Role of New Media in an Earlier Era of Dissidents

To put the Soviet human rights movement in context, it is important to note that Soviet dissidents never started a mass organization, as did their Polish counterparts, and they cannot receive full credit for bringing down the Soviet regime: the arms race, the war in Afghanistan, and the economic disaster wrought by Soviet central planning must receive equal credit. Nor did they ever manage more than a handful of public demonstrations. One of the most famous--staged on August 25, 1968, to protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia--involved only seven people. At noon, the seven gathered in front of St. Basil's Cathedral on Red Square, and unrolled Czech flags and banners marked with slogans: "Long live free and independent Czechoslovakia," "Hands off Czechoslovakia, for your freedom and ours." Within minutes, a whistle blew and plainclothes KGB rushed at the demonstrators, whom they seem to have been expecting, shouting, "They're all Jews!" and "Beat the anti-Sovietists!" They tore down the banners, beat up the demonstrators, and took all but one--she was with her three-month-old son--straight to prison.

But small though they were, these efforts caused a great deal of trouble for the Soviet leadership, particularly given its continued commitment to spreading world revolution and its consequent, obsessive concern about the USSR's international image. In Stalin's era, repression on a massive scale could be kept secret even from a visiting American Vice President [the hopelessly naive Henry Wallace]. In the 1960s and 1970s, news of a single arrest could travel around the world overnight.

In part, this was thanks to improvements in mass communication, the Voice of America, Radio Liberty, and television. In part, it was also because Soviet citizens found new ways to transmit news as well. For 1966 also marked another milestone: the birth of the term samizdat. An acronym which deliberately echoed the term Gosizdat, or "State Publishing House," samizdat literally means "self-publishing house," and figuratively refers to the underground press. The concept was not new. In Russia, samizdat was nearly as old as the written word. Pushkin himself had privately distributed manuscripts of his more politically charged poetry in the 1820s. Even in Stalin's time, the circulation of stories and poems among friends was not entirely unknown.

But after 1966, samizdat grew into a national pastime. The Thaw [after the death of Stalin] had given many Soviet citizens a taste for a freer sort of literature, and at first samizdat was a largely literary phenomenon. Very quickly, samizdat came to have a more political character. A KGB report which circulated among Central Committee members in January 1971 analyzed the changes over the previous five years, noting that it had discovered

more than 400 studies and articles on economic, political, and philosophical questions, which criticize from various angles the historical experience of socialist construction in the Soviet Union, revise the internal and external politics of the Communist Party, and advance various programs of opposition activity.

The report concluded that the KGB would have to work on the "neutralization and denunciation of the anti-Soviet tendencies presented in samizdat." But it was too late to put the genie back in the bottle, and samizdat continued to expand, taking many forms: typed poems, passed from "friend to friend and retyped at every opportunity; handwritten newslettersand bulletins; transcripts of Voice of America broadcasts; and, much later, books and journals professionally produced on underground typesetting machines, more often than not located in communist Poland. Poetry, and poem-songs composed by Russian bards--Alexander Galich, Bulat Okudzhava, Vladimir Vysotsky--also spread quickly through the use of what was then a new form of technology, the cassette tape recorder.

Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, one of the most important themes of samizdat was the history of Stalinism--including the history of the Gulag. Samizdat networks continued to print and distribute copies of the works of Solzhenitsyn, which were by now banned in the USSR. Varlam Shalamov's poems and stories also began circulating in the underground, as did Evgeniya Ginzburg's memoirs. Both writers began to attract large groups of admirers. Ginzburg became the center of a circle of Gulag survivors and literary figures in Moscow.

The other important theme of samizdat was the persecution of the dissidents. Indeed, it was thanks to samizdat--and particularly to its distribution abroad--that the human rights advocates would gain, in the 1970s, a far wider international forum. In particular, the dissidents learned to use samizdat not only to underline the inconsistencies between the USSR's legal system and the KGB's methods, but also to point out, loudly and frequently, the gap between the human rights treaties that the USSR had signed, and actual Soviet practice. Their preferred texts were the UN Declaration on Human Rights, and the Helsinki Final Act. The former was signed by the USSR in 1948 and contained, among other things, a clause known as Article 19:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

SOURCE: Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum (Anchor Books, 2003), pp. 534-536

April Drought Brings May Riots

What is it about May that brings out not just rutting, but rebellion, the latter so often followed by brutal crackdowns? Here's a small sample:

• May 1886 - Haymarket in Chicago
• May 1919 - May Fourth Movement in Beijing
• May 1921 - Palestine
  
• May 1929 - Blutmai in Berlin
• May 1937 - Barcelona in Republican Spain
• May 1968 - France everywhere
  
• May 1970 - Kent State in Ohio
• May 1980 - Kwangju in Korea
• May 1989 - Tiananmen in Beijing
• May 1998 - Jakarta in Indonesia
• May 2004 - South Beirut in Lebanon
• May 2005 - Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan
  

Uzbekistan seems initially to have got short shrift from Western media, in their obsession with the role of one of their own (Newsweek) in the other two "Stans." Bloggers were beating them to the punch: especially Registan, my first stop for news and analysis of Central Asia (and the very first blog to link to my own), Gateway Pundit, and Winds of Change.

UPDATE: On 18 May, the Marmot began daily recaps of key events that fateful day in Kwangju 25 years ago.

Gaddis on Why Grand Strategy Is Tough for Academics

Yale history professor John Lewis Gaddis recently spoke at Middlebury College in Vermont. He had a lot to say, but one thing that struck me was his analysis of why grand strategy is difficult for academics.

First, that grand strategy is, by its nature, an ecological enterprise. It requires taking information from a lot of different fields, evaluating it intuitively rather than systematically, and then acting. It is, in this sense, different from most academic training, which as it advances pushes students toward specialization, and then toward professionalization, by which I mean the ever deeper mastery of a diminishing number of things. To remain broad you’ve got to retain a certain shallowness – but beyond the level of undergraduate education and sometimes not even there, the academy is not particularly comfortable with that idea.

Second, grand strategy requires setting an objective and sticking to it. The academy does not take easily to that idea either. It asks us constantly to question our assumptions and reformulate our objectives. That’s fine to the extent that that sharpens our intellectual skills, and therefore prepares us for leadership. But it’s not the same thing as leadership: for that, you’ve got to say “here’s where we ought to be by such and such a time, and here’s how we’re going to get there.” Taking the position that, “on the one hand this, and on the other hand that,” as you might around a seminar table, won’t get you there. Nor will saying that you voted for the $87 billion appropriation before you voted against it.

Third, grand strategy requires the ability to respond rapidly to the unexpected. It acknowledges that trends can reverse themselves suddenly, that “tipping points” can occur, and that leaders must know how to exploit them. The academy loves this sort of thing when it happens on the basketball court or the hockey rink. In the classroom, though, it resists the idea: instead the emphasis is too often on theory, which promises predictability, and therefore no surprises. That’s why the academy tends to be so surprised when events like the end of the Cold War and 9/11 take place. Leaders, like athletes, have to be more agile.

Fourth, grand strategy requires the making of moral judgments, because that’s how leadership takes place: in that sense, it’s a faith-based initiative. You have to convince people that your aspirations correspond with their own, and that you’re serious about advancing them. You don’t lead by trying to persuade people that distinctions between good and evil are social constructions, that there are no universal standards for making them, that we should always try to understand the viewpoint of others, even when they are trying to kill us.

Finally, grand strategy requires great language. As the best leaders from Pericles through Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan have always known, words are themselves instruments of power. Their careful choice and courageous use can shake the stability of states, as when Reagan said, before anybody else, that the Soviet Union was an “evil empire” headed for the “ash-heap of history.” They can also undermine walls, as when Reagan famously demanded, against the advice of his own speech-writers, that Gorbachev tear one down.

But where, within the academy is the use of great language taught? Where would you go to learn how to make a great speech? Certainly not to political science, language, and literature departments at Yale, where as students advance they are spurred on toward ever higher levels of jargon-laden incomprehensibility. I think not even to my beloved History Department, where my colleagues seem more interested in the ways words reflect structures of power than in ways words challenge or even overthrow structures of power.

The art of rhetoric, within the academy, is largely a lost art – which probably helps to explain why the academy is as often as surprised as it is to discover that words really do still have meanings – and that consequences come from using them.

via Roger L. Simon

Self-defeating Moves in Sumo

Among the many ways in which the world changed in 2001 was the addition to the Nihon Sumo Kyokai's official list of kimarite ('deciding move', literally 'deciding hand') of a category of five self-defeating moves. (This is where the official translation of kimarite as 'winning technique' becomes a bit awkward.)

• fumidashi '(rear) step out' - This is when the defending rikishi accidentally steps back over the edge without the attacker initiating any kind of technique [cf. fumie ('step pictures'), the holy icons that early Japanese Christians were supposed to step on to prove they were no longer believers].
• isamiashi 'forward step out' [lit. 'spirited foot'] - This is when the attacking rikishi accidentally steps too far forward and out of the ring before winning the match, giving the victory to his opponent.
• tsukihiza 'touch knee' - This is when a rikishi stumbles without any real contact with his opponent and loses the match by touching down with one or both knees.
• tsukite 'touch hand' - This is when a rikishi stumbles without any real contact with his opponent and loses the match by touching down with one or both hands.
• koshikudake 'hip collapse' - This is when a rikishi falls over backwards without his opponent attempting any technique.

