South Korean "Foreigners of Convenience"

A few days ago, The Marmot's Hole posted a translated summary of a Korean newspaper article about one way that South Korean parents are getting their children into local international schools, which are a conduit to higher education abroad. They purchase foreign residency permits from embassies of Ecuador or Mali in order to qualify their Korea-resident kids as "overseas Koreans" qualified to attend international schools.

In the case of Ecuador, all you need do is visit for a week to qualify, while Mali’s embassy in Japan can issue permanent residency visas. Both options will usually cost you about 30 million won.

As a result, some people estimate that as many as 80% of the kids enrolled in international schools are South Koreans, while the official Ministry of Education figure is 13% because dual citizens and those with official residency overseas are counted as foreigners.

Finland vs. Estonia vis-à-vis Russia

Finland's President Tarja Halonen recently accused Estonia of being "hypersensitive" to Russia and thereby provoking it. David McDuff, a writer and translator who blogs at A Step At a Time, provides some interesting background on Finland's history of severe compromise in its relations with Russia, relations that defined the neologism 'Finlandization'.

I began to visit Finland - exclusively on business connected with literary translation - during the early part of Koivisto’s presidency, and I can still remember the atmosphere that prevailed in the country at the time. While a relative freedom in social, economic and cultural life was noticeable everywhere, so that if one wanted to, one could imagine oneself to be much further West in Europe, in matters that had anything to do with the Soviet Union, a grim, sarcastic silence and unwillingness to discuss Soviet-related issues were the order of the day. While there was certainly more freedom than there was across the water, in Soviet-occupied Estonia, it was impossible to ignore the constraints that existed in Finnish society where Moscow was concerned. Perhaps because most of my activity in Finland was related to literature and translation, I avoided some of the more intense disagreements that could have arisen between my points of view and those of my hosts. My background in Russian studies, and the time I’d spent in Moscow as a post-graduate research student, tended to interfere now and then, however. I can still remember one or two incidents. For example, at that time, Koivisto’s Soviet Union policy included the long-established practice of returning Soviet defectors to the USSR. On a day when an anti-US and anti-Israel demonstration was being held in Helsinki, I happened to have conversation with a Finland-Swedish poet who much later on became a minister in the government of Paavo Lipponen. Incautiously, I mentioned the subject of Jewish refuseniks in the Soviet Union, and asked if Finland would also return them to Russia if they appeared in Finland. This provoked an outburst of violent anger from my interlocutor, and I decided not to raise any more such questions with him or with anyone else I met, as I was in Finland on an official invitation.

Many years later, I read about some of what had really transpired among Finland’s media and opinion-forming circles during the 1960s, 70s and early 80s in Esko Salminen’s Vaikeneva valtiomahti (The Silent Estate?) and felt that most of my suspicions were confirmed. Finlandization and “self-censorship” really were a important part of Finland’s cultural and political identity in those decades after the Second World War. Now the Finnish politician Erkki Aho has reviewed a recent book by the historian and political analyst Juha Seppinen, entitled Neuvostotiedostelu Suomessa 1917-1991 (Soviet Intelligence in Finland 1917-1991) which deals with the subject of Finland’s relations with Russia and the Soviet Union throughout most of the 20th century (I reached the link through Marko Mihkelson’s blog). The book also lists details of the meetings and contacts many Finnish politicians and public figures had with members of the Soviet security and intelligence services.

Perhaps at least part of the root of the problem in Finland can be traced back to the Finnish Civil War of 1918, when the forces of the Social Democrats (referred to as the “Reds”), who were supported by the Bolsheviks in Russia, fought with the troops of the Conservatives (known as the “Whites”), supported by Imperial Germany. The degree to which this conflict permeated virtually all areas of Finnish life cannot be exaggerated. It even affected the most recondite literary circles: the Dadaist poet Gunnar Björling became involved on the White side, and hid a White telegraphist in his basement room in Red-occupied Helsinki throughout the entire four months of the war.

A Step At a Time is a good place to keep up on regional sources on Russia's relations with Chechnya, Georgia, and its Baltic Near Abroad.

Prepositions from Body Parts

About a dozen years ago, I had a chance to review for Oceanic Linguistics an interesting M.A. thesis by John Bowden (now a professor at ANU) that was published under the title, Behind the preposition: Grammaticalisation of locatives in Oceanic languages (Pacific Linguistics, 1992). The thesis was inspired by a 1989 work by Bernd Heine’s on adpositions (prepositions and postpositions) in African languages. Here are few things that struck me.

Heine examined sources for African locatives in five categories, ON, UNDER, IN, FRONT, BACK, to which Bowden added SEA, LAND, and OUT for Oceanic languages. In both Africa and Oceania, body-part nouns provide the most common sources for locatives in the categories ON, IN, FRONT, and BACK, whereas landmark nouns (‘earth’, ‘soil’, ‘shadow’) predominate for UNDER. As might be expected, landmark nouns also predominate for SEA and LAND locatives in Oceania. The exceptional cases are instructive. For instance, in both Africa and Oceania, ‘head’ is the most common source (‘sky’ is next) for ON, while ‘face’ is the most common source for FRONT. But among some quadruped-herding populations in Africa, FRONT derives from ‘head’, while ON derives from ‘back’. Similarly, the directionals SEA(SIDE) and LAND(SIDE) nearly everywhere in Oceania derive from ‘sea, shore’ and ‘land, earth’, respectively. But among the atoll-dwelling Pukapukans and Rarotongans, the opposition comparable to SEA vs. LAND is rendered more like outside (< ‘back’, a body-part term) vs. inside (< IN, a locative reconstructible for Proto-Polynesian). I should add here that this is not only true of atolls. In two coastal languages of New Guinea, Jabêm (listed in Bowden’s sample) and Numbami, the body-part term ‘backside’ also means the outside, seaside, or windward side of an offshore island (Ja. dêmôê, Nu. dume), while ‘inside’ means the lee side facing the mainland (Ja. lêlôm, Nu. awa). Numbami also has three different words for ‘inside’: lalo, awa (< ‘mouth, hole’), and ketu (< ‘egg’). The last shows a semantic extension unattested in Bowden’s sample. The most common sources for IN are (in order): ‘tooth’, ‘belly’, ‘heart’, ‘liver’, ‘bowels’. Among the few verbal sources for Oceanic locatives are ‘precede’ (> FRONT), ‘follow’ (> BACK), and ‘exceed’ (> ON (TOP) or FRONT), none of them very surprising. Bowden alludes to a more interesting development in a footnote: locatives that come full cycle and yield euphemistic terms for body parts (‘down below’, ‘inside’, ‘backside’, etc.).

Another Basho, Another Scandal

Japan's Fall Grand Sumo Basho is underway, and Jack Gallagher, writing in The Japan Times, updates us on the latest scandal to hit the sport.

The resignation of Japan Sumo Association chairman Kitanoumi last Monday was just the latest in a litany of black eyes for sumo.

In fact, the 55-year-old former yokozuna illustrates precisely why sumo is in its current state.

He was the head of the JSA for more than six years, but under his tenure things didn't stay the same, they got progressively worse.

