Coxinga: Pirate or King? Rebel or Loyalist?

It was the Manchus and the Dutch who called Coxinga a pirate, the English and the Spanish who called him a king. His Chinese countrymen called him both, depending on their mood. But he saw himself as neither; instead, he wanted to be known as a scholar and a patriot, unexpectedly plucked from a privileged upbringing and thrust into the forefront of a terrible war. A child prodigy from a wealthy trading family in seventeenth-century China, Coxinga became a nobleman at twenty-one, a resistance leader at twenty-two, and was a prince at thirty. The last loyal defender of the defeated Ming dynasty, he was the invincible sea lord who raided the coasts for ten years, before leading a massive army to strike at the heart of China itself. Still plotting to restore a pretender he had never seen, he was dead at thirty-nine, only to be canonised by his former enemies as a paragon of loyalty.

In a China that shunned contact with the outside world, Coxinga was a surprisingly cosmopolitan individual. His mother was Japanese, his bodyguards African and Indian, his chief envoy an Italian missionary. Among his 'Chinese' loyalist troops were German and French defectors. His enemies were similarly international, including Chinese relatives and rivals, the Dutch against whom he nursed a lifelong hatred, and the Manchus who invaded his country. Betrayed and deserted by many of his own friends and family, Coxinga's stubborn character was most similar to that of his most famous foe--the Swedish commander whom he defeated in his last battle.

Famous for his pathological insistence on justice and correctness, Coxinga was ever troubled by his shadowy origins. His father was an admiral and the richest man in China, but also a crook who had cheated, murdered and bribed his way to the top of south China's largest criminal organisation. Though Coxinga grew up in a palace, his family had clawed their way to their fortune, and had made many enemies in the process.

This, then, is the man that was known to European writers as that 'heathen idolater and devil-worshipper', the mutilator of his enemies and a heartless brute who could execute a Dutch priest and ravish the man's bereaved daughter on the same day. But Coxinga is also the loyalist lauded by the Chinese as the last son of a departed dynasty, who steadfastly refused to surrender to foreign invaders when millions of his countrymen submitted willingly. He was demonised in Europe, deified in China, and remains a contentious figure to this day.

This is his story. It is also the story of his father, Nicholas Iquan, and of his deals and double-crosses with the Europeans he despised. To the superstitious, it is also the story of the goddess of the sea, and how she granted fortune on the waters to one family for forty long years. Though it ends with saints and gods, it begins with smugglers and pirates.

SOURCE: Coxinga and the Fall of the Ming Dynasty, by Jonathan Clements (Sutton, 2005), pp. 5-6

How Koreans Chose Japanese Names

During the Japanese colonial period, Koreans were heavily penalized if they did not change their family names to Japanese, as Hildi Kang explains in her book Under the Black Umbrella: Voices from Colonial Korea, 1910-1945:

Of our fifty informants, only four families refused to change their names. All others complied, for without a Japanese name citizens could not enter schools, get jobs, or obtain ration cards. The government stopped issuing permits and postmen stopped delivering packages to those with Korean names. However, many Koreans built into their new names ingenious reflection of their Korean name, hometown, or a significant family attribute.

Here are some of the examples Kang compiled.

1. Retain all or part of the Chinese character, but use its native Japanese reading

• Kim 金 – Keep ‘gold’ but use its Japanese pronunciation, as in 金國 Kanekuni ‘gold country’, 金澤 Kanezawa ‘gold pond’, 金城 Kaneshiro ‘gold castle’, 金田 Kaneda ‘gold paddy’
• Ch’oe 崔 – Keep the ‘mountain’ radical on top, as in 山本 Yamamoto ‘mountain base’
• Pak 朴 – Keep the ‘tree’ radical, as in 木戸 Kido ‘wood door’, 正木 Masaki ‘upright tree’
• Yi 李 – Keep the ‘tree’ radical, as in 木元 Kimoto ‘tree base’

2. Create a Japanese-style name based on geographical origins

• Pak 朴 – The Japanese name 大竹 Ōtake might reflect the family’s Korean hometown, Taebyŏn (大 Tae), and the bamboo grove (竹) in back of the old homestead.
• Kang 康 – The Japanese name 信川 Nobukawa might reflect the ancestral seat of the Kang clan, pronounced Sinch’ŏn in Korean.
• Kang 姜 – The Japanese name 大山 Ōyama might reflect the mountain of the ancestral seat of the Kang clan, pronounced Taesan in Korean.

3. Choose a Korean homonym with an alternate native Japanese name reading

• Song 宋 – 宋 has no Japanese counterpart, but the Korean homonym 松 ‘pine’ is very common in Japanese names, as in 松本 Matsumoto ‘pine base’.

4. Choose a symbolic name

• Kim 金 – The Japanese name 岩本 Iwamoto ‘rock base’ might reflect the Korean family’s faith.

SOURCE: Under the Black Umbrella: Voices from Colonial Korea, 1910-1945, by Hildi Kang (Cornell U. Press, 2001), pp. 117-122

UPDATE: Asiapundit notes that just three surnames, Kim (= Gim), Lee (= Yi, Ri, Rhee, etc.), and Park (= Pak, Bak, etc.) account for 45% of family surnames in South Korea. Sun Bin compares the distribution of surnames in Korea with that in China, where the top three Han Chinese surnames (Li 李, Wang 王, Zhang 张) account for only 23% of the total, but the top fifteen account for 51% of the total. The surnames Chen 陈 and Huang 黄 are much overrepresented in Guangdong.

UPDATE 2: On the Rectification of Names

Japanese public (at least journalistic and diplomatic) practice has changed over the past decade or two with regard to rendering Sinographic names in Japanese. It used to be that Chinese characters in foreign names were just pronounced in their Sino-Japanese readings, so that Mao Zedong was Mou Takutou, and Chiang Kaishek (= Jiang Jieshi) was Shou Kaiseki.

But the practice now is to render such names into katakana approximations of their sound values in standard Chinese or Korean. I believe this change was driven partly by some activist Korean Residents in Japan who wanted to de-Japanize their names, but probably also by both the DPRK and ROK governments, which are both generally anti-hanja, pro-hangul (although the ROK Ministry of Education seems to have reversed its hanja-teaching policies many times during the past three decades). So now Korean Kims who Japanized their names to Kane-something can revert to Kimu, and Kim Ilsong can be rendered in katakana as Kimu IrusoN instead of in Sino-Japanese as Kin Nichisei.

Of course, katakana sound values impose a phonological straitjacket not much more elastic than the Sino-Japanese readings of Sinographic names, but at least the new practice treats Chinese and Korean names like those of other foreigners--and, more important, not like members of a special Japanese-dominated kanjisphere (or, alternatively, a China-dominated 汉字球 'hanzisphere').

In my recent visit to Japan I was struck by the similar treatment now accorded to the Japanese names of foreign citizens of Japanese ancestry, like Alberto Fujimori or Isamu Noguchi. They are written in katakana! The ideological reason may be recognition that Japanese emigrants need not remain Japanese, either in cultural practices or national loyalties. But there's also a practical reason: the many-to-many relationship between the pronunciation and writing of Japanese names, especially given names. The kanji for Fujimori and Noguchi can be guessed with very little chance of error, but many other surnames are not, and many, many given names have huge potential for error. That's what Japanese business people take special care to clear up when they exchange business cards. For instance, the common male name pronounced Hiroshi can be written in several dozen different ways. And each kanji can be read in so many different ways, especially in names, that Japanese formfill paperwork routinely asks for both written and pronounced (katakana/romaji) versions of each name. Place names can sometimes be just as bad as personal names in that regard.

One legacy of the Korean bitterness about and resistence to Japanese colonial renaming requirements still lingers in ESL classrooms today, where Korean students usually resist adopting English (or broadly Anglospheric) given names that might make life easier for their teachers. In sharp contrast, Chinese students often request English names, and Japanese students are often quite happy to answer to Anglicized nicknames (Mits, Kats, etc.), at least in my experience.

Language Hat's comment thread, as usual, has a wider-ranging discussion.

Weird War, Weird Peace, Real Worries Across the Dniester

Over the weekend, I forgot to mention a blogpost by David McDuff of A Step at a Time about the weird war between post-Soviet Moldova and its breakaway province of Transdniestria. Kommersant ran the story on 12 December.

When Moldova and Transdniestria were fighting, it was a weird war. The local military called it Drunken. Officers of the combatants met every night to have a drink together. They went away in the morning and opened fire on each other. At night, they got together again to drink for those they had met with the previous night and who they had killed.

Now that Moldova and Transdniestria are no longer at war, this peace is weird too. A new generation has grown up in the self-proclaimed republic who are almost sure that they live in Russia. A lot of young Trasndniestrians go to [the Moldovan capital of] Chisinau to study, have a good time or do shopping even though they despise everything associated with the word “Moldova”. Transdniestrian state propaganda has taught every citizen that the Moldovan president Voronin is a bloody dictator eager to annex his country to Romania.

Vladimir Voronin comes from Transdniestria, by the way. His mother still lives in the breakaway republic. Transdniestrian President Igor Smirnov is a Russian citizen as well as most of Transdniestrian ministers, many of whom are appointed in Moscow....