In this instance, the rather hide-bound, but tradition-inventing Sumo Kyokai seems to have been rather visionary. I expect "Self-Defeat, and How to Avoid It" to be one of the major themes of the 21st century.

UPDATE: After Day 12 of the current Natsu Basho, Asashoryu remains 12-0, with no one else closer than 10-2. The Bulgarian Kotooshu suffered a quick and brutal loss to Asashoryu yesterday by a tsukidashi ('frontal thrust out'), but he recovered nicely today to beat the ozeki ('champion') Chiyotaikai, who had been only one loss behind the grand champion, but is now at 10-2.

Confucian Sanctification of Rebellion in Kwangju

By 1995, on the fifteenth anniversary [of the Kwangju Uprising], crowds of up to reportedly ten thousand (Kwangju ilbo, May 18, 1995) gathered at 10 A.M. for the annual memorial service. The major television networks had set up desks amid the grave mounds for their news anchors, and camera crews seeking a panoramic view of the huge spectacle perched atop a towering crane. The service opened with a national anthem and included a memorial poem, speeches by 5.18 dignitaries, and music by the Kwangju City traditional music orchestra. The main part of the event, however, was a Confucian-style memorial ceremony, conducted in the form of a traditional ancestral rite (chesa)....

While a detailed analysis of the structure of this annual ritual is beyond the scope of this chapter, several observations can be made about its form and meaning and its displacement, after the move to the new cemetery in 1997, from the central spot on the anniversary program. Most obvious are the ways in which the ceremony resembles Confucian-style death-day ancestral rituals: spirits of the dead are called; wine, incense, and food are offered; participants bow; and the ritual is conducted on the death anniversary. There are also, however, many other ways, both small (for example, it is held during the day) and large (children who predecease their parents are not memorialized, and at Mangwol-dong the officiants are not in the proper line of lineal descent) in which it does not. At the very least, domestic ancestral rites in Korea are private family affairs, while this is a community event. How have these traditional Korean ceremonies for the dead come to be transformed in Kwangju every May 18 into a public communal ritual of mourning?

Certainly (as noted above), in the minjung culture movement of the 1980s it was commonplace in Korea to see the use of traditional folk cultural elements in rituals of resistance and political protest, particularly on college campuses. Although this primarily involved the appropriation of shamanic practices, public funerals or rituals evoking funeral imagery often mixed in Confucian rites .... Thus the choice of a Confucian-style ceremony could be seen simply as a political statement, a self-conscious display of oppositional sentiment in the popular culture movement idiom.

But this was not a ritual performance staged by activist students on a college campus; it involved mourning relatives and civic leaders, so despite its minjung movement overtones, perhaps the intent (conscious or otherwise) really is the evocation of Confucian (rather than folk cultural) values. Confucian imagery is often used in Korea to symbolize morality, legitimacy, and virtue. And while traditionally the performance of ancestral rites was about the solidarity of agnatic groups, it also "dramatized ... the fundamental morality of the participants" .... A customary Korean measure of virtue is the observance of proper ritual form; thus by honoring the 5.18 dead in this way, Kwangju citizens demonstrate their own rectitude.

The use of Confucian rituals at Mangwol-dong then becomes an implicit critique of a government that would suppress the memories of 5.18 and through much of the 1980s would characterize those buried at the cemetery as hoodlums, rioters, and Communists. The rite on May 18 asserts the basic righteousness of the actions of those who died and underscores the importance of remembering them properly in death; at the same time, it is a testament to the virtue of those who participate in the ceremony.

SOURCE: Laying Claim to the Memory of May: A Look Back at the 1980 Kwangju Uprising, by Linda S. Lewis (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2002), pp. 116-119

Japundit Series on Japan's Baseball Revolution

Japundit contributor Ampontan has a wonderfully informative series about Japan's baseball revolution from below that erupted last year. Of course, the baseball revolution reflects changes in the larger society as well. I'll excerpt pieces from each of Ampontan's installments. Even if you're not that interested in Japanese baseball, the whole story illustrates how much Japanese society has been changing during the economic doldrums.

No Joy in Mudville

Last year at this time, it seemed as if Japanese baseball was teetering on the edge of a precipice, doomed to collapse in a heap of splendid splinters. Reaching the tipping point would have resulted in a plunge in popularity and prestige, relegating the sport to irrelevance as its best players fled to the United States, taking fan interest with them. Instead, a mass movement by the fans and a player strike enthusiastically supported by the same fans saved Japanese baseball from itself and even put it in a position where it can thrive in the future.

The Old World Teeters

Confronted by declining attendance caused by factors that included a poor economy, competition from a professional soccer league, and the flight of its top stars to the United States, the old guard of Japanese baseball, led by Yomiuri owner Tsuneo Watanabe (photo with cigar), came up with some self-serving solutions. They decided to merge the two Kansai area teams in the Pacific League with poor fan support, push for the merger of two other Pacific League teams, and convert Japanese baseball to a single 10-team league....

In the Japan of just 10 years ago, this plan probably would have gone through. But the old guard had not foreseen what would happen next: no one else liked the plan--not the fans and not the players--and this time they were prepared to do something about it....

The [players’] union handled their opposition to the merger brilliantly. Not only did they back the fans’ movement, winning their support and sympathy, but they appeared calm and rational in contrast to Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB), Japanese baseball’s ruling body. The union submitted a list of demands that baseball officials rejected. These included postponing the merger, forming a special committee to discuss merger issues, and allowing Kintetsu to sell naming rights, which the league also had dismissed without seeming to give the idea serious consideration....

That’s when Yomiuri owner Watanabe made his second mistake, and perhaps the biggest mistake of his career. Asked what he thought about the players’ opposition to the merger, he sneered, “Taka ga senshu.” (They’re nothing more than players, after all.) Watanable couldn’t possibly have chosen three more ill-advised words. The condescension oozing from this comment not only summed up the attitude of the owners toward their employees, the players, but encapsulated their belief that sole authority for the course of Japanese baseball resided with them, regardless of how it affected their employees and on-field performers, and the consumers, or the fans. In fact, it symbolized perfectly the attitude of the power structure in the old Japan.

Strike One

The Japanese players’ union felt so strongly, they threatened to hold a baseball strike, which had never happened in Japan before. They had collected 1.2 million signatures from Japanese baseball fans to prevent the elimination of one team, but were given the cold shoulder by Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB), the organization governing the sport....

The owners seemed intent on joining hands and walking off the cliff together. They held a meeting two days after the players voted to go on strike and formally approved the Kintetsu-Orix merger. Perhaps they thought they were calling the players’ bluff, but if so they badly misread the situation. The vote was 11-0 in favor of contraction, with the abstention of the Hiroshima Carp [my perennial underdog, old-hometown, Central League favorites]. The Hiroshima team thought it stood to lose too much fan support because of local opposition to the owners’ plan to eliminate one team....

The other Pacific League teams wanted the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks [my former Pacific League favorites], a successful and popular team with financially struggling owners, to merge with the Chiba Lotte Marines, but Daiei insisted they wanted to retain ownership of the Hawks and to keep it a separate entity.

The Dust Settles

After more than three months of preliminaries, charges, countercharges, threats of a strike, negotiations, and unnecessary turmoil caused by the owner intransigence, the weekend strike by the players caused the owners to rapidly focus on the problem. It didn’t take them long to figure out that they held a losing hand no matter how they tried to play it.

Thus, only a day or two into the negotiations following the strike, the owners quickly caved in to the players’ demands and agreed to allow a new team to be established to take the place of the one being eliminated through the Kintetsu and Orix merger....

The Sendai fans said in a survey that they wanted Livedoor instead of Rakuten to run the new franchise there, though Rakuten was thought to have more business stability. In fact, that’s why they were ultimately selected. A new team will incur losses early on, and Rakuten had the edge in in pretax profit as well as total assets and sales. The new team became known as the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles, or the Rakuten Eagles for short.

Finally, the last glaring problem with Japanese baseball ownership was rectified when the league approved the purchase of the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks by Softbank Corp., an Internet service provider headed by President Masayoshi Son, an ethnic Korean. Unlike the troubled Kintetsu Buffaloes, who could not draw a million fans, the Hawks drew three million and were recent winners of the Japan Series. “My task is to make a team loved by a huge number of fans into a more decent one,” Son said at a press conference in Fukuoka.

Thus, four months after the crisis began, the hidebound element of Japanese baseball was gone in disgrace, the Kintetsu Buffaloes had merged with another team, bailing out the troubled ownership, another financially troubled owner had found a purchaser with deep pockets, and a new team was created with a young, ambitious owner....

Team ownership was relinquished by old-fashioned, old-line businesses with no ideas how to get Japanese baseball out of its downward spiral and placed in the hands of bright, young, energetic entrepreneurs from the Internet industry brimming with new ideas for the sport.

Escape from Kwangju, 29 May 1980

I did not write any field notes for May 29, 1980, so I cannot recheck my memory of leaving Kwangju as the most frightening experience of my life. The day before, May 28, things had eased up a bit, and it was possible to go out. I went out to look at the cleanup operation. Soldiers with shovels were cleaning up piles of trash and refuse. There were cordons around some buildings, ID checks at a few places, and still no telephone calls or bus transportation outside the city. In the afternoon I went to visit friends and also to the Kwangju District Court, where the judges were at work, but I learned it would be the next week before I could resume my research. Downtown I had met up with Don Baker, a fellow graduate student and former Peace Corps Volunteer in Kwangju, who had come down from Seoul to check on his wife's relatives. He stayed with my family that night, and the next day I decided to go along with him back to Seoul.