What defies comprehension is his seeming unawareness to what was going on around him and refusal to take responsibility until an incredible amount of harm had been done to sumo's standing with the public.

So clueless was Kitanoumi that he practically had to be strong-armed out the door. It is precisely this kind of stubbornness and arrogance that has brought sumo to this point.

Kitanoumi should have been forced out last year, following the beating death of Tokitaizan, a young wrestler in the Tokitsukaze stable, but passed the buck and continued on.

When Russian wrestler Wakanoho was expelled by the JSA last month following his arrest for possession of marijuana, Kitanoumi again had a chance to take responsibility but refused. It was a pathetic show of power.

Only after the most recent embarrassment, the failure of Russian wrestlers Roho and Hakurozan (a member of Kitanoumi's stable) to pass drug tests administered by the JSA, and prodding from his colleagues, did Kitanoumi finally go.

Gallagher also suggests some innovations that might help revitaize the sport.

• Make better geographic use of the six annual tournaments. Having half of them in Tokyo every year makes no sense at all. Hold one in Sapporo and another in Sendai.

• Change the starting times of the makuuchi bouts. Having them on television between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. each day makes it very difficult for a large number of viewers to see them live. People are either at work, on their way home, or otherwise occupied.

• Establish a marketing department that knows how to do something besides just pick up the phone. Take a page out of the J. League's book and be aggressive. Target youngsters and female fans.

• Archive all of the tournaments' videos on the Internet with commentary in English. With the time difference it is tough for folks outside of Japan to see the bouts live. The one place that sumo has retained its interest is with fans overseas. Give them a better chance to follow the sport and increase the international fan base.

via Japundit's Japan News Junkie

Russians and Georgians in South Bend

The current issue of the NEH journal Humanities has an article about a chain of immigrants from Georgia and Russia, who have formed a vibrant and musically gifted community in South Bend, Indiana. The article is excerpted from a new book, From Artists in Exile: How Refugees from Twentieth Century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts (HarperCollins, 2008), by Joseph I. Horowitz, who received an NEH fellowship for the project. Here are a few paragraphs.

During the first half of the twentieth century—decades of war and revolution—an “intellectual migration” relocated thousands of artists and thinkers to the United States, including some of Europe’s supreme actors, dancers, composers, and filmmakers. For them, America proved to be both a strange and opportune destination. A “foreign homeland” (Thomas Mann), it would frustrate and confuse, yet afford a clarity of understanding unencumbered by native habit and bias. However inadvertently, the condition of cultural exile would promote acute inquiries into the American experience. What impact did these famous newcomers have on American culture, and how did America affect them?...

My close friends happen to include another Soviet defector: the pianist Alexander Toradze. Lexo is Georgian, born in Tblisi in 1952. His father was a leading Georgian composer. His mother was an actress. Groomed by the Soviet system, he entered Tblisi’s central music school at six and first played with orchestra at nine. He proceeded to the Moscow Conservatory at nineteen to study with Yakov Zak—then one of the great names of Russian pianism, after Sviatoslav Richter and Emil Gilels. When Zak proved unsupportive, Toradze left him—for a young Soviet artist, a bold and controversial move—for Boris Zemliansky, then Lev Naumov: intimate and intense relationships. In 1976 he was sent to compete in the Van Cliburn competition in Fort Worth and finished second. A flurry of Western dates ensued, but the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan soured cultural exchange with the United States. He festered. His fees were low. He felt suppressed as a Georgian. He was galled by the company of KGB “interpreters.” In 1977, he ran into Mstislav Rostropovich, a family friend, at a Paris airport. “When you go back, kiss the ground of our country,” Rostropovich told him. “But when are you going to do something?” On tour in Madrid with a Moscow orchestra in 1983, Toradze entered the American Embassy and requested refugee status. Within three months, he began a nine-city American tour with the Los Angeles Philharmonic....

In 1990, he married an American girl, a fledgling pianist from Florida. In 1991, he accepted a piano professorship at Indiana University at South Bend—a place best-known for Notre Dame’s football team. Transplanted to northern Indiana, he proceeded to recreate the intense mentoring environment he had known in Moscow, as well as the communal social life he had known in Tblisi. To date, he has recruited more than seventy gifted young pianists, mainly from Russia and Georgia. They bond as a family, with Lexo the stern or soft surrogate father. They make music and party with indistinguishable relish. Lexo’s big house, on a suburban street without sidewalks, is their headquarters.

via A&L Daily

The New York Times review of the book begins, "It is hard to imagine where American culture would be today without the contributions of Hitler and Stalin ..."

Baseball's 1990s: Steroids and Strike Zones

The latest issue of NINE: A Journal of Baseball and Culture (Project MUSE subscription required) contains an article by Benjamin G. Rader and Kenneth J. Winkle, reexamining the reasons for Baseball’s Great Hitting Barrage of the 1990s (and Beyond).

In an article published in NINE in 2002, we examined what we called “Baseball’s Great Hitting Barrage of the 1990s.” In addition to offering statistical support for the claim that there was an unusual amount of offensive productivity in the 1994 through 1999 seasons, we also considered explanations for why the hitting revolution had occurred. With regard to the latter, we questioned some of the popular theories for the offensive outburst—namely the “juiced-ball” hypothesis, the belief that ballparks were cozier in the late 1990s than they had been earlier, and the role of league expansion in diluting the quality of pitching. But at the same time we lent support to the arguments that lighter bats, physically stronger hitters, and a new style of hitting (with the assistance of a smaller de facto strike zone) contributed significantly to the great hitting barrage of the late 1990s.

Now is an especially opportune time to reexamine and update our earlier findings. Not only do we presently enjoy the benefit of a longer historical perspective on the 1990s, but we are also able to extend our analysis from the 2000 through the 2007 seasons. Furthermore, recent disclosures of the widespread use of performance-enhancing drugs by the players and Major League Baseball’s implementation of a drug-testing program in 2003 make it possible to employ statistics to better speculate about the effects of drugs on the great offensive barrage. Equally important to a reconsideration of the recent offensive outburst was the decision of Major League Baseball (beginning in 2001) to enlarge the de facto strike zone, determined by the umpires, and impose a more uniform strike zone on the umpires.

We reach three major conclusions. First, the great hitting barrage peaked during the 1999 and 2000 seasons. While remaining far above the two-divisional era in offensive productivity, the 2001 through 2007 seasons fell below the peak achieved in 1999 and 2000. Based on batting averages, runs per game, home runs per game, and on-base percentage plus slugging percentage, we posit three eras of offense in recent baseball history: (1) the two-divisional era of low productivity (1969–1993), (2) the great offensive barrage (1994–2000 seasons), and (3) the new equilibrium (2001–2007 seasons). Second, while it is impossible to offer quantifiably direct evidence of the relationship between drug use and the offensive explosion, we conclude that player use of performance-enhancing drugs did contribute to the hitting barrage. As the threat of exposure and then drug testing increased, some measures of offensive productivity began to decline, though not approaching the depths of the two-divisional era. Third, it is possible to offer more quantifiably direct evidence of the relationship between the strike zone and the offensive explosion than it is the relationship between drugs and offense. We conclude that the size of the de facto strike zone was an equal, and perhaps even more important, variable in explaining the hitting revolution as well as its modest decline after the 2000 season. When Major League Baseball decided to try to impose a more uniform strike zone on the umpires in the 2001 season, seasonal batting averages and runs per game (but not home runs) fell, though not back to earlier levels.

