Feel free to browse some of the great sites in my blogroll for more history news and keep an eye on www.archaeology.org for archeology news, www.cloudworth.com for WWII news and www.telegraph.co.uk for general history articles.

See you soon.

“Ikea makes you free”

1) I knew my Ikea furniture was cheaply made but I had no idea we’re talking East German slave labour in the 80s. (Link)

2) Vandals have been arrested after attacking Roman monuments including the Trevi Fountain and the Colosseum. The historian part of me would like the vandals to suffer a fate usually reserved to pedophiles and serial killers (and actual Vandals back in AD 455). (Link)

3) Unlike Egypt in early 2011, Libya seems to have minded its archaeology and done everything to preserve its historical treasures. (Link)

4) A sensational discovery has been revealed in Austria. Buried under millennia of sediment: a spectacularly preserved gladiator school. (Link)

5) As we approach the decade anniversary of 9/11, this flight attendant tells us of the many ways in which her job changed in the past 10 years. (Link)

6) An elusive former-president Bush resurfaces ten years after 9/11 to answer some questions. And no, he claims no jubilation at the death of Osama bin Laden. (Link)

7) Our Hungarian Nazi war criminal that was recently acquitted, Sandor Kepiro, has died at the age of 97. They say only the good die young. (Link)

8 ) Statues of Zeus and Hera have been removed from the Athenian Acropolis for “safe-keeping”, not to pay the Germans for bailing out the Greek economy twice. (Link)

9) Scientific American takes a look at upcoming movie “Apollo 18″ and wonders “what if the Apollo program was never cancelled?” (Link)

10) General Perisic once headed ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslav states. After a (very) long trial, he has been sentenced to 27 years in jail by an international tribunal. (Link)

- 1939: On Sept. 1st, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, effectively beginning the Second World War. Hitler’s game of chicken with Stalin, Churchill/Chamberlain and FDR had finally failed. (Link)

- 1997: On Aug. 31st, Princess Diana, hounded by paparazzi and plagued by a drunk chauffeur, died in a limousine crash near Paris’ Pont de l’Alma. (Link)

- “The 10 Greatest Uses of Trash Talk in the History of War” – Genghis Khan keeps it real. (Link)

- “5 Ways the Invention of Pants Shaped the World” – Because we’d take the US president slightly less seriously without them… (Link)

That being said, we still haven’t found the Colonel and something tells me he’s quite far from the action as we speak. Like many African dictators before him, he may have retreated to a villa in a nearby sympathetic nation that has no extradition treaty with the West (Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, etc.).

No matter, we’ll find him soon enough as we did Saddam and he will be brought to one of a few possible “justices”. He may be sent to an international tribunal for war crimes and the like but that is unlikely. He may be tried by the new court system of Libya, where I would expect a swift resolution and the Colonel doing a rumba at the end of a noose. Finally, he may simply receive “justice at the end of a rifle as soon as a rebel finds him. Also, the transition governement of Libya has just announced a 1.7 US$ reward for his capture, dead or alive, so it shouldn’t take very long.

Idi Amin, Charles Taylor, Hosni Mubarak, Mobutu Sese Seko… the Dark Continent has not had a shortage of brutal overlords in the post-colonial era. Each country seems to have rapidly gone through various governments and ways of governing themselves. Slowly but surely, each African country will emerge with a system that works for them and, like ALL of the Western nations, may accomplish it through some level of bloodshed.

Good luck to the new government of Libya. I advise NATO to pull out immediately and for the United Nations to assume the role of facilitator including a heavy presence from the Arab World and the African Union. I hope the journalists holed up at the Rixos Hotel get out safely. I hope the Roman ruins at Leptis Magna are still intact. I enthusiastically applaud the changing of the Libyan flag and I hope the people of Libya will prosper, but in their own way and time.

