Browsing PBH By Articles

When A Soldier Becomes A Mass Murderer

Posted on November 22, 2012 in Articles

The Article: What Turns a Soldier Into a Mass Murderer? by Heather Horn in The Atlantic.

The Text: Germany has launched an investigation of Johann ‘Hans’ Breyer, an 87-year-old Philadelphia man. That he was an SS guard at the infamous Auschwitz, no one, least of all him, disputes. The issue is whether he should be considered an accessory to hundreds of thousands of murders. Given our increasing distance from the time of World War II, this could be the last investigation of its kind. And while that means trials of the living are winding down, it also means the historical investigations of the dead are gaining fresh perspective.

Just last week, for example, the first English edition of the gripping Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying–the Secret World War II Tapes of German POWs was published in the U.S. A collaboration between historian Sönke Neitzel and psychologist Harald Welzer, the book presents and analyzes a series of conversations among not the elite Nazi SS guards, but ordinary German soldiers, navy men, and airmen, captive in British camps.

Conventional myth on the crimes of World War II has held (a) that they were almost exclusively German, and (b) that they were almost exclusively perpetrated by the SS — the Nazi Party paramilitary organization — rather than by ordinary conscripts. Neither of these two points is true, though they were certainly convenient for a time, especially (in the case of the first) when the Allies required Soviet cooperation, and (in the case of the second) when the West German government desperately felt the need to forgive and forget in order to maintain a stable post-war society.

Guantanamo Death Shines A Light On More Leftist Hypocrisy

Posted on November 21, 2012 in Articles

The Article: Another Guantánamo prisoner death highlights Democrats’ hypocrisy by Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian.

The Text: A detainee at Guantánamo was found dead in his cell on Saturday, according to camp officials. He is the ninth person to die at the camp since it was opened more than ten years ago. As former Gitmo guard Brandon Neely pointed out Monday, more detainees have died at the camp (nine) than have been convicted of wrongdoing by its military commissions (six). This is the fourth detainee who has died at the camp since Obama’s inauguration.

Although the detainee’s identity has not been disclosed, a camp spokesman acknowledged that he “had not been charged and had not been designated for prosecution”. In other words, he has been kept by the US government in a cage for many years without any opportunity to contest the accusations against him, and had no hope of leaving the camp except by death.

Indeed, dying in due process-free captivity now appears to be the only way for many of these detainees to leave. The last person to leave the camp via death was a 48-year-old Afghan citizen, Awal Gul, who died in February 2011 of an apparent heart attack. Gul, the father of 18 children, was accused by the US of being a Taliban commander – a charge he vehemently denied because, as his lawyer put it, “he was disgusted by the Taliban’s growing penchant for corruption and abuse.” But the due process-free indefinite detention policy still in place at the camp meant that those conflicting claims were never resolved, and he died after more than nine years in captivity – thousands of miles from his family, in the middle of a foreign ocean – despite never having been convicted of anything.

Julian Assange: Obama’s Latest Neasayer

Posted on November 20, 2012 in Articles

The Article: Assange mocks Obama via video at U.N. event in Reuters.

The Text: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, speaking via a choppy video feed from his virtual house arrest in London, lashed out at U.S. President Barack Obama on Wednesday for supporting freedom of speech in the Middle East while simultaneously “persecuting” his organization for leaking diplomatic cables.

Assange, who has been holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy since June to avoid extradition, made the comments at a packed event on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly.

Assange mocked Obama for defending free speech in the Arab world in an address to the United Nations on Tuesday, pointing to his own experience as evidence that Obama has “done more to criminalize free speech than any other U.S. president.”

The Writing Revolution

Posted on November 19, 2012 in Articles

The Article: The Writing Revolution by Peg Tyre in The Atlantic.

The Text: In 2009, when Monica DiBella entered New Dorp, a notorious public high school on Staten Island, her academic future was cloudy. Monica had struggled to read in early childhood, and had repeated first grade. During her elementary-school years, she got more than 100 hours of tutoring, but by fourth grade, she’d fallen behind her classmates again. In the years that followed, Monica became comfortable with math and learned to read passably well, but never seemed able to express her thoughts in writing. During her freshman year at New Dorp, a ’70s-style brick behemoth near a grimy beach, her history teacher asked her to write an essay on Alexander the Great. At a loss, she jotted down her opinion of the Macedonian ruler: “I think Alexander the Great was one of the best military leaders.” An essay? “Basically, that wasn’t going to happen,” she says, sweeping her blunt-cut brown hair from her brown eyes. “It was like, well, I got a sentence down. What now?” Monica’s mother, Santa, looked over her daughter’s answer—six simple sentences, one of which didn’t make sense—with a mixture of fear and frustration. Even a coherent, well-turned paragraph seemed beyond her daughter’s ability. An essay? “It just didn’t seem like something Monica could ever do.”

For decades, no one at New Dorp seemed to know how to help low-performing students like Monica, and unfortunately, this troubled population made up most of the school, which caters primarily to students from poor and working-class families. In 2006, 82 percent of freshmen entered the school reading below grade level. Students routinely scored poorly on the English and history Regents exams, a New York State graduation requirement: the essay questions were just too difficult. Many would simply write a sentence or two and shut the test booklet. In the spring of 2007, when administrators calculated graduation rates, they found that four out of 10 students who had started New Dorp as freshmen had dropped out, making it one of the 2,000 or so lowest-performing high schools in the nation. City officials, who had been closing comprehensive high schools all over New York and opening smaller, specialized ones in their stead, signaled that New Dorp was in the crosshairs.

And so the school’s principal, Deirdre DeAngelis, began a detailed investigation into why, ultimately, New Dorp’s students were failing. By 2008, she and her faculty had come to a singular answer: bad writing. Students’ inability to translate thoughts into coherent, well-argued sentences, paragraphs, and essays was severely impeding intellectual growth in many subjects. Consistently, one of the largest differences between failing and successful students was that only the latter could express their thoughts on the page. If nothing else, DeAngelis and her teachers decided, beginning in the fall of 2009, New Dorp students would learn to write well. “When they told me about the writing program,” Monica says, “well, I was skeptical.” With disarming candor, sharp-edged humor, and a shy smile, Monica occupies the middle ground between child and adult—she can be both naive and knowing. “On the other hand, it wasn’t like I had a choice. I go to high school. I figured I’d give it a try.”

Satire: Not Readily Understood By All Iranians

Posted on November 18, 2012 in Articles

The Article: Iran news agency picks up “Onion” story, tells Iranians rural Americans prefer Ahmadinejad to Obama in CBS News.

The Text: An Iranian news editor may be lamenting his or her own fact-checking practices this Friday.

The English-language website of the Fars news agency appears to have been duped by a spoof story by “The Onion”, which claimed that a recent poll had found an “overwhelming majority of rural white Americans” would rather vote for Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than President Obama.

The story only appeared on the English site of Fars – which, like all other Iranian news organizations, is controlled strictly by the Islamic cleric-led government. By Friday afternoon, the story was apparently pulled down and attempts to access it generated an error message.