Slides from Thursday, Jan. 25
For Monday, read the Zinn and Doyle articles and the Preface, Intro, Foreword and Ch. 1 and SKIM the sources in Appendix D in the Cullather book. The following groups will lead us through each of the 3 readings:
Zinn: James, Will, Lauren, Zack
Doyle: Rose, Noa, Al, Anya
Cullather: Liam, Jesse, Alyssa, Jon
And check out the digital humanities tools that we looked at today:
The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes
StoryMaps and NeatLine (Swarthmore Project on 1969 Sit-In)
Mapping the Republic of Letters
“There is no better way to judge a nation’s faith in itself than to read its official story. How closely it hews to the truth about the past—good, bad, or ugly—is a measure of a government’s confidence in its own history and in its people” (Doyle 41).
While I found Doyle’s article to be very perceptive about how governments perceive themselves, I thought it lacked nuance that would have been added had it been published later (which I think brings up a whole different discussion about when articles become outdated, and what we do with them after that). I think the United States government and our relationship with our history has trudged along so slowly that the above quote still holds true. In the ways that we form our public school curriculums and how we interact with confederate monuments, I think we can see that we have a troubled relationship with our history, and ergo little faith in ourselves as a nation.
I would have liked to see a 2018 version of this article that tackles what people who are convinced of government cover-ups actually want, and what “revelations” they actually consider to be true. I think we’ve reached a new age of leaks, some of which are true, and some of which are not. Too often it feels like the public are misguided in terms of what secrets there are and what we should be fighting to discover. We spent years talking about Hillary’s emails, and even when “truth” comes out, there seems to be a notable constituency that does not believe it at all, or does not think it’s the whole truth. On the flip side of that: when truthful info dumps about the government are released, I see them dismissed as “fake news.”
How do we integrate the modern concept of fake news as an extension of misinformation campaigns into this assertion that pressure from the constituency and subsequent humiliation gets results?
“The CIA has been described by its former director, Robert Gates, as ‘archivally impaired’; in fact, the agency’s rigid compartmentalization–by which information is internally segregated and granted only to those with a demonstrable ‘need to know’–prevents even its senior employees from efficient access to records, never mind the public” (Doyle 37).
I agree with Al that this article read as pretty outdated. To take that a step further, I actually found it kind of a frustrating read. 1999, when this was published, feels so long ago. 9/11 and the subsequent Patriot Act would have added nuance to this article. Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and the reactions both in America and abroad would have added nuance to this article. As it stands now, Doyle’s article just reads as too simplistic and idealistic.
She did make an interesting point, however, in including the bit from Robert Gates about the CIA being “archivally impaired.” Her article went on to describe other aspects of the U.S. government that could also be classified as “archivally impaired.” The phrase “archivally impaired” is one worth breaking down more, I think. That phrase likely means something very different to, say, the Holocaust and Human Rights Center in Augusta versus the Central Intelligence Agency.
Is there a case to be made for prioritizing archival updates within the government given today’s political climate? While it’s certainly not an either/or, when the government struggles to fund children’s healthcare, for example, is working toward a more efficient archival system what citizens should push for?
“That far more resources are devoted to the collection and preservation of what already exists as records, than to recording fresh data: I would guess that more energy and money is going for the collection and publication of the Papers of John Adams than for recording the experiences of soldiers on the battlefront in Vietnam.” Zion, 22
I think the idea of allocating resources to preserve the events of the present is a really interesting one. however, there is a finite amount of information available of historical events, and it is not surprising that recovering and preserving those sources is more challenging than recording ongoing events. Especially in light of technological advancements, it will become easier and easier to record and will probably develop to a point that most individuals would feel uncomfortable with. In dissent with Zinn, I think that the distribution of resources is good and fair.
Question: If, as Zinn says, every working citizen, regardless of position contributes to the societally identity, how much responsibility to archivists have to record as much as possible? Should they tackle archives as quantity or quality? Does a more expansive collection provide a more honest, well rounded record?
Hi Will,
I am also asking similar questions because I think Zinn may be overzealous in his request. The fact that an archivist would have to record and interpret so many more documents just to get a general consensus is excessive. Your question about quantity also got me thinking about an article I read about cyberspace archives. Is trying to record everything actually effective? Or should we be more selective in what we are archiving on the internet?
“I have only two proposals for archivists: One, that they engage in a campaign to open all government documents to the public…And two, that they take the trouble to compile a whole new world of documentary material…of ordinary people” (Zinn 25).
Zinn is proposing that argument that currently everybody is focused on being a professional in their field of work; however, nobody doubts the system they are working for. He says that knowledge is currently controlled at the top of the chain and this needs to change by opening up both the archives and the current government records to the public. This would promote a democratic nation as it allows the public to keep a constant check on the government officials. It would prevent them from being able to cover themselves and prevent any corruption. He also argues that only records of important people are archived and that the nation needs to do a better job of remembering the larger movements of its citizens. Zinn states remembering only certain people creates an archival bias and does not give a truthful representation of the given time period.
Question: I understand Zinn’s argument that there may be an archival bias by only recording the actions of the most influential people; however, how would the archivists be able to handle the workload of recording the records of every citizen? I am not convinced this is a reasonable option because they already have a huge task on their hands and I do not think the results would be worth the process.
“Professionalism is a powerful form of social control.” (Zinn, 15)
I think this quote raises a couple of fascinating ideas. The idea that people can’t participate in society fully because they’re so caught up in their own niche is something I think holds true even at Colby. Even though Colby is a liberal arts school, and hopefully more open because of that, I think often times people get caught up in their own worlds and forget about the community at large. Everyone is so driven on their own tasks, whether it be school or a sport, that it is hard to step back and participate fully in the community.
