May 24 - Iraq History Goebbels Spain Iran Soccer

Please help with my research

This message has been received: I recently watched a documentary called The Dance of Hope. The film is a documentary about Chilean exiles. I can see on the web site that it is in your Stanford Leland Junior University library. I can't find it anywhere else. I am not in the US and the film is not sold or shown here. The video that i watched was from overseas and it broke.

I need to get a copy of the film or to speak to someone who has watched it recently. Here is why: One of the women interviewed in the film is a lady who lost her daughter. She tells the story about how she took her family to live in Mexico after the coup in Chile. She talked about her life in general. She told stories including how she liked to play tennis as a child and how she met her husband during the night of an earthquake. She showed pictures of her family, including her son, who graduated as a doctor from Oxford University. She showed pictures of her daughter who went missing. While watching the film with my friend who is a Chilean exile, we recognised the face of the daughter who went missing. The information about the disappearance also seemed to add up as well. We would like to contact this Chilean woman with information about her missing daughter. The problem is that we can't be sure of the name of the woman who lost her daughter or what the daughters name was. I think that the woman's name was Fenella and her daughter was called Laura. Someone in the library or in film studies must have watched this film.

RH:Can anyone help? Possibly Carlos López?

Soccer (Ronald Hilton, US) The cover story of the June 2006 issue of the National Geographic is titled "The beautiful game. Why soccer rues the world. This month in Germany 32 teams will compete for the World Cup of soccer, a game that unites--and divides countries around the globe" The article is illustrated with a large two-sided map and description of the game. The Unied States is about the only country in the world where the games are not being followed passionately. One problem is that the US has become used to ruling the world, but it does not rule the world of soccer. It was just defeated by Morocco, which no doubt delighted the Arab and Muslim world, as well as sundry others, who like to see the US humbled. One oddity is that soccer, a man's game in most of the world, has become also a women's game in the US, the land of gender equality. What is odder is that the US women's team is doing better than the men's team.

This is then an appropriate time for WAIS to discuss soccer. First, the negative side. Soccer arouses primitive tribal passions. When I was a small boy in Winchester, England, we supported the Southampton soccer team and hated its arch-.rival Portsmouth. It was all very polite; soccer hooliganism, to which the National Geographic article devotes a section, is fairly recent, but it has become more widespread. Much more serious are the political consequences. Honduras and El Salvador once fought a soccer war. A photograph of a soccer mob shows the fight between supporters of two Croatian teams, Zagreb and Split. When A Belgrade team came to Zagreb in 1990, a riot was an early spark in the Balkan war which led to Croatian independence and the breakup of Yugoslavia. At the same time, soccer healed the Croatian wounds. Courtney Angela Brkic has a piece "Croatia: Group therapy: A Nation is Born". Something similar happened in Angola, Henning Mankell has a piece titled "Greater Goal: Healing a War-Torn Land". This is the beginning of the positive side of soccer.

The educational value of soccer is that it teaches teamwork and learning to play by the rules It even teaches fair play, despite the evils of financial exploitation of the game, which has given rise to a major scandal involving the Juventus team of Turin, Italy. Why is individualism called "rugged"?. In any case, the modern world requires teamwork, not oneupmanship. A team which does not play as a team loses. .Soccer also stresses equality.. In principle, sll players are equal. There is no hierarchy as in most organizations: the government, business, universities , the Church, The social impact of all this will be enormous. Saudi Arabia is proud of its soccer team, which will lead to the opening up of the country. Small boys in villages and slums around the world play soccer, firing them with ambition and making drugs less attractive, although Maradona has gone to pot after his years of glory.

There is a Russian ballet-like aspect of soccer, which contrasts with the brutality of American football. John Lanhester has a piece titled "Ballet with the ball: A Love Story".The millions who will go to Germany to see the World Cup series or watch the games on TV are proof that the world loves soccer. I remember as a boy seeing special trains carrying soccer fans to distant cities to see their team play. That may well be viewed as a misuse of family money. What does it tell us that ordinary people will travel thousands of miles to see the soccer games?

Ordinary American TV will not carry the games, but they will be shown on Spanish TV. I do not have the time or the inclination to watch them, but I will follow carefully any social or political consequences. I hope the games go off smoothly, and that the host country, Germany, gets due recognition. A peaceful soccer match is a contribution to international concordance.. A successful World Cup series would spread immense goodwill for Germany.

WAIS welcomes Benita McShan

WAIS welcomes Benita McShan, who heads a science writers organization in Atlanta, Georgia, the site of the US Center for Disease Control. Her bio reads: Our president, senior writer and staff coordinator, Benita McShan, MSA, has held staff writer positions with publications in Europe and the United States. Her writing has appeared in The Atlanta Journal, The Danville Commercial-News and The Louisville Times daily newspapers. She was also a regular contributor to the suburban London weekly, The Brentford & Chiswick Times Newspaper as well as Paris' Le Metro magazine and Atlanta's Venus magazine.