We set out in the late morning on Thursday, May 29. The streets were full, taxis were running, and the city bus system had just resumed operation. We took a taxi to Songjong-ni, at the edge of town. Others were having to get out of their taxis and walk over a bridge, through lines of troops, to get to the suburban taxis waiting on the other side, but somehow we were allowed to ride through. A tout was yelling, "To Seoul by bus for 10,000 W!"--about five times the usual price, but we hopped into his cab for the ride to the Songjong-ni station.

The station was packed, and we sat in a hot bus for forty-five minutes while, amid confusion and heckling from other exasperated passengers, the driver waited until the bus was full (to overflowing--a seat in the aisle went for a discounted 8,000 W).

We were actually on a local express bus (chikhaeng), supposedly destined for a nearby county. So initially we headed there through the countryside. The normal five-hour trip to Seoul took over eight hours, the first four spent on back roads to Chongup, where we could get on the expressway to Seoul. As we quickly learned, the highway was closed in South Cholla Province; getting to Seoul first involved eluding various roadblocks and military checkpoints to get out of the province.

We were stopped eight or ten times, each a slightly different experience. Soldiers would board the bus, sometimes with guns and bayonets at the ready, once only with pistols. Sometimes they were polite, but more often, surly. They asked for citizens' ID cards and inspected our faces closely. Once, all the male passengers were ordered off, with their luggage, for a thorough search. (The men immediately took the opportunity to wander off to relieve themselves, to the distress of the soldiers.) "What do you do?" they would interrogate some young man. "You visited your brother? His name? Your employer? Phone number?" The first time, some unemployed youth said that they had gone to Kwangju "to play." When the bus pulled out again, their fellow passengers advised them, "Don't say that! Say you are a farmer or a minister." At the next roadblock, one of them tried it out, replying that he was a minister. He was hauled off the bus and detained. As we went on without him, the passengers agreed he should have said he was a priest instead.

At one stop, we were ordered to turn around; a soldier got on the bus and said we had all been "taken" by the driver. Only the persistence of a white-collar worker (who outtalked the soldier) got us going again. Occasionally we were hailed by farmers standing beside the road who thought we really were a country bus heading where our sign said "This presents a problem" (kunil natta) muttered the bus driver, letting the people on, then dropping them off as soon as we were out of sight of soldiers and other onlookers.

Finally, we reached the expressway and picked up speed on our way to Seoul. As a suburban bus with South Cholla Province plates, we were rather conspicuous. Twice our bus was stopped by patrolling cops. "How much did you pay him?" came a voice from the back as we pulled away from the first such incident. We were all nervous when at 10 P.M. we approached the tollbooth just before Seoul. All vehicles were being checked, but we got special treatment. A soldier pointing a gun at all of us and saying, "Don't move!" directed the driver across several lanes of traffic. We were boarded by eight men, one in civilian clothes. People were pulled off for questioning, then allowed back on. "What is this, checkpoint eight or nine?" grumbled one passenger. From outside, a soldier replied, "You should have been checked at least fifteen times!" The stop was short but tense. When we were finally allowed on our way, everyone cheered, and one man ventured the opinion, "At 10,000 W, this was cheap!"

They unloaded us in a hurry in front of the new express bus terminal in Kangnam at 10:15 P.M., less than two hours before curfew. As a country bus with the wrong markings, the best the driver could do was pull in with a lot of city buses and hope no one would notice. At that time, the bus terminal was in the middle of nowhere, and even getting a taxi was a problem. I went to a telephone booth and starting calling friends to see who could put me up for the night.

SOURCE: Laying Claim to the Memory of May: A Look Back at the 1980 Kwangju Uprising, by Linda S. Lewis (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2002), pp. 56-58

Interviews with NK Defectors in Seoul

NKZone has a second post about interviews with North Korean defectors in Seoul. (The earlier post is here.) The group interviews were conducted by Brendan Brown, an Australian national who teaches English to North Korean refugees in Seoul. The introduction notes that SK's "Unification Ministry has asked Brendan to act as an informal consultant on North Koreans' views, since the refugees are apparently less trusting of the South Korean government." The reasons show up in response to question 7.

7) Do the North Korean people still want re-unification with the South? What do most North Koreans think of the South Korean government and people?

Mixed bag of responses here. Of course their greater desire is for North Korea in its present form to disappear forever. Nearly all want to return to their hometowns in a free democratic North Korea.

As for re-unification and their feelings toward the South Korean government and people, the longer one has lived in South Korea the less favourably he considers re-unification and South Koreans. At first, after arriving in South Korea they are appreciative to be in a free and plentiful country and wish for immediate re-unification. However their initials feelings of gratitude eventually turn to disappointment and even resentment of their status in the eyes of South Koreans.

Many South Koreans are openly patronizing of the North Koreans in their dealings with them. Asking what it is like to eat leaves and barks or frogs at a first meeting isn't a way to win North Koreans over. Neither is asking if any family members have starved to death or are imprisoned in North Korea (perhaps because of their own defection). North Koreans don't welcome the bringing up of bitter memories by unknown people, yet many South Koreans ask these type of questions as if enquireing about the weather.

As a North Korea expert I once worked for used to suggest, Unification-era Korea will resemble the Reconstruction-era South in the newly re-United States, with South Koreans playing the role of imperious Yankee carpetbaggers, and North Koreans playing the role of resentful Southern tenant farmers.

Kwangju: "Tienanmen before CNN and the fax"

DURING THE FIFTH REPUBLIC--that is, the presidency of Chun Doo Hwan (1981-1988)--it was difficult even to speak of the Kwangju Uprising, let alone do research or attempt to write about what had happened. Lee Jae-eui tells of his apprehensions and fears as he and a few friends in 1985 began work on their definitive account, Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of the Age; they covered the windows at night so no one could see in and arranged secret signals with their families should the authorities be watching.

While in a retrospective gaze these precautions seem almost quaintly cloak-and-dagger, Lee's concerns were very real. As he says, "Any publication criticizing the Chun Doo-hwan regime was completely banned. Of course, 'the truth about the Kwangju uprising' was told in an incomplete and distorted way. Given the conditions, documenting the uprising was like belling a cat" .... Indeed, in May 1985 the publishing house where Lee's volume was being printed was raided, copies of the unbound book were seized, and both the publisher and the "cover author" (Hwang Sok Yong) were arrested; it was not until 1987 that the book could be openly sold.

Information about the Kwangju Uprising circulated underground, but harassment of publishers and print shops; raids on bookstores; and confiscation of videos, books, and other "subversive" materials found at such places as churches and the offices of student and activist groups were commonplace through much of the 1980s. In fact, restrictions on the press and the suppression of free speech were (remarkably) even more severe under Chun Doo Hwan than under his predecessor [Park Chung Hee]. As one report on human rights noted, "Were the press free, President Chun's policies, practices, and indeed his very authority would no doubt come under close scrutiny, and political opponents would be able to get their message to voters. To have a free press would be to invite political competition. This is something the South Korean government is not willing to permit" (International League For Human Rights 1985:49).

An incomplete, yet still deep and fearful, silence surrounded the "incident" of May 1980 and its larger implications. Even outside Korea it was difficult in the 1980s to get the scholarly community to confront the Kwangju issue and to discuss it openly. Nowadays I often characterize 5.18 as "Tienanmen before CNN and the fax"; the comparison is painfully apt in the sense that although there were indeed many political analysts, academics, and "friends" of Korea concerned at the time about human rights abuses under Chun, in the absence of "reliable" accounts, there were others who simply found it more convenient to believe the government's version of events in Kwangju.

SOURCE: Laying Claim to the Memory of May: A Look Back at the 1980 Kwangju Uprising, by Linda S. Lewis (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2002), pp. 75-76

May Grand Sumo Tournament: Foreigner vs. Foreigner

Six days into the May Grand Sumo Tournament in Tokyo, Mongolian grand champion Asashoryu and low-ranking rookie Tamakasuga share the lead at 6-0. Half of Asashoryu's bouts so far have been against other foreigners: Georgian Kokkai on Day 4, Russian Roho on Day 5, and fellow Mongolian Kyokutenho on Day 6. All the latter now stand at 2-4.

For more, see fellow sumophile Tom at That's News To Me.

Linda Lewis on Contested Memories of the Kwangju Uprising

The Kwangju Uprising (or "5.18," after the date it began) was a popular revolt against the Korean government that lasted for ten days in May 1980. What began as a peaceful demonstration against the reimposition of military rule turned into a bloody citizens' uprising when the people of Kwangju, outraged by the brutality of government troops sent in to suppress dissent, pushed the soldiers to the edge of town and proclaimed a "Free Kwangju" (haebang Kwangju). The military eventually retook the city with tanks and tear gas but not without great cost in human lives and government credibility.

In retrospect, the Kwangju Uprising stands as one of the most important political events in late twentieth-century Korean history, a powerful symbol of popular opposition to thirty years of repressive military rule and a milestone in South Korea's long journey to democratic reform. Nonetheless, 5.18 also remains, at the millennium, a contested event, the subject still of controversy, confusion, international debate, and competing claims....

In 1979-1980 I had been in Korea for thirteen months, doing research for my doctoral dissertation. My project concerned the role of judges as mediators in civil disputes, and I had chosen the district court in Kwangju as my research site. Ironically, I first visited Kwangju (to arrange housing) just days after the October 26, 1979, assassination of President Park Chung Hee--retrospectively the first in a chain of events leading to the May uprising.

