T. G. Ash on Malaysia's Multiculturalism

Timothy Garton Ash, who did yeoman work reporting from Eastern Europe before and during its escape from the Soviet Empire, files a now-trademark world-weary report in the Guardian from Malaysia, headlined I respect your articles of faith - will you respect mine?

Measured by the standards of the Middle East, indeed of most majority Muslim states, Malaysia is an exemplar of interfaith coexistence.

As the maritime trading crossroads of south-east Asia, it has for centuries been a place where all of what Europeans have called "the east" has met - Indians, Chinese and Japanese, as well as the native peoples. Its population became even more diverse under the aegis, at once repressive and transforming, of Portuguese, Dutch and British colonialists. (From the window of the National History Museum, which is housed in a building where John Major once worked as a banker, you still peer down on a somewhat melancholy cricket pitch.) This place was globalised well before anyone talked of globalisation.

Look a little closer, however; talk to Malaysians from the minority faiths as well as critical observers within the Muslim community, and the picture becomes more muddy - as befits a city whose name means "muddy confluence". For a start, the communities coexist rather than co-mingle. I'm told there is relatively little intermarriage. This is no melting-pot. "We live and let live," says the Buddhist businessman of Sri Lankan origin. Apart from anything else, the different groups' religious prescriptions often prevent them eating each other's food.

Of course there's nothing wrong with such peaceful coexistence. The same was true of another often-lauded exemplar of multiculturalism, Sarajevo, before the second world war, and it is probably true of parts of London and New York today. Only advancing secularism (as in Sarajevo under the communist regime led by Marshal Tito) or farreaching assimilation (as has been traditional in France and America) produces the deeper mixing. But retaining separate communities does mean that politics remain group-based and there is always the potential for violent conflict to erupt, as happened here in 1969, if one group feels strongly disadvantaged.

In Malaysia, all communities are equal but some are more equal than others. Although the National Front coalition, which has been in power since 1957, includes Chinese and Indian parties, the Muslim Malay majority is dominant. While the Chinese still have a predominant position in the business community, there is affirmative action for the Muslim Malays, and other "indigenous" groups, in access to higher education, jobs in the civil service, government contracts and housing. Inter-ethnic and inter-religious conflict is avoided not by the systematic balancing mechanisms of a liberal democracy, with fully representative politics, free media and independent courts, but by a semi-democratic, semiauthoritarian balancing act, with a distinct tilt towards the Malay Muslim side. The day I arrived, the government announced the indefinite suspension of the Sarawak Tribune newspaper, which published one of the Danish cartoons. It also made it an offence for anyone to publish, import, produce, circulate or even possess copies of the caricatures....

You may say: what right have I, as a westerner, a guest and a descendant of British colonialists to boot, to point these things out? Indeed, the religion with which I grew up teaches that one should start by criticising one's own faults rather than those of others. That seems to me a good principle. So my first responsibility is to look at the way my own communities - Oxford, Britain, the EU, the west - treat their own minorities, not least their Muslim minorities. We have plenty of discrimination and double standards of our own.

Does that disqualify me from commenting on other countries' shortcomings? I think not, especially when what I'm doing is reporting criticisms made to me by Malaysians, people who do not feel they can speak entirely freely in their own country and who would not be published if they did. In fact, I believe that as a writer with access to free media I have a duty to speak up for those who cannot speak freely for themselves. That's my strongly held belief, and I trust that political leaders of other faiths, including Islam, will respect my beliefs. Then we can have a productive interfaith dialogue.

via RealClearPolitics

Why Asian Muslims Didn't Explode

Karim Raslan writes in the International Herald Tribune about differences within both the Muslim and the Western worlds.

The extensive violence and ugly rhetoric we are seeing broadcast from elsewhere in the Muslim world point to differences between the Arab-Muslim heartland and the Indo-Malay periphery.

Yes, we are part of the extended family of believers, the ummah. We cannot help but feel some sense of solidarity with our co-religionists in Damascus, Tehran or Cairo. But the explosiveness of the Arab street doesn't translate, somehow, to the tropics.

Many of us have a growing suspicion that we are culturally different from our Arabic- and Urdu-speaking brethren, perhaps more tolerant and less emotional.

I am reminded of how uncomfortable I felt last year when traveling through Saudi Arabia, surrounded by a people I found disquietingly alien.

For all we share as Muslims, we Southeast Asians don't really know what it's like to inhabit the cultures or politics of the Middle East.

Nor is the West a unitary culture. Europe's fervent secularism reminds me that the nation of the Great Satan, with its crowded churches and Sunday preachers who fill sports stadiums, is actually more like my world than Europe is.

Since Sept. 11, I've accepted certain verities that now I have come to question. Europe was supposed to be the neutral bastion of moderation in the face of a belligerent America. But in fact that Europe is godless and alone.

via Middle East Transparent

UPDATE: Malaysian blogger the _earthinc offers a much better take on the cartoon offensive that doesn't appeal to cultural (or "tropical") values. (After all, the English word amok was borrowed from Malay, not Arabic.)

When I first heard that a Danish media published caricatures of Prophet Mohammad (tag) last year, to be honest, being a Muslim myself, I was slightly irritated. Though it's an act of free speech, the Danish media abused its rights. That was that and I didn't expect it to balloon up unnecessarily. I didn't expect it because I don't think it's rational for such issue to take a center stage in world politics. Apparently, I have overestimated the Muslim world's sensibility. Muslim Malaysians on the contrary are acting coolly. Comparing Malaysians' response against Arabs and Indonesians' reaction on it, I can't help but feel proud to be a Malaysian.

In my opinion, what's happening in the Muslim world is a gross overreaction followed by impossible demand. The side at fault is the rightwing newspaper Jyllands-Posten, not the Danish government. Moreover, the Danish government has no right to censor the newspaper. Nobody should but that's another matter altogether. Hence, the Danish government has no reason to apologize....

The ability to discern between the government and a private entity is not lost on Malaysians, unlike Arabic countries and Indonesia. In fact, I think, Malaysia is the only Muslim-majority country that is not blaming the Danish government for a private entity's doing. I might be wrong but it seems like so.

To all Muslims out there, seriously, be sensible. The first thing to do is to realize that it's a rightwing paper that started this, not Denmark the country. Differentiate the two and then comprehend that the Danish government can't censor that paper. Blaming and targeting the Danish government and its people for things that they didn't do only complicates the matter at hand and bring about a much unneeded clash of culture.

So Denmark, I stand by thee. But definitely not by Jyllands-Posten.

via LaputanLogic

UPDATE 2: The culture editor of the Jyllands-Posten explains in a Washington Post op-ed what has been happening in Denmark since the publication of the cartoons.

Since the Sept. 30 publication of the cartoons, we have had a constructive debate in Denmark and Europe about freedom of expression, freedom of religion and respect for immigrants and people's beliefs. Never before have so many Danish Muslims participated in a public dialogue -- in town hall meetings, letters to editors, opinion columns and debates on radio and TV. We have had no anti-Muslim riots, no Muslims fleeing the country and no Muslims committing violence. The radical imams who misinformed their counterparts in the Middle East about the situation for Muslims in Denmark have been marginalized. They no longer speak for the Muslim community in Denmark because moderate Muslims have had the courage to speak out against them.

In January, Jyllands-Posten ran three full pages of interviews and photos of moderate Muslims saying no to being represented by the imams. They insist that their faith is compatible with a modern secular democracy. A network of moderate Muslims committed to the constitution has been established, and the anti-immigration People's Party called on its members to differentiate between radical and moderate Muslims, i.e. between Muslims propagating sharia law and Muslims accepting the rule of secular law. The Muslim face of Denmark has changed, and it is becoming clear that this is not a debate between "them" and "us," but between those committed to democracy in Denmark and those who are not.

via Peaktalk

On Trying to Reach H&R Block's Tech Support

I've been a little bogged down lately trying to complete my taxes for 2005 before heading off for Japan again in March. This is my second year of using H&R Block's TaxCut after more than a decade of TurboTax, whose customer service has got progressively worse after it was taken over by Intuit. (I'm not talking about either tax advice or tech support. They couldn't even manage to deliver their product to me the last two years before I dropped them.)

Well, after I recently took advantage of TaxCut's online tax advisors, who came back with useful advice, I tried to give a little feedback to their tech support, which seems to reside behind an impenetrable phalanx of automated responses. Here's the record of my attempts to get feedback to their tech support.

Joel to onlinetaxesfeedback@hrblock.com:

I posted a tax question to your online tax advisor. The textbox into which I typed by questions stripped all punctuation from my sentences and didn't allow me to navigate with up and down arrows (only left and right). Later, when I entered by payment information, the Address box only allowed [14 characters]; I can't imagine that many people have addresses short enough to fit in that box.

I trust that you handle numbers better than text input, but at this point I'm not very hopeful that I will get any useful text back in reply to my request for tax advice. If I get back an autogenerated reply, I am not likely to use your tax advisor again, nor to recommend it to anyone else.

Online Taxes Feedback to Joel:

Thanks for your feedback. We take customer comments very seriously and use them to continually improve our products. Thanks for taking a moment to share your thoughts.