Europeans went to ask Viktor Yushchenko after the Orange Revolution to close down the frontier with Transdniestria to crack down on the smuggling. But nothing happened. The whole of Transdniestria live on the smuggling, and at least half of Odessa Region get their bread on that. That’s why arms are still being smuggled in, through and later sold.

The Interpol states that the arms produced in Transdniestria later drift away for terrorist groups worldwide. A major part of them go straight to Chechnya. So, the West is actually accusing Russia (with some help of Ukraine) of supplying Chechen militants with arms and, and wants to hamper it. Russia, in its turn, condemns the West for striving to lock it in the circle of enemies. One thing is not clear: is it a renewal of the Cold War or the continuation of the Drunken War?

South Korean Missionaries and North Korean Defectors

The Marmot calls attention to a fascinating New York Times article on 19 December about tensions between South Korean missionaries and North Korean defectors.

To the North Korean defectors, some South Korean missionaries seem more concerned about brokering deals to smuggle them out of China and using them in Seoul as publicity tools against North Korea. To South Korean missionaries, who have risked their lives to evangelize in China, some North Korean defectors appear ungrateful. Although no precise figures exist, only a fifth to a third of North Korean defectors ultimately convert to Christianity, according to most South Korean missionaries interviewed.

More at the Marmot's Hole.

Paul 'Scrooge' Theroux on Aid to Africa

The New York Times on 15 December carried an op-ed on African aid by Hawai‘i's resident literary Scrooge, Paul Theroux.

It seems to have been Africa's fate to become a theater of empty talk and public gestures. But the impression that Africa is fatally troubled and can be saved only by outside help - not to mention celebrities and charity concerts - is a destructive and misleading conceit. Those of us who committed ourselves to being Peace Corps teachers in rural Malawi more than 40 years ago are dismayed by what we see on our return visits and by all the news that has been reported recently from that unlucky, drought-stricken country. But we are more appalled by most of the proposed solutions.

I am not speaking of humanitarian aid, disaster relief, AIDS education or affordable drugs. Nor am I speaking of small-scale, closely watched efforts like the Malawi Children's Village. I am speaking of the "more money" platform: the notion that what Africa needs is more prestige projects, volunteer labor and debt relief. We should know better by now. I would not send private money to a charity, or foreign aid to a government, unless every dollar was accounted for - and this never happens. Dumping more money in the same old way is not only wasteful, but stupid and harmful; it is also ignoring some obvious points.

If Malawi is worse educated, more plagued by illness and bad services, poorer than it was when I lived and worked there in the early 60's, it is not for lack of outside help or donor money. Malawi has been the beneficiary of many thousands of foreign teachers, doctors and nurses, and large amounts of financial aid, and yet it has declined from a country with promise to a failed state.

In the early and mid-1960's, we believed that Malawi would soon be self-sufficient in schoolteachers. And it would have been, except that rather than sending a limited wave of volunteers to train local instructors, for decades we kept on sending Peace Corps teachers. Malawians, who avoided teaching because the pay and status were low, came to depend on the American volunteers to teach in bush schools, while educated Malawians emigrated. When Malawi's university was established, more foreign teachers were welcomed, few of them replaced by Malawians, for political reasons. Medical educators also arrived from elsewhere. Malawi began graduating nurses, but the nurses were lured away to Britain and Australia and the United States, which meant more foreign nurses were needed in Malawi.

When Malawi's minister of education was accused of stealing millions of dollars from the education budget in 2000, and the Zambian president was charged with stealing from the treasury, and Nigeria squandered its oil wealth, what happened? The simplifiers of Africa's problems kept calling for debt relief and more aid. I got a dusty reception lecturing at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation when I pointed out the successes of responsible policies in Botswana, compared with the kleptomania of its neighbors. Donors enable embezzlement by turning a blind eye to bad governance, rigged elections and the deeper reasons these countries are failing.

Although I gave up on Theroux's travel writing after his bitchy, self-absorbed The Happy Isles of Oceania, I think he has a valid point here.

via Arts & Letters Daily

Rodriguez on Hispanic and Asian Americans

When I was twelve years old, my father said he wished his children had Chinese friends--so polite, so serious are Chinese children in my father's estimation. The Spanish word he used was formal.

I didn't have any Chinese friends. My father did. Seventh and I Street was my father's Orient. My father made false teeth for several Chinese dentists downtown. When a Chinese family tried to move in a few blocks away from our house, I heard a friend's father boast that the neighbors had banded together to "keep out the Japs."...

With one breath people today speak of Hispanics and Asians--the new Americans. Between the two, Asians are the more admired--the model minority--more protestant than Protestants; so hardworking, self-driven; so bright. But the Asian remains more unsettling to American complacence, because the Asian is culturally more foreign.

Hispanics may be reluctant or pushy or light or dark, but Hispanics are recognizably European. They speak a European tongue. They worship or reject a European God. The shape of the meat they eat is identifiable. But the Asian?

Asians rounded the world for me. I was a Mexican teenager in America who had become an Irish Catholic. When I was growing up in the 1960s, I heard Americans describing their nation as simply bipartate: black and white. When black and white America argued, I felt I was overhearing some family quarrel that didn't include me. Korean and Chinese and Japanese faces in Sacramento rescued me from the simplicities of black and white America.

I was in high school when my uncle from India died, my Uncle Raj, the dentist. After Raj died, we went to a succession of Chinese dentists, the first Asian names I connected with recognizable faces; the first Asian hands....

No belief is more cherished by Americans, no belief is more typical of America, than the belief that one can choose to be free of American culture. One can pick and choose. Learn Spanish. Study Buddhism.... My Mexican father was never so American as when he wished his children might cultivate Chinese friends.

SOURCE: Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father, by Richard Rodriguez (Penguin, 1992), pp. 160, 166, 171

Coffee, Tea, or Treason? My Lovelife as a CIA Spy

In the aftermath of September 11, I should have felt motivated to be a better case officer. But the actions, or lack thereof, of the CIA had caused me to lose faith altogether. The attacks in New York and Washington had sent everyone at Headquarters into a tailspin: to view 9-11 as anything but a massive intelligence failure, we all knew, was sheer denial. Everybody at the Agency was wondering where we had gone wrong, and what the hell we were supposed to do now.

I could no longer perceive the value of the "intel" we received from the likes of Jasna the dour Bosniak, or Ahmet and his network of pesky Albanians, or Dimé and Tony and their circle of chauvinistic [Macedonian] clowns. I argued to [my supervisor] Scott, and also in cables back to Headquarters, that these cases ought to be terminated; that in light of the events of September 11, we should cut loose our less productive agents--to include my own--and focus on developing a network of terrorist-related targets. But it seemed that my arguments--as well as, I was sure, those of other similarly concerned case officers--fell on a conspiracy of deaf ears back at Langley.

"It's a good experience for you," Scott said when I balked about traveling again to meet Jasna, who I knew would have nothing of import to say.

"But she's useless," I said. "And we pay her a ton of money--for what?!"

"Headquarters wants you to keep running the case." Scott frequently blamed management back home.

And so I would continue to run Jasna, I realized, and a number of other second- and third-rate assets, because someone at the CIA thought it was good for my career. Privately, I conjectured what anybody who had lost a loved one in a terrorist attack would think of these pointless exercises. I felt that now, in addition to shortchanging myself, I was failing everyone else. The CIA, on the other hand, viewed me as one of their most promising junior officers.

One day, I was walking through Skopje when I got caught in the imaginary cross fire of a dozen young boys armed with plastic guns and rifles. They were playing "Macedonians and Albanians" like American boys used to play Cowboys and Indians. The boys ambushed one another from behind parked cars with a kind of maniacal zeal, and I thought, I am someone who is caught in a game. A little boys' game that men continue to play as adults.

September 11 had upset the CIA, I realized, because it meant someone was not playing by the rules of the game. If ever there were a chilling indication that the Cold War was over, and that the traditional spy-versus-spy tactics were not going to work anymore, it should have been then.

But the CIA was, and still is, made up of men who are loath to give up playing their game.

SOURCE: Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy, by Lindsay Moran (Berkley Books, 2005), pp. 273-275

This is the second-crappiest* CIA memoir that I've read. Nearly 300 pages of narcissistic drivel and only one passage worth excerpting on this blog. The book it most reminded me of was one I read decades ago, Coffee, Tea, or Me? The Uninhibited Memoirs of Two Airline Stewardesses.

Better subtitles for this CIA memoir would be: The Lousy Spook Dating Scene, How the Company Ruined My Lovelife, My Life as a CIA Narcissist, or My Life as a Jetsetting CIA Rockclimber. This was a national bestseller? Bah, humbug! What a waste.

Moran's book seems to have made a similar impression on Amazon reviewer Raja "Punjeeb".

*The crappiest CIA memoir I've read so far is Robert Baer's Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude (Three Rivers, 2004). Baer's book needs further disclosures after the title, something along the lines of "As spoken into Intercontinental hotel bar taperecorders across the Middle East" and "How to ruin your credibility even with readers not hostile to your thesis."

Amazon book reviewer Alejandro Contreras is pretty much on the mark about Baer, but still overrates him:

As one reads this book, one gets the impression that Baer became convinced of the Saudis' double game, and wrote this book without fully structuring his thoughts and without bullet-proofing rationally his arguments.

