Articles Books

This edition contains (as its title suggests), three landmark articles that were all published in Mc Clure's magazine in January 1903. The articles, "The Oil War of 1872" by Ida M. Tarbell; "The Shame of Minneapolis" by Lincoln Steffens; and "The Right To Work" by Ray Stannard Baker are indeed rare to find collected in one volume. Thankfully, for students of journalism and history they are collected here.

When looking at all three articles, they might seem to a 21st century reader as a little flat and not all that shocking or sensational. However, if one looks back at some of the hokey pablum that many papers and magazines employed, these articles were nothing short of a bombshell. Some of the journalism of that era smacked of boosterism or partisan sentiment, but these articles were indeed beholden to none but the truth (or as close to that moving target as you can get).

The introduction and essays that accompany these pieces do a good job of providing the reader with information about the writers. The essays also help put the events of the early 20th century into context. It is safe to say that while these essays are not necessarily flashy or earth-shattering in their conclusions, they are solid, helpful material that only give the reader a deeper appreciation for the term "muckraking."

This is a fantastic compilation and a "must have" for all who are even peripherally interested in the BOUNTY story. Maxton did a magnificent job. One senses his passion and dedication! Highly, highly recomended.

I guess the title of this article is a takeoff on Norman Podhoretz's February, 1963 Commentary article ("My Negro Problem - and Ours"). But let's not discuss that article. Let's discuss this one.

Natalie Angier (author of the interesting book, "Woman: An Intimate Geography") notes that when religion is used as a reason (or an excuse) to attack science, most scientists fight back. She herself says she's encouraged to help fix a problem, namely that some polls show that only 28% of Americans have much confidence in the theory of evolution. Angier agrees that the scientists are right about this problem. And I agree as well: truth is a value, and we're going to get in trouble by refusing to teach it or by denying it.

On the other hand, Angier thinks that scientists are too lenient in discussing other religious statements that also deny science. What about the virgin birth or the resurrection of Jesus? Should scientists take these on as well? Is it proper for them to avoid discussing all this on political grounds?

Of course, some scientists are monotheists. In a 1998 survey, 7% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences said that they believed in the monotheist god. Still, what about the other 93%? Why don't they take on antiscientific religious statements? The answer seems to be that as long as religious folks don't appear to challenge science directly, most scientists feel it's best not to challenge religion. After all, who wants a fight?

Angier, however, argues that all this "wincing and capitulating" just results in "a fresh round of whacks." And I think she's making a good point.

Sure, we see plenty of silly anti-Zionist lies and taunts. But do the liars really take themselves seriously? What about in Pakistan, where after a major earthquake, Israel naturally offered help? After all, Israelis are skilled at digging people out of fallen buildings.

Well, as this article explains, it seems that Pakistan did indeed turn down serious and sincere offers of help, believing in (or at least doing a good job of pretending to believe in) its own demonology rather than gratefully accepting help that would save the lives of some of its citizens. It waited for days to even acknowledge Israel's immediate offer of help, and after that it said it would accept such support only through the United Nations or some other third party!

Now, Pakistan's leader had gone so far as to shake hands with Ariel Sharon less than a month earler. But it seems that accepting aid from an enemy is a more serious matter than shaking hands.

Jochnowitz asks why Pakistan ought to consider Israel an enemy at all. For that matter, he asks why of all the walls in the world, only the one used to defend Israelis from suicide bombers has merited the condemnation of the International Court of Justice, or the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. North Korea, a truly oppressive society, has a wall, but no one seems eager to condemn that!

I don't know why the fight against Israel is so much fun for so many people. But I do know that it is not doing anyone any good.

I recommend this article.

This was one of my favorite books from my childhood. I read this over and over again. Any Steven Kellogg book is a fantastic selection--he is a world class illustrator and I still enjoy reading his books as an adult.

Nancy passed away peacefully in her condo in February of 2008. She was an iron woman and loved Hawaii with all her heart and soul - having lived there since 1948. She wrote a book about her saving Chinatown in Honolulu. This is what brought me to this website (Amazon) but I don't think Amazon carries it yet. I would be very interested in purchasing her historical writings about this successful endeavor. Thank you - and God rest your soul Nancy.

This article is Joel Singer's excellent review of a truly terrible book, namely Raymond Helmick's "Negotiating Outside the Law." In that book, Helmick boasts of some horrible and unjust United Nations General Assembly resolutions, misrepresents some of them to make them even worse, and then pretends that they constitute international law! He then attributes the failure of Camp David negotiations in the year 2000 to failure to follow such laws.

Well, there may be something to this argument. Namely, the U.N. resolutions may indeed have inspired this atrocious book. And they may indeed have contributed to Arab intransigence, which has resulted in some violence that surely does not benefit anyone. Still, it is inexcusable to pretend that such resolutions were anything other than unjust, unreasonable, and counterproductive.

In addition, there is a risk that some of the nonsense the U.N. has come up with may one day find its way into international law. If so, it is easy to imagine how such laws will be written about by a variety of opponents of human rights.

In this review, Singer exposes some of Helmick's misstatements and misrepresentations. And he explains that Helmick was not writing as a true negotiator, but as one who was advising Arabs to open an "intifada" against Israel in the year 2000.