Your message won’t reach technical support. If you need immediate assistance with your taxes or have a question about a product, click here to sign in to your account. Or, copy and paste this URL into the address bar of your browser: http://www.hrblock.com/customer_support/online.html. You can search the Help Center or click the Contact Us link at the top of the page to contact technical support by phone, e-mail or chat.

Thanks for using H&R Block.

Joel to onlinetaxesfeedback@hrblock.com:

I see. You make it absolutely impossible for customer feedback to get to your technical support. When I login, I just get shoved through to tax advisor screens, well past the Contact Us. When I filled out the message box at Customer Support, I got an automated reply from clarify@fin.hrblock.com. No wonder your online interface sucks. The main reason I switched to TaxCut from TurboTax was for the same kind of incompetent handling of customers.

Online Taxes Feedback to Joel:

Thanks for your feedback. We take customer comments very seriously and use them to continually improve our products. Thanks for taking a moment to share your thoughts.

Your message won’t reach technical support. If you need immediate assistance with your taxes or have a question about a product, click here to sign in to your account. Or, copy and paste this URL into the address bar of your browser: http://www.hrblock.com/customer_support/online.html. You can search the Help Center or click the Contact Us link at the top of the page to contact technical support by phone, e-mail or chat.

Thanks for using H&R Block.

Joel to clarify@fin.hrblock.com:

I posted a tax question to your online tax advisor. The textbox into which I typed by questions stripped all punctuation from my sentences and didn't allow me to navigate with up and down arrows (only left and right). Later, when I entered by payment information, the Address box only allowed [14 characters]; I can't imagine that many people have addresses short enough to fit in that box. I trust that you handle numbers better than text input, but at this point I'm not very hopeful that I will get any useful text back in reply to my request for tax advice. If I get back an autogenerated reply, I am not likely to use your tax advisor again, nor to recommend it to anyone else.

clarify@fin.hrblock.com to Joel:

Thank you for contacting H&R Block.

An H&R Block tax professional will be happy to assist you with your tax-related questions. With H&R Block's Satisfaction Guarantee, you can try us out risk free.

To locate a tax professional in your area, click on http://www.hrblock.com/universal/office_locator.html

If you prefer, tax help is available online for an affordable fee. To get the right answers to your tough questions, go to http://www.hrblock.com/taxes/doing_my_taxes/products/advisor.html

Should you have any future questions we would be happy to assist you. Please contact us at 1-800-HRBLOCK (1-800-472-5625) to speak with a Customer Support Specialist.

The Client Relations Team
H&R Block

===============================================
Please do not reply directly to this e-mail address (do not use your e-mail 'reply' button). If additional help on this or any other subject is required, assistance is available via the Internet by going to http://www.hrblock.com.

Thank you for your inquiry.

Okay, then. Just keep your crappy online interface.

UPDATE: Reader Justin in DC describes even worse problems with H&R Block's total incompetence online and complete resistance to customer feedback. Are they hiring too many ex-employees of the IRS?

Found this on google, wanted to add that I totally agree how UNBELIVEABLY BUSH LEAGE HRBlock and their website really is.

I made the HUGE mistake of using it, rather than Intuit in 2003 for a return. I now have a problem where I need to access that old filing. I could not remember my password, and their 'system' to reset it reuqires you enter your Username, Social, and Birthdate to check against your filing. It then attempt to hit your credit card to 'confirm' your ID.

The problem is the credit card MUST be the same one one you used origingally with HRBlock. I have the card, but expired in 2005 before I moved. Their 'form' doesn't have 2005 even available in the year drop down, and if I use a current card I am told it does not match their records.

So basically if you move, there is LITERALLY no way to reset your password and get to YOUR finical info.

I did try to call on the phone and wade through the 40 automated menus and finally got to a customer Rep.

She didn't seem to have a clue, and walked through the form because 'I might be entering information correctly'. Once she understood what the problem was she asked me to hold, and after 5min I was greeted with the DIAL TONE.

I called back, and got a guy, who although didn't hang up on me wasn't any help. I have the HRBlock original registration emails, the email with my transaciton code and order id from HRBlock, any other info they want (I offered to fax birth certificate, anyting!) and was told too bad and "thats just the way it is"

I did inform the clown there, that their 'inteface' is retarded and designed with some VERY significant holes in it. He didn't agree, and I just thanked him for not hanging up with me and left it at that.

AVOID HR BLOCK (online at least) ALL ALL COSTS!!!!!!
Justin in DC | 04.28.06 - 4:39 pm | #

Burma: The Next Iran?

Oh, great. Slate has just published an article by Ian Bremmer entitled "Is Burma the Next Iran?" And it's not talking about an explosion of blogging by Burmese young people.

The United States and its European allies worry that if they simply accept a nuclear Iran, other states will be encouraged to pursue nuclear ambitions of their own. But that ship may already have sailed. As the world watches the twists and turns of Iran's path toward the Security Council, the military regime in Burma may be quietly selling its energy resources to finance the acquisition of nuclear technology....

Burma's generals, known in state-controlled media as the State Peace and Development Council, routinely harass and imprison opposition activists. Citizens have been used as slave labor. The junta's security police have been known to strafe demonstrators with gunfire. In December, an Asian human rights group issued a 124-page report on the Burmese government's "brutal and systematic" torture of political prisoners.

To deepen the country's isolation, last November the generals began to move Burma's capital from the southern coastal city of Rangoon to the mountain stronghold of Pyinmana, deep in the country's interior. Perhaps the regime's oft-stated fear of a U.S. invasion prompted the retreat from the coast. That would explain press reports that the junta has surrounded its new capital with land mines. Perhaps the regime is even more afraid of the ethnically diverse and impoverished students of Rangoon. We can't look for answers to the United Nations' envoy to Burma. He resigned in January after failing for nearly two years to gain entry into the country....

Just as Iran's energy wealth frustrates U.S. and European efforts to sanction Tehran, foreign competition for gas contracts will obstruct international attempts to pressure Burma toward democratic reform. China has profited time and again by forging commercial deals with states that are the objects of international scorn, and other energy-dependent Asian countries (India and South Korea, in particular) don't want China to monopolize Burma's energy reserves. These states and others will continue to chase energy deals there, including agreements to build the infrastructure needed to pipe gas or petroleum directly to their consumers and industries. Even the United States and European Union have resisted pressure to ban all investment in the country—so energy firms Unocal and Total can join in the scramble.

The Burmese junta knows when it approves these deals that it's giving its Asian neighbors an important stake in the regime's survival. China, a veto-wielding permanent member of the Security Council, is an especially useful provider of diplomatic cover. Energy revenues also help finance the domestic repression that keeps the opposition in check and the generals in charge....

Another reason Burma matters for regional stability is that it adds to the growing list of irritants in U.S. relations with China. Burma provides China with the use of a military base on the Indian Ocean. Sino-Burmese trade grew by more than 10 percent between 2004 and 2005 to more than $1.1 billion. Late last year, China outmaneuvered India for an agreement to buy 6.5 trillion cubic feet of gas. As China's dependence on Burma's energy grows, we can expect Beijing to help the junta resist international pressure—just as they have done for authoritarian regimes in Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Zimbabwe. (China has invested around $300 million in Zimbabwe in return for mining concessions and direct supply of gold, diamonds, chrome, bauxite, and possibly uranium.) That will only add to Washington's diplomatic frustrations.

Kunimoto Takeharu's Bluegrass Shamisen

Hiroshima-based blogger Wide Island profiles Kunimoto Takeharu.

Yesterday I posted a picture of my daughter playing with her mother’s sanshin, a banjo-like Okinawan instrument that is the direct ancestor of the Japanese shamisen. I thought I’d post today about the shamisen player Kunimoto Takeharu and his foray into bluegrass, a style of music I vastly prefer (and I realize I’m in the minority here) to pop, J or otherwise.

Kunimoto was born in Chiba Prefecture. Both parents were practitioners of a form of storytelling called roukyoku. Unlike the older and better-known art of rakugo comic storytelling, in traditional roukyoku narrative is combined with singing, and the storyteller performs standing, accompanied by a concealed shamisen player. There is an improvisational element as well, and the same piece may be dramatically different from one performance to the next. Roukyoku was widely popular at the height of radio, but like many older arts has lost a great deal of its audience in recent decades.

There's more. And the picture he refers to really is quite charming.

Muninn's Recent Japan Travelogue

Catching up on my favorite Asia blog reading, I came across Muninn's post from two weeks ago recounting a few wonderful anecdotes about his latest trip to Japan to present a paper at a conference. It starts off with his encounter with a Swedish-speaking customs official who tests out how similar Norwegian is.

This time, the inspector look at my passport, smiled, and said, “Hei!” I thought he was speaking to me in English and that I was thus being greeted with an exclamation of some kind. I looked around to see what he might be trying to bring my attention to. He then said, “Can I say … Hei!” Then I realized: He is saying “Hei” in Norwegian - that is “Hello.” He said, “In Swedish I can say Hei! Can I say Hei! in Norwegian?” I said, “Yes, it is the same in Norwegian.”

My immigration officer went about continuing to process my visa and after a few seconds he looked up and said, “Norwegian and Swedish is all the same right?” I replied, “Umm…ya Danish, Swedish, Norwegian are all very close, think of it as something like Osaka dialect and Tohoku dialect.”