The same issue also contains a poem by Mary Herbert that Language Hat is sure to appreciate, Only Peggy Lee Could Sing of My Mets Misery.

The Jackie Robinson of 1905?

Ten years ago in Harvard Magazine, Karl Lindholm briefly profiled Harvard graduate William Clarence Matthews, who some people at the time thought might be capable of breaking the color barrier in professional baseball by playing with the Boston Nationals.

Born in Selma, Alabama, and trained at Tuskegee Institute from 1893 to 1897, Matthews was a promising student and outstanding athlete who was sent north for further education, first to Phillips Andover and then to Harvard. From 1901 to 1905, he played shortstop on perhaps the best college team in the country (75 wins, 18 losses in his four years) at a time when baseball enjoyed singular appeal in the United States. It was not uncommon for players to walk off a college campus onto a major-league diamond: Christy Matthewson left Bucknell for John McGraw's Giants, and two of Matthews's teammates, Walter Clarkson and "Harvard Eddie" Grant, went on to play in the big leagues....

Unlike many other black players, he had options off the diamond. He had taken courses at Harvard Law School as a senior; now he earned an LL.B. at Boston University while working as an athletic instructor at Boston high schools. He passed the bar in 1908 and embarked on a legal and political career; in 1913, with the help of Booker T. Washington, he was appointed special assistant to the U.S. district attorney in Boston. From 1920 to 1923, he served as legal counsel to the black separatist Marcus Garvey.

Even while working with Garvey, he remained involved in Republican politics, and he played a major role in the 1924 presidential campaign. When Calvin Coolidge was elected with the help of a million black votes, Matthews was rewarded with a post in the Justice Department--but a list of "demands" for the "recognition of colored Republicans" that he presented to party leaders was ignored. Whatever else he might have accomplished was thwarted when he died of a perforated ulcer at 51. His death was reported in all the major East Coast newspapers: the Boston Globe called him "one of the most prominent Negro members of the bar in America." The black press ran front-page headlines.

Matthews said in 1905, "A Negro is just as good as a white man and has just as much right to play ball."

Now, ten years later, Karl Lindholm has published a fuller analysis of the public speculation at the time in the latest issue of NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture (Project MUSE subscription required). His article title, Rumors and Facts: William Clarence Matthews’s 1905 Challenge to Major League Baseball’s Color Barrier, indicates that the newspapers of that era, in particular the Boston Traveler, were often no more reliable than those of our day.

Rumors sometimes have a basis in fact, and sometimes rumors are pure fiction, made up, irresponsible, serving commercial, political, or personal ends. In 1905, one of baseball’s most compelling rumors involved the imminent entry into the major leagues of William Clarence Matthews, “Harvard’s famous colored shortstop.” This rumor, reported in the Boston Traveler in July 1905, was repeated in Sol White’s History of Colored Baseball (1907) and passed on to contemporary audiences by Robert Peterson in his seminal Only the Ball was White (1970).

There are inevitable questions about the rumor’s veracity. Is it possible that forty years before Jackie Robinson signed a contract with Brooklyn, someone in organized baseball was seriously considering adding a black man to a major league roster?

This essay addresses that question by examining the major players—the Boston Nationals’ player-manager Fred Tenney in particular—as well as the primary documents associated with the rumor of Matthews’s breakthrough, demonstrating the reasons Matthews might plausibly be considered for this role, while also raising the possibility that the Traveler conjured a patently false story in Boston’s overheated journalistic environment during the first decade of the twentieth century.

What China Taught India, 1962

From India: The Rise of an Asian Giant, by Dietmar Rothermund (Yale U. Press, 2008), pp. 46-48:

The big blow to [Afro-Asian] solidarity came in 1962 when China invaded India in order to settle a border dispute. Nehru had assumed that China was an anti-imperialist power just like India and that such powers would live in peace with each other. Moreover, he had supported China's control over Tibet, which was supposed to be an autonomous region. Unfortunately, he had failed to get from China a definitive statement concerning the India-China border in return for this support. The treaty which Nehru concluded with China in 1954 only mentioned some passes through which the trade between the two countries might flow. It also contained the five principles (panchshila) relating to mutual benefit and non-interference in each other's internal affairs which Nehru henceforth regarded as the cornerstone of his foreign policy. However, none of this could prevent a clash with China. In 1959, the Dalai Lama, Tibet's priestly ruler, fled to India and Nehru granted asylum to him but did not permit him to establish a Tibetan government in exile. In the following months border clashes increased and notes were exchanged which Nehru did not publish until he was forced to do so by the Indian parliament. In 1961, the Chinese Prime Minister Chou En-lai visited India for border negotiations. Nehru had collected all relevant maps and was surprised that Chou En-lai did not wish to look at them but immediately proposed a deal: China would recognize India's eastern border as delineated by the McMahon Line of 1914 if India would leave the Karakoram Pass and Aksai Chin (northeast Kashmir) to China. China had secretly occupied most of Aksai Chin in the 1950s, so India would simply have to acquiesce in this loss. The access to the Karakoram highway was of great strategic importance to China for the control of its western provinces. However, Nehru as head of a democratic government could not deal with national territory as easily as Chou En-lai had expected. The deal was not accepted and border clashes continued. Finally, China forced the deal on an unwilling India by means of a well-planned military offensive. When the USA and the Soviet Union were busy with the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, a division of Chinese troops crossed the McMahon Line in the east and soon reached the Assamese plains. But this was a diversionary move. These troops withdrew before their supply lines could be cut. In the meantime the Chinese also launched a massive offensive in the west to capture the Karakorum highway – and they did not withdraw as this was the area which really interested them. Subsequently, there was a conspiracy of silence between India and China as to what had happened there. India was not willing to admit its losses and China would not reveal its illegitimate gains. China has adopted an attitude of superiority ever since and sometimes this has even been expressed quite openly. When China invaded Vietnam in 1979, Deng Xiao-ping compared this to what China had done to India in 1962. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who visited China at that time as India's Minister of External Affairs in order to 'normalize' relations with China, got this message and immediately returned home. 'Normalization' had to wait for a long time.

