For the generation of students I am now teaching, Radovan Karadzic might seem like ancient history. Only my older nontraditional students remember the Bosnian War. Those in their twenties and teens were either too young at the time to notice, or their parents spared them such grim images on the news. And soon I’ll have students who hadn’t been born yet.

So it is getting time to figure out how to include this material in an already full European history survey that barely does justice to the end of the Cold War. So far I’ve only managed a few words in the context of a thematic lecture on human rights. Sometimes it also comes up in a followup discussion to my lecture on war and society, because the reader I frequently use includes diary entries from Zlata Filipovic, a young girl caught in the war in Sarajevo. (Here’s a video interview with her on Charlie Rose.)

Radovan Karadizic’s recent arrest provides a fresh opportunity to reflect on that war, since he is now in the media spotlight. I just wish that the wheels of justice in the Hague spun a little faster, for people’s attention spans are short, and the media lets this kind of thing disappear quickly from its front pages.

Some recent news items:

• The End of a Manhunt—photos from Karadizic’s past from Reuters via the New York Times.
• Bosnian Serb Under Arrest in War Crimes—story of his arrest, New York Times, 7/22/2008.
• The Double Life of an Infamous Serbian Fugitive—story of how Karadzic had been living in the open before his arrest, New York Times, 7/23/2008.
• Perfect Villains, Flawed Tribunal—story in the Washington Post from a 7/20/2008, that is, right before the arrest, criticizing the ineffectuality of the international tribunal and saying its days were numbered.
• War Crimes Arrest Bolsters Other Courts—an article suggesting things might be looking better for these courts than they did on the 20th, New York Times, 7/23/2008.
• With Karadzic’s Arrest, Europe Sees Triumph—an article that points to one triumph of European soft power, New York Times, 7/23/2008.
• The Two-Bit Villain the World Somehow Feared—essay by Neely Tucker in the Washington Post (7/23/2008) that paints him in unflattering colors. The demystification is perhaps necessary, though it’s hard not to take a man seriously who has that much blood on his hands.
• A Leader Turned Ghost—a more thoughtful portrait of Karadzic by John F. Burns of the New York Times, 7/22/2008.

Sorry that most everything is from the New York Times and none of the articles are European. If you know of an article offering good information on this war or interesting reactions to the arrest and the international tribunal, please share it in a comment.

Kevin Levin of Civil War Memory has posted good material to his academic blog under the category, The Myth of Black Confederates. Several recent posts include criticism of efforts by modern-day Confederate patriots and would-be historians who want to appropriate Weary Clyburn, a slave, as a defender of Southern liberty. In one he points out that writing good books to debunk myths is all well and good, but on the subject of black Confederates “the real fight must take place on the web.”

In the same post he points to an earlier one he made in late March: “Should Civil War Historians Blog (academic that is)?” In it he observes how vast the public discourse about the American Civil War is, while the discourse in which professional historians participate is relatively narrow. Historians need to continue their current research and publishing mission, but they also have “a responsibility to engage a wider audience and contribute to the public discourse.” Since much of the public turns to the internet for ready answers, historians need to offer these answers in an accessible format, especially for highly sensitive questions that shape American identity.

I agree with Kevin about the need for Civil War historians to blog. I have also observed a similar need with respect to Holocaust denial, since I have found that Google can get it wrong. Until now I have used this blog mainly to reflect on what I do and to communicate with other historians, but as Kevin points out, Google brings him search engine traffic for important topics such as black Confederates, so his blog posts reach a wider audience. I have written a few of my posts with that awareness, but his arguments make me think I could do much more. So could other historians.

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A question about names: I refer to other historians by their last name in formal academic prose. In blogging, on the other hand, I generally refer to fellow bloggers by their first name. This post has left me unsure of how to handle this issue. Since it’s about blogging, I have decided to go with the first name. If I had been engaging historiographical arguments, I think I would have used the last name instead. What do you other blogging historians do?

In a piece called “Mind Games: Remembering Brainwashing” from today’s New York Times, Tim Wiener points to one of the more irresponsible uses of historical documents that I have seen this summer. Apparently “American military and intelligence officers” (he is not more specific) decided in 2002 to examine Cold War CIA studies of Chinese interrogation methods during the Korean War. After all, these Communists were the supposed masters who fed the kinds of fears that later gave rise to a movie like “The Manchurian Candidate.” In one major study the officers found examples of what are now often called “harsh interrogation techniques” when the more negatively valued term “torture” is being deliberately avoided. “They reprinted a 1957 chart describing death threats, degradation, sleep deprivation—and worse—inflicted by Chinese captors. And they made it part of a new handbook for interrogators at Guantánamo.”

The provenance of these techniques might give pause, but here’s the real bombshell:

The irony is that the original author of that chart, Albert D. Biderman, a social scientist who had distilled interviews with 235 Air Force P.O.W.’s, wrote that the Communists’ techniques mainly served to “extort false confessions.” And they were the same methods that “inquisitors had employed for centuries.” They had done nothing that “was not common practice to police and intelligence interrogators of other times and nations.”