A few more stamps got issued and mysterious commands entered into his computer as he went back to looking like the stern mechanical immigration officer I have come to expect. Then, suddenly, he asked, “Can I say, ‘Jeg elsker deg.’” I felt a bit weird, looked around to see if there were any laughing Scandinavians nearby but smiled and said, “Yup, in Norwegian ‘I love you’ is also ‘Jeg elsker deg.”

At the conference he attended, one speaker indulged in some uncontested fantasies about Asian values.

Some of these concerns can be seen in the content of the conference’s final talk. At the end of the conference, Iwate University president and former Waseda professor Taniguchi Makoto gave a speech about Asian community in English. I was the only non-Asian at the talk (or at the conference for that matter) and couldn’t help noting the irony that English was the necessary choice of language given that some of the guests from Thailand and Mongolia didn’t speak Japanese (they were also the only participants not to make their presentations in Japanese). Taniguchi speaks fantastic English and his eloquent presentation fit his Cambridge education and long years of experience working for Japan’s foreign ministry, the UN, as deputy head of the OECD, and elsewhere. After an interesting analysis of Japan’s recent failures in negotiations related to the formation of “an Asian community” (indeed, he argued that after losing control of the movement, the foreign ministry is actively trying to torpedo all attempts to make anything meaningful out of the concept), he launched a critique of “Western values”. In passages that remind me of the confidence of the bubble period Japan or Asian leaders before its humbling economic crisis, Taniguchi suggested to the audience that Asia should take pride in its own values and take a more critical stance towards the West.

He offered two pieces of evidence for the inferiority of Western values. He recounted a story of when he was criticized by colleagues in France for having dined with his own chauffeur, thus violating the aristocratic separation of classes. His second anecdote lamented the inhumane behavior of New York City police officers he witnessed rudely expelling the homeless sleeping in Grand Central Station. The message was clear: Asian values have a higher degree of compassion and are less class conscious. The problem, of course, is that this is absolute nonsense. I have indeed accompanied Chinese company managers when they have dined and socialized happily with their chauffeurs in Beijing, but I have also seen Korean executives treat their chauffeurs as barely human slaves on the streets of Seoul. And as for compassion towards the homeless, it is interesting to note that one of Japan’s leading headline stories today (January 31st) is about violent clashes between Japanese police and homeless being evicted from a park in Osaka; their blue tarp tents being torn down.

There's lots more. Read the whole thing.

A Chechen View of the Cartoon Offensive

David MacDuff's well-informed blog A Step At A Time keeps a close watch on events affecting Chechnya and Chechens abroad. From the Russian-language Chechen Society website, he translates posts a portion of an intriguing interview with Musayev Ilias, Copenhagen spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Independent Chechen Republic of Ichkeriya (ICR).

- How are your relations with the Danish government?

- They are definitely good and friendly. If they were not so, I do not think that we could have the possibility to lead such a way of life as we do now. The Danish government practically helps us in all kinds of conflicts with Russian authorities by supporting the Chechen community here.

- I am sure that you have heard about the scandal of the published Muhammad drawings in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. What is the position of the Chechen community on this issue?

- Definitely, we consider the drawings to be scandalous but I think there is one very interesting point in this story: I realized Jyllands-Posten’s editor of culture is married to the daughter of a FSB [formerly KGB] general. And he had been working in Moscow as Jyllands-Posten’s correspondent. I suppose that this scandal is nothing else than another regular provocation of the Russian Special Services. Why did they do this? That’s another question. We all know very well that Russian authorities for a long time have been trying to close the North Caucasus' door for western humanitarian organisations, which have a good experience of supporting the Chechen population and also collected a large data archive about war crimes permitted in Chechnya. Of course, they do not want this information to be used by international human rights prosecutors. And the present situation with the Danish Refugee Council is not surprising. Of course the official position of our government in exile is that we would like the Danish Refugee Council to remain in Chechnya. Ramzan Kadirov, the prime minister of Chechnya, only has a 3rd grade education, and he is only a Kremlin mafia's puppet. He never had his own opinion. And he cannot do such kind of steps without the Kremlin's special edict. Also it is a possibility for FSB to create in Denmark the same massive phobia that we have now in Russia. It is the same dirty business, they only changed the picture of the public enemy. If in Russia it is Chechens blasting Russian buildings, in America and, now in Denmark , it is warlike Muslims burning the Danish flag. Using their own agent in Jyllands-Posten, they felicitously prepared the world for the 3rd World War. War between two civilisations – East against West. And I do not really think that Russia will take sides in such a war.

If this has any measure of validity, Putin's FSBocracy may have decided that turnabout's fair play. This time it's Russia's turn to play the nonaligned Third World role while the Islamists take over the role of the Third International in trying to overthrow bourgeois Western society--and impose a totalitarian war-footing on their compatriots until they achieve that goal. Putin can play one side against the other, just as much of the Muslim world did during the Cold War, when every frontline client state enriched its thugocracy and enfeebled its civil society in the process.

In any case, it's more than your run-of-the-mill conspiracy theory.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, Richard Cohen in the Washington Post notes how stark the difference is between Putin's policy toward Hamas and his policy toward the Chechens. (via PeakTalk)

Stratfor has also weighed in on Russian's new game. A Step At A Time has the whole thing. Here's a small chunk.

Russia's willingness to speak to Hamas creates a new dynamic in the Muslim world. Syria and Iran are seeking "great power" support against the United States. Indeed, we could expect an evolution in which the Iraqi government also would be looking for counterweights to American power. By inviting Hamas and possibly opening a channel between Hamas and the Israelis, Russia is positioning itself to become a mediator in other disputes, and to walk away with relationships that the United States has been unable to manage.

Given the robustness of Russia's arms industry, which is much more vital and advanced than is generally understood, the Russians could return to their role as arms provider to the region and patron of governments that are hostile to the United States. The situation from 1955 to 1990 was a much more natural geopolitical dynamic than the current situation, in which Russia is really not present in the region. Russia is a natural player in the Middle East.

Remember also that Hamas is very close to Saudi Arabia, with which Russia has an intensely competitive relationship in the energy markets. And then there is Chechnya. The Russians have long charged that "Wahhabi" influence was behind the Chechen insurgency as well as insurgencies in Central Asia. In the Russian mind, "Wahhabi" is practically a code word for "Islamist militants," including al Qaeda. The Russians also feel that, while the Americans have forced the Saudis to provide intelligence on al Qaeda, they have not elicited similar aid on the issue of the Chechens. In other words, Moscow perceives the United States not only as having neglected to help Russia on Chechnya, but as actually hindering it.

The Russians badly want to bring the Chechen rebellion under control without allowing Chechnya to secede. They believe that the Chechen insurgents, and particularly the internationalized jihadist faction among them, would not survive if outside support dried up. They believe that the United States is not displeased to see the Chechen war bleeding Russia, and that Washington has discouraged Saudi collaboration with Moscow. All things considered, this is probably true. In reaching out to Hamas, Russia is also reaching out to the Saudis. The Saudis cannot control the Chechens, but they may have some means of determining the level of operations the Chechens are able to maintain.

Sparks Hit Prussian-ruled Poznan, 1848

France provided the spark that touched off the unrest [of 1848]. Dogged by a powerful wave of opposition to his unpopular rule, on February 24 King Louis Philippe abdicated and fled to England, leaving the reins of power in the hands of a coalition of reform-minded moderates and liberals. This turn of events electrified opposition movements across the continent, and they immediately raised the pressure on their respective governments. On March 13 Austria's archconservative chancellor, Prince Metternich, was forced to step down, and the royal family fled Vienna soon thereafter. Surrounded by a large, angry crowd and fearing the same fate, [Prussian King] Friedrich Wilhelm IV made a series of extraordinary concessions. On March 18 he came out in support of a constitution for Prussia and the creation of a united Germany. The next day he appeared on the balcony of the royal palace to face the thousands of Berliners gathered there, and at their insistence he paid homage to the corpses of citizens killed by the military in recent street clashes. On March 21 he agreed to take part in a parade through the city following the black, red, and gold flag that had come to symbolize the cause of German unification. One of his closest advisers, Friedrich Wilhelm von Rauch, traveled alongside the king that day and burned with shame as the aura of the Prussian monarchy was reduced through such vulgar associations. "I cannot describe the impression that this ride made on me," he noted. "It seemed to me as if everything had gone mad."

The atmosphere in Poznan had been highly charged in the weeks preceding the Berlin revolution. Many nobles from the surrounding region had gathered in Poznan in order to obtain late-breaking reports from around the continent. When the courier arrived early on March 20 with news of the recent events in Berlin, the city crackled with activity. By ten o'clock almost everyone had heard, with the reports growing more exaggerated with each retelling. The Polish response was amazingly swift. Before long, women had hung dozens of red and white Polish flags from the windows of the Bazar and many private residences, and thousands of Poles filled the streets.