What we get, then, is a somehow salad mix of anecdotes from Baer's experience at the CIA and afterwards. These stories are almost randomly mixed with stories Baer heard and with some (possibly true and proved) historic facts.

Maybe I'll post a few examples if I can find the time and patience.

UPDATE: Yikes. Read Daniel Drezner's blogpost, entitled Worst Tradecraft Ever, about the CIA's unbelievable bungling in Italy.

Selling Baseball to the Anglosphere, 1888

In 1888, an American baseball player and businessman set out to promote baseball across the Anglosphere.

The Spalding Tour was the event which brought baseball to Australia. It introduced the nation to the game that seemed forever destined to live in the shadow of cricket. It was big and brash, expensive and lavish - the Spalding Tour was all of the things that other nations expected of Americans. Albert Spalding (1850-1915) had been a successful baseball player during the formative years of the sport. By the time of his famous tour, he was a team owner, a baseball entrepreneur and a sporting goods businessman. According to the English-born baseball journalist, Henry Chadwick, the Spalding Tour of 1888 was the "great event in the modern history of athletic sports"

As a leading player and later, manager, Spalding was so convinced that the world would turn to baseball that he took the entire Boston team to England in 1874. He gained some support there for the sport, even a match at Lord's. This baseball tour also had the distinction of beating a top rated cricket team at cricket. The English were polite but reserved in their enthusiasm for the new American game.

This Spalding tour did not yield any profits but it did introduce the game overseas. Spalding remained committed to encourage future tours. He later reflected upon the England Tour of 1874 in his Spalding's Official Base Ball Guide of 1890. Here he noted that attempt to introduce baseball to England was a failure. Several years later, after the Spalding Tour had visited England in March 1889, this view was still accurate. Indeed, the British press made this dubious assessment of baseball:

"The pitcher seems to have it all his own way ... there is an extraordinary amount of "work" on the ball. The result is that the unfortunate batsman, be he ever so skilful, makes but a lame and feeble display ... the odds against him are so great that our English love of fair play is offended ... For this reason, baseball will never be popular in England."

Spalding always denied he was trying to displace cricket in Britain and Australia. He only wanted to make it "one of the kindred field sports of the country. The reader cannot help but think that Spalding was showing his true feelings when he noted: "Baseball is a sport for the masses, cricket for the leisure classes. Baseball takes 2-3 hours, cricket takes 2-3 days. Spalding also was concerned that, with the development of team sports, there seemed to be few sports in common between the major English speaking countries such as Canada, America, Britain, Australia and New Zealand.

SOURCE: Time and Game: The History of Australian Baseball, by Joe Clark (U. Nebraska Press, 2003), online edition, chapter 1

Penal Colony Self-government

Laurence Jarvik notes that "Felix Kulov, the current Prime Minister of Kyrgyzstan, a former Mayor of Bishkek and KGB officer, was sent to a Soviet-style penal colony by the country's former ruler, Askar Akayev." Here's a short excerpt on self-government in Kulov's penal colony from an interview with him on Ferghana.ru.

What is a penal colony? A territory fenced in, with watchtowers and soldiers on them, with people living inside that territory. It is absolutely deserted by night. Just two men somewhere on the tower, warrant officers on duty. They are unarmed, but have a radio to make their reports. A Soviet system, you know. A penal colony, not prison. In Western movies all cells open simultaneously, prisoners take their daily walk, and get herded back in later on. That's probably how things are done there, I do not know. It is different in our penal colonies. You get in, there is not one other prisoner around, you are on your own. Decades of the Soviet regime and this penitentiary system resulted in appearance of certain rules.

Say, a prisoner is not supposed to carry a knife openly. No fights are permitted. Whoever has to settle some issue in that manner, they have to go to the so called forbidden zone beyond the barbed wire. The survivor comes back. That's logical, or there will be endless fights. Sure, they occur too, but they always incur a punishment. A prisoner who got drunk should not show it because not everyone has access to booze. Prisoners do get drunk, but they are supposed to behave themselves. They'd have killed each other in no time at all otherwise. They are all "heroes" there, you know. Shortly speaking, it took many generations of prisoners literally decades to work out all these rules.

Some men become thieves by statute which elevates them to the highest status of the underworld hierarchy. It is they who see to it that these rules are observed and enforce them whenever necessary. Here is one of the rules. Whenever someone puts someone else on drugs, makes this someone else a needle-freak, then this man is in real trouble. He'll be beaten to the inch of his life, until he wishes he did not do it. Whenever it is done in that other life, beyond the barbed wire and fence, it's all right. In a penal colony it is forbidden.

The first principle of self-government in a penal colony is to govern yourself very carefully. LaurenceJarvikOnline posts a longer excerpt.

Foreign Workers in Kobe Shipyards, 1944

We [young men drafted from Korea] worked on a huge military ship, camouflaging it from the American planes. When they took it off dry dock we finished the top and the inside. This work had to be done deep in the bottom of the ship. The workers banged away with rivets and machinery, making huge noises that reverberated inside the ship. Those workers went down in the morning and came out late at night. They never saw the sun. The black dust flew around in there and covered them with soot, so they were all black--their whole bodies, all black.

The officer on board ship chose me to be his deputy and ordered me to take refreshments to the other officers and guards. Because of that, I didn't suffer too badly. Part of my job was to deliver lunches to the Japanese guards. In their box lunch they had white rice and other tasty things, but even so, these bosses were so spoiled that they complained about the quality of their food. They yelled, "This is not fit for human consumption. Not even pigs would eat this!" They actually tossed it to me, and yelled, "Here, you eat this."

When they did that, I shared it with my friends because they were really starving. The rest I stashed away, dried it, hid it, so I could take it with me when I got ready to escape. I did this for several months.

Prisoners of war worked there also, mixed in with us. These prisoners were mostly British, captured in Singapore. You could tell they had been starved--they were just skin and bones. They looked so emaciated that even we, who were hungry, thought they looked starved. They were brought to the ship in shackles, then the shackles were taken off. They scrounged in the garbage cans for any scraps of food.

I felt so sorry for them that I shared cigarettes in secret. They said to me, thank you, thank you, so many times that I felt embarrassed for the little I could do. If I had been caught, of course, my own life would be in danger. Although we couldn't really communicate, whenever they saw me they smiled, laughed, and called out. There is no question that some things that one human being should never do to another had been done by those Japanese.

SOURCE: Under the Black Umbrella: Voices from Colonial Korea, 1910-1945, by Hildi Kang (Cornell U. Press, 2001), p. 125

Topsy-turvy Chaos of Liberation, Korea, 1945

Life for the Japanese changed overnight [after the liberation of Korea in 1945]. In our Chongju area, our people policed themselves, and treated the Japanese well. The Japanese went to live in shelters or schools, and went out during the day to find jobs. We ourselves hired a Japanese woman as our maid.

One man who had been the middle-school principal was reduced to living at the shelter and going out during the day to seek work. One day two boys saw him and they thought he looked familiar. When they got close and recognized their former principal, old habits took over. They automatically stopped and gave him their respectful bow, even though he now dressed as a rag picker. He returned their bow, and right there shed tears, to think that the boys still respected who he was, not what he had become.

As for me, one day, walking toward Toktal village to visit Grandmother, I noticed a Japanese family trudging dejectedly along the road in the opposite way, toward Chongju city. I gasped when I recognized the school principal and his family from Chonch'on where we had lived earlier. They had been our friends. I didn't know what to do. I hung my head and pretended I didn't see them. To this day I am ashamed that I couldn't even greet them.

In our north part of the country, when the Japanese packed up to leave, no one really knew how to rule in their place. People tried to police themselves and in some areas it worked better than others. Where we lived, in Chongju, it was calm and orderly. Much later I learned that terrible things happened in some places, especially in Hamgyong Province to the northeast near the Russian border. Anti-Japanese nationalists let out all their frustrations, and also the Korean communists, who had been biding their time, became militant. Cruel guerrilla attacks made everyone nervous. Nobody really knew who was in charge.

SOURCE: Under the Black Umbrella: Voices from Colonial Korea, 1910-1945, by Hildi Kang (Cornell U. Press, 2001), pp. 143-144

Friends and Neighbors in Defeat, Korea, 1945

CHIN MYONGHUI, (f) b. 1932, housewife, South Hamgyong Province:
My father had lived in both Russia and Japan. When he returned to Korea, he got a job teaching in Wonsan, South Hamgyong Province, and became principal, which was very unusual for a Korean. Almost always, school principals were Japanese.

Because of Father's high position, we lived in a Japanese neighborhood and my best friends were Japanese. I did not know or use any Korean language at all, not speaking or reading or writing.

After liberation, the Koreans said my father was pro-Japanese, a running dog, because he was so high up. They almost lynched him. Then the Russian army came, and they wanted someone who could speak Russian to help them out. Father said no. So because of these two events, he fled to south Korea, leaving the rest of the family in the north. Later we made our own way to the south.

KIM P. [ANONYMOUS], (f) b. 1931, housewife:
When the war ended, everyone stopped using Japanese and started speaking Korean again. I was young, and I had never spoken Korean in my entire life. Since I didn't know a single word of Korean, I repeated the sixth grade just to learn to speak my own native language.