SOURCE: Laying Claim to the Memory of May: A Look Back at the 1980 Kwangju Uprising, by Linda S. Lewis (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2002), pp. xv-xvi

Timothy Garton Ash on Europe's Memory Wars

Timothy Garton Ash writes from Warsaw in the 12 May Guardian about the fractures in Europe's memories of VE Day.

After a continent-wide round of commemorations to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of the second world war in Europe, it's clear that the peoples of Europe have a shared past, but not a common one.

Sixty years on, the memory of war here in Warsaw is still irreconcilable with that in Moscow. But it's also utterly different from London's low-key festival of "We'll meet again" nostalgia. Only in the recollections of former inmates of the Japanese prisoner-of-war camps does British memory approach the horrors of daily degradation that are the stuff of everyday Polish or Russian memory.

For Russians, the war began in 1941; for Poles and Brits, it began in 1939. For Vladimir Putin, May 9 1945 marked the end of the Great Patriotic War, when the Red Army almost single-handedly liberated - yes, liberated - most of Europe from fascism. For most Estonians, Lithuanians and Latvians, it marked the transition from one totalitarian occupation to another, Nazi to Soviet....

The Georgian president, Mikhail Saakashvili - leader of his country's "rose revolution" in 2003 - has said we are witnessing a "second wave" of liberation, inside the former Soviet Union, starting with Georgia and Ukraine. Speaking on CNN the other day, he corrected himself, suggesting it was really a "third wave". I make it the fourth. The first wave rolled over western and northern Europe in 1944-45; the second swept through southern Europe, starting in Portugal in 1974; the third liberated central Europe, starting in Poland in 1980 and reaching the Baltic states in 1991; now the fourth wave, if wave it is, may be building in eastern Europe.

Tokugawa vs. Maya Forest Policy

The Spring 2005 issue of New Perspectives Quarterly has an interview with Jared Diamond, author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.

NPQ | You have looked over the history of civilizations and come up with a framework for analyzing why some collapsed while others prevailed. You cite four common challenges of past societies-climate change, self-inflicted environmental damage, changes in trading partners and enemies-and then look at how the response to those challenges led to success or failure.

You point out, for example, how the Maya failed and the 17th-century Tokugawa Shoguns in Japan succeeded. Having overexploited their territory, the Maya collapsed because the ruling caste, which extracted wealth from the commoners, was insulated from the effects of deforestation and soil erosion and thus failed to act.

Conversely, the shoguns of 17th-century Tokugawa Japan recognized the danger of deforestation to the long-term peace and prosperity of their successors and imposed heavy regulations on farmers, managed the harvest of trees and pushed new, lighter and more efficient construction techniques. Today, even though Japan is the most densely populated country of the developed world, it remains 70 percent forested....

DIAMOND | The problem is that all the challenges are interrelated. If we solve problems such as invasive species or toxic pollution, but not the shortage of fresh water, collapse still beckons. All the challenges need to be addressed simultaneously because they add up to an unsustainable course.

But, let's take just two challenges: deforestation and fresh water.

At the rate at which we are going now, the world's tropical rainforests--except the largest ones in Congo and Amazon Basin--will be completely felled within the next decade. In the Philippines and the Solomon Islands, they will be gone within the next five years.

Most economies in these areas, of course, are heavily dependent on those forests. In places like Indonesia, which is the world's fourth most populous country, or in the Philippines with 80 million people tightly connected to the US, there are already civil wars, in part based on environmental factors and fights over resources. China and Japan already get most of their timber from those countries.

Further, this is not to mention places in Africa like Gabon or Cameroon that are similarly on the verge of deforestation.

Historically, deforestation makes people poor and leads to conflict. We are bound to see that again.

Seventy percent of the earth's fresh water is already being utilized by people for drinking, industry and agriculture. The remaining 30 percent is in places like Iceland and Northwest Australia, which are hard to get to. What happens when we use up even that last 30 percent? Why not desalinization of sea water? Okay, but that requires fossil fuel energy to operate the plants, and that creates other problems.

We've already seen countries come close to fighting over water, such as Turkey and Syria or Hungary and the Czech Republic. Water is a time bomb set to go off within decades, not centuries...

NPQ | This suggests that the Communist remnants of central planning in China might be better able to respond to the environmental challenge of unsustainability than consumer democracy.

If Japan had a consumer democracy in the 17th century instead of the Tokugawa Shogunate, perhaps it would not have been able to stem deforestation and collapse?

DIAMOND | Maybe, but I don't think so. The historical record, at least, shows no general case for either democracy or dictatorship in terms of curbing environmental damage. The Tokugawa Shoguns made a good decision; the ruling kings of the Maya failed to take action.

via RealClearPolitics

Several years ago, I heard Jared Diamond talk about protecting bird habitats on the island of New Guinea. He described how easy it was to set up a vast sanctuary on the Indonesian side of the island (West Papua), where a powerful and ruthless government simply decreed that the sanctuary was off-limits and also prohibited villagers from owning firearms that threatened both the bird populations and government control. The weakness of the central government in Papua New Guinea, by contrast, allowed villagers to possess firearms that nearly destroyed bird populations within the radius of many villages. The highly contentiousness nature of local land ownership also prevented the central government from setting aside large nature preserves. At the same time, litigious landlords in PNG forced the oil companies to be very, very careful not to disrupt village land resources, so that big-oil extraction sites in PNG were often the most effective nature preserves in the state. (The same can hardly be said for the mining industry in either PNG or West Papua.)

Chinese Restaurants in U.S. Outnumber McDonald's

Slate provides a short history of Chinese restaurants in the U.S.

"Have You Eaten Yet?," the wonderful Chinese restaurants exhibit now on view at New York's Museum of Chinese in the Americas, takes a Babel of ephemera and makes it speak. One's visit begins with an absence: the never-photographed first Chinese eateries in America, known as "chow chows," which sprang up in California in the mid-19th century to serve Cantonese laborers....

According to Chinese Restaurant News, there are now more Chinese restaurants in America than there are McDonald's franchises--nearly three times as many in fact. In the 19th century, though, the Chinese were scorned as rat-eaters; nothing could have been more revolting than eating what they ate....

Happily, change was on its way. The 1965 liberalization of immigration laws brought new arrivals and new food, from Sichuan and Hunan and Shanghai. Multiculturalism and Nixon's visit to China in 1972, meanwhile, inspired an "authenticity revolution"—a transformation further fueled by a changing clientele. Charles Lai, the director of the museum, recalls wandering into a Chinatown restaurant as a boy in the '60s and realizing that everyone else in the place was white. "I felt like, what am I doing here?" he says. But no more: Today, Chinese and Chinese Americans are important customers, as are other Asians and Asian Americans, and some restaurants are once again catering to newly arrived workers. How "authentic" they are, though, depends on how you define "authentic." "It is and isn't a return to the way things were at the beginning," says Lee. She points out that with globalization, food is changing quickly even in Asia; what constitutes Chinese food is evolving.

via Arts & Letters Daily

A Ukrainian Sign Language Broadcast Hero

Last week, Language Hat blogged a report by Nora Boustany of the Washington Post about a heroic sign language interpreter whose signed truths reached deaf ears:

During the tense days of Ukraine's presidential elections last year, [Natalia] Dmytruk staged a silent but bold protest, informing deaf Ukrainians that official results from the Nov. 21 runoff were fraudulent...

On Nov. 25, she walked into her studio for the 11 a.m. broadcast. "I was sure I would tell people the truth that day," she said. "I just felt this was the moment to do it."

The newscaster read the officially scripted text about the results of the election, and Dmytruk signed along. But then, "I was not listening anymore," she said.

In her own daring protest, she signed: "I am addressing everybody who is deaf in the Ukraine. Our president is Victor Yushchenko. Do not trust the results of the central election committee. They are all lies.... And I am very ashamed to translate such lies to you. Maybe you will see me again," she concluded, hinting at what fate might await her. She then continued signing the rest of officially scripted news.

Macam-Macam on Aceh, Burma, and Singapore

While I've been stumbling around the Asian edges of Europe, Macam-Macam has been keeping a sharp eye on the edges of Southeast Asia: Terror attacks strike Burma, Aceh's forests in big trouble after the tsunami, and Singapore's links to Burmese opium kingpins.

Forced Repatriation of Soviet Citizens after VE Day

Among the many controversial decisions they made at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin agreed that all Soviet citizens, whatever their individual history, must be returned to the Soviet Union. Although the protocols signed at Yalta did not explicitly command the Allies to return Soviet citizens against their will, that, in effect, is what happened....

Some wanted to return home.... Others, frightened by what might await them, were nevertheless convinced to return by the NKVD officers who traveled to the POW and displaced persons camps scattered all over Europe. The officers trawled the camps, looking for Russians, offering them smiling visions of a bright future. All would be forgiven, they claimed: "You are now considered by us as true Soviet citizens, regardless of the fact that you were forced to join the German army ... "

Some, particularly those who had fallen on the wrong side of Soviet justice before, naturally did not want to go back at all. "There is enough room in the Motherland for everyone," the Soviet military attaché in Britain told a group of Soviet soldiers living in Yorkshire POW camps. "We know what sort of room there will be for us," one prisoner replied. Allied officers were nevertheless under orders to send them--and so they did. In Fort Dix, New Jersey, 145 Soviet prisoners, captured wearing German uniforms, barricaded themselves inside their barracks to avoid being sent home. When American soldiers threw tear gas into the building, those who had not already committed suicide rushed out with kitchen knives and clubs, injuring some of the Americans. Afterward, they said they had wanted to incite the Americans to shoot them.