In his memoir Marceli Motty recalls his impressions of that memorable day: "The streets were choked with people like on a major holiday; without a trace of the police or army and with the government either in hiding or maintaining a very low profile.... Here in the market square teemed men and women and people of all ages. Seeing their faces and hearing their voices, one would have thought it was Poznan in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, for on this day just about every person and every word in circulation was Polish. The Germans and Jews were sitting at home, not sure of what to make of our intentions." Motty's comments capture how the initial breakdown of royal power in Berlin ignited the hopes of a broad cross section of the Polish population, unnerved most Germans and Jews, and paralyzed local Prussian authorities. His description also suggests how the events of that day displayed in dramatic, palpable fashion what was at stake for the city. For Motty and other Poles, the fluttering Polish flags and the chorus of Polish voices in the streets allowed them to imagine themselves back in time to a preferred Poznan that was proudly and indisputably Polish, an idealized past that could serve as a model for the future. For Germans and Germanized Jews, however, these same scenes likely brought less savory associations to mind. The temporary eclipse of the symbols of Prussian power and the presence of German culture underscored how fragile their privileged position in the city actually was.

SOURCE: Religion and the Rise of Nationalism: A Profile of an East-Central European City, by Robert E. Alvis (Syracuse U. Press, 2005), pp. 157-159

Ajami on the Global Ideological Supply Chain

Fouad Ajami recently spoke to a gathering of Toronto's intellectual and business elite. The Toronto Star has just published an edited transcript. One theme that struck me is that the global grievance export/import business is not all that different from other global supply chains. You never know where all the parts were manufactured and assembled.

The real precursor to what is happening in Denmark today happened a generation ago, when Salman Rushdie wrote The Satanic Verses. The issues are exactly what we are witnessing today.

With Satanic Verses, the troubles began in Bradford, England. The book burning began in England. The activists who got hold of this issue and wanted to stay with it were in England. Ayatollah Khomeini, when he wrote his famous fatwa, came in on this issue a good month or two after. He happened onto it. He sensed its importance. He understood that this is really what you need to do, that this is a meaningful issue, and that if you are trying to walk away from the wreckage of the Iran/Iraq war and the defeat of Iran in this long war, if you want to give your revolutionary children, as he called them, something to think about, and if you want to situate Iran as the centre of the Islamic world, then why not turn to The Satanic Verses?

You would have expected European Islam to be more tolerant, but it was the other way around. The troubles migrated from England and made their way through the Islamic world, and we saw what happened.

In the case of these cartoons, this is exactly what happened. The Muslim activists in Denmark took their cause to the Islamic world. As they worked their way through the Islamic world, there was this exquisite little irony: They went into regimes that oppress Islamists, which kill Islamists, but which were more than willing to lend a helping hand, because such is what you have to do....

The city I grew up in, Beirut, has played a part. We watched the attack on the Danish consulate in Beirut. The people who assaulted the consulate came into a Christian area of Beirut, a city that is divided in the old-fashioned Ottoman way. There are Christian neighbourhoods and Muslim neighbourhoods. And the Lebanese know better than to go into a neighbourhood that is not their own. They know the rules of the road. But nevertheless, they stormed this consulate and they attacked a Mennonite church in east Beirut. [Mennonite? Perhaps Star reporters--and editors--can't tell Mennonites from Maronites.]

When the police rounded up some of these suspects, we learned something about them. The largest number of people who were rounded up were Syrians. The second largest were Palestinians. And the third, finally, bringing up the rear, were the Lebanese themselves.

via PeakTalk and Daniel Drezner

Reason Magazine on Middle East Transparent

On 9 February, Michael Young, opinion editor of Beirut's Daily Star, published in reasononline a fascinating interview with Pierre Akel, who runs the popular website Middle East Transparent, a trilingual forum that seeks to give a wider voice to Arab liberalism. The interview, entitled No Red Lines, is also reprinted on Middle East Transparent. Here are few excerpts of what Akel had to say. Read the whole thing.

To understand Arab liberalism, one has to understand not only what it now represents but where it emerged from: In Syria, it mostly comes from the remnants of the communist or Marxist left—just like the Eastern European dissidents of 30 years ago. In Saudi Arabia, it comes from the very heart of Islamic fundamentalist culture, but also from the orthodox Sunnis originating in the Hijaz, where the cities of Jeddah, Medina and Mecca are located. Hussein Shobokshi is a good example. It also comes from the Shiite minority in the oil producing Eastern Province. In Tunisia, it comes from the reformed Islamic university Al-Zaitouna. In Egypt, liberals are inspired by the great liberal tradition that was crushed by the late President Gamal Abdel Nasser....

In the Arab world, much more than in the West, we can genuinely talk of a blog revolution. Arab culture has been decimated during the last 50 years. Arab newspapers are mainly under Saudi control. The book market is practically dead. Some of the best authors pay to have their books published in the order of 3,000 copies for a market of 150 million. This is ridiculous. Even when people write, they face censorship at every level—other than their own conscious or unconscious censorship. Meanwhile, professional journalism is rare....

When it comes to satellite television in the region, Al-Jazeera is controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood, while many of the rest are under Saudi control. Al-Arabiya, for example, is owned by the Al-Ibrahim, the brothers-in-law of the late King Fahd. Even the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation cannot cross certain Saudi red lines. Yes, you can hear a liberal point of view here and there. But, to take one example, both Abdul Halim Khaddam, the former Syrian vice president who turned against the regime of President Bashar Assad, and Riad Turk, the Syrian dissident, have been under a Saudi ban from Al-Arabiya for the last month, because the Saudi leadership does not now want to annoy the Assad regime. For once, Al-Jazeera has also banned them, but for Qatari political reasons. Qatar is lobbying on behalf of the Syrian regime in Europe.

On the Internet, people can publish whatever they want: no red lines. They can use pen names if they want. People read, send comments, and they transmit information to their friends by email and fax, etc. The regimes' monopoly on information has been broken. Remember: Three months ago a Libyan writer was assassinated and his fingers cut for writing articles on an opposition Web site. The Internet is a historical opportunity for Arab liberalism.

Of course, liberals cannot compete with Al-Jazeera. We do not have the financial means to start a liberal satellite channel. Hundreds of Arab millionaires are liberals. Only, they cannot stand up to their regimes. Arab capitalism is mostly state capitalism. If you are in opposition, you are not awarded contracts by states. So, for the near future, we do not expect much help from these quarters.

via Belmont Club

Khrushcheva on Putinism

In today's Washington Post, Nikita Khrushchev's great-granddaughter, New School professor Nina Khrushcheva, gives her take on Putinism.

When I was growing up in the Soviet Union of the 1970s, it was President Leonid Brezhnev that I loathed. The dreaded Joseph Stalin seemed merely a name from a distant past. Back in 1956, he had been outed as a monster by my great-grandfather, Nikita Khrushchev, in the famous "secret speech" at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party and deleted from history....

After the anarchy that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a period when democracy came to represent confusion, crime, poverty, oligarchy, anger and disappointment, it turned out that Russians didn't like their new, "free" selves. Having for centuries had no sense of self-esteem outside the state, we found ourselves wanting our old rulers back, the rulers who provided a sense of order, inspired patriotic fervor and the belief that we were a great nation. We yearned for monumental -- if oppressive -- leaders, like Ivan the Terrible or Stalin. Yes, they killed and imprisoned, but how great were our victories and parades! So what if Stalin ruled by fear? That was simply a fear for one's life. However terrifying, it wasn't as existentially threatening as the fear of freedom, of individual choice, with no one but oneself to blame if democracy turned into disarray and capitalism into corruption.

This is why the country rallies behind President Vladimir Putin. Putin promotes himself as a new Russian "democrat." Indeed, Russians view him less like the godlike "father of all nations" that Stalin was, and more like a Russian everyman -- a sign of at least partial democratization. Putin often notes that Russia is developing "its own brand of democracy." Translation: His modern autocracy has discovered that it no longer needs mass purges like Stalin's to protect itself from the people. Dislike of freedom makes us his eager backers. How readily we have come to admire his firm hand: Rather than holding him responsible for the horrors of Chechnya, we agree with his "democratic" appointment of leaders for that ill-fated land. We cheer his "unmasking of Western spies," support his jailing of "dishonest" oligarchs and his promotion of a "dictatorship of order" rather than a government of transparent laws.

"Putinism," an all-inclusive hybrid that embraces elements of Stalinism, communism, KGB-ism and market-ism, is our new national ideology. A man for all seasons and all fears, Russia's president pretends that by selectively adopting and adapting some elements from his predecessors' rule -- the Russian Orthodox Church of the czars, the KGB of the Soviets, the market economy of the Boris Yeltsin era -- he is eliminating the extremes of the past, creating a viable system of power that will last. But his closed and secretive system of governing -- the "vertical power" so familiar from the pre-secret speech era, with information once again manipulated by the authorities -- suggests that his proposed "unity" is yet another effort to rewrite the past.

And so the secret speech is no longer seen as a courageous act of political conscience, in which Khrushchev, in order to secure justice for Stalinism's victims and liberate communist ideals from the gulag's grotesque inhumanity, called for reform of the despotic system he had helped to build. In the Russian media today, the speech is dismissed as something far more ignoble: Khrushchev's effort to avenge his oldest son, Leonid, whom Stalin had allegedly persecuted for betraying socialist ideals by serving the Nazis during World War II.