It may not seem to matter how negotiations come out, as long as there are signed agreements. But at Camp David, there were not even any signed agreements! Had there been a signed agreement I suspect that it would have been broken almost at once by the Arab side. In addition, I think Arab demands to steal land from land-poor Israel and ethnically cleanse it of its Jews were a threat to peace. And these were demands that Israel was prepared to accept!

Helmick wrote a very misleading book which implied that Israelis were the problem and that Arab thugs were basically non-violent and benevolent. Singer is to be congratulated for alerting us to this attack on reality.

I have found in my years of sexual ambiguity that Harvery Wachsman is the only Immortal writer amongst merely impotent child molesting entrprenuers. In closing... "did i do that?????" -Jaleel White

Bernard Lewis makes a number of good points in this essay about anti-Semitism. One is that in previous centuries, persecution of Jews was linked to the fact that Jews, by not being Christian or Muslim, did not submit to the rulings of local Christian or Muslim authorities. Jews often escaped from this persecution simply by converting. Converted Jews could even join the persecutors. However, in the twentieth century, persecution took on a racial aspect. Conversion did not help.

Today, as Lewis explains, anti-Semitism has become more ideological than racial, so Jews can once again join the persecutors. And it's easy to see that some have indeed taken advantage of this opportunity. As a matter of fact, it is theoretically possible that a majority (or even almost all) will do just that.

Lewis mentions the fact that when the Levant has been divided between Arab and Jewish areas, it has been taken for granted that Jews must not be permitted to dwell in Arab regions and Arabs must be permitted to dwell in Jewish regions. Lewis regards this as symptomatic of anti-Semitism. But I prefer to, um, dwell on the arbitrariness of such a policy and note that in the long run, such policies are counterproductive.

Another point that Lewis makes is that while today, one may realize that it benefits a society to abide human rights for all sorts of minorities, such opinions were rare just a few hundred years ago. Back then, it was taken for granted that for a majority to give rights (or, as the author says more precisely, "equal opportunities") to a minority was a "dereliction of duty."

The author also notes that "Polytheism was essentially tolerant, each group worshipping its own God or Gods [the capitalization by me, not by Lewis], offering no objection to the worship of others."

One more point is the way some folks regard Jews not as people but more like some sort of Cosmic Evil. It is very rare for other groups to be thought of in such a manner, and as a result, this is considered by Lewis to be a major aspect of what he calls anti-Semitism.

There is also the question of dual loyalty. As the author explains, we rarely hear about this issue when the Irish complain about the British or the Armenians and Greeks complain about the Turks, but we often do when Israelis complain about their oppressors. In some cases, this can be explained in part by anti-Semitism. A simpler test is the reaction when people get killed in the Middle East. If the killers and victims are all Arabs, very few Westerners show much interest. If Jews are involved, or if Jews can be blamed, there is enormous interest. One can see the difference between the killing of tens of thousands of people at Hama (which had nothing to do with Jews and thus was almost disregarded in the West) and Sabra and Shatilla (where less than a thousand people were killed and once again, the actual murderers were almost ignored but the possibility of blaming the Jews excited a huge number of folks).

Lewis cautions us to be careful about obvious differences in standards applied to Jews and non-Jews. In some cases, there may be more going on than simple anti-Semitism. But I don't worry about what we call it. We're all humans, and we need to value truth and justice. If we're being unjust and arbitrary, we have a problem no matter what motivates our biases. And I think Lewis has supported that point rather well in this article.

In the 1930s, Kalman Sultanik applied to the British Mandatory Power for a certificate that would allow him to find safe haven in the British Mandate. The British refused, of course, so the author wound up in a concentration camp where he was among the few who survived. He says he has no doubt that if the Jews had won their national independence before the war began, hundreds of thousands of European Jews could have been saved in much the same way that Israel later received hundreds of thousands of survivors.

The author continues by marvelling at the way Islam has become so distorted as to preach intolerance and murder. Actually, that does not surprise me. I'm not particularly enamored of monotheistic religions. But I have to agree with Sultanik that something is wrong when most of the world shrugs at the fact that many Arab countries are Judenrein, having accomplished in their nations no less than the Germans of the 1930s and 1940s attempted to achieve in Europe. They shrug when Arabs ask that the Jews all leave Israel "and take their graves with them." Why? Isn't such apartheid and bigotry worth commenting on? Or are they too busy accusing Israel (of all countries) of apartheid, bigotry, and racism?

The author says that he is concerned about this new antisemitism (by which he means anti-Zionism) in spite of its "modest numbers and the low caliber of its thinkers." After all, the new antisemites make up for this by being energetic. And it is Sultanik's impression that antisemitism is as popular in Arab nations today as it ever was in pre-war Europe. And he calls Israel the "testing ground of world-wide Muslim terrorism." This terrorism, according to the author, "has as its declared objective the destruction of Israel and its Jewish population."

As the author says, many people on college campuses who call themselves liberals are indulging in this new antisemitism, giving "blind support to the most reactionary and oppressive societies in the region that are fueled by medieval notions of hegemony and obscurantist religion." To some extent, this does not surprise me either. Many fascists and racists have claimed to be on the Left, whether they were supporting Stalin, or the Vichy government in France, or the "National Socialists" in Germany, or the anti-Israeli reactionaries of today.

To him, the problem of tomorrow is "Muslim antisemitism, buttressed by a devil's alliance with the Left."

He makes a strong argument for this conclusion.