"Once you go ridiculously overboard, you never go back." (8)

1) A return on Dr. Zimbardo and the Stanford Prison Experiment: how we are, at all times, a hair away from descending into cruel savagery. (Link)

2) The recent “News of the World” scandal of questionable journalistic practices brings back the tale of William Randolph Hearst, media magnate at the turn of the century and father to all that is “questionable journalism”. (Link)

3) A new biography elaborates that Coco Chanel was  Nazi Spy. Great! I can tell the wife I can’t buy her Chanel anymore. (Link)

4) One of the directors of the “Grand Theft Auto” video game series wants to make his next installment about the 1979 Iranian Revolution. I am thoroughly intrigued… (Link)

5) Sunken treasure! Archaeologists have found a massive trove an ancient coins off the coast of Sicily. (Link)

6) Challenging our prehistorical preconceptions, new massive fossils indicate that dinosaurs lived with proper birds. (Link)

7) A very rare statue of the demigod Hercules has been excavated in northern Israel. Rare due to its small size and due to its survival in what has been a war zone for most of the past two millennia. (Link)

8 ) For when farming was much more “badass”, see this 1910 booklet on farming with dynamite. (Link)

9) With the twentieth anniversary quickly approaching, the BBC sheds new light on the last days of the Soviet Union. (Link)

10) Archeologists in England have discovered the first “planned” town that actually dates back to before Roman settlement. (Link)

- 1920: On Aug. 16th, it was a dark day for the sport of baseball as a fastball fatally hit Ray Chapman of the Cleveland Indians. He remains the only player to have died in such a way in the sport’s history. (Link)

-1969: On Aug, 15th, 500,000 people attended the beginning of the Woodstock music festival in a New York field. The goal was to challenge the Establishment. Minutes later, that goal was thrown out in favour of “partytime”. (Link)

- “5 Aerial Battles That Put Top Gun to Shame” – More than Tom Cruise? (Link)

-”6 Companies that Changed the Rules of the Game” – With enough business acumen, some of these have even dictated reality. (Link)

Henry VIII's missing documents may or may not be burning as we speak

1) The UK’s national archives report hundreds of missing documents. From official edicts of Henry VIII to letters from Winston Churchill, the British are enraged to say the least (this is why hooligans are REALLY burning down London). (Link)

2) In the name of counter-terrorism and supported by the Patriot Act in the past decade, certain defence contractors were sent to jail for torture. Now, former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld has been found not to have immunity concerning this and he may very well be indicted shortly for condoning torture. (Link)

3) Theory confirmed…as horrifying. An ancient Roman villa in England has a hundred baby carcasses in the basement. Seems as though it was a Roman brothel that disposed of its unwanted offspring far from sight. (Link)

4) The downgrade of the American economy has been blamed on Republicans, Democrats, President Obama, Tea Partiers, credit agencies and perhaps even global warming. One thing is certain, the political blame game has historically only brought on bad things. (Link)

5) Manuel Noriega, dictator of Panama during the 1980s was deposed by the Americans and incarcerated for twenty years. He was then extradited to France where he is serving time for money laundering. He may soon be extradited back to Panama as his own countrymen want to impose their own justice. (Link)

6) The State of Virginia is proposing two new history textbooks for state-wide classes, after the last two had a few errors. Errors such as “Thousand of African-Americans fought for the South during the Civil War, which most historians reject…” (Link)

7) Archaeologists have excavated a 3,000-year-old gate of massive proportions in southern Turkey. The gate, complete with a huge and intact lion, is said to have adorned the entrance of an ancient Hittite palace. (Link)

8 ) The New York Times brings us a postcard from 1950s Manhattan. From Andy Warhol walking the streets to Truman Capote living with his mother… (Link)

9) Heat and droughtare devastating Texas and drying up every lake in sight. A small silver-lining has been the discovery of a sprawling cemetery for freed slaves that may contain much lost history. (Link)