Worse were the incidents that involved women and children. In May 1945, British troops, under what they were told were direct orders from Churchill, undertook to repatriate more than 20,000 Cossacks, then living in Austria. These were former anti-Bolshevik partisans, some of whom had joined Hitler as a way of fighting Stalin, many of whom had left the USSR after the Revolution, and most of whom no longer held Soviet passports. After many days of promising them good treatment, the British tricked them. They invited the Cossack officers to a "conference," handed them over to Soviet troops, and rounded up their families the following day. In one particularly ugly incident at a camp near Lienz, Austria, British soldiers used bayonets and rifle butts to force thousands of women and children onto trains which would take them to the USSR. Rather than go back, women threw their babies over bridges, and then jumped themselves. One man killed his wife and his children, laid their bodies neatly on the grass, and then killed himself. The Cossacks knew, of course, what would await them upon their return to the Soviet Union: firing squads--or the Gulag.

SOURCE: Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum (Anchor Books, 2003), pp. 436-437

Turkey Triumphant, 1915

THE WITHDRAWAL of the Allied fleet from the Dardanelles [in 1915] had consequences which the world does not yet [in 1918] completely understand. The practical effect of the event, as I have said, was to isolate the Turkish Empire from all the world excepting Germany and Austria. England, France, Russia, and Italy, which for a century had held a restraining hand over the Ottoman Empire, had finally lost all power to influence or control. The Turks now perceived that a series of dazzling events had changed them from cringing dependents of the European Powers into free agents. For the first time in two centuries they could now live their national life according to their own inclinations, and govern their peoples according to their own will. The first expression of this rejuvenated national life was an episode which, so far as I know, is the most terrible in the history of the world. New Turkey, freed from European tutelage, celebrated is national rebirth by murdering not far from a million of its own subjects.

I can hardly exaggerate the effect which the repulse of the Allied fleet produced upon the Turks. They believed that they had won the really great decisive battle of the war. For several centuries, they said, the British fleet had victoriously sailed the seas and had now met its first serious reverse at the hands of the Turks. In the first moments of their pride, the Young Turk leaders saw visions of the complete resurrection of their empire. What had for two centuries been a decaying nation had suddenly started on anew and glorious life. In their pride and arrogance the Turks began to look with disdain upon the people that had taught them what they knew of modern warfare, and nothing angered them so much as any suggestion that they owed any part of their success to their German allies.

"Why should we feel any obligation to the Germans?" Enver [Pasha] would say to me. "What have they done for us which compares with what we have done for them? They have lent us some money and sent us a few officers, it is true, but see what we have done! We have defeated the British fleet--something which neither the Germans nor any other nation could do. We have stationed armies on the Caucasian front, and so have kept busy large bodies of Russian troops that would have been used on the western front. Similarly we have compelled England to keep large armies in Egypt, in Mesopotamia, and in that way we have weakened the Allied armies in France. No, the Germans could never have achieved their military successes without us; the shoe of obligation is entirely on their foot."

SOURCE: Ambassador Morgenthau's Story, by Henry Morgenthau (Wayne State U. Press, 2003), pp. 190-191 (first published in 1918; dedicated to Woodrow Wilson)

How Turkey Bribed Bulgaria to Join the Central Powers, 1915

There were two great prizes in the game then being played in the Balkans: one was Macedonia, which Bulgaria must have; and the other Constantinople, which Russia was determined to get. Bulgaria was entirely willing that Russia should have Constantinople if she herself could obtain Macedonia.

I was given to understand that the Bulgarian General Staff had plans all completed for the capture of Constantinople, and that they had shown these plans to the Entente. Their programme called for a Bulgarian army of about 300,000 men who would besiege Constantinople twenty-three days from the time the signal to start should be given. But promises of Macedonia would not suffice; the Bulgarian must have possession.

Bulgaria recognized the difficulties of the Allied position. She did not believe that Serbia and Greece would voluntarily surrender Macedonia, nor did she believe that the Allies would dare to take this country away from them by force. In that event, she thought that there was a danger that Serbia might make a separate peace with the Central Powers. On the other hand, Bulgaria would object if Serbia received Bosnia and Herzegovina as compensation for the loss of Macedonia--she felt that an enlarged Serbia would be a constant menace to her, and hence a future menace to peace in the Balkans. Thus the situation was extremely difficult and complicated.

One of the best-informed men in Turkey was Paul Weitz, the correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung. Weitz was more than a journalist; he had spent thirty years in Constantinople; he had the most intimate personal knowledge of Turkish affairs, and he was the confidant and adviser of the German Embassy. His duties there were actually semidiplomatic. Weitz had really been one of the most successful agencies in the German penetration of Turkey; it was common talk that he knew every important man in the Turkish Empire, the best way to approach him, and his price. I had several talks with Weitz about Bulgaria during those critical August and early September days. He said many times that it was not at all certain that she would join her forces with Germany. Yet on September 7th Weitz came to me with important news. The situation had changed over night. Baron Neurath, the Conseiller of the German Embassy at Constantinople, had gone to Sofia, and, as a result of his visit, an agreement had been signed that would make Bulgaria Germany's ally.

Germany, said Weitz, had won over Bulgaria by doing something which the Entente had not been able and willing to do. It had secured her the possession at once of a piece of coveted territory. Serbia had refused to give Bulgaria immediate possession of Macedonia; Turkey, on the other hand, had now surrendered a piece of the Ottoman Empire. The amount of land in question, it is true, was apparently insignificant, yet it had great strategic advantages and represented a genuine sacrifice by Turkey. The Maritza River, a few miles north of Enos, bends to the east, to the north, and then to the west again, creating a block of territory, with an area of nearly 1,000 square miles, including the important cities of Demotica, Kara Agatch, and half of Adrianople. What makes this land particularly important is that it contains about fifty miles of the railroad which runs from Dedeagatch to Sofia. All this railroad, that is, except this fifty miles, is laid in Bulgarian territory; this short strip, extending through Turkey, cuts Bulgaria's communications with the Mediterranean. Naturally Bulgaria yearned for this piece of land; and Turkey now handed it over to her. This cession changed the whole Balkan situation and it made Bulgaria an ally of Turkey and the Central Powers. Besides the railroad, Bulgaria obtained that part of Adrianople which lay west of the Martiza River. In addition, of course, Bulgaria was to receive Macedonia, as soon as that province could be occupied by Bulgaria and her allies.

I vividly remember the exultation of Weitz when this agreement was signed.

"It's all settled," he told me. "Bulgaria has decided to join us. It was all arranged last night at Sofia."

The Turks also were greatly relieved. For the first time they saw the way out of their troubles. The Bulgarian arrangement, Enver [Pasha] told me, had taken a tremendous weight off their minds.

"We Turks are entitled to the credit," he said, "of bringing Bulgaria in on the side of the Central Powers. She would never have come to our assistance if we hadn't given her that slice of land. By surrendering it immediately and not waiting till the end of the war, we showed our good faith. It was very hard for us to do it, of course, especially to give up part of the city of Adrianople, but it was worth the price. We really surrendered this territory in exchange for Constantinople, for if Bulgaria had not come in on our side, we would have lost this city. Just think how enormously we have improved our position. We have had to keep more than 200,000 men at the Bulgarian frontier, to protect us against any possible attack from that quarter. We can now transfer all these troops to the Gallipoli peninsula, and thus make it absolutely impossible that the Allies' expedition can succeed. We are also greatly hampered at the Dardanelles by the lack of ammunition. But Bulgaria, Austria, and Germany are to make a joint attack on Serbia and will completely control that country in a few weeks. So we shall have a direct railroad line from Constantinople into Austria and Germany and can get all the war supplies which we need. With Bulgaria on our side no attack can be made on Constantinople from the north--we have created an impregnable bulwark against Russia. I do not deny that the situation had caused us great anxiety. We were afraid that Greece and Bulgaria would join hands, and that would also bring in Rumania. Then Turkey would have been lost; they would have had us between a pair of pincers. But now we have only one task before us, that is to drive the English and French at the Dardanelles into the sea. With all the soldiers and all the ammunition which we need, we shall do this in a very short time. We gave up a small area because we saw that that was the way to win the war."

The outcome justified Enver's prophecies in almost every detail. Three months after Bulgaria accepted the Adrianople bribe, the Entente admitted defeat and withdrew its forces from the Dardanelles; and, with this withdrawal, Russia, which was the greatest potential source of strength to the Allied cause and the country which, properly organized and supplied, might have brought the Allies a speedy triumph, disappeared as a vital factor in the war. When the British and French withdrew from Gallipoli that action turned adrift this huge hulk of a country to flounder to anarchy, dissolution, and ruin.

SOURCE: Ambassador Morgenthau's Story, by Henry Morgenthau (Wayne State U. Press, 2003), pp. 185-188 (first published in 1918; dedicated to Woodrow Wilson)

Edirne (Adrianople) after the Balkan Wars

Much has been published on the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) in general, and on the siege of Edirne (Adrianople) in particular, by journalists, diarists, historians, and others. The Balkan Wars, it will be recalled, had the distinction of being the first twentieth-century international conflict on European soil, complete with the use of aircraft. The siege of Edirne by the Bulgarian and Serb armies, which lasted more than five months, was one of the war's most dramatic events, and it elicited much public interest in Europe and elsewhere....