How Coxinga Got His Name

Well, this passage answers a question I have long wondered about:

Coxinga ... was said to have greatly impressed the bookish Emperor of Intense Warring [the remaining Ming pretender who had retreated to Fuzhou as the Manchus invaded]. Still only a youth of twenty-one, the former Confucian scholar was made assistant controller of the Imperial Clan Court. The childless Emperor also commented that he was disappointed not to have a daughter he could offer to Coxinga in marriage, and bestowed him with a new name. Once Lucky Pine [Fukumatsu], then Big Tree [Da Mu, a nickname from Sen 'Forest'], the boy was now given the appellation Chenggong, thereby making his new given name Zheng Chenggong translate literally as 'Serious Achievement'. In a moment of supreme pride for his family, the boy was also conferred with the right to use the surname of the Ming ruling family itself. It amounted to a symbolic adoption, and he was often referred to as Guoxingye, the Imperial Namekeeper. Pronounced Koksenya in the staccato dialect of Fujian, and later transcribed by foreign observers, the title eventually transformed into the 'Coxinga' by which he is known to history.

SOURCE: Coxinga and the Fall of the Ming Dynasty, by Jonathan Clements (Sutton, 2005), p. 124

UPDATE: As usual, Language Hat's learned commentariat sheds more light on the topic, among them Andrew West:

Early Portuguese accounts of China frequently use "x" in romanizing Chinese names (Xanadu from Xangdu from Shangdu 上都 is a well-known example). On the other hand, when does Dutch use "x" rather than "ks"?

Looking at the original Dutch translation of the letter from Coxinga to Frederick Coyett dated 1662, (images of the manuscript are available here), his name is consistently given as "Coxinja" rather than "Coxinga". Googling also produces a lot of Dutch pages which refer to the "Zeeroover Coxinja". Coxinja certainly gives a better representation of the final syllable of the Chinese Guoxingye.

In "An Introduction to Taiwanese Historical Materials in the Archives of the Dutch East India Company" here, Coxinga's name is apparently spelled as "Cocxinja" in the Dutch sources, which supports the hypothesis that the "x" in his name represents the initial sound of the second syllable rather than a combination of the final sound of the first syllable and first sound of the second syllable.

So I wonder when the spelling "Coxinga" is first attested?

Is India or China Getting More Bang for Its Buck?

On last week's Foreign Exchange, Fareed Zakaria interviewed two economists about the differences between how China and India are growing their economies. The transcript is now online. Here's a chunk of it.

Fareed Zakaria: India and China are booming of course but investors worldwide are wondering who will boom more loudly in the coming years? And it’s not an easy question because it means going inside two complex developing economies and making projections about the future. But we’re going to do it anyway.

Joining us to talk about this are Yasheng Huang of the MIT Sloan School of Management and Sandeep Dahiya, Professor at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown and a former Consultant with McKinsey.

So let me ask both of you; the--if we focus in on the issue of Indian companies and Chinese companies, my sense is that you’ll actually find surprisingly that Indian companies are better known certainly around the world. You’ve--you people have heard of the big outsourcing companies like Infosys; people have heard of companies like Tata, whereas there are very few Chinese companies in that category. Let me ask you Yasheng why is that? China’s economy is growing much faster than India’s. It’s been growing faster for a long time, you know probably 15 years longer it’s had a boom and yet there aren’t those many Chinese world-class brand names.

Yasheng Huang: That’s right; I think this is one of the most interesting puzzles about Chinese economy and this is something that I have done research on. One of the main reasons is that the Chinese economic miracle has been created essentially by foreign direct investment. It is not created by the entrepreneurship, local entrepreneurship, indigenous private sector growth, whereas--.

Fareed Zakaria: Explain that; so you mean that it’s been created by Volkswagen coming into China?

Yasheng Huang: That’s right.

Fareed Zakaria: Getting the government to give them a great deal, employing Chinese and making low cost Volkswagens and export them?

Yasheng Huang: Yeah; essentially the Chinese economic miracle is a result of Chinese labor being cheap and very productive rather than the result of the capital accumulated by the Chinese capitalists and--and this is one of the principal reasons why even with eight or nine percentage growth rate every year we do not see the emergence of the world-class Chinese companies coming out of that economy.

Fareed Zakaria: Now what--why is that--because most people would say if you go to China you certainly see this. There’s a very strong entrepreneurial spirit in China, that certainly--

Yasheng Huang: That’s right; yeah.

Fareed Zakaria: You know to the extent that genetics or culture matter, they seem to be fine. I mean you look at Southeast Asia it’s all Chinese entrepreneurs.

Yasheng Huang: Yeah, absolutely; the Chinese entrepreneurs do very well outside of China. China--Chinese have this animal spirit, the business acumen capabilities and let me add a substantial engineering and scientific capability. The main issue is not a lack of these capabilities or entrepreneurial drives; the main reason is the lack of a financial system supportive of these entrepreneurial initiatives and growth. So you can get Chinese company up and running to a certain level; after that they stop growing because you need outside financing; you need outside capital; they can't get bank loans; they can't get listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange or [Shenzhen] Stock Exchange and from that perspective Indian firms have done much better because they have access to financing; they have access to legal protection in a way that the Chinese entrepreneurs so far have lacked.

Fareed Zakaria: All right; so let’s say that’s the good news about Indian firms--that they are real you know private sector firms. They use capital and they probably use it more efficiently because they don’t get as much of it. But can--can they grow in this environment of a pretty chaotic political system, very little sustained reform taking place? If you look at the Indian Government it keeps announcing reform programs that never get implemented. It keeps announcing infrastructure, roads, buildings and bridges that don’t get built. I mean do--what is your sense? Looking at companies, do they find this a major obstacle or can they find ways around it?

Sandeep Dahiya: You bring up a very interesting point Fareed and this is very true, which is this stop and go reform process in India and the fact that the political process is--is not always geared 100-percent towards making the economy as--as open--as liberalized as some economists would argue. And the world-class firms that we are talking about; what is so peculiar about them is they’re all concentrated in the IT sector. That is one sector which literally grew under wraps. It--the government knew nothing about it and before you knew it--it was a big sector. And that’s saying something about the--the lopsided growth of Indian companies--at least in terms of international recognition.

Fareed Zakaria: Well and the other big difference is--correct me if I’m wrong--but the other big difference is the IT firms are unique in that they don’t need infrastructure since what they transport is transported over the internet. If you’re--if you’re trying to send toys, manufactured toys, you need roads, you need ports, and that’s why it seems to me the Chinese--firms are able to do that so much better because their roads are better--their ports are better. If you’re sending services over the internet you--it’s the one area where you can transport goods without infrastructure.

Sandeep Dahiya: Precisely; it’s very true. About five years ago before the telecom made the communication cost come down a lot you could send people abroad which the IT firms did in the early ‘90s and in the last few years as the--the communication services and--and the capacity to--to work remotely has become much better, but you’re absolutely right. You do not need these busy ports or--or infrastructure.

Fareed Zakaria: But right now wouldn’t it be fair to say China is growing because of the state and India is growing because of its private sector?

Yasheng Huang: Well but you--you can argue about the quality of--of that growth. China invests about 40-percent--actually last year--50-percent of its GDP; India is investing about 20-percent of the--its GDP. The Indian growth rate is inching up to about seven--seven point five; Chinese growth is about nine and--and China is--

Fareed Zakaria: So you think it’s getting a bigger bang for its buck as it were?

Read the rest, including an interview with Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, and a segment on a Spanish entrepreneur trying to turn fast food into healthy food. The latter interview was followed by a surprising chart:

Percentage Overweight/Obese Children:
Russia: 10%
Brazil: 14%
UK: 20%
USA: 26%
Iran: 30%
Spain: 34%
Source: Foreign Policy, World Health Organization

The Yangzhou Massacre of 1645

Yangzhou was occupied by Shi Kefa, a 44-year-old general with fanatical loyalty to the Ming dynasty. The Manchus tried to win Shi Kefa over in a number of ways, sending numerous letters in the name of Dorgon, but actually drafted by turncoats. Shi Kefa had famously berated the Emperor of Grand Radiance on military matters, using language that would have led to the reprimand or imprisonment of a less valuable soldier. [Manchu Prince] Dorgon's messages capitalised on this, reminding Shi Kefa that, loyal to the Ming or not, he was currently serving a depraved master. While the Manchus fought the Ming loyalists, wrote Dorgon's scribes, both sides lost out on the opportunity to unite and pursue the true enemy: the remnants of the forces of [northern warlord] Li Zicheng. Dorgon urged Shi Kefa at all costs to avoid a situation in which there were 'two suns in the firmament'. But it was too late; already there were two people claiming to be the emperor of China--three, if one was prepared to count the fugitive Li Zicheng.

When the Manchu army finally began the assault of Yangzhou, Shi Kefa's [Jesuit-designed] guns killed them in their thousands. The bodies piled up so high, that after a time, there was no need for siege ladders, and fresh Manchu troops climbed a mountain of corpses to reach the battlements.

The defenders of the city began fleeing the walls by jumping onto the houses immediately below, tearing off their helmets and throwing down their spears, creating an unearthly clatter as their feet smashed tiles on the rooftops. The noise brought townsfolk out of their houses in time to see the defenders running away, and soon the streets were full of refugees. But there was nowhere to run. Someone opened the south gate, and the last possible escape route was cut off by more Manchu soldiers.