10) Plot twist! The lost Alfred Hitchcock film “The White Shadow” (1924) has been found in a New Zealand vault and becomes his oldest surviving work. (Link)

- “The 5 Biggest Disasters in the History of Marketing Ideas” – Why wouldn’t a free Krusty Burger for every American Olympic gold medal in 1984 be a good idea? (Link)

- “If Famous Photographs Were Off By a Second” – A Photoshop contest of witty proportions. (Link)

- 1861: On August 5th, President Lincoln’s congress ratified the first income tax, a temporary measure to bolster state coffers during the civil war but that turned into a permanent hand in American pockets. (Link)

- 1945: On August 9th, the United States dropped a devastating atomic bomb on the Japanese harbour city of Nagasaki. A final blow to Japan and a warning to the Soviet Union, the bomb killed about 80,000 people. (Link)

From Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel to Craxi and Berlusconi.

And now from the late 1800s beginning of Italy through a burst of fascism and a timid democratic republic we arrive at the 1980s, where it really gets interesting.

Corruption and the acceleration of downfall

With the 1980s now came a savior, leader of the Socialist party and prime minister from 1983-87, Bettino Craxi. With Craxi came the rebounding of the Italian economy to the point of joining the G8 (G7 at the time) and he did this by increasing spending. A lot. In his short years, national debt skyrocketed past 100% of Italian GDP. This is also where began the proliferation of political corruption qualified as tagentopoli (Bribesville). Reaching the 1990s, it was getting more and more obvious that major private companies were bribing officials in return for preference and contracts and thus a group of judges asked for the creation of the Mani Pulite (Clean Hands) investigation. At first some mid-level officials were found guilty. Then, people started denouncing others. Then, accusations, convictions and confessions spread like a brushfire across Italian government from the municipal level all the way to the prime minister’s office. What followed was almost a collapse of Italy there and then. By 1992, the four major parties of Italy were implicated and politicians were falling left and right (to imprisonment but also extensively to suicide). The Christian-Democrats, in power for almost 50 years, crumbled and disbanded and the other three parties of Italy followed suit. Craxi himself was found guilty and sentenced to prison despite his defense of “everyone else was doing it” (Craxi fled the country and died in a luxurious Tunisian villa in 2000).

Pompeii wasn't the only thing in Italy falling to pieces.

The Italians overthrew this third attempt at a responsible and stable government and in 1994 elected someone that actually saw the Mani Pulite as an opportunity. Media magnate Silvio Berlusconi was a millionaire that almost certainly owned companies that had participated in bribing officials (everyone was doing it remember?). He quickly changed the law to eliminate prison terms from corruption convictions and when his own brother was found guilty by the investigation, pardoned him (for the first of several times). High on the transparency trend, Italians campaigned to indict Berlusconi and he resigned his government at the end of 1994.

Silvio Berlusconi was actually reelected in 2001, allegedly bribing his way to the top again. With the Mani Pulite long gone, he actually manipulated Italian media (most of which he personally owns) into demonizing the Mani Pulite judges and anyone involved in prosecuting politicians. Furthermore, he surrounded himself with an expert legal team that exploited the notoriously loophole-y Italian judicial system into letting accusations expire against the prime minister. He lost in 2006 but once again (!) Italians elected him in 2008 and he remains prime minister to this day. Still on trial, Berlusconi is accused of corruption and bribery (for almost two decades now without conviction), especially concerning the bribery of politicians in the 2006-2008 government.

A head of state.

Italy has become so used to politicians conducting themselves in this manner that it accepts and continuously reelects a man that is openly known to conduct criminal business and that is openly suspected to have bribed his way into office several times. Considering the track record that we’ve just gone through, I guess he is the most democratic of a long-line of corrupt and authoritarian leaders. Berlusconi’s misdeeds are so unsubtle that Italians may simply prefer the devil they know… Now however, Italians must realize that their trial-and-error history of democracy has brought them to a financial precipice.