YU TOKHUI, (f) b. 1931, housewife, South Ch'ungch'ong Province:
I noticed that the Second World War upset the entire social order of our village. My uncle had many servants and they all knew their places, but when the war required the young men to be drafted into the Japanese army, every young man was taken, servants and yangban, all went together, and it blurred the hierarchy. Everybody's fate was the same, so they all became equal. Because of that, after the war, many of the servants moved out of Uncle's house and moved to other cities. The old order crumbled.

PAK SONGP'IL, (m) b. 1917, fisherman, South Kyongsang Province:
On August 15, I finished ferrying doctors out to the troop ship in the Pusan harbor, docked my boat, and went upstairs in the office building. I had no idea what had happened. I saw the Japanese workers in the office wailing, banging on the desks, banging the floor. I can see them today in my mind. These very ones who had been so sure they were invincible. The next thing they did was drink themselves into a stupor. They went crazy. It was the tragedy of a nation in defeat.

SOURCE: Under the Black Umbrella: Voices from Colonial Korea, 1910-1945, by Hildi Kang (Cornell U. Press, 2001), pp. 145-146

Sacred Texts and Talismans in the Digital Age

Michael Hyatt, a religious publisher with a blog, is convinced e-books are the wave of the future, just as soon as the right very, very booklike reading device comes along.

The blogpost compares iPod vs. hardware platforms for distributing music, but the extension of this model to the distribution of books doesn't seem quite parallel. Some of the comments to his post are pretty interesting, but I'd like to focus on the implications of sacred texts as talismans in the digital age.

Electronic editions seem best for periodicals and reference works, but not for novels, and not for bath or toilet reading. Religious publications seem to be expanding in both print and electronic media. A lot of people have bought Bible-concordance software packages in addition to the more talismanlike print edition. Concordance software is a powerful tool, especially for matching translations with originals, but it's harder to make the transition to treating a CD or an e-book as a sacred talisman.

Two problems for e-Bibles:

1. "Do you swear, on this electronic device, to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?"

2. When I was a kid, Baptist Sunday schools classes sometimes used to have "sword drills"--competitions to unsheathe our Bible "swords" and find the page on which a particular book, chapter, and verse was located before anyone else did. I don't know how that would work if Bibles were handheld electronic devices. I suppose the competition could be to input the best combination of search terms to make the shortest possible list of search results to choose from.

Saipan After World War II

On the 60th anniversary of the Battle of Saipan in 1944, former Peace Corps Volunteer P.F. Kluge spoke to a group of veterans and residents on the island. The text of his speech appears in the latest issue of The Contemporary Pacific (Project Muse subscription required). Here are a couple of excerpts.

Saipan in the 1960s

In launching a large Micronesia program, the Peace Corps had advertised, only half ironically, that it was going to paradise. The result was an ambitious, overextended, and controversial program involving hundreds of volunteers. We joked that if the same ratio of volunteers to locals prevailed in, say, India, there would be no young people left in the United States.

The Saipan we came to was no paradise, that was clear. Almost a quarter century had passed since the shooting had stopped, and yet the place was still shaped, defined, by the battle that had been fought here. Long after the combat stopped, long after the naval administration walked away from its camps and Quonsets and airfields, the island was ... well ... haunted. It was like a theater that had been abandoned by actors and by audience, a place still littered with costumes and props, ticket stubs and programs in the aisles. Have you ever, driving around America, gone past an old outdoor drive-in theater, the big screen still standing, weeds in the parking lot, long semicircular rows of those little parking-meter-like poles evenly spaced, and the ruins of a rickety, graffiti-marked projection booth in the middle of it all? That was what Saipan felt like.

It had a kind of sullen magic. Scarred, handsome, and in its way, beautiful. It invited exploring. It made you think. And it was all about the past; it was about some of you who gather here now. It was about you, this sighting out from the invasion beach at landing craft and tanks impaled on the reef. It was about you, when I went swimming off the rusting breakwaters and half-sunken barges at Charley Dock. It was about you, traveling in and off the islands, waiting at little Kobler Field for a DC-3. You were there, your spirit lingered at Isley Field, with overgrown bunkers and revetments, all the giant footsteps of another time. Saipan then was one of those rare, dear places where you could confront history without a ticket, a tape-recorded spiel, a forced march through a museum, and a sign warning you about all the things you weren't supposed to do. In the villages--­Garapan, Susupe, Chalan Kanoa--­it was about you, in the remnants and ruins of destroyed Japanese buildings, bullet-pocked walls and cisterns, overgrown gardens; about you as well in the scrap metal and lumber taken from the emptied internment camps, hammered into houses, and collected and rehammered after typhoons, when people came back from bunkers and old Japanese buildings where they had taken shelter during the storms. You were on the roads, in surplus jeeps the Saipanese had purchased at $1 each. You were in the roads themselves, those roads that, more than anything else, made Saipan special: it was the only Trust Territory island west of Majuro where you could spend more than a minute in third gear....

Saipan Today

Now, in an island vastly transformed since becoming part of America, there remains cause for celebration and concern. What I love, maybe more now than before, is the wild-card vitality, the buzz and hurly-burly, the characters who land­in some cases, wash up­here, searchers, dreamers, tax-dodgers, flimflam men, the hits just keep coming. What characters, what schemes, especially in the early years: an X-rated Doonesbury cartoon. This was let's-make-a-deal time, the coming of disco, duty-free karaoke, poker machines, etc, etc. A time in which opportunity shaded into opportunism. The world discovered Saipan; Saipan discovered the world. Things got complicated and still are. The Saipan tourist industry is at the mercy of ups and downs in Japan, the wanderlust of mainland Chinese, the health of airlines, the outbreak of SARS [Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome], the risk of terrorism. The garment industry thrives in the shadow of regulations, soon to go into effect, that will permit Chinese garments made in China into the US market. Will Chinese need to come to Saipan to sew? In its moment of greatest strength, Saipan is singularly vulnerable to outside forces beyond its control. All this is another way of saying it has ceased in an important way to be an island at all. Forget your images of island life: Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, Shakespeare's Tempest, Fantasy Island, Napoleon on St. Helena. Forget the familiar island adjectives: remote, isolated, lonely, insular, self-sufficient. They don't apply. Saipan's not an island anymore. It's all connected.

The island's main export may be irony. I saw the first Japanese tourists in the late sixties: decorous, dark-suited, camera-toting groups, middle-aged and older. I attended the opening of the first hotel, the Royal Taga. First and last, I thought. Was I wrong! Who could have guessed that a World War II battleground would turn into a Japanese Florida? Or that its transformation would mimic the 1944 campaign, first taking the invasion beaches, then heading north toward Marpi, duty-free shopping, souvenir and convenience stores and gaming emporia shooting galleries following along behind? And, among these nearly 500,000 visitors per year, there are fewer and fewer who come for the reasons that unite us today. They walk past pillboxes and monuments on their way to the beach. Was there a battle here? Well, that was then and this is now. A famous victory? Never mind: sunburn lotion is their armor. Against this tide of indifference and forgetting, the memories we share and renew may amount to more than history. They may offer guidance in times ahead.

Talk about garment industries, talk about hotels and realize that they have one thing in common: a reliance on outside capital and outside labor. The Saipanese are agents, middlemen­not bosses, and rarely employees. Where are the Saipanese? The most enthusiastic celebrants of the US Commonwealth--­and there is much to celebrate: hospitals, businesses, a likeable junior college--­turn quiet when I inquire. The Saipanese are outnumbered, nearly two-to-one, on their own island, that's for sure, outnumbered by those waves of foreign workers, garment makers, security guards, barbers and beauticians, hostesses and maids, farmers and hard-hats who have come to do the island's heavy lifting. There were around 11,000 people in the Northern Marianas in 1967, mostly local, and now there are 75,000, mostly alien. Be careful what you wish for. Saipanese are a minority on their own islands­--an elite minority, to be sure, and determined to stay that way, but a minority nonetheless. What, then, are they up to? What is their work, job, occupation, trade, calling? Their purpose or their passion? This is something that they may still be discovering. It's taking time. For the moment, most island citizens who work are employed by local and commonwealth government. That is cause for wonder. It will take a few trips to know whether the situation I've described can last: an entrenched government contending with outside money, transient workers. I will not predict the worst: the island has a way of dodging bullets, pulling through. It has some magic. But if I predicted happy endings, we'd have to define terms.

No island is an island anymore.

China's Latest Uprising: Angry Villagers, Pirate Gangs, or Both?

Today's Tacoma News Tribune carries an earlier Washington Post report on the outbreak of violence in coastal Guangdong northeast of Hong Kong.

DONGZHOU, China – Paramilitary police and anti-riot units have opened fire with pistols and automatic rifles for the past two nights on rioting farmers and fishermen who have attacked them with gas bombs and explosive charges, according to residents of this small coastal village.

The sustained volleys of gunfire, unprecedented in a wave of peasant uprisings over the past two years in China, have killed between 10 and 20 villagers and injured more, residents said.... As far as is known, previous riots have all been put down with heavy use of truncheons and tear gas, but without firearms.

This time, according to a villager who heard and saw what happened, police responded to the launching of explosives by repeatedly firing “very rapid bursts of gunfire” over a period of several hours Tuesday and Wednesday nights. Some villagers reported seeing People’s Armed Police carrying AK-47 assault rifles, one of the Chinese military’s standard-issue weapons. There were no reports of violence Thursday night.