The clash between India and China had sounded the death knell of Afro-Asian Solidarity even before 1962, but anti-colonial solidarity still motivated Nehru, who was sensitive to appeals from leaders of countries which were involved in their freedom struggle. In September 1961, Kenneth Kaunda, the future President of Zambia who had attended the Belgrade Conference of the Nonaligned Nations, visited New Delhi and gave a lecture in which he blamed Nehru for tolerating Portuguese colonial rule in Goa. He argued that rather than setting an encouraging example which the Africans could follow Nehru obviously wanted to wait until the Africans had overcome Portuguese colonial rule, whereupon Goa would then fall into his lap like a ripe fruit. Kaunda was clearly quite right in assessing Nehru's motives and his speech stung him into action. Goa was liberated by the Indian army in December 1961; it proved to be a walkover but this could not have been predicted. As a member of NATO, Portugal was well armed and had a strong garrison in Goa. It could also rely on support from Pakistan. If the Portuguese Governor-General had decided to defend Goa seriously, the liberation could have ended in a bloodbath. Fortunately, he only blew up a few bridges and surrendered gracefully as he was aware of the far superior power of the Indian army. This was Nehru's last great triumph, but he experienced it with mixed feelings. He lost his reputation as an apostle of peace and was berated by every Western power. This he could live with, but the humiliating defeat he suffered at the hands of the Chinese in 1962 broke his heart. He must have felt very deeply that he had failed as architect of India's foreign policy.

Nehru's successors adopted a more realistic approach: India's regional position was more important to them than its role in world affairs. The twin challenges of China and Pakistan converted India with a vengeance into a self-conscious territorial state concerned with its defence. A retired Indian general had once said that the colonial legacy of a huge army embarrassed India's political leaders as much as inheriting a brewery would embarrass a teetotaller. Nehru did not invest much money in armaments; however, this changed after India's defeat by the Chinese in 1962. Defence expenditure was stepped up, which alarmed Pakistan. The Chinese had shown that India could be beaten and had thus set Pakistan an example, but due to India's rapid armament, the window of opportunity for Pakistan seemed to be closing fast. Pakistan's military dictator Ayub Khan was pushed by his young Foreign Minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, to attack India in Kashmir. Bhutto had forged a military alliance with China in 1963 and Pakistan had yielded a large part of territory to the west of the Karakoram Pass to China at that time. Nehru's successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri, was considered weak and inexperienced. Pakistan tested his reaction to a border intrusion in the Rann of Katch in the summer of 1965. Shastri requested the then British Prime Minister Harold Wilson to arbitrate in this matter, which only served to encourage Ayub Khan to launch his Operation Grand Slam in September 1965 and he sent his tanks to cut the only connection between India and Kashmir. If Shastri had again called for arbitration, Ayub Khan could have finished his business in Kashmir and then negotiated from a position of strength. But this time Shastri ordered his troops to launch a counter-attack on Lahore. He also refused to listen to a Chinese ultimatum which referred to their threat to cross the border of Sikkim. Pakistan had hoped that China would open a second front in the east, but the Chinese did not follow up their ultimatum and bitterly disappointed their Pakistani allies. China had encouraged Pakistan in the hope that it would do some damage to India, but it was not interested in investing anything in this war as it had reached its aims in 1962. The same Chinese stratagem was repeated in 1971 when Pakistan lost its eastern half and the Chinese supported Pakistan, but did not give the Pakistanis help when they needed it.

Registan's Foust on Citizen Propagandists

I've been distracted by other projects lately (no, not watching the major-party infomercials in the U.S.) and by reading hard-to-blog chapters in books (but a good long excerpt will follow), so I've neglected to post a link to a blogpost by Joshua Foust on Registan (the first blog to link to mine, back in 2003) about the rise of citizen propagandists. I'll cite just one paragraph from the full article, which is online at Columbia Journalism Review.

Non-official propaganda matters greatly, because while most bloggers issued shallow and predictable jeremiads about either the horrors of the “new Cold War” or the horrors of American-supported client states, there were some out there who were largely getting things right. Unfortunately, these sober voices were often drowned out by the overwhelming amount of citizen propagandists flooding the blogosphere. Nevertheless, they bear mentioning.

Foust's article concerns the role of citizen propagandists in the current war between Russia and Georgia, since Registan's regional focus is the Russian Near Abroad in Central Asia. But Foust's thesis also applies to political blog spinmeisters, comment-thread propagators, and the lazy professional journalists who rely on their favorite blogs both to determine the newsworthiness and to frame the narratives of the "news" stories they bother to report (or not).

Wordcatcher Tales: girmitya, kala pani

From India: The Rise of an Asian Giant, by Dietmar Rothermund (Yale U. Press, 2008), p. 1:

India is a state encompassing a civilization. It includes a multitude of ethnic and linguistic groups which share a common cultural background. Its historical continuity is amazing.... In the recent past India has also become a territorial nation state with defined borders and institutions guarding its territorial integrity. The idea of a clearly delineated territoriality was not prevalent in India in earlier times. The Himalayas in the north and the ocean encircling the country appeared to those living inside it as 'natural' boundaries. In fact the mountain people never conceived of the Himalayas as a boundary and they 'transgressed' it in many ways. Many of the coastal people, on the other hand, participated throughout the ages in maritime trade. The orthodox prejudice against crossing the kala pani (black water) was not shared by them. This aversion to seafaring was a relatively late phenomenon in an era when people in India became more introverted and defensive.

The awareness of the 'natural' boundaries of India did not imply a feeling of national identity in territorial terms. Nationalism first found expression among educated people and did not affect the common people for along time. The poor people from northern India who were transported to Fiji as indentured servants to work on the sugar plantations did not refer to themselves as 'Indians' but as girmityas. The word girmit was a Hindi neologism derived from 'agreement', the document which bound them to their servitude. Their identity was derived from this common fate. It was only later when emissaries of Mahatma Gandhi reached Fiji that these girmityas became Indians.

End of the Americo-Liberian Aristocracy, 1980

From The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence, by Martin Meredith (PublicAffairs, 2005), pp. 545-548:

In his book Journey Without Maps, an account of his travels in Liberia in the 1930s, the English writer Graham Greene recorded that 'Liberian politics were like a crap game played with loaded dice'. It was a game that Liberia's ruling elite – the descendants of some 300 black settler families from the United States who set up an independent republic in 1847 – played among themselves with considerable relish. For more than 100 years – from 1877 to 1980 – Liberia was governed under a one-party system in which the same party, the True Whig Party, controlled by the same elite group, held office continuously, dispensing patronage, deciding on public appointments and retaining a monopoly on power – a record equalled by no other political party anywhere in the world. Elections were nevertheless taken seriously, if only to determine which family – the Barclays, the Kings, the Tubmans – emerged on top. 'The curious thing about a Liberian election campaign,' wrote Greene, 'is that, although the result is always a foregone conclusion, everyone behaves as if the votes and the speeches and the pamphlets matter.' However, he added, the system was more complicated than it seemed. 'It may be all a question of cash and printing presses and armed police, but things have to be done with an air. Crudity as far as possible is avoided.'

As members of a ruling aristocracy, the Americo-Liberians, as they called themselves, were immensely proud of their American heritage. They developed a lifestyle reminiscent of the antebellum South, complete with top hats and morning coats and masonic lodges. They built houses with pillared porches, gabled roofs and dormer windows resembling the nineteenth-century architectural styles of Georgia, Maryland and the Carolinas. They chose as a national flag a replica of the American Stars and Stripes, with a single star, and used the American dollar as legal tender.

