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The Government Department is very excited to welcome Dr. Feryaz Ocakli , who will be joining the department as an Assistant Professor next fall. Prof. Ocakli received his doctor-al degree from Brown University, where he wrote a dissertation about the electoral strate-gies of Islamist parties in Turkey. Prof. Ocakli is an accomplished, award-winning, engag-ing and energetic teacher, and we urge all of you to welcome him to the department in the fall, and to consider signing up for his courses. In the fall he'll be teaching GO 103 and GO 239: Politics of the Middle East.

This has undoubtedly been a busy year at Skidmore; however Professor Ginsberg found time to complete his new book entitled, The European Union in Global Security: The Politics of Impact , a riveting look at the role of the EU in maintaining global security. The book attempts to unravel the mysteries of EU security mechanisms through a compre-hensive exploration of the decision-making bodies of Government in the EU. Professor Ginsberg, along with his co-author Ms. Susan Penksa, undoubtedly compiled a large volume of research based on complex case studies to finish the publication. The book represents months, and even years of hard work for both Authors and should be a land-mark publication in the continued study of the European Union.

In December, shortly after teaching his last class, Professor Hoffmann flew to Rota, Spain and spent seven weeks with his grandchildren. In the course of his stay Professor Hoffmann lived in the Town of Puerto de Santa Maria, visited The US naval and air base at Rota, Seville, Cadiz, Granada, Cordoba, Madrid, Jerez, the Sierra Nevada mountains in Andalusia province, towns and historical sites in the Spanish province of Estremadura as well as The Strait of Gibraltar and Tangier, Morocco. Not one to limit his travels, he also visited towns and historical sites in Portugal.

The great playwright, anti-communist dissident, and Czech statesman Vaclav Havel died this past December. Czech mourners have celebrated his legacy and reflected on the Velvet Revolution that he helped lead. One of his oldest allies was Pavel Bratinka, who served with Havel on the Civic Forum, the umbrella group that unified anti-Communist forces. Bratinka was also one of the founders of the Civic Democratic Alliance (a center-right party) and was elected to the legislatures of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Repub-lic. For the January/February edition of The American Interest, Professor Flagg Tay-lor interviewed Bratinka about the legacy of totalitarianism in his country and the chal-lenges facing his country today in a piece entitled “Hope and Change, Czech Style.” Paul Howard of the Manhattan Institute interviewed Professor Flagg Taylor about Havel's life and legacy. You can listen to the interview on the Manhattan Institute’s website under their Podcast section: http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/ podcasts.htm

Professor Timothy Burns just completed an article, “Nicias and Cleon in Thucydides and Aristophanes,” for a collection of essays called The Political Theory of Aristophanes: Rethinking the Quarrel Between Poetry and Philosophy, edited by Bryan-Paul Frost (SUNY Press, 2012). He is now working on an article, “Roman Virtues in a Christian Commercial Republic: Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice ,” which will be appearing in the June, 2012 issue of Perspectives in Political Science. He will be presenting a paper on Francis Bacon at the conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas (ISSEI), to be held at the University of Cyprus in Nicosia, Cyprus, July 2-6, 2012. Professor Burns recently signed a contract with Palgrave McMillan to become co-editor, with Thomas Pangle, of a new series called Recovering Political Philosophy. (A brief description is available at http://tinyurl.com/77uvm4d). Submissions of book proposals and manu-scripts so far already include works on Xenophon, Cicero, Lucretius, the liberal polity, and Sexuality and Globalization. He will spend the summer working on a book on Shake-speare's political thought.

Professor Burns: The truth behind the mutilation of the herms in Athens in 415 BC, before the Athenians set sail for Sicily, would be nice to know. Many of the best citizens were jailed and killed in an effort to discover the perpetrators of the sacrilegious deed, which was thought to be part of an impious conspiracy to bring down the democracy. The truth was never found, though the religious frenzy came to an end through a feigned confession as part of a plea-bargain. It is of interest for the following rea-son. Alcibiades, an outstanding leader and chief proponent of the Athenian expedition, was accused of participating in the sacrilege, and after the expedition set sail, he was tried and found guilty, i n abstentia , of impiety—a capital crime—and escaped from the Athenians that came to Sicily to bring him back to Athens for execution. He went to Sparta, where he suc-ceeded in convincing the Spartans to send a force to Sicily, where only the pious leader Nicias remained in charge of the Athenian expedition. Had Alcibiades remained in charge rather than being persecuted for impiety by his enemies, the Athenians would have defeated Syracuse, gone on to defeat Carthage, and taken over the Mediterranean. It is likely that the Roman em-pire never would have arisen, and all of Western history (and languages) would have been substantially different.

Another scandal whose truth would be interesting is the award-ing of the 1932 Pulitzer Prize to Walter Duranty, for the 13 arti-cles he wrote in The New York Times in 1931 about life in the Soviet Union, in which he whitewashed the horrors of life under Stalin. Duranty's articles merely parroted official Soviet news sources, presenting their lies as if they were facts. And in 1933, he denied, from Moscow, that there was any famine in the Ukraine. But there was. And that famine was the direct, planned result of Stalin's forced collectivization of agriculture, whose goal was to "liquidate the kulaks as a class." At least five million people were starved to death (a fraction of all who were murdered under Stalin). Duranty's articles denied Stalin's atroc-ities and failures, and presented the Soviet Union as a workers' paradise. Duranty did this at a time when the British reporter Malcolm Muggeridge was reporting the truth about life in the Soviet Union. One would like to know why Duranty did this, and why the Pulitzer committee was so eager to believe his fabrica-tions.