The villagers who rose up against land confiscations in Dongzhou, a community of 10,000 residents 14 miles southeast of Shanwei city, in Guangdong province near Hong Kong, also opened a new chapter – the use of the homemade bottle bombs and explosive charges that local fishermen normally use to stun fish.

Belmont Club has compiled a range of background information about economic projects in Shanwei City, as well as an intriguing story in the People's Daily on 29 January 2000 of the arrest and execution there of 13 pirates, including an Indonesian national.

The executions of Weng Siliang, Indonesian citizen Soni Wee and the other 11 who committed the crimes on China's territorial waters in the South China Sea were enforced in Shanwei City of Guangdong.

The gang started planning the robbery in August of 1998 with illegal purchase of guns and buying ships. On November 16, they intercepted the Cheung Son cargo ship from Hong Kong by masquerading as Chinese police.

They robbed the ship and killed all of the 23 seamen. Later they sold the contraband for 300,000 US dollars. They also stole a total of 970,00[0] yuan in cash.

Wen and Soni Wee also were involved in the pirating of two foreign ships, and Wee was found with 156 grams of narcotics when arrested, according to court hearings.

UPDATE, 18 December - Yesterday's Washington Post has a fascinating story about how Chinese bloggers are evading censors by discussing this event in the guise of a similar event in 1926.

HONG KONG, Dec. 16 -- At first glance, it looked like a spirited online discussion about an essay written nearly 80 years ago by modern China's greatest author. But then again, the exchange on a popular Chinese bulletin board site seemed a bit emotional, given the subject.

"In Memory of Ms. Liu Hezhen," which Lu Xun wrote in 1926 after warlord forces opened fire on protesters in Beijing and killed one of his students, is a classic of Chinese literature. But why did thousands of people read or post notes in an online forum devoted to the essay last week?

A close look suggests an answer that China's governing Communist Party might find disturbing: They were using Lu's essay about the 1926 massacre as a pretext to discuss a more current and politically sensitive event -- the Dec. 6 police shooting of rural protesters in the southern town of Dongzhou in Guangdong province.

via Crooked Timber

Improvements in Religious Freedom in Indonesia

The U.S. State Department's International Religious Freedom Report 2005, introduces its section on improvements in religious freedom in Indonesia with the following summary.

NGOs in the country made some progress in improving respect for religious freedom, particularly in the conflict zones of Central Sulawesi and the Moluccas. NGOs worked closely with religious leaders and the local community to promote mutual respect and cooperation. Conflict resolution efforts in former conflict areas of Central Sulawesi and the Moluccas continued to progress during the period covered by this report. Religious leaders and their followers visited each other's religious holiday celebrations and often consulted with each other. Sporadic violence incidents in both areas during the period covered by this report failed to spark broader conflict as it had done in years past.

In December, 2004, a 2-day International Dialogue on Interfaith Cooperation, organized jointly with Muhammadiyah, was co-sponsored in Yogyakarta by the Government and the Government of Australia. The President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono opened the dialogue with remarks that terrorism must be regarded as the enemy of all religions and that tolerance building was critical. Major faith leaders from Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, and East Timor participated in the Dialogue.

In a national celebration of the Chinese New Year, the President stated that the Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, including Confucianism, and followers should not hesitate to practice their beliefs. The New Year, which took place in February 2005, was celebrated without incident.

Local police displayed significantly more willingness during the period covered by this report to indict security forces allegedly involved in religious violence. In January 2005, local police arrested a senior police officer for his alleged role in the December 2004 church bombings in Palu. Local police also became more active in making arrests of those allegedly involved in violent incidents. A day after the shooting of a Palu clergywoman in July 2004, the Police Chief held a closed door meeting with local religious leaders and promised that the police would guarantee security for both Christians and Muslims. Since that time, local police have protected local churches and other prayer houses during religious services.

Local courts also began, for the first time, to try some cases of those allegedly responsible for violence in Ambon. Beginning in July 2004, local courts began to prosecute a rash of cases, including 17 trials of predominantly Christian separatists in connection with the April 2004 violence.

The Government has taken more steps to prosecute perpetrators involved in Maluku and Sulawesi conflict. On August 28, 2004, 12 Muslim militants were sentenced for their involvement in the Morowali attack in Central Sulawesi in 2003.

The news is not all good, of course. The same report also contains much longer sections on the legal/policy framework and restrictions on religious freedom, plus shorter sections on abuses of religious freedom, forced religious conversion, and abuses by terrorist organizations.

Japanese Kamikaze Pilots vs. Today's Human Bombs

Japan Focus recently posted a thought-provoking article by Yuki Tanaka entitled "Japan’s Kamikaze Pilots and Contemporary Suicide Bombers: War and Terror" (via Arts & Letters Daily):

It is widely believed that the major source of kamikaze suicide pilots was the Air Force Cadet Officer System in the Japanese Imperial Navy and Army Forces, which recruited university and college students on a voluntary basis. In fact, however, the majority of kamikaze pilots were young noncommissioned or petty officers, that is graduates of Navy and Army junior flight training schools.... Many assume that the majority of kamikaze pilots were former college students, because the letters-home, diaries and wills of these young men, who became kamikaze pilots through the Air Force Cadet Officer System, were compiled and published as books and pamphlets after the war.... Unfortunately similar personal records left behind by non-commissioned and petty officers are not publicly available. It is therefore necessary to rely on private records to gain a fuller understanding of the thoughts and ideas of these kamikaze pilots....

Kamikaze Pilots

In analyzing private records of the cadet officer kamikaze pilots, the following psychological themes emerged as bases for accepting or responding to a kamikaze attack mission.

1) Rationalizing one’s own death to defend one’s country and its people

In the final years, the cadets clearly understood that Japan would lose the war. Therefore, they had to rationalize their own deaths in order to believe that their sacrifice would not be a total waste. To this end, some convinced themselves that their determination to fight to the end would save the Japanese people (i.e. the Yamato race) and their country by forcing the Allied Forces to make concessions so as to end the war as quickly as possible to avoid further Allied casualties by kamikaze attack....

2) The belief that to die for the “country” was show filial piety to one’s own parents, particularly to one’s mother

Many wills and last letters convey apology to parents for the inability to return all the favors the kamikaze pilots had received and for causing their parents grief by their premature death. Yet, they also state that their death for the “noble cause” was one way to compensate for the misery caused their parents.... The majority of cadets viewed their unavoidable duty as defending their mothers no matter how corrupt the society and politics....

3) Strong solidarity with their flight-mates who shared their fate as Kamikaze pilots ...

Japanese planes were not equipped with radios, but it was common practice for the same flight formation team to be maintained through all stages from training to actual combat in order to create and sustain coordinated team actions.... In cases where pilots in the same team were separated on different missions, many complained bitterly to their commanders, claiming that they had pledged to die together....

4) A strong sense of responsibility and contempt for cowardice

Most of these top university students were sincere and had a strong sense of responsibility. They felt that if they themselves would not carry out the mission nobody else would follow suit. They also saw escape from their “duty,” for whatever reason, as an act of cowardice.... It seems that this mentality derived from university life, which had sheltered them from conventional ways of thinking.

5) A lack of an image of the enemy

One of the striking features of these youths’ ideas is that they convey no discernible image of their enemy.... Specifically, virtually no sense of “hatred of the enemy” can be found in their writings. Perhaps this was partly due to the fact that these cadets had never experienced actual combat. By contrast, the Allied navy soldiers who encountered kamikaze attacks usually regarded the kamikaze pilots with intense fear and hatred, calling them “crazy, cruel, and inhumane Japs”. In the case of these Japanese youths, a concrete mental concept of “the enemy” did not exist at all. Instead they were preoccupied by philosophical ideas such as how to find some spiritual value in their brief lives, how to spend their remaining time meaningfully, and how to philosophically justify their suicidal act....

Contemporary Suicide Bombers

In the absence of detailed information on the ideology and psychology of contemporary “terrorist suicide bombers,” it is not easy to compare the kamikaze mentality with that of terrorist bombers. One important difference stems from the fact that kamikaze attacks were implemented and legitimized by the military regime of a nation-state, while “terrorist suicide bombing” is generally planned and authorized by organizations outside a state structure. Certain preliminary comparisons are nevertheless still possible....

Anwar Ayam, the brother of a Palestinian suicide bomber, is said to have observed, “It will destroy their economy. It causes more casualties than any other type of operation. It will destroy their social life. They are scared and nervous, and it will force them to leave the country because they are afraid.” (emphasis added) ...

In this sense there is an important similarity between suicide bombing (including kamikaze attack) and the “strategic bombing.” Strategic bombing, i.e., the indiscriminate bombing of civilians, is justified as the most efficient method of destroying the morale of the enemy nation, and thus the most economical way to force surrender. In this concept too, concrete images of victims are absent in the minds of strategists and bombers. This similarity is not surprising. This is because the indiscriminate bombing of civilians conducted by military forces is nothing but state violence against civilians, that is, it is state terrorism. “Terrorist attacks” either by a group or by a state can only be executed when images of victims are abstracted and detached from the minds of attackers and strategists.