In the aftermath Shi Kefa ordered his men to kill him, but his lieutenant could not bring himself to strike the death blow. With the town now in Manchu hands, Shi Kefa was brought to [Manchu Prince] Dodo. The prince advised him that his loyalty had impressed his Manchu enemies.

'You have made a gallant defence,' he said. 'Now that you have done all that duty could dictate, I would be glad to give you a high post.'

Shi Kefa, however, refused to abandon his beloved Dynasty of Brightness [= Ming].

'I ask of you no favour except death,' he replied. Over several days, the Manchus made repeated attempts to persuade Shi Kefa to join them, but he was adamant that the only thing he wanted was to die with his dynasty. On the third day, an exasperated Prince Dodo granted Shi Kefa his wish, and beheaded him personally.

Despite his pleas to Shi Kefa, Dodo was intensely irritated at the human cost of taking Yangzhou. He told his troops to do whatever they wanted with the city for five days, and the ensuing atrocities reached such heights that it was a further five days before Dodo regained control of his men. The surviving Manchus avenged their fallen comrades on the population of the town, slaughtering the menfolk and raping the women. The clemency shown to turncoat towns further in the north was nowhere in evidence here, as Manchus and Chinese traitors looted what they could, and murdered all the witnesses they could find. Fires broke out in numerous quarters of the city, but were largely put out by heavy rain.

A survivor reported that the corpses filled the canals, gutters and ponds, their blood drowning the water itself, creating rivulets of a deep greenish-red throughout the city. Babies were killed or trampled underfoot, and the young women were chained together ready to be shipped to the far north. Many years later, travellers in Manchuria and Mongolia would still report sightings of aging, scarred female slaves with Yangzhou accents, clad in animal skins.

SOURCE: Coxinga and the Fall of the Ming Dynasty, by Jonathan Clements (Sutton, 2005), pp. 116-118

Hear Four Sets of Anglospheric Accents

The University of Otago has mounted online samples of male and female speakers of four sample accents of English: New Zealand female and male, Australian female and male, North American female and male, and English female and male.

Part of their experiment involved asking people from other nations to evaluate the personality traits of the speakers along several dimensions based solely on their accents. The results are often surprising.

UPDATE: It's interesting that, in virtually every country, the North American accents rank most highly in the categories of solidarity (especially the female) and often competence, but much lower in the categories of status and power. The North American accents are American, not Canadian, but very few of the evaluators are likely to have been able to tell the difference. If you want to sharpen your ear for American-Canadian differences, just listen to the Winter Olympics coverage on NBC. There seem to be several Canadian-American pairs of announcers.

Living with Doubt, Losing without It

The contrarian Spengler at the Asia Times weighs in on the Cartoon Offensive.

The global relationship among literacy rates, secularization and population growth makes clear that the fragility of Muslim traditional society is not a Muslim problem as such. But the Muslim world is far more vulnerable than the numbers suggest, for two reasons. The first reason is chronological, and the second is theological.

It is not a good thing to come late to the table of globalization. China and its neighbors have emerged from the maelstrom of revolution and the violent loss of tens of millions of lives to become actors on the world economic stage. Of China's 1.3 billion people, 400 million are integrated into the world division of labor, and millions more are becoming urbanized, literate and productive by the year. India remains behind China but has good prospects for success. Against these formidable competitors, few countries in Western Asia, Africa or Latin America can hope to prevail. In a world that has little need of subsistence farmers and even less need of university graduates with degrees in Islamic philosophy, most of the Muslim world can expect small mercy from the market.

The theological problem I have discussed in other locations, most recently in reporting the pope's seminar at Castelgandolfo. Christianity and Judaism have adapted to doubt, the bacillus of modern thought, by inviting doubt to serve as the handmaiden of faith. No better formulation of this can be found than in Benedict XVI's classic Introduction to Christianity. The object of revelation, the believer, becomes a participant in revelation, in dialogue with the Revealer. This great innovation has not prevented the death of traditional, autonomic Christian belief, but it has left an enduring core of Christian faith in the West well inoculated against skepticism. As the pope explained, the eternal, unchanging character of the Koran that the Archangel Gabriel dictated verbatim to Mohammed admits of no doubt. Muslim belief is not dialogue, but submission. It is as defenseless before the bacillus of skepticism as the American aboriginals were before the smallpox virus.

That is why Muslims cannot respond to Western jibes at the person of their Prophet except as they did to the Jyllens-Posten cartoons. I do not sympathize with scoffers but, like Benedict, I see doubt as an adversary to be won over, rather than as an enemy to be extirpated. I would not have drawn nor published these cartoons, but when the lines are drawn, I stand with Western freedom against traditional authority. I write these lines over a Carlsberg and shall drink no other lager until the boycott of Danish product ends.

Okay, I have many doubts about Spengler's broad brush. Plenty of Muslims nowadays are full of doubt, and perhaps even more full of justifiable fear--from all sides. But societies that brook no doubt and no dissent are destined for the dustbin of history.

I swim in doubt--I drown in doubt--and have done so for as long as I can remember. My closest brother, who was baptized at the same time I was in the dunking pool of the First Baptist Church in Winchester, Virginia, says we laughed on the way home from church in the rear-facing third seat of our family's Nash Rambler station wagon. I don't really remember. I just vaguely remember being shy about being down front and having to read our testimony before the congregation. But I remember all too well the last Sunday school class I attended several years later at my last mission meeting at Amagi Sanso before returning to the States to face college, the draft, or whatever else awaited a newly 18-year-old male citizen of the U.S. in 1967.

A new missionary, half a generation younger than our parents, was our Sunday School teacher that year. Some of us MKs were borderline delinquent, infected with both doubt and rebelliousness, and perhaps our missionary parents thought Uncle Jim's testimony might connect with us. He had been a delinquent himself until he found the Lord, as he testified in some detail. Not entirely boring detail. Postconversion joy was far less interesting. But how do you know that God even exists, some of us asked. The experience he described was foreign to some of us. Well, it says so right here, he answered, and read the Bible to us to prove the existence of its imputed author ("as told to" quite a string of ghostwriters). But haven't you ever doubted the scriptures, some of us asked. Never! Not since I found the Lord, he assured us. Well, that didn't connect too well.

That night I asked my Dad if he had ever had doubts about his beliefs. He had been raised a Quaker, but joined the Baptist church in his youth (dunked in a mill pond near his country church). Of course I've had doubts, he said. But Uncle Jim says he had never doubted the scriptures since his conversion! Well, Dad hesitantly replied, anyone who says he's never had any doubts about his beliefs is either a fool or a liar. What a relief it was to hear that! I can't convey how much I appreciated his honesty that night. And still do. He doesn't shy away from unpleasant truths. I think Uncle Jim eventually came to the same realization. His own kids later turned out no less delinquent and disoriented as teenagers than the older MKs he failed to connect with that night.

A generation later, it was my daughter's turn to go through confirmation class at a UCC church in Honolulu--a church imbued with doubt about most elements of the Christian tradition. Even so, I rarely attended. And even though I was welcome to partake of communion there, I couldn't bring myself to do so. I didn't feel part of the community of belief, even though my wife and daughter were regular members of that community of believers (or at least seekers).

One of the confirmation class activities was to interview your parents (or guardians, etc.) about their religious beliefs. I had to confess that I find it hard to believe in a Supreme Being. Even so, I have too many doubts to be an outright atheist. And one of the major sociological goals of the confirmation class (in fact, most of the goals seemed to be more sociological than theological) was to to prepare Christians for an age in which they constitute a minority in global society, in which (as the pastor once put it) "the church is not the chapel of the state." That is a most worthy goal, in my estimation. One that militant evangelicals of all religions would do well to adopt.

Nationalism and Religion: An Alliance of Convenience

Some leading [Polish] Catholics who had earlier felt alienated by the secular tone of the nationalist movement began to recognize an essential connection between the defense of the church and defense of the Polish nationality. Their ranks included the agricultural modernizer Dezydery Chłapowski.

A telling example of this alliance came during the funeral of Karol Marcinkowski in 1846. The event, orchestrated by Polish nationalist leaders to broaden sympathy for their cause, attracted huge crowds eager to honor the good doctor. Marcinkowski had drifted away from the church during his student years in Berlin and never returned. On his deathbed he apparently refused to take Holy Communion and explicitly declined a Catholic funeral. "Despite this," explained provincial governor Maurice Beurmann in exasperation, "on the day of his funeral the archbishop appeared at the head of the entire clergy in clerical robes and joined the funeral procession." Beurmann reacted so strongly to this because it foreshadowed his own worst fears. As he had explained two years earlier: "Two levers command unparalleled power to move the local population: nationality and religion. The first exercises its influence over the nobility, and the second over the common people. A combining of the two, through which religious interests also come to oppose the government's intentions, will spell trouble."

Heinrich Wuttke recognized the same ominous signs. In 1846 he noted: "Three or four years ago a rapprochement or alliance occurred between the Poznan-area nobility and various clerics. Its exact nature remained unknown at the time and is still unclear, but it has been betrayed by its effects. Many noble men and women widely known to be irreligious suddenly demonstrated great piety. Our disenchanted world no longer quite believes in the sudden illumination of the Holy Spirit."