By the outbreak of the Balkan Wars, the Ottoman Empire had been in a state of disintegration for some time. However, the Balkan Wars, which resulted in the Ottoman Empire's loss of most of its European territories and the concomitant rise of victorious and strong Balkan national states that laid claim to the loyalties of the empire's Christian minorities, delivered the final blow to the possibility of Ottoman plural coexistence and foreshadowed the empire's complete demise. Indeed, within one decade from the end of the Balkan Wars, the remnants of the empire would be transformed into a national state in which the great majority of its population would follow one religion (Islam) and speak one language (Turkish). And these processes were fully reflected in the fate of Edirne.

According to Turkey's official census of 1935, Edirne's total population was 36,121, including 31,731 Muslims, or Turks (88 percent of the total), 4,020 Jews (11 percent), and 368 Christians (1 percent). What is striking about these figures is the almost total disappearance of the Christians (who were more than 30 percent of the population in 1912) due to migration and population exchange and the decline of the Jews (17-18 percent in 1912) in both absolute numbers and relative terms. But perhaps even more surprising is the numerical decline of the Muslims (55,000 in 1912). In fact, between 1912 and the post-World War I era, Edirne lost about two-thirds of its population and did not begin to recover until the 1960s.

The reason for Edirne's decline is well known. The city that until the Balkan Wars had been a major administrative, military, economic, and commercial center had essentially become an isolated border town, but off from its commercial and economic hinterland. The Balkan Wars ... also caused extensive destruction throughout eastern Thrace, further undermining Edirne's economy. The outcome was a rapid flight of population and commercial and economic enterprises from Edirne.

SOURCE: "The Siege of Edirne (1912-1913) as Seen by a Jewish Eyewitness: Social, Political, and Cultural Perspectives," by Avigdor Levy, in Jews, Turks, Ottomans: A Shared History, Fifteenth through the Twentieth Century, ed. by Avigdor Levy (Syracuse U. Press, 2002), pp. 153, 191-192

Edirne (Adrianople) in 1912

In 1912, Edirne was the capital and administrative center of a large and central Ottoman province (vilayet) by the same name, comprising an area of 42,500 square kilometers and a population of almost 1,500,000. The city of Edirne and its suburbs had a population of more than 100,000, and according to one source, in 1912 the population consisted of approximately 55,000 Turks, 20,000 Greeks, close to 20,000 Jews, 10,000 Bulgarians, 6,000 Armenians, and an unspecified number of foreign nationals of various European states.

Edirne was an important crossroads and a major Ottoman military, commercial, and economic center in the eastern Balkans. From a historical and cultural perspective, Ottomans regarded Edirne, a former imperial capital, as second only to the current capital, Istanbul. The political and economic importance of Edirne was underscored by the fact that Austria, Britain, France, Russia, and Bulgaria all maintained consulates in the city. In addition, the city had foreign schools, hospitals, and various religious institutions under the protection of Austria, France, and Italy.

The Jewish community of Edirne was historically one of the oldest and most important in the Ottoman Empire. It was probably the largest and most important Ottoman Jewish center in the period between the Ottoman conquest of the city in 1361 and its transformation into the Ottoman capital and the conquest of Constantinople (Istanbul) in 1453 and the transfer of the capital to the latter city. In subsequent years other Jewish communities--especially those of Istanbul, Salonica, and Izmir--surpassed the community of Edirne in their size and importance. Nevertheless, until the end of the Ottoman era, Edirne was known as a vibrant and important Jewish cultural center.

Following a period of decline in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the community became stabilized in the mid-nineteenth century and began flourishing anew. At the end of the nineteenth century, the numbers of the Jewish population increased from approximately 4,000-5,000 in 1870 to some 15,000 by the beginning of the twentieth century. The Jews constituted then approximately 17 percent of the city's total population that numbered 87,000, and they were the third largest group after the Turks and the Greeks. This growth was due to some extent to Jewish emigration from eastern Europe and the Balkan countries, especially from areas that the Ottoman Empire had lost to the Balkan states following the 1877-1878 Ottoman-Russian war. The Jewish population continued to increase in the first decade of the twentieth century, and in 1911 it numbered some 17,000.

SOURCE: "The Siege of Edirne (1912-1913) as Seen by a Jewish Eyewitness: Social, Political, and Cultural Perspectives," by Avigdor Levy, in Jews, Turks, Ottomans: A Shared History, Fifteenth through the Twentieth Century, ed. by Avigdor Levy (Syracuse U. Press, 2002), pp. 156-157

The Port of Salonica in 1912

Salonica ... is a paradise for Jews. When you are rowed ashore there, your boatman is an Israelite masquerading in Turkish fez and trousers. On landing, you are hustled by porters in turbans and red shoes; but they are Jews. You enter the Customs-house: the mobs of officers, with their continuous gabble, are Jews. Jews in turbans and Jews out of turbans; Jews as builders of houses and Jews as barbers--the children of Israel are everywhere, in every kind of work." --Samuel S. Cox, Diversions of a Diplomat in Turkey

In 1912, at the end of its life as an Ottoman city, Salonica was flourishing as a major industrial and transportation center. Railroads that first reached Salonica in the early 1870s, as well as the telegraph linkages that came in the next decade, played crucial roles in the growth of the city. Before the end of the century, railroad lines connected Salonica to the Ottoman capital, Istanbul, as well as to the Serbian network and thus to Europe. Salonica boomed as the railhead of three lines that redirected the import-export trade of the southern Balkans through the city. As a result, ship tonnage at the port of Salonica doubled to two million tons by 1912. At this time Salonica was tied with Beirut as the third-largest Ottoman port, surpassed only by the much larger ports of Istanbul and Izmir.

Despite these huge increases in sea-borne commerce, improvements in Salonica's port facilities came very slowly. Financed by European capital and carried out by Western corporations, construction of more modern facilities was retarded by two quite different forces. The first was the Ottoman state itself, concerned that Western development of ports would lead to increased foreign control of the Ottoman economy and, perhaps, as in China, to extraterritorial port zones. In addition, merchants' efforts to streamline operations were checked by the Salonica porters' guilds. These workers, who were overwhelmingly Jewish, saw modernization neither as a blessing nor as progress, but rather as a threat to their jobs of manually hauling freight. As in other Ottoman ports, the porters' guilds at Salonica prevented real improvements until the end of the century. Finally, in 1897, the Ottoman state yielded to foreign pressure and granted a concession to a French firm. The expansion of the port was completed by 1904. A few years later, the porters' guilds were curbed further. In 1909 the Salonica Quay Company, the Oriental Railways Company, and the Salonica-Constantinople Junction Railway Company signed an agreement making it possible for trains to run all the way onto the quays, directly discharging to vessels in the port. Previously the trains had stopped at the railway station, where porters picked up the goods and manually carried them over one kilometer of bad road to the port. The new arrangement certainly did make handling more efficient. But the porters who had hauled the goods over that bad road now lost their jobs.

SOURCE: "The Industrial Working Class of Salonica, 1850-1912," by Donald Quataert, in Jews, Turks, Ottomans: A Shared History, Fifteenth through the Twentieth Century, ed. by Avigdor Levy (Syracuse U. Press, 2002), pp. 194-195

Escaping the Gulag with a "Walking Supply"

Generally, memoirists agree that the overwhelming majority of would-be runaways [from the Gulag] were professional criminals. Criminal slang reflects this, even referring to the coming of spring as the arrival of the "green prosecutor" (as in "Vasya was released by the green prosecutor") since spring was when summer escapes were most often contemplated: "A trip through the taiga is possible only during the summer, when it is possible to eat grass, mushrooms, berries, roots, or pancakes baked from moss flour, to catch fieldmice, chipmunks, squirrels, jays, rabbits..." In the very far north, the optimum time to escape was the winter, which criminals there referred to as the "white prosecutor": only then would the swamps and mud of the tundra be passable.

In fact, professional criminals were more successful at escaping because once they had gone "under the wire" they stood a far better chance of surviving. If they made it to a major city, they could melt into the local criminal world, forge documents, and find hiding places. With few aspirations to return to the "free" world, criminals also escaped simply for the fun of it, just to be "out" for a little while. If they were caught, and managed to survive, what was another ten-year sentence to someone who already had two twenty-five-year sentences, or more? One ex-zek remembers a woman criminal who escaped merely to have a rendezvous with a man. She returned "filled with delight," although she was immediately sentenced to the punishment cell....

Not all escapes involved clever flights of fancy. Many--probably the majority--criminal escapes involved violence. Runaways attacked, shot, and suffocated armed guards, as well as free workers and local residents. They did not spare their fellow inmates either. One of the standard methods of criminal escape involved cannibalism. Pairs of criminals would agree in advance to escape along with a third man (the "meat"), who was destined to become the sustenance for the other two on their journey. Buca also describes the trial of a professional thief and murderer, who, along with a colleague, escaped with the camp cook, their "walking supply":

They weren't the first to get this idea. When you have a huge community of people who dream of nothing but escape, it is inevitable that every possible means of doing so will be discussed. A "walking supply" is, in fact, a fat prisoner. If you have to, you can kill him and eat him. And until you need him, he is carrying the "food" himself.

The two men did as planned--they killed and ate the cook--but they had not bargained on the length of the journey. They began to get hungry again:

Both knew in their hearts that the first to fall asleep would be killed by the other. So both pretended they weren't tired and spent the night telling stories, each watching the other closely. Their old friendship made it impossible for either to make an open attack on the other, or to confess their mutual suspicions.

