Prof. Ira Klein - History Page
The greatest of many great architectural accomplishmenets of the Indo-Persian architectural style which flourished under the Mughals and earlier Islamic regimes, the Taj Mahal has been called the world's most beautiful building. But it's placid perfection gave little sense of the ferocious political world in which it came into being. It's creator Shah Jehan was imprisoned there for the last years of his life by his fierce son Aurangzeg, who, in accordance with tradition, killed all his brothers in the struggle for succession, then jailed his father who had unexpectedly recovered from an illness. Aurangzeb's long wars against Marathas, Sikhs and others sapped the Mughal empire, and left it exhausted by his death in the early eighteenth century, an aid to eventual British succession to power in India. ndo-Persian style which
Ira Klein grew up mainly in Brooklyn, New York and Los Angeles, good spots for a Dodger fan. He did some undergraduate work at UCLA and the University of Wisconsin, but took all his degrees at Columbia University, specializing in History and Political Science, and enjoying the bounties of the Upper West Side, including its intellectual life, Chinese food and foreign films. He has spent three years doing research in England, the first two for his dissertation, the last on a post-doctoral fellowship. His studies were conducted mainly at the British National Archives and the India Office Library, but also in the Scottish National Archives, the British Library, and in various repositories in Cambridge, Oxford, Birmingham and Leeds. While in England he was a founder member of the leading civil rights organization, the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination and was an active member of its speaker's bureau. He also was active in the Bloomsbury Labour party, whose secretary and his friend, Frank Dobson, at this writing is a minister in Tony Blair's Labour government. He was fortunate in living in Bloomsbury during his graduate student days, letting part of a flat from A.S. Byatt and her family, who became close friends and who loaned him the flat for his wedding party (A.S. Byatt since has been awarded the Booker Prize in Literature). He spent a year in India, doing research in Delhi, Calcutta, Madras, Allahabad and Poona before returning to New York to finish his degree. During that last year in New York, his wife obtained a position as researcher for the New York Times's theater critic, and the couple enjoyed free tickets, fifth row center, to all the plays in New York, as well as cast off Times furniture. The desk on which this is being written was once part of the Times newsroom.
He has two research specializations, one on twentieth century British and European Diplomacy and the second on the Western impact on Asian and other developing societies, and both are reflected in his teaching. His graduate level courses such as War and Diplomacy; Napoleon to Bismarck and War and Peace; Bismarck to Hitler deal with diplomacy as realpolitik, the chess board of great power strategic maneuvers against each other. They focus heavily on interpretation and they reinterpret some topics, particularly the Vienna Settlement, the Unification of Italy, Imperialism, the Partition of Africa, Versailles, Munich and the making of World War II. His graduate level course on Modern Revolutions is much broader, emphasizing the theory of revolution, particularly Marx, modernization theory, expectations theory, and his own "factors of revolution," then examining twentieth century revolutions in Russia, Germany, China and Iran. His undergraduate courses include The West in Crisis, which focuses on the rival ideologies of the early twentieth century, Communism, Fascism and the Nazis, and New Deal Liberalism, and on the two World Wars. Civilization and Modernization: Asia concentrates on the Western impact on China, Japan and India, their processes of "modernization" and why they had emerged by the twenty first century as very different civilizations. Imperialism and Revolution takes a more global perspective on twentieth century developments, ranging from China and Vietnam to Central and South America, and comparing their experiences, while also examining such contemporary issues as population growth, resource availability and the environmental problems associated with "development."
In the early dogfights of World War I few recognized the full potential of airplanes or could have conceived how they would transform strategies during World War II. One who did comprehend was Basil Liddle Hart, an English initiator of some of the major ideas of offensive strategies employed in the next great war. Liddle Hart had high hopes that his ideas would be understood by the ebullient Minister for Air, Winston Churchill, but Churchill did not comprehend, or approve Liddle Hart's plans. Conversely, the German general command read Liddle Hart carefully, and his ideas figured centrally in what emerged as the Blitkreig, in which the Germans used their dive bomber, the Junker, with terrible effectiveness against Poland and France. Perhaps the major reason for British "appeasement" at Munich was that the British military commanders on the Committee of Imperial Defense told the Cabinet that the RAF could not then stand up to the Lutwaffe, and without a strong air force the British could not be sure of protecting the Royal Navy and hence of staving off a German invasion. The Japanese were equally original in their use of air power, initiating their attack on Pearl Harbor as an airplane raid launched from aircraft carriers, inconceivable to American military leaders and therefore insufficiently guarded against.
The immense human costs of World War I were shocking. A pre-war best seller, The Great Illusion claimed it was illusionary that a major war could occur--the advances of industry and democracy made war irrelevant. At the end of the slaughter, the long years of trench warfare, with movement of only a few miles in four years on the Western front convinced French leaders and some others that future wars would be defensive, a reason the French built the Maginot Line and for their catastrophe when confronted with the Nazi blitzkreig in 1940.
Requiring domination Hitler never had any regular civilian job, other than leader of the Nazi Party and Chancellor and Dictator of Germany. His acute memory and comprehension, and oratorical and psychological skills made him charismatic to many, but the darker, suspicious side of his character was hinted in his original title for his book, "My Struggle Against Four and One-half years of Lies, Tyranny and Cowardice"--eventually shortened to "Mein Kampf" by his publisher. His Minister of Munitions during World War II, Albert Speer wrote that it was wise to stay in close physical proximity to Hitler; if you were distant from him for long he began to believe you might be plotting against him.