Ancient Rome similarly went through a kingdom, republic and empire, none of which had very much success bringing power to the people.

A bad mixture of tradition and corruption has maintained Italy on the path to economic and national catastrophe and, despite punctual periods of prosperity, leaves Italy not far from where they were in 1861, 1922, 1946 and 1992. They tried something and failed dramatically and now must reevaluate their options. I have no reason to believe that Italians will do better next time but I do suspect that they are not afraid to try drastically new things, and that, is a scary prospect.

The Americans will cut social programs and raise taxes, the Greeks have cut government spending with a scythe but Italy needs more. No reform will fix the fundamental flaws in the Italian nation (in its 2011 incarnation). They need to go back to the drawing board once again. So now we wait. Berlusconi is still prime minister, still a media magnate and still manipulating courtrooms (in cases that now include an underage affair), the Italian debt is still escalating and the Italian of 2011 is at home thinking.

From Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel to Craxi and Berlusconi.

With all this talk of the United States possibly defaulting on their international loans and of Greece receiving a second bailout from Germany and the European Union to continue existing, one thing is clear: the global economic recession is far from over.

This week, I specifically turn to a country that has the fourth-largest economy of the European Union, that is part of the G8 most powerful countries on the planet, that has 60 million inhabitants, that holds thousands of years of history and that is generally crumbling in debt: Italy.

We are far from the US’ $14 trillion in debt but Italy’s $2.2 trillion in debt is more than Italians can handle. You see, Italy has key flaws built into their fledgling nation that now, more than ever, prevent it from getting out of trouble and will even compound the problem to an unthinkable national collapse.

For eample, tax evasion is rampant (an estimated 100 billion Euros lost per year), annual growth rate has stagnated around 4% since 1988, over a quarter of young Italians aged 15-24 are unemployed, heavy traditional family values has meant thousands of small companies and almost no large publicly-owned companies not to mention just about half of Italian women not participating in the workforce and finally very strong unions and trade guilds make firings almost impossible and therefore companies prefer not to hire and consequently immigration to the country is so low that Italy’s aging population is currently not replacing itself. Oh, and the government is huge. For its population, Italy has the largest government spending on earth (almost 52% of GDP) and the debt of this public sector annually amounts to 120% of GDP. Italy, for all the spending cuts it is trying to implement, is still spending much more than it is bringing in, and that, just for the public sector.

One can see why Italy’s troubles seem unfixable. But it gets worse. Much worse.

150 Years in the Making

When we think of Italy we think of the ancient Etruscans and Romans, the Popes at the Vatican, the cultural explosion of the Renaissance… but that is not Italy. Much like Germany, Italy was not a unified state until later in the XIX^th century. Instead, the Italian land was host to kingdoms, duchies, Papal States, republics and the like until three Italian wars of unification brought them all together in 1861 to form the country we know today (give or take).

Thus it was that Italians were disillusioned with a constitutional monarchy that pulled in different directions, that brought them into a devastating war and that, in the end, couldn’t even deliver on their promises. Enter Benito Mussolini in 1922. Marching on Rome in a coup sponsored by the king (Victor Emmanuel II), Mussolini’s National Fascist Party was greeted with great acclaim before ruling over the country with an iron fist for two decades. Despite this return to authoritarian rule, the same pattern emerged. Mussolini’s government pretended to listen to the people while disseminating flattering propaganda but Italy was actually signing treaties with the Vatican (for land and support), with the Nazis (for protection) and with the Japanese (to please Germany) while curtailing all liberties at home.

I spare you the details of the Second World War but half a million dead Italian soldiers and civilians along with a destroyed Italian economy saw a renewed uprising by the Italian people, the summary execution of Mussolini and a referendum to become a republic by June 2, 1946, throwing out the monarchy altogether this time.