Another similarity between kamikaze attack and suicide bombing is the huge technological gap in military capability between suicide attackers and their enemies....

In my view, religious or ideological indoctrination is not the decisive factor in turning a young person into a suicide attacker. Rather religion and ideology are used to justify and formalize their cause of self-sacrifice and to rationalize the killing enemies, whether military or civilians. In so doing, they mirror the strategies of their oppressors who likewise, in practice, make no distinction between military and civilian targets. Ritualising killing makes it psychologically easier not only to annihilate enemies but also to terminate one’s own life.

I take exception to two points in the last paragraph.

Notice how the Japanese are presented as the victims, and those winning the war as their "oppressors"? Exactly when, during the half-century between 1895 and 1945 did Japan switch from being oppressor to victim? In 1895? In 1904? 1910? In 1931? 1937? 1939? In 1941? 1942? 1943? Yes, that's it, at precisely the moment when they began to lose they became the victims, despite the appalling number of casualties they continued to inflict on themselves and others by not conceding defeat.

The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have helped arouse real fears of their own destruction in the imperial clique who kept dithering while their subjects died by the thousands, but they also helped obliterate Japan's own imperial history and elevate in its place a powerful narrative of victimhood at the hands of other imperial powers.

The other point is that extremist ideological indoctrination has everything to do with willingness to slaughter civilians up close and personal, whether it's Imperial Japan, Tamil Eelam, or a New Caliphate. True believers who constantly preach hatred and resentment against external enemies--whether of race, class, gender, nation, religion, or secular ideology--should not be surprised when their followers disgrace their own cause by the way they treat their foes. Bombing civilians, whether "strategically" or suicidally, tends to make the survivors more angry and less susceptible to reasonable compromise. Like torture, it doesn't really have that great a track record of proven effectiveness.

UPDATE: About a year ago, we were having dinner with family friends from Sri Lanka who have now immigrated to the U.S. At one point, the father in the family expressed some bitterness about the U.S. President, but he reserved his Hitler analogy for the leader of Tamil Eelam.

Also, the 1939 Battle of Nomonhan was added to the date list, thanks to a commenter at White Peril.

Individualization of Modern Urban Christianity

A priest I once heard in a white middle-class parish defended the reformed liturgy by saying that it had become necessary to 'de-Europeanize' the Roman Catholic Church. He said that Catholicism must translate God's Word into the many languages and cultures of the world. I suppose he is right. I do not think, however, that the primary impetus for liturgical reformation came from Third World Catholics. I think rather that it came in response to a middle-class crisis of faith in North America and Western Europe. The new liturgy is suited especially to those who live in the secular city, alone in their faith for most of the week. It is not a liturgy suited to my parents or grandparents as much as to me.

When I go to church on Sunday I am forced to recognize a great deal about myself. I would rather go to a high ceremonial mass, reap for an hour or two its communal assurance. The sentimental solution would be ideal: to remain a liberal Catholic and to worship at a traditional mass. But now that I no longer live as a Catholic in a Catholic world, I cannot expect the liturgy--which reflects and cultivates my faith--to remain what it was. I will continue to go to the English mass. I will go because it is my liturgy. I will, however, often recall with nostalgia the faith I have lost.

And I will be uneasy knowing that the old faith was lost as much by choice as it was inevitably lost. My education may have made it inevitable that I would become a citizen of the secular city, but I have come to embrace the city's values: social mobility; pluralism; egalitarianism; self-reliance. By choice I do not confine myself to Catholic society. Most of my friends and nearly all of my intimates are non-Catholics. With them I normally will observe the politesse of secular society concerning religion--say nothing about it. By choice I do not pray before eating lunch in a downtown restaurant. (My public day is not divided by prayer.) By choice I do not consult the movie ratings of the Legion of Decency, and my reading is not curtailed by the [Papal] Index. By choice I am ruled by conscience rather than the authority of priests I consider my equals. I do not listen to papal pronouncements with which I disagree.

Recently, bishops and popes who have encouraged liturgical reforms have seemed surprised at the insistence of so many Catholics to determine for themselves the morality of such matters as divorce, homosexuality, contraception, abortion, and extramarital sex. But the Church fathers who initiated rituals that reflect a shared priesthood of laity and clergy should not be surprised by the independence of modern Catholics. The authoritarian Church belonged to another time. It was an upper-class Church; it was a lower-class Church. It was a hierarchical Church. It was my grandparents' Church.

SOURCE: Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, by Richard Rodriguez (Bantam Books, 1982), pp. 114-115

Privatization of Medieval Christianity

The biomedical devastation [of the Black Death] had a strange and complex impact on the Church. It may have reinforced a trend away from optimism to pessimism, from a God who could be partly encapsulated in reason and was a mighty comfort and fortress, to one whose majesty and planning and rationale were impenetrable, although that pessimistic inclination was already rising in intellectual circles thirty years before the Great Pestilence.

The century after the Black Death was marked--in England, France, the Low Countries, and Germany--by what may be called the privatization of medieval Christianity. This took both organizational and spiritual forms. Organizationally there was a rush by the affluent upper middle class to found chantries, private chapels supported by one family or a small group of families. The great lords and millionaire gentry and merchants had always had private chapels. Along with the capability of having three hundred people for dinner in your household, it was the signal conspicuous consumption of great wealth.

In the more plebeian chantries, the rising middle class imitated their betters. Even the workers organized into craft guilds got into the act. The labor corporations also became confraternities that sustained private chapels and provided burial benefits to their members.

Spiritually and intellectually, the century after the Black Death in England and elsewhere in northern Europe was marked by the rise of intense personal mysticism and separately by a privatist kind of bourgeois behavior in elaborate spiritual exercises....

The Black Death provided an activating psychological context for privatization of late medieval religions. It did not create it.

SOURCE: In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death & the World It Made, by Norman F. Cantor (Harper Perennial, 2002), pp. 203-206

UPDATE: Up-and-coming medievalist Andrew Reeves comments:

I disagree with this assessment that the plague had much to do with an increased sense of individualized devotion. The real period for "privatization" was the thirteenth century. It was the Church's emphasis on genuine penance and contrition in the area of sin that began in the twelfth century and reached it's full articulation in Lateran IV that began it.

Now then, the profusion of pastoralia (manuals of pastoral care, dealing with confession and instruction) in the years around Lateran IV and after was most extensive in England and France north of the Loire, but such materials appear in other parts of Europe as well.

Maybe that accounts for Cantor's waffling a bit in the final paragraph of the excerpt quoted above.

Immigration and Job Growth

A new study by the Harvard Business School suggests links between immigration and job growth, reports Daniel Weintraub of the Sacramento Bee in the San Diego Union-Tribune.

A major piece of conventional wisdom about immigrants – that newcomers take jobs away from native Americans – has been questioned in a new study of urban job growth by a Harvard Business School professor and expert on inner-city economics.

The study, in fact, seems to show just the opposite: Cities with higher concentrations of immigrants are the places where the number of jobs is growing the fastest.

The research by Michael E. Porter, founder of the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, found that about half of the 80 largest inner cities in America had job growth between 1995 and 2003.

Inner cities that lost jobs and those that gained them tended to have similar percentages of minority residents, and their residents had about the same level of high school and college education.

But the two groups of cities differed sharply when it came to one demographic measure: immigration. Inner cities that gained jobs had populations that, on average, were 31 percent immigrant. Inner cities that lost jobs had populations that averaged just 12 percent immigrants.

"There is a direct correlation between immigrant populations and job growth in inner cities," Porter writes. "Immigrants clearly and more readily identify the unique business conditions and opportunities that inner cities offer and are able to capitalize upon them. In addition, they are attractive to small and large businesses seeking willing and available labor."

A crucial question left unanswered by Porter's study is the extent to which immigrants cause job growth or are attracted by it. If the presence of immigrants in an economy leads to more business creation and job growth, then that is a very important finding. If immigrants are merely more likely to go to a place that already has a vibrant economy, then the connection between their presence and job growth is not as significant.

via RealClearPolitics

Well, let's compare the records of Britain, Ireland, and Sweden with that of, say, France, as reported in the International Herald Tribune on 21 October 2005 (via the Dynamist).

It turns out the doomsayers were partly right: Nearly a year and a half after the expansion of the European Union, floods of East Europeans have washed into Britain.

Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians and other Easterners are arriving at an average rate of 16,000 a month, a result of Britain's decision to allow unlimited access to the citizens of the eight East European countries that joined the EU last year.

They work as bus drivers, farmhands and dentists, as waitresses, builders, and saleswomen; they are transforming parts of London into Slavic and Baltic enclaves where pickles and Polish beer are stacked in delicatessens and Polish can be heard on the streets almost as often as English.

But the doomsayers were also wrong: Multicultural Britain has absorbed these workers like a sponge. Unemployment is still rock-bottom at 4.7 percent, and economic growth continues apace.

Since May 2004, more than 230,000 East Europeans have registered to work in Britain, many more than the government expected, in what is shaping up to be one of the great migrations of recent decades.

Yet the government says it still has shortages of 600,000 workers in fields like nursing and construction.

"They are coming in and making a very good reputation as highly skilled, highly motivated workers," said Christopher Thompson, a diplomat at the British Embassy in Warsaw. "The U.K. is pleased with the way it's progressed over the first 16 months, and we're confident it will be a beneficial relationship for both sides in the future."