Ira Klein has been active in American University affairs, serving as director of the Honors Program during five critical early years of its existence, acting as Vice Chair of the General Education Committee, and suggesting major features of the Gen. Ed. Program. He spent nine years Chairing the University Senate Grievance Committee, the last resort for faculty members who fail to obtain tenure, promotion, who have salary complaints, equity complaints and other problems. He credits himself with having developed techniques which facilitated the equitable resolution of many grievances, and which, with the cooperation of able University administrators, made the grievance procedures a much more viable instrument for resolving faculty problems. He and his (adult) children have a deep seated concern with community issues, and he expressed that interest by taking the lead in developing a service-learning program, whereby students can obtain academic credit for community service activities by exploring the intellectual roots of community issues in which they have been involved. He values his close relations with students, many of whom have become good friends, and for the last three years he has Chaired the University Senate Committee on Student Relations, which has made progress in resolving campus life issues. He was nominated best teacher in the College of Arts and Sciences in 1990 and for Outstanding Service in 2001, and has obtained other University service awards.
In the years before the Bolshevik Revolution, Stalin raised funds for the Party by robbing banks and trains. After he ruthlessly manipulated his way to absolute power in the 1920s--all the while maintaining a facade of bonhomie, Stalin later ordered the deaths of all original members of the Politboro and the majority of the army general staff during the purges of the 1930s. Isaac Deutscher attributed these brutal actions to his fear of a challenge to his leadership in case of a war with Germany and a Nazi invasion of the USSR. In the years before his death he appears to have become paranoid. His daughter Svetlana fled to the West and claimed that if Soviet leaders didn't look into his eyes, he suspected they were plotting against him and had them killed, a fate purportedly avoided by his long term Foreign Minister, Molotov, only by Stalin's demise. Whether Stalinism was necessary for Soviet Communism recently has been hotly debated.
Brilliant, ruthless, stubborn and a poet, Mao rose to leadership of the Chinese Communist Party despite lacking the usual educational credentials. Breaking from the Marxism-Leninism of the Moscow-trained top party leaders, Mao acculturated Marx to real Chinese conditions, originating the strategies of successful peasant based revolt, by adopting methods he first learned about in his youth, when reading the political romances which chronicled peasant rebellion against oppressive imperial administrators. His leadership was unchallenged from the Long March to the fiasco of the Great Leap Forward 25 years later in 1959. Virtually unmatched as a revolutionary strategist, Mao had serious flaws as civilian policy maker of a "developing" country, and was removed as head of state, while remaining Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. His differences with those he called "capitalist-roaders" surfaced in his "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution," in which he ultimately failed to purge the opposition and became a spent volcano.
Ira Klein wrote his dissertation on "The Diplomacy of British Imperialism in Asia," focusing particularly on Anglo-Russian rivalries in Iran, China, Tibet and Afghanistan, and Anglo-French rivalries in Southeast Asia in the early twentieth century. All chapters were published as scholarly articles, in the Historical Journal, The Journal of British Studies and other journals. In these and other essays about Western diplomacy in Asia he has stressed not only the nature of great power policies but how Western penetration destablilized many Asian societies, whose processes of modernization were disruptive, promoted anti-Western nationalist movements and further Western intervention. His interest in the West and Asia also has been expressed by comparing the divergent impact of development in Western countries, particularly England, and Asian societies, especially India. In numerous essays published in Modern Asian Studies, The Journal of Asian Studies, The Indian Economic and Social History Review and elsewhere he has shown how development policies unaccompanied by mass education, environmental reclamation, or sufficient social change or information about the diffusion of disease, promoted environmental disruption and the spread of epidemics, and increased death rates in India and some other colonies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He has also written about development in Independent India and its contemporary efforts to improve health and reduce population growth. An essay on "Materialism , Mutiny and Modernization in India" in Modern Asian Studies, XXXIV, July, 2000, reassesses the Western impact on India, and holds that British policy was flawed less for "cultural colonization"--the imposition of the English language, literature and Western cultural paradigms--than for imbalanced development policies which exposed a small elite to Westernism but did too little for the masses, leaving 99% of all women and 99% of all lower caste people illiterate by the 1920s. He has co-authored a light popular history of early modern Europe, and is completing manuscripts primarily about development and health in India.
The productions of which he is most proud, however, are his three grown children, of whom one works with homeless young adults in San Francisco and teaches creative writing at San Francisco State, a second helps women organize cooperatives in villages in Mexico and the third teaches in a Los Angeles middle school.
Called a Mutiny by the British and a Revolt mainly by Indian writers, the events of 1857 were seen as a dividing line by some authors, who thought it marked an end to British reformism and development policies in India; but this writer has disagreed, noting that the British construction of railroads, great irrigation canals, universities and democratizing steps toward parliamentary governance and home rule mostly were created after 1857. The British complained that the "Mutiny" revealed Indian "barbarity," but then blew rebels from the mouths of canons and hanged them from trees along major city avenues. Nonetheless British rule in India was more progressive than most colonial ventures, but had some terrible inadvertent consequences.