This story reminds me of the student who hurriedly pulls a bunch of quotes from a book without actually reading or studying the book as a whole, let alone thinking about its historical context. The student then slaps the material together in a paper that might confirm his own beliefs, but whose conclusions bear no tangible relationship to the source that he supposedly read and analyzed. Is that what happened here? Or was the document perhaps too complex for them? Perhaps they needed to invest in some historians who were not afraid to dig through this kind of thing in an honest manner, no matter what conclusions the documents might suggest.

Today citizens of the United States celebrate Independence Day. On this day, 232 years ago, thirteen American colonies proclaimed their independence from Great Britain in a famous document that Thomas Jefferson wrote, the Declaration of Independence. As a history teacher, I find this document fascinating, because it fuses together two different political traditions. On one hand, it recalls seventeenth-century English constitutionalism and its arguments about what had supposedly always been the rights of Englishmen. On the other hand, it advances the kind of powerful and universalizing claims about natural law and human rights spawned in the Enlightenment and given their most dramatic expression during the French Revolution. These connections make the document an interesting object lesson for the history classroom. They also can act as a healthy reminder to Americans that our Declaration of Independence displays not only differences from European political traditions, but also powerful affinities for them.

For traditions of English constitutionalism, have a look at the second half of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, which speaks of “a long train of abuses and usurpations” and ends thus: “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.” Following this statement is a list of all the King’s offenses.

Now compare this list as well as the language complaining of tyranny to the Petition of Right, which the English parliament issued in 1628 in response to perceived abuses of power by King Charles I, who a couple decades later fought a civil war and was eventually tried for treason and beheaded in 1649. To understand the gulf in political culture between Parliament and the King, it is also helpful to look at a statement that the king’s father, James I, wrote in 1598, while still just James VI of Scotland: True Law of Free Monarchies. In it the king is a divine right ruler who sees himself as “before any estates or ranks of men within the same, before any Parliaments were holden or laws made; and by them was the land distributed (which at the first was wholly theirs), states erected and discerned, and forms of government devised and established.”

England tried government without a monarchy for a about a decade, but in 1660 a Stuart, Charles II, once again ascended the throne. His son became King James II in 1688. Fears of the son’s absolutist ambitions and attempts to bring Catholicism back to England led Parliament to depose him, and invite his daughter and son-in-law to rule, William and Mary. This time Parliament passed a much more far-reaching bill, the English Bill of Rights of 1689, to which the new King and queen acquiesced. Nonetheless, Parliament did not claim to have the right to depose kings. Instead, it observed that James II had “abdicated the government and the throne [was] thereby vacant.” After discussing his offenses, the members of the upper and lower houses of Parliament declared that “for the vindicating and asserting [of] their [the representatives'] ancient rights and liberties,” kings could not rule without Parliament on their royal authority alone. The king was subject to the law. Then the document enumerates a series of rights that will look familiar to anyone who knows the first ten amendments of the United States Constitution.

Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence describes similar tyranny, and his explanation for the colonists’ rebellion is not inconsistent with what Parliament had done eighty-eight years earlier. It represented not so much a revolution, per se, as a severing of relations with the king, in order to preserve traditional rights. Jefferson’s own argument read thus:

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

If the Declaration of Independence was consistent with English constitutionalist traditions, however, it also offered a powerful and universal statement about human beings that was based on natural law instead of ancient liberties.

We hold these truths to be self-evident:

That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

This kind of thinking was indeed revolutionary. In France beliefs in natural law soon helped bring down the old regime in 1789, though the American contribution to that was probably more the debts that Louis XVI had incurred in his support of the enemies of his enemy, Great Britain, during the American rebellion. Members of the Third Estate called the National Assembly into existence, and members of this body began their work by focusing on individual rights, only later turning to more practical constitutional issues. In contrast to England in 1688 and later the American colonies in 1776, though, the French didn’t modify an existing form of government. They invented something new based on natural law. Read the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which appeared during the first summer of revolution. The first three items in this document will sound familiar to Americans who know their own country’s foundational documents:

1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be based only on common utility.

2. The purpose of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.

3. The principle of all sovereignty rests essentially in the nation. No body and no individual may exercise authority which does not emanate expressly from the nation.

The causal link between this document and our own Constitution and Declaration of Independence is indirect at best, but one can see the common concerns that had arisen from the Enlightenment, and the common justification for people coming together and forming a new political order of their own free will.

The Declaration of Independence has a foot in two different traditions, one of old English rights that Parliament asserted and expanded in the face of the absolutist ambitions of its kings, and one more universal, based on natural law and reflected not only in the ideals of the French Revolution, but also the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is tempting to speculate on how these two different traditions might continue to inform American political culture today, but that will have to wait for another time and perhaps another author. Important here is rather the conversation among foundational constitutional documents from the United States, England, and France.

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Image: “Declaration of Independence” by John Trumbull

Related post: Human Rights in the History Survey

I’ve written two posts on the Supreme Court’s decision about habeas corpus and the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay over on Stoneman’s Corner. I put them there because they’re more political than historical, but I’m announcing them here because some of my military history readers here will be interested. Here are the links:

• The Supreme Court and the Bush Administration’s Detainee Dilemma (6/22/2008)
• The Rule of Law in Time of War (6/13/2008)

Please let me know if you know of any historical resources on the internet that deal with these issues.