Tens of thousands of East Europeans have also moved to Ireland and Sweden, the only other West European countries that opened their labor markets to the new EU members....

Fearing a massive influx of East Europeans after enlargement, other West European countries threw up barriers that will be lowered only gradually over the next decade. A Pole seeking to work in France, for example, still needs to apply for a work permit. France issued 737 such permits to Poles in the 10 months after enlargement; that is the number of Poles who arrive in Britain every two days.

Allowing immigrants access to jobs and business opportunities seems to be key.

Malaria Drugs Misused

The VOA reports:

Roughly 50 years ago, chloroquine and other quinine-derived drugs were extremely effective in treating malaria, a disease spread by the bite of mosquitos infected with the parasite, Plasmodium falciparum.

The illness causes extremely high fevers, bouts of chills, jaundice and severe anemia. Young children who contract malaria often die.

Chloroquine and mefloquine have since become ineffective against the parasite because of the misuse of chloroquine, but in the last decade or so, an effective, new drug [long used in China], called artemisinin, has come into use.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has urged countries to use artemisinin in combination with other anti-malarials so it, too, does not lose its effectiveness.

But the warning isn't being heeded, and a study published this week in the journal the Lancet found the first evidence of resistance to artemisinin in two African countries where the drug is readily available, according to researcher Ramon Jambou of the Pasteur Institute.

"In Senegal and in French Guiana, artemisinin was not used by the ministry. It just used by everyone but on markets and so on," he explained.

Dr. Jambou and colleagues took blood samples from 530 patients in French Guiana, Senegal and Cambodia treated with different artemisinin-derived drugs. The samples were tested to measure the parasite's sensitivity to artemisinin.

The researchers found no resistance in samples taken from Cambodia, which carefully controls the use of the drug. The parasite was less sensitive to the drug in Senegal, where artemisinin is somewhat restricted. Resistance to the drug was greatest in French Guiana, where it is readily available.

Texas and Nigeria Evangelize Each Other

The Guardian, whose reporters are equally mystified by Higher Beings and Rural Beings, reports on a fair-play turnabout in missionary endeavors: Nigerian missionaries evangelizing rural Texans. I wonder if they would have used the same template to describe all those Southern Baptist missionaries, many (often the richest) of them Texans, who descended upon xenophobic Japan after World War II.

They say that God moves in mysterious ways, but perhaps never more so than when telling the leaders of Africa's largest evangelical church to build their North American headquarters in Floyd....

The Nigerian church, founded in Lagos in 1952, paid about $1m (£580,000) for 198 hectares (490 acres) of pasture, on which it is planning to build cottages, a 10,000-seat amphitheatre, an artificial lake and possibly a modest waterpark, leading some to dub it a Christian Disneyland. At the moment the only structure is a large conference centre that last month hosted a meeting of more than 1,000 ministers and volunteers....

Ajibike Akinkoye, the regional church leader in Dallas, said that when he arrived in Texas more than 10 years ago a voice spoke to him. "The Lord ... said 'you are not going to build a megachurch church yet. You are going to plant little churches around the Dallas metroplex and then I will give you a camp.'" After a series of what he describes as miracles he was pointed towards Floyd. "God directed us there. Through him now we want to open up things that will be great and everlasting blessing to everybody."

Mr Akinkoye said that before buying the land he had not known about the history of the area, where until recently the Ku Klux Klan had openly thrived. "It never crossed my mind there could be any opposition or danger," he said. "But when people pointed that out it made me feel 'thank God we are there', because even if they are negative towards us, or violent, or kill one of us, that is not going to stop the work God wants us to do. We have no fear, because whatever happens it is God's will."

Judge Joe Bobbitt is everything you would expect a Texas judge to be: a walking giant with a crushing handshake, cowboy drawl and a ready smile. In his office at the courthouse two flags - the Stars and Stripes and the Lone Star of Texas - frame his desk. Continuing the stereotype, you might not expect him to have an entirely tolerate attitude towards outsiders taking over a patch of Texas land. But nothing could be further from the truth. "When they first came here I thought their plans were pie in the sky," he said. "But I met with the head of their organisation from Nigeria and a gentleman from Dallas, and I've done my due diligence on this; there are no negative marks on this organisation.

"I did an internet search, and normally, you know, with an organisation this size, somebody, somewhere has something bad to say. But I haven't been able to find any negative websites on these people. They've repaired the road, put in water and sewage and raised the value of that land for everybody. It's going to be good for the community."

via Danny Yee's blog

Rosie the Alewife: One Boon o' the Plague

The Black Death was the trauma that liberated the new.

It can be readily seen that the Black Death accelerated the decline of serfdom and the rise of a prosperous class of peasants, called yeomen, in the fifteenth century. With "grain rotting in the fields" at the summer harvest of 1349, because of labor shortage, the peasants could press for higher wages and further elimination of servile dues and restrictions. The more entrepreneurial landlords were eventually prepared to give in to peasant demands. The improvement in the living standard of many peasant families is demonstrated by the shift from earthenware to metal cooking pots that archeologists have discovered.

The Black Death was good for the surviving women. Among the gentry, dowagers flourished. Among working-class families both in country and town, women in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries took a prominent role in productivity, giving them more of an air of independence. The beer- and ale-brewing industry was largely women's work by 1450. The growth of a domestic wool-weaving industry allowed working-class women to become industrial craftsmen in the textile industry. The graphic picture of farm women churning butter in their kitchens that George Eliot gave us in Adam Bede (set in the 1790s) was certainly occurring by 1400.

SOURCE: In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death & the World It Made, by Norman F. Cantor (Harper Perennial, 2002), pp. 202-203

The Wrathful Dispersion Theory of Linguistic Evolution

I've been distracted by some old-fashioned print-publication-related onuses. (Yeah, that seems to be the English plural, although the Latin is onera. In banking, an on-us check is one drawn on the clearing bank's own reserves and thus not passed on through to the Federal Reserve's check-clearing system.) Anyway, that's my excuse for neglecting to note an important new development in historical and comparative linguistics: Wrathful Dispersion Theory.

The opponents of Wrathful Dispersion maintain that it is really just Babelism, rechristened so that it might fly under the radar of those who insist that religion has no place in the state-funded classroom. Babelism was clearly rooted in the Judeo-Christian story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11: 1–9); it held that the whole array of modern languages was created by God at a single stroke, for the immediate purpose of disrupting humanity's hubristic attempt to build a tower that would reach to heaven: "Let us go down," God says to Himself, "and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech." Wrathful Dispersion is couched in more cautiously neutral language; rather than tying linguistic diversity to a specific biblical event, it merely argues that the differences among modern languages are too perverse to have arisen spontaneously, and must therefore be the work of some wrathful (and powerful) disperser who deliberately set out to accomplish a confusion of tongues. When asked in court to speculate about the possible identity of the disperser, Michael Moringa, a prominent proponent of WD, demurred, saying that the theory makes no claims about the answer to that question, and that it certainly does not insist that the Disperser is the God of Genesis. Moringa has, however, elsewhere avowed a deep personal belief in the Christian God as the power responsible, as have other WD theorists. Indeed, there appear to be no atheists in the foxholes on the WD side of this war, and for that matter, no Jews or Muslims, either; the WD movement is composed almost exclusively of evangelical Protestants.

via Language Hat via Language Log

I'm sure the new Pope will clear this up for any doubting Thomists.

UPDATE: I hope it wasn't necessary to include <clever parody> tags on the blockquote.

Black Death Pogroms and Jews in Slavic Lands

The belief that the Jews were responsible for the Black Death first took root in southern France and neighboring Spain. In the fourteenth century there were only 2.5 million Jews in all of Europe, but a third of these lived in Spain and on the other side of the Pyrenees in southern France. The Jewish communities in this region were of long standing, in some parts going back to Roman times. There were relatively affluent, extremely literate, and in a relationship of growing tension with their Christian neighbors for both religious and economic reasons....

The Black Death pogroms against the German Jews had the inevitable effect of making them feel frightened and insecure. When Duke Casimir II of Poland not only tried to protect Jews in his domains from pogroms, but invited Jews to move eastward and settle in his vast, underpopulated domains, large numbers of Jews began to move en masse to Poland.

This immigration continued into the sixteenth century. Like many Western European rulers of the early Middle Ages (700-1000), the Polish duke and his successors saw the Jews as an economic asset, bringing credit facilities and long-distance trade to the country.

By 1500 the Jews had been assigned an additional role of importance in Polish society and the frontier Ukrainian lands also ruled by the Polish nobility. They were widely employed as estate agents for the Polish nobility, supervising thousands of peasants forced into serfdom and managing the exploitation of the rich Polish and Ukrainian soil. Jewish males became trilingual--Hebrew for liturgy and rabbinical learning, a Slavic language for business, and Yiddish, a late medieval German dialect written in Hebrew characters, for everyday life in their own communities (most Jewish women knew only Yiddish).