Ms. McShan received her journalism education at Clark College. Her professional writing skills were honed under the tutelage of the editors of the International Herald Tribune in Paris. She is a past president of the Georgia Writer's Association and has served as the chairperson of the prestigious annual Georgia Author of the Year competition. Ms. McShan is also the founder and executive director of the Southeastern Writing Resource Center, Inc, a non-profit organization that offers creative writing workshops to shut-in and recovery oriented populations.

Ms. McShan has a graduate degree and mastery certification in business disciplines. For several years, she was a senior manager of regional contract negotiations for Lucent Technologies Inc.

The Spanish Civil War

Angel Viñas writes: I thank Nigel Jones for his report on Antony Beevor's new book The Battle for Spain. Am I allowed to do a bit of self-promotion? In September/October Critica (Barcelona) is publishing my book La soledad de la República. El abandono de las democracias y el viraje hacia la Union Sovietica. It´s the first volume of a trilogy (La Republica en guerra y el contexto internacional). The second one (El escudo de la República. Ayuda exterior y discordia interna) will appear sometime next year, possibly before summer. In both of them I take Mr Beevor to task on the basis of a far more extensive Soviet, Spanish and other foreign documentation than he has ever dreamed of. My findings, I hope, supported by overwhelming primary evidence are rather contrary to his major thesis, and, I´m reluctant to say so among WAISers, to the late Burnet Bolloten´s. But History is implacable, and anything which can be discovered will eventually be discovered. Also with regard to Soviet and other foreign interventions. I wouldn´t leave it unstated that I don´t share Mr Jones´ view on Prof. Juan Negrin.

RH: Angel Viñas is a distinguished historian of the Spanish Civil War, and we look forward to the publication of his trilogy.

IRAN: The US hostages (Alain de Benoist, France)

Sardar Haddad (ex-Iran) wrote: Regarding Mahmoud Ahmadinejad‚s background: The information from the Americans who were held hostage by the mullah regime is correct about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad being one of the interrogators. Alain de Benoist asks: Any proof that this “information” is “correct”? RH: It seems to me that the hostages would know. Sardar Haddad also wrote: The Islamic republic controls the universities in Iran, and they have issued phony university degrees for many regime officials. Ahmadinejad‚s degrees are questionable. Alain de Benoist comments:– Comment: even in the (many) countries where phony university degrees are issued, at least some university degrees are authentic. Any proof that Ahmadinejad’s degrees do not belong to the second category? RH: It may be comparable to the honorary degrees that US universities bestow on public figures.

The Spanish Civil War

Nigel Jones writes: WAISERS might be interested to learn that the old debate about the extent of Stalin's takeover of the Spanish Republic has been re-ignited by the appearance of the historian Antony Beevor's new book The Battle for Spain. 'Beevor (of Stalingrad and Fall of Berlin' fame) has basically updated his earlier history of the Spanish Civil War with the addition of new information, much from previously closed Soviet archives. He has an article in today's London Times'detailing some of his findings, including correspondence and reports from figures such as Andre Marty, French-born Commissar of the International Brigades, reporting the shocking mass shootings of IB troops after they broke and fled in the battle of Brunete. Hundreds were killed by their own side.The book caused an uproar when it was published in Spain.

All this may be old news to WAIS scholars who have studied these events in depth, but it does represent, by a popular and best-selling historian, a long-overdue demolition of the still persistent myth that the Republic was an embattled democracy gallantly fighting for freedom against fascism. IN fact, as demonstrated long ago in the meticulous but overlooked work of the American historian the late Burnett Bolloten, the Republic started to sink in 1936 and finally foundered in 1937 when Premier Largo Caballero was replaced by the Communist-backed puppet Premier, Juan Negrin. Had the Republic triumphed, the result would have been a Stalinist Spain with all the horrors of mass murder, political persecution and totalitarian tyranny that that implies. It is at least arguable that Franco's dictatorship was by far the more preferable of two admittedly unpalatable options available to suffering Spain.

I welcome this tribute to the late Burnett Bolloten, one of the founding fathers of WAIS, and a man of total, self-sacrificing integrity.

Website Factual Errors - Magda Goebbels (Jan 2005)

Benitta Elena writes:

I was shocked by the inaccuracies appearing in the reprint of biographical information on Magda Goebbels, the reputed First Lady of the Third Reich, authored by Angela Mesna. The scholarship is extremely poor. I was horrified to read that the author was actually in college.

Examples of bio inaccuracies:

1. The bio states that Magda had seven children by Goebbels. She had six. Their names were Helga, Hildegarde, Helmut, Hedwig, Holdine and Heidrun,

2. Mesna bio does not mention that Magda was a divorcee with a child when she married Goebbels. Her first child was Harald Quandt, son of Gunther Quandt. Anyone studying German industry would be aware of the role of the Quandt family in supporting the Reich and shaping the post-war economy. The Quandts are multi-billionaires, possibly the wealthiest family in Germany, with major or controlling interests in BMW, Daimler-Benz, AFA and VARTA. Although Christopher Jones attempts to correct the number of children, he compounds the inaccuracy of reporting that Harald Quandt died in the bunker.