Just like white settlers in Africa, the Americo-Liberians constructed a colonial system subjugating the indigenous population to rigid control and concentrating wealth and privilege in their own hands. Despite their origins as descendants of slaves from the Deep South, they regarded black Liberians as an inferior race, fit only for exploitation. The nadir of Americo-Liberian rule came in 1931 when an international commission found senior government officials guilty of involvement in organised slavery.

When other West African states shed colonial rule in the 1960s, the Liberian system stayed much the same. Liberian law stipulated that only property owners were entitled to the vote, so the vast majority of indigenous Africans were effectively left without one. Small numbers were assimilated into the ranks of the ruling elite: 'country boys' adopted by coastal families; girls selected as wives or concubines; ambitious 'hinterlanders' climbing the ladder. During the 1970s a few were co-opted into government. Local administration in the 'hinterland' was largely run by indigenous officials. But essentially Liberia remained an oligarchy where 1 per cent of the population controlled the rest – some 2 million people.

The last of the line of Americo-Liberian presidents was William Tolbert, the grandson of freed South Carolina slaves who had served as vice-president for twenty years. A Baptist minister, he attempted a series of cautious reforms, abandoning the top hat and tail-coat traditions favoured by his predecessor, William Tubman, selling the presidential yacht and abolishing a compulsory 'tithe' of 10 per cent of every government employee's salary that went to the True Whig Party. But much of Tolbert's efforts were also devoted to amassing a personal fortune and promoting the interests of family members in the traditional manner. One brother was appointed minister of finance; another was chosen as president of the senate; a son-in-law served as minister of defence; other relatives filled posts as ministers, ambassadors and presidential aides. The crap game of Liberian politics was as highly profitable in the 1970s as in the 1930s.

Economic development in the 1960s and 1970s helped underpin the system, as well as provide new opportunities for the elite's self-enrichment. The mainstay of the economy had initially been rubber. In 1926 the Firestone Tyre and Rubber Company leased a million acres for ninety-nine years at six cents an acre to meet the American demand for car tyres. But iron ore exports from massive, high-grade deposits in the Bomi hills then overtook rubber as the major source of foreign investment and government income. By 1970 Firestone and the Liberian Iron Mining Company were providing the government with 50 per cent of greatly increased revenues. A third source of income came from registration fees from the world's largest ghost fleet of ships: Liberia possessed only two ships of its own, but allowed more than 2,500 vessels plying the seas to fly Liberia's flag of convenience without the bother of inspection, for a suitable fee.

Liberia 's economic advances, however, served only to highlight the growing disparity between the ostentatious lifestyle of the rich elite and the overwhelming majority of impoverished tribal Africans. In 1979 – the same year that Tolbert spent an amount equivalent to half the national budget while acting as host to an OAU heads of state conference – demonstrators took to the streets in protest against a 50 per cent increase in the price of rice, the staple food of most Liberians. The price increase had been authorised by Tolbert in the hope of encouraging local production. But since one of the chief beneficiaries was the president's cousin, Daniel Tolbert, who owned the country's largest rice-importing firm, it was seen as another move to enrich the elite. On Tolbert's orders armed police and troops opened fire on the demonstrators, killing dozens of them.

In the following months Tolbert struggled to contain a rising tide of discontent, colliding not just with the poor but with a new generation of the educated elite. He allowed the formation of an opposition party, but when opposition politicians called for a general strike, he had them arrested on charges of treason and sedition and banned the party.

On the night of 12 April 1980 a group of seventeen dissident soldiers led by a 28-year-old master sergeant named Samuel Doe, scaled the iron gate of the president's seven-storey Executive Mansion, overpowered the guards and found Tolbert in his pyjamas in an upstairs bedroom. They fired three bullets into his head, gouged out his right eye and disembowelled him. His body was dumped in a mass grave along with twenty-seven others who died defending the palace. Ministers and officials were rounded up, taken before a military tribunal and sentenced to death.

Amid much jubilation, watched by a crowd of thousands laughing and jeering and filmed by camera crews, thirteen high-ranking officials were tied to telephone poles on a beach in Monrovia and executed by a squad of drunken soldiers, firing volley after volley at them. A great shout arose from the mob. 'Freedom! We got our freedom at last!' The soldiers rushed forward to kick and pummel the corpses.

Thus the old order ended.

Thus begins the chapter entitled "Blood Diamonds," in which the barbarism only gets worse and worse. Few societies have solved the problem of how to overthrow recalcitrant aristocrats without descending into a period of barbarism that only serves to unduly enhance nostalgia for prerevolutionary times, as Theodore Dalrymple observes in his retrospective on Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

The Russian satirical writer Vladimir Voinovich satirized Solzhenitsyn’s Russian nationalism by depicting someone resembling him having his employees flogged in Vermont. This satirical scene, in fact, made a profound criticism of Solzhenitsyn’s political thought. Voinovich was alluding to the fact that, were it not for the horrors of Bolshevism, the pre-revolutionary Russian political tradition would be regarded as so brutal that no sensitive person of good will could be a Russian nationalist. As it was, the Bolsheviks regularly killed in a few minutes more people than the Romanovs managed in a century, giving pre-revolutionary Russian history the retrospective luster of decency, wisdom, and compassion that it did not in the least deserve. For Voinovich—and the distinguished historian of Russia Richard Pipes—Leninism had its roots in the Russian tradition as well as the Marxist one. This meant that Solzhenitsyn, while absolutely right in his uncompromising attitude to Marxist-Leninism and all its works, belonged in the category of Dostoevsky: a brilliant seer who would nevertheless have made a very bad guide.

Religion and Romania's Iron Guard

From Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to the War on Terror, by Michael Burleigh (HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 270-271:

Few European Fascist movements went so far as to proclaim that 'God is a Fascist!' or that 'the ultimate goal of the Nation must be resurrection in Christ!' Romania was the exception. Romanian Fascists wanted 'a Romania in delirium' and they largely got one. The Legion of the Archangel Michael was founded in 1927 in honour of the archangel, who had allegedly visited Corneliu Codreanu, its chief ideologist, while he was in prison. It was the only European Fascist movement with religion (in this case Romanian Orthodoxy) at its core. In 1930 the Legion was renamed the Iron Guard. While rivalling only the Nazis in the ferocity of their hatred of Jews, these Romanian Fascists were sui generis in their fusion of political militancy with Orthodox mysticism into a truly lethal whole. One of the Legion's intellectual luminaries, the world-renowned anthropologist Mircea Eliade, described the legionary ideal as 'a harsh Christian spirituality'. Its four commandments were 'belief in God; faith in our mission; love for one another; son'. The goal of a 'new moral man' may have been a totalitarian commonplace, but the 'resurrection of the [Romanian] people in front of God's throne' was not routine in such circles. But then few European Fascists were inducted into an elite called the Brotherhood of Christ by sipping from a communal cup of blood filled from slashes in their own arms, or went around with little bags of soil tied around their necks. Nor did they do frenzied dances after chopping opponents into hundreds of pieces. Not for nothing was the prison massacre of Iron Guard leaders – including the captain Codreanu himself – by supporters of King Carol II known to local wits as 'the Night of the Vampires'. Although the Romanian elites emasculated the Guard's leadership, much of their furious potential was at that elite's disposal.