Having twice failed at a stable government in a short period, Italians and their government now took timid steps. They accepted the American “Marshall Plan” that gave Western European powers money to rebuild after the war (in exchange for keeping communism at bay), they elected Christian-Democrats at the head of the country (women voted for the first time in 1948) and Italy became a member of NATO, surrounding itself with powerful, democratic and economically sound allies this time. In this period of “step-by-step”, Italy even participated in the creation of the European Economic Community in 1957, the precursor of the European Union.

With confidence restored, despite an admittedly less than stellar track record after its centennial celebrations, Italy fell into some old habit in the 1960s and 70s. International economic downturns, such as the 1973 oil crisis, hit the country very hard and in times of hardships, especially economical, Italians once again wanted to change their form of government. Rome did not become fascist or communist this time but those two extremes of the political spectrum gained a large following and frequent clashes between them, and against the democratic republic, led to extensive terrorism and assassinations (notably of Aldo Moro in 1978, the Christian-Democrat leader).

We continue next week with part two of the article. See how the 1980s and 90s brought about corruption, imprisonment, suicide and finally indifference to the politicians of Italy, leaving it a bankrupted state in many ways.

The End will use this time to grieve for the youth of Norway and the surviving victims of an unthinkable incident.

A nation of peace for the better part of a century, the Western World will be shocked for a long time that such a horrendous act of racism, ultranationalism and senselessness could happen anywhere, even in one of the most non-belligerent, democratic and prosperous countries.

These types of incidents bring out the worst in people (i.e. the American man executed last week for randomly going on a shooting rampage against non-whites following 9/11). I just hope Norwegians can unite in resentment and hatred towards this one man, what he did and no one else, and then try to let the justice system decide his fate.

Luck and condolensces.

.........Sort of. (1)

1) As a member and supporter of the Mubarak regime, Zahi Hawass “The Original Indiana Jones”, Minister of Antiquities and protector of Egypt’s archaeological heritage for decades, has been fired. (Link)

2) A Hungarian war criminal, in league with the Nazis during a 1942 police raid that killed 30 Jews and Serbs, has been found not guilty at the age of 97. (Link)

3) One easily associates the term “Nazi” with pure evil. I will not be weakening the association with this list of the 8 worst human experiments conducted by the Nazis. (Link)

4) On the lighter side of Nazism… we know that German soldiers were issued condoms during WWII but a new book claims sex dolls were also distributed to prevent STDs. (Link)

5) A final ally of the Germans, Austria-Hungary, has lost its last member of the royal family, Otto von Habspurg (despite the fact that Austria-Hungary ceased to exist 93 years ago). (Link)

6) New research tries to elucidate of the Inca civilization, despite being prolific builders, indeed had no written language. (Link)

7) A smuggling ring of ancient Egyptian coffins has been thwarted. A part of me would have wanted one of those (are they really safer in Egypt?). (Link)

8 ) We are going through North America’s worst heat wave on record. Global warming! Oh wait, this doesn’t even make the top 10. (Link)

9) College students are not necessarily smarter today. The New York Times sheds a light on the history of “college grade inflation”. (Link)

10) Jane Austen’s manuscript of an unpublished novel “The Watsons”, racked up $1.6 million at auction. (Link)

- 1945: On July 16th, the United States detonated the world’s first nuclear bomb in a new Mexico desert. Satisfied with this one and only test, President Truman green-lit the next two to be dropped on Japan three weeks later. (Link)

- 1918: On July 17th, Czar Nicholas II and the Romanov family were executed by the Bolsheviks, ending the Russian kingdom and empire that had lasted many centuries. (Link)

- “The 6 Most Amazing Military Raids of All-Time” – Because the best strategies have been insane. (Link)

- “7 ‘Ancient’ Forms of Mysticism That Are Recent Inventions” – Because Satanism exists only because Christians insisted it did. (Link)

That being said, enjoy this in the meantime. General high-school history was a while back but I sure as heck don’t remember my teacher telling me about 11,000-year-old architecture. (Link)

End.