3. The bio states that Magda poisoned her seven children in the bunker that her family shared with Hitler. Harald, a Luftwaffe pilot, was in a POW camp in North Africa when the rest of the family died. He survived the war and went on to further build the family fortune.

RH: We thank Benita Elena for her comments:. Of course Goebbels had six children. However, beyond that there are sharp disagreements abut facts. Incidentally, The author of the postinbg was not a member of WAIS. I posted her message because she said something interesting. So much goes over my desk that I do not remember this discussion.

The WAIS "Learning History" project takes all kind s of turns, as is evident from "One for the textbooks" by Debra J. Sanders (San Francisco Chronicle, 5/21/06) As part of affirmative action, there were demands that the contributions of various ethnic groups be recognized. While indeed they should be, attempts to placate the various groups led to a gross distortion of reality. Do accounts of Italian contributions to America include the Mafia? What the groups want is flattery, which is not history.

I do not know the final outcome of the complaints by Asian Indians about the treatment of Hinduism in California textbooks. Debra Saunders calls our attention to new groups demanding that their contribution to America be recognized in history textbooks: gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. Incredibly, the bill, presented by openly lesbian Senator Sheila Kuehl (D., Santa Monica), passed the California Senate by a 22-15 vote. Soon left-handed and short people will be demanding that their contributions to America be ensconced in history textbooks. The possible list is endless.Some history teachers are accomplices in all this. Some years ago I wrote an article lamenting that Stanford courses on the Middle Ages stressed the grotesque oddities of the period with little reference to its greatness. Presumably it was what the students like.

May I take this opportunity to praise Eugen Weber of UCLA, whose "The Western Tradition" gives a splendid overview of history since antiquity. It is magnificently informative and balanced. He is emeritus, and I know no history professor now teaching who can compare with him. Incidentally, does a bisexual professor become emeritus or emerita? Let us settle for emeritum.

Re: IRAQ: War Unprovoked? Disastrous? A failure?

Vincent Littrell writes: The responses to my post defending the Iraq war were most interesting to read. All of them were thought provoking. I will address a few items. I have seen mention of Phyllis Gardner's response to my post though I have not been able to read it for technical reasons. I certainly would like to do so at some point. My writing was termed "curiously off-target" by one polite WAISer. I was actually quite on target for my purposes. I suspected my avoidance of President Bush's primary justification for war would provoke response. I wanted to cut to what I viewed as the purely moral argument without the clouds of politics surrounding it. For me, when dealing with brutal tyranny, the necessity to save human life from such oppression supersedes political wrangling (if possible). I know just that statement alone is one to cause debate in this forum. I won't elaborate now on it.

Siegfried Ramler's response was excellent, especially his concluding comments. In my post I did state multilateralism is preferable to unilateralism. I guess where he and I would disagree is that he seems to believe that even in the face of brutal tyranny, the UN should be the mechanism through which consensus is achieved before any type of action is executed like the invasion of Iraq. I would agree is desirable, except that the UN is dysfunctional and in need of serious reform before it is a viable enforcer of international law or effective executor of humanitarian intervention on a massive scale (there have been some successes like Sierra Leone, to some degree now even Democratic Republic of Congo etc.). A terrible paradox exists, on the one hand unilateral action is not preferable, yet really seems to be the only way to remove tyrants with speed when the resources and will exists to do so, on the other hand collective security mechanisms are not yet evolved to the point where they can take decisive, timely action (in most cases), though they are preferable to unilateralism.

David Crow's recent post to Nushin Namazi was excellent as well, where he makes the assumption of a "moral imperative" in dealing with oppressive regimes. I have absolutely held to that line of thinking for some time. There are essential, universal morals that cut across political, religious, ethnic, and cultural lines. This is why I am such a proponent of interfaith dialogue. Finding common ground between faiths and cultures is a necessary facet to the process of higher order political evolution for mankind in its totality.

Regarding Robert Whealey's comments: I am a-bit of a student in international relations theory. Dr. Whealey's writing strikes me as placing him somewhat into the 'realist' camp, while my views might be labeled as neo-liberal in some respects. I don't believe the international state system as it exists today is the same as it was prior to WWII. The state system has evolved and moral influences are playing a much greater role in global discourse. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a perfect example of this. Though Woodrow Wilson's vision culminating in the development of the League of Nations failed politically, the morality of it, and the rightness of the ideal, certainly did not. The formation of the UN was in my view an advancement of the Wilsonian ideal though not necessarily an end state. Such ideals must be re-visited, and will continue to be over time. I will say that Whealey's discussion on my usage of the word "legitimate" is a valid one. I was not precise in my usage of that term. I will replace my usage of the word "legitimate" in regards the rule of tyrants to "morally legitimate."

In my professional capacity at NATO, I do get exposure to major players in international politics and high-diplomacy who do recognize the evolutionary nature of the advancement of the human condition. The moral imperative is very much alive in the minds of many senior leaders.