-country family trip album. A Chinese dinner for four in San Francisco was $11:

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History lessons at the art museum

by philg

I touched on my visit to the North Carolina Museum of Art in Is Donald Trump worse than George Washington? but I’d like to share some additional history lessons from the signage. This is a government-funded institution, so the lessons are, presumably, official State of North Carolina versions.

We learn that rich people love to laugh at peasants:

The Dutch were bad in general:

One Dutch guy was especially bad, being responsible for “Dutch expansion, exploitation, and violence” and giving Dutch people ships was bad because they used them for “violent establishment of foreign colonies”:

The English were bad settler-colonialists in North America (see previous post regarding a wall-sign biography of George Washington) and the Bostonians were especially bad, e.g., Sir William Pepperrell who was “the sole heir to a well-known merchant and enslaver in Massachusetts”:

The bird nerd is bad:

If you think that racism 200 years ago isn’t relevant, note that the National Audubon Society continues to support the party of slavery, with more than 98 percent of its political contributions going to Democrats (opensecrets.org; I think this might measure the contributions of executives and officers since a nonprofit org itself shouldn’t be donating to any political candidates).

Unlike Audubon, the museum bravely takes a stand against slavery (“deplorable”!) and “systemic racism”:

Has all of human civilization been exploitation and violence? No. Elites and peasants lived in harmony in pre-Columbian America. They danced and made music together at “communal feasts” where “diverse parts of society coexisted, sharing food and drink.”

What kind of “food and drink” was shared? From the History Channel:

When the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and his men arrived in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán in 1521, they described witnessing a grisly ceremony. Aztec priests, using razor-sharp obsidian blades, sliced open the chests of sacrificial victims and offered their still-beating hearts to the gods. They then tossed the victims’ lifeless bodies down the steps of the towering Templo Mayor.

Andrés de Tapia, a conquistador, described two rounded towers flanking the Templo Mayor made entirely of human skulls, and between them, a towering wooden rack displaying thousands more skulls with bored holes on either side to allow the skulls to slide onto the wooden poles.

Reading these accounts hundreds of years later, many historians dismissed the 16th-century reports as wildly exaggerated propaganda meant to justify the murder of Aztec emperor Moctezuma, the ruthless destruction of Tenochtitlán and the enslavement of its people. But in 2015 and 2018, archeologists working at the Templo Mayor excavation site in Mexico City discovered proof of widespread human sacrifice among the Aztecs—none other than the very skull towers and skull racks that conquistadors had described in their accounts.

While it’s true that the Spanish undoubtedly inflated their figures—Spanish historian Fray Diego de Durán reported that 80,400 men, women and children were sacrificed for the inauguration of the Templo Mayor under a previous Aztec emperor—evidence is mounting that the gruesome scenes illustrated in Spanish texts, and preserved in temple murals and stone carvings, are true.

In addition to slicing out the hearts of victims and spilling their blood on the temple altar, it’s believed that the Aztecs also practiced a form of ritual cannibalism. The victim’s bodies, after being relieved of their heads, were likely gifted to noblemen and other distinguished community members. Sixteenth-century illustrations depict body parts being cooked in large pots and archeologists have identified telltale butcher marks on the bones of human remains in Aztec sites around Mexico City.

Maybe show up for the concert, but don’t stay for dinner?

The state-funded museum provided some follow-up reading in the gift shop:

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