Hitler's conquests in western Europe in 1940 led Carol II to abandon his country's alignment with Britain and to seek a role for Romania within the all-conquering German 'new order'. That June, the Soviet Union took Bessarabia and Bukovina under the terms of the deal it had struck with Hitler. Three million Romanian Orthodox Christians languished under an alien and atheist regime, a state of affairs that outraged opinion in the Old Kingdom. In September 1940 Carol invited the military strongman, General Ion Antonescu, to form a government, which within a month deposed the king in favour of his son prince Michael, who is still the claimant to the throne of Romania. Because, like Franco, Antonescu lacked a political base, he revived the Legion so as to provide a basis for what became the 'National Legionnaire State'. The Iron Guard leader, Horia Sima, became vice-premier, and the Guard gained five ministerial portfolios. For the ensuing five months the Guard attempted a stealthy coup from within, even as their corruption and violence created chaos. Since sections of the Nazi leadership favoured the Guard, the wily Antonescu knew where to turn.

In January 1941, Antonescu flew to Germany for a meeting with Hitler , whose troops were massing in Romania for the projected invasion of the Soviet Union. The strong personal rapport between these two implacable haters of the Jews enabled Antonescu to provoke and crush a revolt by the Guard after he returned home; nine thousand were detained and eighteen hundred sentenced to imprisonment. The Guard was proscribed and the Legionnaire State abandoned. Antonescu assumed the title of 'conducator' used by the murdered Codreanu, while his son Mihai became vice-premier of a government largely consisting of antisemites of the National Christian Party, for in this respect the old elites were no different from the Fascists. Acting reflexively in its search for someone to blame, the Guard carried out a pogrom in Bucharest, killing 630 Jews, some of whose corpses hung in the capital's slaughterhouse as 'kosher meat'.

In 1983-84, we lived in an apartment at the north end of Parcul Tineretului within easy walking distance of both the main slaughterhouse and the main crematorium, the latter surrounded by huge cemeteries, including Cimitirul Israelit. (The crematorium features in Saul Bellow's novel The Dean's December, which we read that year.) Here's my translation of the paragraph on the history of the crematorium at the link above:

The crematorium "Cenusa" ['Ash'] is one of the few monuments in Bucharest that is closely tied to the recent history of Romania. The first person incinerated here after its inauguration in 1928 was Profira Fieraru, a woman who died at the age of 40. The opening of the crematorium was the subject of controversy between church and state, leading to discussion of the legitimacy of the burning of cadavers from the point of view of religious doctrine. Among those said to have been cremated in "Cenusa" are General Antonescu, several legionnaires from the interwar period, and Ana Pauker from the communist period. At the Revolution of 1989, those 43 people killed at Timisoara were brought to the crematorium and incinerated, but their ashes were thrown away.

India's Rise: Sick Mills vs. Powerlooms

From India: The Rise of an Asian Giant, by Dietmar Rothermund (Yale U. Press, 2008), pp. 88-89:

In the years of the Great Depression, the Indian textile industry was partially protected under the regime of imperial preference, Production for the home market expanded, but there was hardly any investment in new machinery. Moreover, India had no textile machine industry of its own. During the Second World War, no machinery could be imported, but the mills worked around the clock under the regime of government procurement. By the end of the war, spindles and looms were worn out and mill-owners would have liked to have invested in new machinery. However, foreign exchange was scarce as India had no immediate access to its reserves accumulated in the Bank of England. At this stage something happened which had terrible consequences for the future of the Indian textile industry. Mahatma Gandhi had compelled the Indian government to abolish the food-grain controls introduced during the war. Prices fell after the controls had been abolished – as Gandhi had predicted. His followers then tried to apply the same rule to cotton texiles, which had also been subjected to controls. The mill-owners warned the government that they would not be able to cope with the rising demand with their decrepit looms. Nevertheless, the controls were abolished and prices rose. Controls were then re-imposed in August 1948. At the same time positive discrimination in favour of the products of handloom weavers was introduced. These weavers were dear to Gandhi as he regarded them as the paragon of the type of cottage industry which he preferred to the mills. The well-meaning protectors of the handloom weavers did not notice that these weavers had to a large extent been replaced by powerloom weavers, whose rise will be described below. The mills were now prevented from modernizing their equipment and expanding their production. They were turned into living fossils. The mill-owners continued production half-heartedly. There seemed no longer to be any future for this industry. Some mills were closed down as early as the 1950s and 1960s. To make matters worse, a prolonged strike of textile labour in Mumbai in the 1980s sounded the death knell for the industry in this metropolis.

It was quite natural that textile labour should be frustrated under these conditions, but resorting to a strike in an industry which was already doomed proved to be counterproductive. The workers turned to Dr Datta Samant, an independent labour leader who had organized a very succesful strike for the workers of the Premier automobile factory in Mumbai. This strike ended with a substantial increase in wages, which were tied to a productivity index. Samant was a medical doctor who knew nothing about economics and thought that his recipe would work in the textile industry just as it had done in the automobile industry. He was a charismatic leader and inspired the workers to continue their strike, which started in 1982, for eighteen months. (His life ended tragically when he was openly gunned down by gangsters in 1997.) The result of the strike which he had led was perverse: the workers shifted to the powerlooms in order to earn a living and the mill-owners procured cloth from these power looms and marketed it. By the time the strike ended the powerlooms had taken over most of the production and the mills were 'sick'.

The phenomenon of a 'sick mill' can only be understood in the Indian context. Elsewhere a sick mill would go bankrupt and close down. In India, however, where there are no unemployment benefits, laid-off workers are politically dangerous and therefore the government will nurse sick mills to keep them alive even if they cease to produce anything. The mill-owners soon learned to make a profit out of being sick. The Reserve Bank of India sanctioned favourable loans for such sick mills. Clever manipulators could siphon off enough money from such loans and use it for other purposes. The production of mill-made cloth declined steeply under such conditions, from about 3.4 to 2 billion metres in the decade of the 1980s. In the same period the production of powerlooms increased from 5 to 11.4 billion metres.

African-Soviet Parallels before and after 1989

From The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence, by Martin Meredith (PublicAffairs, 2005), pp. 378-379, 385-387:

By the end of the 1980s, not a single African head of state in three decades had allowed himself to be voted out of office. Of some 150 heads of state who had trodden the African stage, only six had voluntarily relinquished power. They included Senegal's Léopold Senghor, after twenty years in office; Cameroon's Ahmadu Ahidjo, after twenty-two years in office; and Tanzania's Julius Nyerere, after twenty-three years in office....

Out of a list of fifty African countries in 1989, almost all were one-party states or military dictatorships. Opposition parties were illegal in thirty-two states. Elections, when held, served mainly to confirm the incumbent president and his party in power. In twenty-nine countries, over the course of 150 elections held between 1960 and 1989, opposition parties were never allowed to win a single seat. Only three countries – Senegal, the tiny state of Gambia and Botswana – sustained multi-party politics, holding elections on a regular basis that were considered reasonably free and fair. Botswana, in particular, stood out as an example of a liberal democracy, tolerant of opposition activity, where the rule of law was held in respect and where economic development proceeded apace.