By the mid-sixteenth-century Jews were rewarded for their services. as estate agents with a lucrative monopoly in selling liquor to the peasants. This is the origin of the Yiddish folk song "a Gentile is a drunkard." Jews also prospered as lumber and fur merchants. Great schools of rabbinical learning, many still in existence when night descended in September 1939, emerged in Poland and the Ukraine. By the early seventeenth century half of the Jewish world population of 3.5 million lived in Poland and the Ukraine.

The Jews came to love the Polish and Ukrainian physical environment and in the nineteenth century (if not much earlier) wrote poetry lavishly praising the farmland, forests, and climate of Eastern Europe. The rise of the great Jewish communities in Slavic Europe, remarkable for their enterprise and traditional learning, and also innovative in religious and literary expression, was a direct result of the Black Death.

SOURCE: In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death & the World It Made, by Norman F. Cantor (Harper Perennial, 2002), pp. 150-151, 163-165

From Aristotle via Arabic to Aquinas

The Thomist school grew from the consequences of the penetration into the Paris University around the middle of the twelfth century of the vast corpus of Aristotelian science and philosophy through the medium of Arabic and Jewish schools (also writing in Arabic) in Spain and Sicily.

The Aristotelian corpus was translated in the eastern Mediterranean by Byzantine monks and Arab Muslim scholars into Arabic between 800 and 1000 and found its way, accompanied by various mathematical and medical texts, into Cordoba, Spain, and Palermo, Sicily, by 1050. Previously only Aristotelian logic was available in the West, which was thoroughly dominated by the Platonic idealistic and mystical rather than the Aristotelian scientific and rational frame of thought. By the middle of the thirteenth century Aristotle's writings were being translated directly from Greek into Latin rather than through Arabic mediation, and these improved translations were available to the corpulent and good-humored Dominican friar at Paris, Thomas Aquinas.

What drove the Thomist mission was a concern that Catholic doctrine was founded on the Bible, church authority, and the more mystical and irrational part of ancient culture, not on reason and Aristotelian science. It was to defend this established faith and high culture--something that the Cairo rabbi Maimonides had already attempted for Judaism, to deep resentment from the Orthodox rabbinate--that Thomas Aquinas, following his Parisian Dominican mentor Albert the Great, set out to show the large-scale compatibility of Catholic faith and Aristotelian reason and science.

SOURCE: In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death & the World It Made, by Norman F. Cantor (Harper Perennial, 2002), pp. 116-117

Iranian Maoists in Oklahoma in the 1970s

Softskull Press's website offers a downloadable sample chapter of Paul Berman's new book, Power and the Idealists (2005). The chapter is entitled "The Muslim World and the American Left." One of the people it discusses is Azar Nafisi, the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran.

Nafisi is an Iranian, and she grew up in the gilded districts of Tehran under the shah during the nineteen-fifties and sixties—the daughter of Tehran’s mayor (though he ended up in jail, a matter of pride for the family), with distinguished and cultured ancestors tracing back eight hundred years. Somebody might object that, with her glorious background, Nafisi can hardly be regarded as typical of her part of the world. But who is typical of anything? The medieval ancestry might suggest, at the least, that here is someone with a sharp eye for Iranian traditions. Nafisi went abroad to study—and this, surely, was a typical thing to do, for the educated elite in what used to be called the Third World. She studied in Switzerland and Britain until the serendipities of life and love brought her, in the nineteen-seventies, to the University of Oklahoma, at Norman. She explored American literature at Norman—the only foreign student in the department. The American New Left was at high tide, and Oklahoma did not escape its many currents. All over the American university system in the seventies, clever left-wing students were organizing study groups to pore over the texts of Marx, Lenin, Mao, Lukacs, Debray, and the Frankfurt School—the alternative syllabus of the world of Marxism. These groups formed at Norman, too, and Nafisi took her place among them....

Student leftism back home in Iran grew noisier and more militant over the course of the seventies, agitating against the shah. The shah’s secret police, the Savak, cracked down, and students were killed in terrible massacres. And, as these grisly events took place far away in Iran, the Iranian students in America likewise grew noisier and more militant, and marched in picket lines that, as I remember well (from observing a demonstration in New York, not Oklahoma), were weirdly vehement, radiant with violence, and slightly mysterious, too, with the marchers’ faces wrapped in scarves to conceal their identities from the agents of the Savak and the FBI. Iranian students were especially active at Norman. They were fervent for Maoism. They hung out in the Norman student union, sipping coffee and Coke, and declaiming in favor of Stalin and, as Nafisi remembers, “the need to destroy once and for all the Trotskyites, the White Guards, the termites and poisonous rats who were bent on destroying the revolution.” This, too, expressed the spirit of the age....

In 1979 the revolution broke out for real—not in Oklahoma but in Iran. Nafisi completed her dissertation ... [and] set out for Tehran—she and a good many other Iranian radicals, full of enthusiasm for the revolution and for their own opportunity to play a role. The Tehran airport was bedecked with slogans written in black and red: DEATH TO AMERICA! DOWN WITH IMPERIALISM & ZIONISM. She took a position as a professor of literature at University of Tehran, where the Marxists were especially strong. And yet, in those early days after the shah’s overthrow, to be alive was not necessarily bliss, nor was it Heaven to be young. The revolution came to power because Ayatollah Khomeini and his radical Islamists put together a broad front with the Iranian Communist Party (the Tudeh) and the Marxist Fedayin Organization, together with a couple of popular organizations that favored liberal democracy, and the mixture of mosques, Marxists, and liberals turned out to be powerful. The shah fled for his life. But Khomeini and his mullahs stood at the head of this absurdly wide United Front, and, once the mullahs had succeeded in establishing the United Front’s revolutionary government, they and their Marxist allies turned against the liberals and crushed them. Then the Islamists turned against the Marxists. A battle for control of the university and of every institution of Iranian life got underway—mullahs against Marxists and everyone else. And the Islamist victory, as it crept across the landscape, turned out to be dreadful.

Berman writes in a very blunt, engaging, and often poignant style, but everything he writes has the flavor of an epitaph.

Hari on Berman's Power and the Idealists

In last Sunday's New York Times Review of Books, Johann Hari reviews Paul Berman's latest book, Power and the Idealists: Or, The Passion of Joschka Fischer, and its Aftermath (Soft Skull Press, 2005), about the ideological split in the generation of '68 captured by Hari's title, "The Red and the Green."

In the years since 1968, the New Left had acquired a sepia glow, with nostalgia mopping up any blood and broken teeth. Now the old conservative criticism - that 1968 and its children staged a thuggish, apolitical tantrum, with no lasting legacy - resurfaced.

If anyone can put this dispute into its historical context, it's Berman. He is not only an alumnus of the rebellion; he is the keeper of its yearbook and its funeral director. In this free-standing sequel to his superb "Tale of Two Utopias," he revisits the European graduating class of Rebellion High.

Behind those horrible images [of Joschka Fischer beating a policeman], Berman explains, lies a complex history. These self-styled revolutionaries were the children of a Europe that had failed to resist fascism. Their parents had lowered their gaze and sleepwalked in a Europe littered with gas chambers. So, for this generation, "the way to judge anyone's moral character ... was to pose a hypothetical question.... To wit, what would you have done, in France under the German occupation?" ...

Liberal democracy (and capitalism, and Zionism) became, to them, cunning veils for a new Hitler. So when, during the Munich Olympics of 1972, the Palestinian Black September cell murdered 11 Israeli athletes, Ulrike Meinhof (along with much of the radical left) declared herself thrilled. And the deformations of morality multiplied. In 1976, a group called the Revolutionary Cells hijacked a plane, flew it to Entebbe in Uganda, and separated the passengers: Jews and non-Jews. The Jews - "capitalists" and "Zionists" - were selected for death. The leader turned out to be a man named Wilfried Böse, who was much admired on the Frankfurt left. Fischer knew him well. This was the point of Fischer's desillusionierung....

As Fischer was retreating from his police-beating days, a string of soixante-huitard European intellectuals began to use the vocabulary of the New Left to create nothing less than a political philosophy opposed to all dictatorship, everywhere. Waving his copy of Solzhenitsyn, the French philosopher André Glucksmann tossed a dynamite-packed question to his New Left comrades. If we want to resist every variant of Hitlerism and every streak of authoritarianism, he asked, might we not at least recognize it in the empire to our east, where 20 million people have died in gulags and free speech is a cruel joke?

The conservative pessimists jeered, claiming Glucksmann would be left alone and humiliated. But slowly, steadily, many of the most famous children of 1968 rallied to his side, from Daniel Cohn-Bendit ("Danny the Red") to Bernard-Henri Lévy. Berman argues that - at this moment - the spirit of the rebellions solidified into its most enduring form: an antitotalitarianism of the liberal-left....

This antitotalitarian '68 went on to shape the actions of European governments at a turning point for the continent. In the 1990's, it was the soixante-huitards - now close to the chancelleries and palaces of much of Europe - who led the fight against the New Left's old fascist enemy when it emerged in the form of Serbian ultranationalism. When a program of ethnic extermination began just two days' drive from Auschwitz, it was the old barricadier Joschka Fischer who made Germany's wrenching involvement - its first lurch into postpacificism - possible, explaining to a shocked audience of fellow Greens, "I learned not only 'No more war' but also 'No more Auschwitz.'" In Europe at least, Kosovo was the New Left's war - the street fight against fascism now directed against a target worthy of the name.

via Cliopatria