Finally, one fell asleep. The other slit his throat. He was caught, Buca claims, two days later, with pieces of raw flesh still in his sack.

SOURCE: Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum (Anchor Books, 2003), pp. 395-398

May Fourth in China, 1919 and 2005

In yesterday's New York Times, reporter Joseph Kahn reminds us of possible similarities between China's current anti-Japanese demonstrations and those 86 years ago.

The Communist Party stirs patriotic feelings to underpin its legitimacy at a time when few, even in its own ranks, put much faith in Marxism. Official propaganda and the national education system stress the indignities suffered at the hands of foreign powers from the mid-19th century through World War II. Japan, which China says killed or wounded 35 million Chinese from 1937 through 1945, gets the most attention....

But China has never made nationalism the driving force of its foreign policy. The government mainly emphasizes its desire to have a "peaceful rise" that does not impinge on its neighbors, and the authorities are nervous about disrupting the flow of investment and technology that has powered economic growth.

Moreover, anti-Japan protests have a long and, for the government, a sobering history. A student-led march on May 4, 1919, to protest the decision by World War I Allied powers that allowed Japan to take over Germany's colonial territories in China spawned Chinese resistance against Western colonialism. But the May 4 movement and uprisings in 1931 and 1937 turned against the government.

"My impression is that the well-educated elite in China are genuinely baffled and upset by how long the government has tolerated provocations from Japan," said Wenran Jiang, an expert on China-Japan relations at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. "Every anti-Japan movement has sooner or later turned against the government."...

But a senior editor at a party newspaper says the persistence of the anti-Japan campaign and the participation of urban professionals has alarmed the authorities. Officials are accustomed to dealing with unrest among peasants and workers who feel defrauded or disenfranchised by China's economic boom, not among the urban elite, who are its primary beneficiaries.

"The white-collar middle class is supposed to be a pillar of stability," the editor said.

On the other hand, maybe they are now the only ones who have the luxury of fighting about ideology and international status, rather than more material issues.

Collaboration, a Gulag Survival Strategy

Perhaps the most famous exception to the near-universal refusal to admit to informing is, once again, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who describes his flirtation with the camp authorities at length. He dates his initial moment of weakness to his early days in camp, when he was still struggling to accustom himself to his abrupt loss of status. When invited to speak to the operative commander, he was ushered into a "small, cozily furnished room" where a radio was playing classical music. After politely asking him whether he was comfortable and adjusting to camp life, the commander asked him, "Are you still a Soviet person?" After hemming and hawing, Solzhenitsyn agreed that he was.

But although confessing to being "Soviet" was tantamount to confessing a desire to collaborate, Solzhenitsyn initially declined to inform. That was when the commander switched tactics. He turned off the music, and began to speak to Solzhenitsyn about the camp criminals, asking how he would feel if his wife in Moscow were attacked by some who managed to escape. Finally, Solzhenitsyn agreed that if he should hear any of them planning to escape, he would report it. He signed a pledge, promising to report news of any escapes to the authorities, and chose a conspiratorial pseudonym: Vetrov. "Those six letters," he writes, "are branded in shameful grooves on my memory."

By his own account, Solzhenitsyn never did actually report on anything. When recruited again in 1956, he says he refused to sign anything at all. Nevertheless, his initial promise was enough to keep him, while in camp, in one of the trusty jobs, living in the trusties' special quarters, slightly better dressed and better fed than other prisoners. This experience "filled me with shame," he wrote--and doubtless provoked his disdain for all trusties.

At the time of its publication, Solzhenitsyn's description of the camp trusties was controversial--and it still is. Like his description of inmate work habits, it also sparked a running debate in the world of camp survivors and historians, one which continues to this day. Virtually all of the classic, most widely read memoirists were trusties at one time or another: Evgeniya Ginzburg, Lev Razgon, Varlam Shalamov, Solzhenitsyn. It may well be, as some claim, that the majority of all prisoners who survived long sentences were trusties at some point in their camp career. I once met a survivor who recounted to me a reunion of old camp friends he had once attended. The group had taken to reminiscing, and were laughing at old camp stories, when one of them looked around the room and realized what it was that held them together, what made it possible for them to laugh at the past instead of crying: "All of us had been pridurki [trusties]."

There is no doubt that many people survived because they were able to get indoor trusty jobs, thereby escaping the horrors of general work. But did this always amount to active collaboration with the camp regime? Solzhenitsyn felt that it did. Even those trusties who were not informers could, he alleged, still be described as collaborators. "What trusty position," he asked, "did not in fact involve playing up to the bosses and participating in the general system of complusion?"

SOURCE: Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum (Anchor Books, 2003), pp. 367-368

Evolution of a Fantasy-based Save-the-world Community

Aum is an extreme example of a religious movement that, operating from a position of righteousness, set out on a grand mission that reflected the ambitions and visions of its leader and that was affirmed and strengthened by the beliefs, actions and commitment of its followers. That mission, although it also began with a promise of universal salvation, had an innately polarising dimension in its conceptualisation of a sacred war between good and evil. In its rejection of the external realities and the materialist orientations of the everyday world Aum rapidly set itself apart, creating a spiritual hierarchy that claimed superiority over the world at large. Due to the continuing failures of its mission--or rather, in Aum's terms, the refusal of the world to listen--its alienation from society increased, and as it did so, it constructed an alternative and self-directed view of morality. Its doctrines developed accordingly, sanctifying acts that were committed in order to protect the position and authority of its leader and to safeguard what it saw as its mission of truth. As it followed this path, Aum lost its grasp of external reality and turned inwards into a self-constructed world in which all who remained outside the movement were unworthy while those inside were transformed into sacred warriors who believed that they could kill with impunity and that in so doing, they could save in the spiritual sense those they killed.

The tragedy of Aum Shinrikyo is not just that its symbolic fight against evil and for world salvation was transformed into a real and brutal fight which resulted in indiscriminate murder, but that in claiming to operate on exalted spiritual ground beyond the boundaries of normal morality, it severed all links with the spiritual status to which it aspired. Asahara started with messages that resonated with the needs of many Japanese people and expressed ideas that have been at the heart of religions through the ages, such as the imbalances and problems of societies based on materialism and concepts of progress that fail to give due consideration to spiritual explanations and needs, and the affirmation of spiritual techniques and practices that can lead to happiness and liberation.

The tragedy and irony, of course, is that, in seeking to implement such messages, Asahara Shoko and his disciples--the buddhas and bodhisattvas with the mission to create a Buddhist new age of Lotus villages and a Shambala kingdom--betrayed every one of their ideals, killing not only those outside the movement who symbolised the corruption against which they fought, but their own devotees. In setting out with a mission to save the world from disaster, Aum ended up by killing the very people, such as Ochi Naoki [who died hanging upside down during religious training and was then incinerated], it needed in order to carry out its mission. The process through which it reached this position was centred around religious themes, doctrines and images, and was linked closely to its self-image as a religious movement with a sacred mission. As such Aum Shinrikyo provides us with a salient example of the violence-producing dimensions of religion and reminds us of how religious movements can, through a confluence of circumstances, engender, legitimate and commit acts of violence in the name of their faith.

SOURCE: Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan: The Case of Aum Shinrikyo, by Ian Reader (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2000), pp. 248-249

Taiwan: Nation, Province, or Colony?

Postwar Taiwan is difficult to categorize: is it a nation, a province, or some combination of the two? The case studies of Taiwanese reactions to Nationalist rule contained in this chapter raise still another possibility: a colony. Although even the suggestion of colonialism is politically sensitive, colonialism merits discussion because it captures the complexity of the Taiwanese interaction with the Nationalists and forms part of the ideological underpinning for the independence movement today. Since retrocession, when islanders compared Japanese and Nationalist policies, aspects of colonialism were not defined in any abstract sense, but by the similarities between the pre- and post-1945 administrations.

One common way of describing colonial rule is the model of core and periphery. The metropole is the core, which dominates and exploits the less developed periphery. A variation of this model is the notion of internal colonialism developed by Michael Hechter. Essentially, Hechter places the core-periphery paradigm within one nation-state; in his case study, the Irish, Welsh, and Scots within the United Kingdom. He writes that a "spatially uneven wave of modernization over a state territory creates relatively advanced and less advanced groups." Hechter points out that the core has economic dominance and political control, and practices "national discrimination on the basis of language, religion or other cultural forms." The core uses its political power to maintain its advantages, much as a colonial power seeks through direct or indirect rule to dominate a colony. "Disadvantaged groups," Hechter notes, "are likely to demand that decision-making be 'localized' so that their special problem might become appreciated and therefore taken into account in the allocation process." This describes the goals of the Taiwanese elite.

However, to describe Taiwan as a colony or internal colony under Nationalist rule is problematic. First, this peripheral island was more advanced economically than the mainland. Second, immigrants from the mainland after 1945 were more exiles than colonists. Furthermore, the government struggled to prove that the local population was culturally, politically, and historically one and the same with mainlanders. The Nationalists never thought of themselves as colonizers, and in fact based their legitimacy on a claim of restoring Chinese rule to the island. This idea was even embedded in language, as retrocession (guangfu) became the term used by the Nationalists to describe their takeover of the island after the war. To the Nationalists, three factors "proved" Taiwan was not a colony: international law (the Cairo Declaration returned the island to China), intent (mainlanders did not seek to make Taiwan a colony), and policies (government measures were designed for the entire nation). Specific programs such as local self-government represented the fulfillment of long-term goals for China, not a specific colonial policy.