SOURCE: Religion and the Rise of Nationalism: A Profile of an East-Central European City, by Robert E. Alvis (Syracuse U. Press, 2005), pp. 106-107

David Hackett Fisher Interviewed

Historian David Hackett Fisher is interviewed at The American Enterprise Online. Here are a few bits that struck my fancy.

TAE: Your religious background is Protestant and you end up teaching at Brandeis.

FISCHER: My parents were both Lutheran and I was confirmed in a Lutheran church. Then I married a Methodist and we encouraged our children in the Protestant spirit to find their own way. One became an Episcopalian and the other became a Unitarian and is now a Buddhist. I live in a town that’s predominantly Roman Catholic and I teach very comfortably in my 85th semester at Brandeis, which calls itself non-sectarian Jewish.

TAE: Did you have any expectations about Jewishness that were either confirmed or shattered upon coming to Brandeis?

FISCHER: I found a kind of excitement that I didn’t find anywhere else. There were other schools that I had offers from at the same time. One was an old New England school and the people who interviewed me there were interested in who my grandparents were and where I got my sportcoats. I had another offer from a Big Ten school. They wanted to know if I could teach the General Survey course. I said, “How big is the class?” They said it’s usually about 500 students. And then I went to a very good Southern school and they said, “We normally have gatherings to talk about subjects of current concern. Do you want to come over and join us?” I said I would be delighted. What’s the subject? “Capital punishment.” So I went over, rehearsing my arguments against capital punishment—and the discussion was about methods of execution....

TAE: Judging from the books my daughter brings home from elementary school, kids today are learning that the Revolutionary and Civil Wars were fought primarily by runaway slaves and girls who dressed as boys in order to carry a gun. Is this didacticism more of a problem now in elementary grades and high school than in the university?

FISCHER: There are lags. Whatever was in fashion in the universities remains in fashion in other places a little bit longer. But what’s really interesting is to see how military history is rapidly expanding. I was down at the annual conference of the Society for Military History in Charleston last year, and their morale has never been higher. They have a sense that history is with them. And the morale amongst the social and cultural historians has never been lower: they think that history is against them. About ten or 15 years ago it was quite the other way. And I think that’s a straw in the wind. I’m very bullish about the way things are going. Each lunacy we go through holds open the possibility of a revisionist movement that is rational, mature, and thoughtful, and that’s what we need. These are exciting times for a historian....

TAE: The word “liberty,” a rhetorical cornerstone of the Democratic Party throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, pretty much disappeared during the New Deal, and has seldom been on Democrat lips since. Is this a mistake?

FISCHER: Absolutely. The worst mistake that Kerry and Gore made was that the value of liberty was rarely mentioned. This was another instance of a party losing touch with the core values of society. The results when parties do that are always the same: they lose elections. I’m a card-carrying Independent. I really hope that the Democrats can reconstruct these great American values in a way that will give them new meaning and give them something other to do than complain about the Republicans.

TAE: Have you ever voted for a Republican for President?

FISCHER: I’ve never voted for a Republican for President in a general election, but I voted in the Republican primary for John McCain, who is my ideal of a strong centrist leader.

I'm not quite so keen on McCain, but I did vote for John Anderson when I couldn't bring myself to vote for either Carter or Reagan in 1980. I even collected signatures to get him on the ballot in a solidly Democratic state. I'd do it again if there were a strong centrist third-party candidate.

Is Iran Pushing the Cartoon Offensive?

Laurence Jarvik wonders whether the sudden ratcheting up of the current Cartoon Offensive, which was just a local Danish phenomenon back in September 2005, isn't perhaps being pushed by Iran in retaliation for pressure from the EU on its nuclear program.

Anyone who has seen the cartoons knows they are "tame" and not on their face offensive. Yet the organized and international nature of the protest would indicate state support as well as religious sensitivity. Given that the original offense took place four months ago, the outbreak of violence at this point raised the question:

What if this is a shot across the bow to the EU and the non-Muslim world that an attack on Iran could lead to the Muslim "street" exploding around the world?

Just a working hypothesis at this point--but all the more reason for the US and UK to take a stronger stand in support of the Danes, if true. For if this was a test, then the US and UK look like they have failed the test. They have been intimidated. And the Europeans, so far have not.

Which means military action, if it does take place, will require a great deal better diplomatic and public relations support than the Iraq war.

If you look where the principal violent outbreaks have occurred so far in the Middle East--in areas where Iranian allies remain most influential: Hamas in Gaza, the Assad regime in Damascus, and now possibly Hezbollah in Lebanon--Iran's possible handiwork does seem likely.

Jarvik also links to the apparently newly assembled Mohammed Image Archive:

While the debate rages, an important point has been overlooked: despite the Islamic prohibition against depicting Mohammed under any circumstances, hundreds of paintings, drawings and other images of Mohammed have been created over the centuries, with nary a word of complaint from the Muslim world. The recent cartoons in Jyllands-Posten are nothing new; it's just that no other images of Mohammed have ever been so widely publicized.

This page is an archive of numerous depictions of Mohammed, to serve as a reminder that such imagery has been part of Western and Islamic culture since the Middle Ages -- and to serve as a resource for those interested in freedom of expression.

Personally, I think ridicule is one of the most potent weapons against religious totalitarianism. And I'm not inclined to feel very sensitive to the feelings of people who, in the name of religion, (a) burn embassies, (b) blow up infidels, and (c) demonstrate with signage that contains variations on the formula "Kill/Exterminate/Massacre/Behead Those Who Insult/Defame/Slander/Ridicule [Insert your religion here]."

And here's a nice quote posted by Kansan Bart Hall on a long, fairly temperate, and sometimes thought-provoking comment thread on Winds of Change about the Cartoon Offensive.

"Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are not sure that we are doubly sure. Fundamentalism is, therefore, inevitable in an age which has destroyed so many certainties by which faith once expressed itself and upon which it relied."

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) [liberal theologian]

Macam-Macam on Cambodia's Photographer of Death

I neglected to link to Macam-Macam's recent post on Nhem En, photographer of death. It starts with a wall of 50 mugshots.

It is a modern tragedy that these photographs are amongst the most famous photos ever taken by a South East Asian - meticulous mug shots of Cambodian prisoners accused of counter-revolutionary crimes by the Khmer Rouge and admitted to S-21, an institution dedicated solely to the incarceration, torture, extraction of "confessions" and documentation of enemies of the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979. Almost all prisoners who passed through S-21 were eventually executed, or "smashed".

The man who took most of these shots is Nhem En, a country boy who joined the Khmer Rouge in 1970, aged only ten. Sent overseas to China to study because of his academic promise, his job as photographer at S-21 started in 1976 when he returned to Cambodia and was sent to Tuol-Sleng, the site of S-21. He was only sixteen at the time.

Read and view the whole thing.

Indonesia's Helsinki Agreement

In August 2005 in Finland, representatives of the Indonesian government and the Free Aceh Movement signed an agreement which sets down the outline of a comprehensive settlement to the Aceh conflict. Until recently, this conflict had appeared close to intractable. Earlier attempts to reach a negotiated settlement between 2000 and 2003 broke down in acrimony and the Indonesian government launched a military offensive, vowing to wipe out the rebels once and for all. Why did the two parties agree to resume talks so soon after the earlier failures? And what are the chances that the peace agreement will hold this time?

Written by a leading expert on the Aceh conflict, this study examines the factors that prompted the belligerents to return to the negotiating table, surveys the course of the negotiations, analyses the deal itself and identifies potential spoilers. It concludes that the Helsinki agreement represents Aceh's best chance for peace since the separatist insurgency began almost thirty years ago. The deal is more comprehensive than earlier agreements and its monitoring provisions are more robust. There is also more good will on both sides, based partly on greater awareness that previous violent strategies had failed. Even so, there are powerful forces opposed to the deal, and backsliding or equivocation on either side could easily prompt a return to violence if implementation is not managed skillfully.

SOURCE: THE HELSINKI AGREEMENT: A More Promising Basis for Peace in Aceh? by Edward Aspinall. Policy Studies 20. Washington, DC: East-West Center Washington, 2005. x, 104 pp. Paper, $10.00.

Meanwhile, Macam-macam reports that Indonesia is not nearly so willing to compromise over 43 West Papuan separatists seeking political asylum in Australia.

Yale Press Website Banned in Thailand

Inside Higher Ed reports that the Thai government is banning internal access to Yale University Press's website.

Thailand takes lèse-majesté seriously — as Yale University Press is finding out.

The Thai government has blocked access in the country to the Yale University Press Web site because it includes information about a forthcoming, critical biography of Thailand’s king. The King Never Smiles: A Biography of Thailand’s Bhumibol Adulyadej is described in Yale publicity materials as the story of “how a king widely seen as beneficent and apolitical could in fact be so deeply political, autocratic, and even brutal.” The author is Paul Handley, a journalist who spent much of his life reporting from Asia, including 13 years in Thailand.