Yet a new wind of change was stirring across Africa. It was driven in part by widespread discontent with the corruption, incompetence and stifling oppression of Big Man rule, in part by resentment over rising unemployment, falling living standards and austerity measures that African governments were forced to implement in return for international assistance. Students were at the forefront of a wave of protests that erupted in one country after another, but other urban groups – businessmen, professionals, churchmen, labour unions and civil servants – soon joined in, demanding not just redress of economic grievances but political reform.

Events abroad, in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, affected the clamour for change. From the mid-1980s, as a result of Mikhail Gorbachev's 'new thinking', the Soviet Union began to retreat from Africa, no longer willing or able to sustain client states that had relied upon Soviet largesse for survival. With the demise of Marxism-Leninism in Europe came its demise in Africa. When Ethiopia's Mengistu went to Moscow in 1988 to ask for more military hardware, Gorbachev turned him down, telling him he needed to reach a negotiated settlement to the wars in Eritrea and Tigray. Having lost Soviet sponsorship and confronted by rebel advances, Mengistu renounced Marxism-Leninism and embraced the idea of a multi-party system in the hope of avoiding defeat at the hands of the rebels. The outbreak of mass street demonstrations in Eastern Europe starting in the spring of 1989 and culminating in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the departure of European dictators like Ceausescu in Romania and Honecker in East Germany provided potent examples of what 'people's power' could achieve. One-party regimes now looked outmoded, in Africa as much as in Europe. Even Julius Nyerere, the most articulate spokesman for one-party systems in Africa, felt obliged to modify his support. 'To view a one-party system in almost religious terms is wrong; he said in February 1990 after visiting Leipzig in East Germany. 'We Tanzanians have one party as a historical necessity. But this is not a kind of divine decree. It is not proper to treat a person who floats the idea of a multi-party system as someone who has committed treason.'

The end of the Cold War, moreover, changed the West's attitudes towards Africa. Western governments no longer had strategic interests in propping up repressive regimes merely because they were friendly to the West. Along with the World Bank, they concluded that one-party regimes lacking popular participation constituted a serious hindrance to economic development and placed new emphasis on the need for democratic reform.

In June 1990 Britain declared that the distribution of its aid programme would henceforth favour countries 'tending towards pluralism, public accountability, respect for the rule of law, human rights and market principles'. At a Franco-African summit at La Baule in June 1990, attended by thirty-three African delegations, twenty-two of which were led by heads of state, President Mitterrand stated that French aid would be dependent on efforts towards liberalisation. He warned: 'French eagerness to offer development aid is bound to cool off in the case of authoritarian regimes which fail to heed the need for democratisation while regimes prepared to embark on the courageous path of democracy will continue to have our enthusiastic support.'

Previously, Franco-African summits had been known as lavish, back-slapping family gatherings, full of empty talk.

It seems clear in retrospect that Soviet models of governance and Soviet models of "development" were just as effective in strangling civil society and hollowing out the private sector in postcolonial Africa as they were in the ostensibly postimperial Soviet Union, leaving failed states awash in Kalashnikovs and ruled by gangsters to deal with the new expectations, dilapidated infrastructure, and diminished foreign subsidies of the 1990s, during which Africa experienced more than its share of Bosnias and Chechnyas (though with less artillery and more machetes than in their northern counterparts).

Tanzania's Economic Breakdown, 1970s

From The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence, by Martin Meredith (PublicAffairs, 2005), pp. 256-259:

The disruption caused by the 'villagisation' programme nearly led to catastrophe. Food production fell drastically, raising the spectre of widespread famine. Between 1974 and 1977 the deficit recorded in cereals was more than 1 million tons. Drought compounded the problem. The shortfall was made up with imports of food, but the country's foreign exchange reserves were soon exhausted. In 1975 the government had to be rescued by grants, loans and special facilities arranged with the assistance of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and by more than 200,000 tons of food aid. Far from helping Tanzania to become more self-reliant and to reduce its dependence on the international market economy, Nyerere's ujamaa programme made it dependent for survival on foreign handouts. Nor did the idea of communal farming take root. Although by 1979 some 90 per cent of the peasantry had been moved into ujamaa villages, a mere 5 per cent of agricultural output came from communal plots.

Other aspects of Nyerere's socialist strategy were no more successful. His programme of state control spawned a multitude of state corporations that were inefficient, incompetently managed, overstaffed and mired in debt. By 1979 some three hundred parastatal organisations had been set up – state industries, state banks, state farms, state marketing boards, state shops. They were controlled by managers who acted more like bureaucrats than businessmen and ran their domains as civil service bureaucracies, exercising considerable patronage. Workers came to regard their jobs as guaranteed by the socialist state. In a candid speech in 1977 entitled 'The Arusha Declaration Ten Years After', Nyerere complained bitterly of the inefficiency, indifference and laziness of managers and workers in state-run enterprises. 'It is essential that we should tighten up on industrial discipline. Slackness at work, and failure to give a hard day's effort in return for wages paid, is a form of exploitation; it is an exploitation of the other members of society. And slackness has undoubtedly increased since the Arusha Declaration was passed.'

But state enterprises continued to operate in the same manner, incurring huge losses. Among the most notorious were ten state-owned crop authorities. The pyrethrum board, for example, spent more on its administrative costs in 1980 than the total value of the crop it purchased; the sisal board's overheads in 1980 were higher than the amount Tanzania earned from exporting sisal. Farmers meanwhile were offered inadequate prices and faced long delays in payment, sometimes lasting up to one year, and eventually they resorted to using the black market or growing subsistence food. The production of export crops like sisal, cashew nuts and pyrethrum fell drastically in the 1970s.

By the end of the 1970s Tanzania was in dire straits. Its trade deficit was widening all the time: in 1980 exports covered only 40 per cent of the value of imports; its foreign debt had soared. With sharp increases in world oil prices, its terms of trade were constantly deteriorating. Oil imports, which used only 10 per cent of the value of exports in 1972, took 60 per cent in 1980; a ton of exported tea in 1970 bought 60 barrels of oil, but in 1980 only 4.5 barrels. The shortage of foreign currency hampered the running of factories and farms. For want of spare parts and materials, machinery and trucks were idle. Inflation and drought added to the toll. A shortage of basic commodities like soap, sugar and cooking oil and other consumer goods produced black markets, petty corruption and smuggling – magendo, as it was called. Manufacturing output in 1980 was reduced to less than one-third of capacity. Agriculture declined by 10 per cent between 1979 and 1982. National output between 1977 and 1982 declined by about one-third. The average standard of living between 1975 and 1983 fell by nearly 50 per cent. In a broadcast in December 1981 to mark the twentieth anniversary of Tanzania's independence, Nyerere admitted: 'We are poorer now than we were in 1972.'