If it’s a problem at Colby, I’d say the quote 100% holds true in the real world. When everybody is focused on their own thing it is hard to take a step back and realize that every single person has some role to play in contributing to society.
Question- what role can information play in bringing people back to thinking about society as a whole?
“Garfinkel’s office figured that the government spent some $4.1 billion in 1997 alone on “security classification.” And that amount does not include the CIA’s share, which is…secret?” pg. 36
When thinking about the mass amount of debt that our country is consistently accumulating, isn’t it possible that policymakers could pride themselves on lowering the annual government budget by simply putting time into declassifying large and insignificant parts of government intelligence? Though this document does mention that much of declassification stalling is due to the power of bureaucracy and intelligence agencies themselves, it also states that citizen protest is the issue’s moving factor. Why has this large funding issue gone unnoticed for so long? Why haven’t politicians tried harder to use this to their advantage? Do you think that there has been intimidation by those at the executive level in Washington to dispel worries? If the US electorate did decide to care more about the funding of security classification, do you think that anything would change?
“Having done so little historical research of its won, the agency had to rely on accounts by historians with no access to classified documents, and its training program suffered from its own efforts to conceal and distort the public record.” (Cullather, XVI)
I think that the most pressing implication of this quote is that it points to how agencies in and of themselves could feasibly have an obligation–not a moral obligation, or an obligation to the public, but a utilitarian obligation to themselves–to keep their own histories as accurately and faithfully as they can. As we see here, even within the tightly-controlled confines of the CIA, old distortions in the public record, allowed to perpetuate because no one had the clearance to correct them, reproduce themselves and infiltrate not just the external sphere, but the internal one as well. As Cullather notes, this is to the detriment of an important training program, and thus to the CIA itself. It’s almost poetic justice in that those who lied in the past now have to live that lie, but the fact of the matter is that there really isn’t any upside to poor documental preservation in the context of an institution: The public is indifferent due to a lack of knowledge, and the institution has to rely on the public going forward inasmuch as it wants to at least try to teach its own history. I suppose that the moral of the story here is that those who distort their own history will suffer from it unless they have taken the proper archival measures so as to retain the truth, even if it does have to be buried in some obscure filing cabinet in Langley, Virginia.
Question: Do the “burn bags” that Cullather discusses have any ethical, moral, or generally non-clandestine uses? Last week, we read about the “Archival Imperative,” and with that in mind, I lean towards the “no” side. But is it dangerously utopian and naive to think that we should just preserve everything?
“After all, what did the Cold War teach us, if not the fundamental instability of closed regimes?” (Doyle 34).
Doyle lays out the reasoning for the history of secrecy in the US government, and calls on the American public to press for more courageous openness to preserve democracy from within the archives.
When it comes to the NSA Latin America documents, like those we looked at briefly in class, the US should have published more and sooner. We made enough mistakes by involving ourselves so thoroughly in Latin America, if these countries are able to have truth commissions, the least we can do is publish our self-damning documents under no penalty and for no threat to national security. The work of the countries we involved ourselves in, in fear of dominoes, have much more difficult work to do than our embarrassing publications of NSA documents.
Quote: “As World War II drew to a close, dictators who ruled Central America through the Depression years fell on hard times, and authoritarian regimes in Venezuela, Cuba, and El Salvador yielded to popular pressure.” Cullather, 10
Comment: Throughout the history described in this book is an insidious relationship between economics and politics–the power exercised by the United Fruit Company, and of the U.S. through that, and the blend of economic and political concern on behalf of the U.S. over the prospect of Communism in its “backyard” during the Cold War. Learning about U.S. involvement and the reasons and practices of the C.I.A., the defining line between politics and economic motivation seems very confused if not nonexistent. I found the above quote particularly interesting in this context of thought in that it seemed to connect a government’s economic weakness to the ability of its people to exercise control in it.
Question: Is greater economic equality necessary for improved democracy?
Quote: “The scholar may swear to his neutrality on the job, but whether he be physicist, historian, or archivist, his work will tend, in this theory, to maintain the existing social order by perpetuating its values, by legitimizing its priorities, by justifying its wars, perpetuating its prejudices, contributing to its xenophobia, and apologizing for its class order.”
Comment: I chose this quote in particular because it really sums up Zinn’s argument that scholarship and archival-work is innately political. In the current political climate, I often hear people arguing things like “keep politics out of the NFL” or even to “keep politics out of music” (as someone on my twitter timeline said last night about the Grammys). This is a silly idea though because—as Zinn argues—politics permeates every facet of our lives. Everything is political. Maintaining the status-quo is itself a political act. It is naïve to deny the overwhelming influence that politics has on every single thing we do.
Question: Zinn called for all government documents to be part of the public record. Does Zinn not think the military should be allowed to keep records confidential for national security purposes?
Qoute: “It is often asserted that the United States acted at the company’s behest in Guatemala, but this indicident suggests the opposiute may have been true: the administration wanted to use the United Fruit to contain communism in the hemisphere.” (Cullather 19)
Comment: I find this quote especially interesting in light of the many redactions the CIA made to Cullathers research report. It would seem that if anything the CIA might have wanted to silence this alternative narrative that Cullather is suggesting. However, it really doesn’t hold the CIA directly responsible, instead it holds the Truman administration responsible and maybe that is why they were fine with keeping this in the report as they could simply shift the blame from their own actions to the long gone Truman administration, kind of like how the Nazis shifted blame up the hierarchy of power after World War II.
Question: What further primary sources linking CIA decisions independent of the Truman Administration could reveal how the agency interfered with Guatemalan politics.