Nevertheless, when examining the island's elite, the model of Taiwan as a colony has some validity. The various positions taken by Taiwanese vis-à-vis the Nationalist state, and the divisions among prominent islanders, had many similarities to the pre-1945 colonial experience. As these case studies illustrate, most islanders found ways to reconcile their personal, professional, and political aspirations with the reality of Japanese, then Nationalist, control without resorting to violence. This is not to gloss over the brutality of Jiang Jieshi's [= Chiang Kai-shek's] police state.... However, the authoritarianism of the Nationalist regime constituted just one of many factors that shaped the provincial elite's relationship with the government. Continuing a trend initiated during the Japanese period, many islanders participated in an impotent system of local self-government even as they tried to reform it. Although the Nationalists preferred to have the support of islanders, they were satisfied if Taiwanese simply avoided all political activity and did not openly oppose the regime ...

Terms like assimilation and independence do not convey the complexity of the Taiwanese understanding of their place in China and the Republic of China. Most islanders hoped to find a modus vivendi that fell between these two ends of a continuum--usually articulated as a drive for expanded local self-government. In the same way, the term colonialism is too simple and does not fully explain the reality of Nationalist policies on the island, even if the Taiwanese elite reacted like a people living under colonial rule. Perhaps this lack of clarity is to be expected in postwar Taiwan. The advocacy of local self-government, itself an ambiguous concept whose meaning shifted over time, corresponds to this situation just as nationalism can be a reaction to "pure" colonialism. Ultimately, Taiwan is best understood by examining the complex interaction of all three of these seemingly contradictory elements: nation, province, and colony. After the Nationalists' defeat on the mainland, Taiwan represented a nation with a state that insisted it was a province, and the Taiwanese were a people whose political activity suggested they were living in a colony. Ironically, the real colonizers were the Han Chinese immigrants to the island during the late Ming and Qing periods who had conquered Taiwan and subdued the aboriginal peoples--the first Taiwanese. This fact, like so much of the island's history, was conveniently forgotten by Han Taiwanese and mainlanders alike.

SOURCE: Between Assimilation and Independence: The Taiwanese Encounter Nationalist China, 1945-1950, by Steven E. Phillips (Stanford U. Press, 2003), pp. 136-139

German and Chinese Classmates in My "Curs de Perfecţionare"

My year of linguistic research in Romania in 1983–84 was pretty much a bust. Having done fieldwork in a kind of New Guinea Sprachbund, I intended to study the Romanian literature on the Balkan Sprachbund. But my advisor, an Albanian specialist, wasn't interested in much but a Daco-Thraco-Illyrian substrate. And no one wanted to talk about any Slavic substrate or superstrate. I came away much less impressed by the Balkan Sprachbund than by the Western European one, with all those preposed articles, a stronger tendency to render subordinate clauses in the infinitive rather than the subjunctive, and a clearly discernible Latin superstrate.

But one of the many peripheral bright spots was the chance to sit in on a Romanian "curs de perfecţionare" with classmates from China, East Germany, and the U.S. What made the class interesting was not the sometimes stupifyingly dull lectures, but rather the need to use Romanian to communicate with our classmates, not all of whom were stupifyingly dull.

The four young German girls were all Russian majors (at the University of Leipzig, I believe) picking up a second language to enhance their translator/interpreter career prospects. Two of them were very reliable members of the Party; the other two were not. I ran into one of the latter, a chunky little red-head, at an art exhibit and reception in the West German embassy. She panicked and begged me not to tell anyone I had seen her there. I didn't and, as far as I know, she didn't get in any trouble.

When it came time to give oral presentations in one of our classes, they all chose safe and boring presentations on such topics as sports terminology and shipping terminology. The latter talk, by a girl from the Baltic seaport of Rostock, is where I first heard the term "roll-on/roll-off" (also roro) for a type of ship.

During the second term, I got permission to attend their course introducing Bulgarian, but I couldn't keep up since the class assumed prior knowledge of Russian.

The two Chinese women in the class were broadcasters for Radio Beijing's Romanian broadcast service. In fact, they still are! One was very reserved, and I never got to know her very well, but the other was quite outgoing and I found her not only far more interesting, but much less frustrating to talk with than the only other American linguist among my classmates. (That'll have to be another post.)

At one point during the long, lean winter, with markets usually barren of fresh meat and vegetables, she managed to supply us with a chunk of meat from the Chinese embassy. Just before we left, we passed on to her the cassette player/shortwave radio we had brought with us.

Her class presentation was the most interesting one of all. A group from the Chinese embassy had taken a holiday trip through Yugoslavia and Hungary, but she focused mostly on Janos Kadar, less about his economic reforms than about his anti-personality cult. He was so modest, according to her sources, that he would not cut to the head of a line waiting to get into some place--at least not until someone noticed and then everyone deferred to him. As she was talking, I would occasionally glance up at the portrait of Mr. Personality Cult himself that hung in every Romanian classroom. Our professor, the most pleasant and sensitive of our lot, did a good job of taking it all in stride. I thought, if any of us could trash a personality cult, it was someone who had lived through the last years of Mao Zedong. (I learned only recently about the long relationship between Janos Kadar and the Chinese Communist Party.)

Four years later, on a trip to Beijing after a year teaching English in a small town in Guangdong, we had a chance to meet again. I called Radio Beijing and managed in my barely adequate Chinese to get someone to call her to the phone. But then when she answered and I tried to switch to my somewhat faded Romanian, I had trouble keeping Chinese out of it. She brought her six-year-old son and her husband to our small hotel near the Temple of Heaven and spent a few hours chatting in the courtyard garden during a blackout with my wife and me and our two-year-old daughter. Fortunately, her husband spoke a fair bit of English, having worked as an Italian translator/interpreter for a travel agency, so we didn't have to depend entirely on my rusty Romanian befreckled with dots of Chinese.

Next installment: the three weird Americans in my class.

Unglamorous Scottish Glamour

Virginia Postrel posts a bit of Scottish etymology:

In his poem "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," Sir Walter Scott introduced the word glamour into English from Scots, where it meant a literal magic spell that kept the subject from seeing things as they really are:

And one short spell therein he read:
It had much of glamour might;
Could make a ladye seem a knight;
The cobwebs on a dungeon wall
Seem tapestry in lordly hall;
A nut-shell seem a gilded barge,
A sheeling [a shepherd's hut] seem a palace large,
And youth seem age, and age seem youth:
All was delusion, nought was truth.

The last bit certainly applies to much of modern syntax, if not grammar more generally.

Language Hat on Barbarian Names

Language Hat quotes an interesting take on name etymologies from O. Maenchen-Helfen's The World of the Huns (University of California Press, 1973). Here's a bit of it:

We must be prepared to meet among the names borne by Huns Germanic, Latin, and (as a result of the long and close contact with the Alans) also Iranian names. Attempts to force all Hunnic names into one linguistic group are a priori doomed to failure.

"Let no one," warned Jordanes, "who is ignorant cavil at the fact that the tribes of men use many names, the Sarmatians from the Germans and the Goths frequently from the Huns." Tutizar was a Goth and Ragnaris a Hun, but Tutizar is not a Gothic name and Ragnaris is Germanic. The Byzantine generals who in 493 fought against the Isaurians were Apsikal, a Goth, and Sigizan and Zolban, commanders of the Hun auxiliaries. Apsikal is not a Gothic but a Hunnic name; Sigizan might be Germanic. Mundius, a man of Attilanic descent, had a son by the name of Mauricius; his grandson Theudimundus bore a Germanic name. Patricius, Ardabur, and Herminiricus were not a Roman, an Alan, and a German as the names would indicate, but brothers, the sons of Aspar and his Gothic wife. There are many such cases in the fifth and sixth centuries. Sometimes a man is known under two names, belonging to two different tongues. Or he has a name compounded of elements of two languages. There are instances of what seem to be double names; actually one is the personal name, the other a title. Among the Hun names, some might well be designations of rank. It is, I believe, generally agreed that the titles of the steppe peoples do not reflect the nationality of their bearers. A kan, kagan, or bagatur may be a Mongol, a Turk, a Bulgar; he may be practically anything....

In addition to the objective difficulties, subjective ones bedevil some scholars. Turkologists are likely to find Turks everywhere; Germanic scholars discover Germans in unlikely places. Convinced that all proto-Bulgarians spoke Turkish, Németh offered an attractive Turkish etymology of Asparuch; other Turkologists explained the name in a different, perhaps less convincing way. Now it has turned out that Asparuch is an Iranian name. Validi Togan, a scholar of profound erudition but sometimes biased by pan-Turkism, derived shogun, Sino-Japanese for chiang chün, "general," from the Qarluq title sagun. Pro-Germanic bias led Schönfeld to maintain, in disregard of all chronology, that the Moors took over Vandalic names.

I particularly like the first comment, from John Emerson:

Boodberg and Wolfram have both argued that steppe peoples are not "peoples" the way that anthropologists think of it. They are armies, together with their families. Voluntarily or otherwise, whole groups of other peoples could be absorbed.

The supposed ethnicity of a group is a function of the ethnicity of its leader and his clan, and also of the language spoken in the leadership councils. So the Huns weren't really Huns, nor the Goths Goths -- not the way we can say that a people that's been living in a certain valley for five generations might have a given ethnicity.

That's somewhat similar to my impression of many peoples along the coast of New Guinea.