The book is due out this summer — in a year in which Thailand will be celebrating the 60th year of the king’s reign. The book acknowledges his popularity with the Thai people, but — according to the press — “portrays an anti-democratic monarch who, together with allies in big business and the murderous, corrupt Thai military, has protected a centuries-old, barely modified feudal dynasty.”

Well, I for one refuse to believe it until I see actual video on CNN of well-armed bodhisattvas brandishing their weapons, of masked mendicant monks carrying C4 in their begging bowls, of Theravadan thugs in Gitmo-orange robes chanting "Death to Elis" "Hasten the Retrograde Reincarnation of Elis as Flies!"

This illustrates in a small way the fatal weakness of area studies in academia: One can never be too critical of the areas one studies. One must always be their advocate and apologist. Well, except perhaps in American studies.

A Wreath of Herring Tails and Potatoes

The Prussian government appointed [Julius Maximilian] Schottky as a professor of German language and literature at the gymnasium [in Poznan], believing that he would be able to kindle the interest of the restive student body. But his curriculum fell flat in an institution dominated by Polish sympathies, and his lack of pedagogical skill led to chaos in the classroom. [Marceli] Motty was enrolled at the gymnasium at the time and recalls in his memoirs how his fellow students would chatter among themselves, run from bench to bench, and hide behind the furnace while Schottky tried to teach. On one occasion the professor entered a classroom full of uncharacteristically silent students, only to discover that they had placed upon his lectern a herring ringed with potatoes, along with a note that read: "Out of herring tails and potatoes is Schottky's laurel wreath composed." Schottky lasted there just two years....

More typical of Poznan's German intelligentsia in the early nineteenth century was another professor at the local gymnasium, Michael Stotz. Stotz was first hired in 1814 to teach history, geography, and Latin. He served as director of the institution from the 1820s to 1842. Stotz never earned a reputation as a serious scholar or pedagogue. He published little, and, according to Marceli Motty's memoir, when he taught, "the greater part of the hour normally would pass in light banter about the news, recent events inside and outside of school, and historical anecdotes." Despite his shortcomings, Stotz was beloved by his students, Germans and Poles alike. His popularity rested in large part on his appreciation of the region's cultural diversity and his ability to navigate with ease between the German and Polish spheres. In marked contrast to the nationalist focus of Schottky's scholarship, Stotz was, in Motty's words, "utterly indifferent to matters concerning nationality and politics." Although he spoke German at home and socialized mainly with Germans, Stotz was equally at home among the city's Polish majority, leading Motty to conclude that Stotz was "a Pole in spirit and instinct." Like many long-term German residents of the Poznan area, Stotz was a product of the region's cultural blending. In fact, his students used to joke that he would begin every lecture with the phrase: "We Poles, we Germans...."

SOURCE: Religion and the Rise of Nationalism: A Profile of an East-Central European City, by Robert E. Alvis (Syracuse U. Press, 2005), pp. 73, 74

T. G. Ash on the Luck of the Poles

Timothy Garton Ash, who did some of the best reporting (in English) from Poland during the rise of Solidarity and the Götterdämmerung of the Soviet Empire, recently published a catch-up piece in the New York Review of Books.

Peoples can be luckier than people. People are only young once. They seize their chances or miss them; then they grow old and die. Despite the anthropomorphic similes beloved of romantic nationalists—"young Italy," "young Germany"—peoples "live," in some important sense, for centuries, even millennia, sustained by real or imagined continuities of political geography and collective experience. They can be "sick" or "old" for hundreds of years, but then become renewed and youthful.

China today is one example, Spain another, and Poland a third. For two hundred years, from the end of the eighteenth century, when the first Polish rzeczpospolita, or republic (actually an elective monarchy), was divided up like a Christmas turkey between the Prussian, Russian, and Austrian empires, to Poland's achievement of full independence (within very different frontiers) at the end of the twentieth century, the Poles had only two decades of fragile self-rule in a single state— their "second republic," between 1918 and 1939....

Peoples can be luckier than people. But in a given time, what matters most is the happiness of the individual people who make up a given people. Honesty demands a plain acknowledgment that for millions of Polish men and women, especially among the workers, the poor, the old, and those living in the south and east, the years since 1989 have been painful and disappointing. For them, the reality of freedom has proved very different from the dream.

There is, however, another side to the story. One of the unexpected delights of the Solidarity anniversary reunion was to meet not just old friends and acquaintances, but their children —now, like my own, in their early twenties. Back in 1980, my Polish friends and I lived in different worlds. Not just the political possibilities but the life chances, in the broadest sense, of a young Pole were incomparably more limited than those of a young Brit. In the generation of our children, that is no longer true. Today, the life chances of an enterprising young Pole are altogether comparable with those of a young Brit, and by no means only for those from a privileged background, as I see every day among the Polish students and student-workers in Oxford. Something has been won.

via Arts & Letters Daily

Harper Lee, Gregarious?

The New York Times on 30 January reports on Tuscaloosa's equivalent of Groundhog Day.

TUSCALOOSA, Ala., Jan. 27 — Of all the functions at the president's mansion of the University of Alabama here, none has acquired the mystique surrounding a modest annual luncheon attended by high school students from around the state.

They come with cameras dangling on their wrists and dressed, respectfully, as if they were about to issue an insurance policy or anchor the news. An awards ceremony for an essay contest on the subject of "To Kill a Mockingbird," the occasion attracts no actor, politician or music figure. Instead, it draws someone to whom Alabamians collectively attach far more obsession: the author of the book itself, Harper Lee, who lives in the small town of Monroeville, Ala., one of the most reclusive writers in the history of American letters....

The students write with longing for the kind of unmanaged childhood experienced by Jem and Scout Finch in the rural 1930's Alabama of Ms. Lee's rendering. Some tell of the racial tensions they witness in their school cafeterias, others of the regional prejudices they experience at the hands of Northern peers who assume anyone from Alabama must drive a pickup truck or live in a mobile home. In an essay a few years ago one girl likened the trial of the book's Tom Robinson, a black man unjustly accused of raping a white girl, to the 1999 murder of Billy Jack Gaither, a young man living in Sylacauga, killed because he was gay....

Ms. Lee is quick-witted and gregarious. At the ceremony she greeted a server at the mansion whom she remembered from luncheons past. "I went back to my friends and I told everyone that I'd met you," the young woman said. "Nobody believed me. I said, 'Oh, yeah, I did, and she is the nicest, sweetest lady." Ms. Lee looked at her with amused suspicion and started to laugh.

During lunch she reminisced about her old friend Horton Foote, who wrote the screenplay for the acclaimed 1962 film of "To Kill a Mockingbird," starring Gregory Peck. Ms. Lee spent three weeks on the set, she said, and took off when she realized everything would be fine without her.

"I think it is one of the best translations of a book to film ever made," she said. Ms. Lee attended Peck's memorial service in California three years ago. About her friend Mr. Foote, who is 89, she said, "He's become quite amazing looking in old age, like God, but clean-shaven."

When Mr. Carruthers approached and asked why he hadn't received a letter from her in so long — the two have become good friends — she answered that she would get to him "once I finish off all the letters I have to write." Since the release of "Capote," much of her time has been spent writing demurrals to reporters seeking interviews about her life. Someone suggested she come up with a form-letter response to such requests.

What it would say, she joked, "is hell, no."

via Arts & Letters Daily

To my mind, Catherine Keener's Harper Lee character in the film Capote was almost a eulogy to the passing of common sense and the common touch among literary types in our age of celebrity mania.

P.S. I didn't realize Harper Lee was a descendant of Robert E.

The Last Telegrams

Donald Sensing of One Hand Clapping recalls some of the roles that telegrams have played in his blogpost about the demise of Western Union's telegram service. (Wire transfers are now their primary business.)

Cheap long distance telephone service and email did telegrams in. Their passing is the demise of real Americana. For military members telegrams always had a measure of foreboding. In World War II the services notified next of kin of death and serious injuries by sending a telegram. This practice was gradually modified over the years so that by the time of 1991’s Gulf War the Army made death notifications in person but sent telegrams to notify kin of soldiers listed as Very Seriously Injured or Seriously Injured....

It used to be a custom, in the South, anyway, that brides and grooms would send a telegram to their parents the day after their wedding to thank them for the occasion. Sometimes the telegram would be sent from their honeymoon location. Cathy and I sent such a telegram.

I never heard of that custom, but I suppose it makes sense that private telegrams announced only the most important events: weddings and funerals. Be sure to read the first comment to Rev. Sensing's post, about the lengthy telegraph traffic into the town of Bedford, VA, in the wake of D-Day.

The last telegram I can recall sending was in China in 1988, when we sent a message to some fellow teachers from the porcelain-making town of Jingdezhen in Jiangxi Province during our Spring Festival trip to Hangzhou, Nanjing, and Jingdezhen during our year in Zhongshan City, Guangdong Province. I wrote out the short message announcing our arrival date and time into the square blocks of the telegram form and handed it to the clerk. She then translated each Chinese character into its 4-digit telegraph code, charged us a small fee per character, and passed the message on to the stack awaiting the transmission clerk, who must have shown up for work that day because our friends were waiting for us when our train pulled into the station at drab, sooty Jingdezhen, where street vendors hawked porcelain factory seconds.