Whatever difficulties Tanzania encountered, however, Nyerere held fast to his socialist strategy, dismissing all suggestions that the strategy itself might be at fault. He acknowledged that the country was neither socialist nor self-reliant, but he argued that government policy had prevented the worst excesses of capitalism, in particular the emergence of a rich and powerful elite. Comparing socialism to a vaccine, he said in 1977: 'We are like a man who does not get smallpox because he has got himself vaccinated. His arm is sore and he feels sick for a while; if he has never seen what smallpox does to people, he may feel very unhappy during that period, and wish that he had never agreed to the vaccination.' At a ruling party conference in 1982, Nyerere admitted that Tanzania had many 'very serious' and 'very real' problems, but socialism, he said, was not one of them. 'We have good policies. We have good plans. We have good leadership.'

Throughout Nyerere's tenure as president, few in Tanzania questioned the course on which he had embarked. It was held to be a matter of ideological faith. Indeed, no serious political discussion of any kind occurred. Under Tanzania's one-party system, parliament remained impotent; the press muzzled. Real power lay in State House in Dar es Salaam, in party committees and with a ruling class of bureaucrats, all of them intolerant of opposition. Nyerere himself was by no means averse to using Tanzania's Preventive Detention Act to silence political critics, and Tanzania for many years remained high on the list of African countries with political prisoners.

Much was achieved as a result of Nyerere's efforts, notably in the fields of education, health and social services. Primary school enrolment increased from one-quarter of the school-age population to 95 per cent; adult literacy from 10 to 75 per cent; four in ten villages were provided with clean tap water, three in ten had clinics; life expectancy increased from forty-one years to fifty-one years.

Yet what progress was made was financed largely by foreign aid. During the 1970s Tanzania received no less than $3 billion, mostly from the West. In 1982 the annual level reached $600 million. Without such funds, Tanzania would have plunged into penury. Nyerere's achievement, therefore, was related not to the success of his strategy, but to his ability to persuade foreign sponsors that his objectives were sincere.

Wordcatcher Tales: Gorin = Orimpikku

Japanese video reports about the Olympics often show the screen label 北京五輪 'Beijing Olympics'. I had assumed that the Japanese news media were simply following Chinese usage, with 五輪 gorin ('5 rings/wheels') being a clever and concise sound-symbol translation of the word Olympic, which is otherwise rendered more lengthily in Japanese katakana オリンピック. A Google search on 五輪 returns 18,600,000 possible results, while a search on オリンピック returns 27,000,000 results.

Well, it turns out that this usage of 五輪 for 'Olympics' is restricted to Japanese. The official Chinese homepage for the Beijing Olympics uses four characters strictly for their sound values, 奥林匹克 (ao-lin-pi-ke), a string that Google finds on 17,500,000 pages. Korean usage also relies on a phonetic transcription, 올림픽 (ol-lim-pik), with 23,300,000 Google results.

So it looks as if the Japanese may have coined the term 五輪 for 'Olympics', probably on the occasion of its 1964 Olympics. That headword shows up in my father's battered old New Pocket Japanese-English Dictionary (Kenkyusha), which was revised in 1964 after first appearing in 1958. (Does anyone have an earlier edition?) It's a clever coinage, with several positive allusions, but first I'd like to note that the Beijing Olympics logo also incorporates a bit of clever usage of Chinese characters. The stylized image of a runner strongly evokes the character 京 jing ('capital') of Beijing ('north capital'), and the logos for the various event types also evoke the old Chinese seal scripts widely used in decorative engraving from as early as the Han dynasty.

I emailed Matt of No-sword about this, and he suggested that one positive association of 五輪 is Miyamoto Musashi's Book of Five Rings (五輪書), which involves competitive strategy and tactics and is sometimes translated as The Art of War. Indeed, many of the Chinese-language search results for 五輪 referred to that book. Other Chinese results referred to "5-wheel" (off-road 4WD) vehicles, the 5th round of 6-party talks, and the popular Japanese singer Itsuwa ('5-rings') Mayumi (also known as Wulun Zhengong in Chinese). Just about the only Chinese-language usage I could find of 五輪 for Olympics was by a Chinese blogger in Japan.

A more spiritual association of 五輪 occurs in 五輪塔 (gorintō), the 5-element pagoda. And 五輪 is also homophonous with 五倫 (Jp. gorin, Ch. wǔlún), the essential 5 relationships of Confucianism.

POSTSCRIPT: I've been watching far more of the Olympics than I had planned, and I must say that I am most impressed by the good sportsmanship of the athletes from both the host country and the largest guest country. It's a big improvement over the behavior of both such parties during the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. (And congratulations to Constantina Tomescu-Dita! Her gutsy move paid off.)

Stalin Reinstates the Church, 1942-43

From Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to the War on Terror, by Michael Burleigh (HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 233-236:

Unlike Stalin, who suffered a mental collapse when the reality of Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union penetrated his state of denial, on the very day of the attack metropolitan Sergei sent a message to every Orthodox parish. It reminded the Russian faithful of the heroic deeds of their ancestors, and of the saints Alexander Nevsky and Dimitri Donskoi, who had rescued Holy Russia in past crises: 'Our Orthodox Church has always shared the fate of the people. It has always borne their trials and cherished their successes. It will not desert the people now ... The Church of Christ blesses all the Orthodox defending the sacred frontiers of our Motherland. The Lord will grant us victory.' ... When Stalin did finally address the nation on 3 July, he spoke in the uncharacteristic tones of 'Brothers and sisters! My dear friends!' whose religious accents were unmistakable. He may have mentioned Lenin, but the radio address was much more like a simple priest sounding the village tocsin. In October, patriarch Sergei wrote a further address, as the Germans came within sixty miles of the capital. He condemned clergy who had defected to the enemy, notably metropolitan Voskresensky who had been despatched to the Baltic States before the war as part of a wider attempt to exploit Orthodoxy to integrate the newly acquired states into the Red Empire. On 11 November, Stalin harangued troops on Red Square as German troops battled their way towards suburban Moscow, invoking Nevsky, Donskoi, Suvarov and Kutusov, realising that common or garden patriotism and religion had greater mobilising potential than Marxist-Leninism. Typically, patriarch Sergei had been dragged from his sickbed a few days before and deported to Ulyanovsk.

Of the other two remaining Orthodox hierarchs, metropolitan Nikolai was brought back from the Ukraine to Moscow, where he became the regime's main clerical foreign policy propagandist, while metropolitan Alexei rallied the faithful during the terrible siege of Leningrad. The regime made a few cautious and parsimonious concessions to a Church that played a major role in maintaining wartime morale. It tolerated rather than encouraged religion. Overt anti-religious propaganda may have ceased for the duration, perhaps in rueful recognition of Pius XII's leading role in persuading sceptical US Catholic bishops of the legitimacy of their government's Lend-Lease aid to the Russian people despite his predecessor's comprehensive damnation of Communism, a stance that militates against the notion that anti-Communism was the overriding obsession of his pontificate. Sunday was restored as a day of rest, and artists were allowed to repair damaged icons. In 1942 the presses of the almost defunct League of the Militant Godless were used to produce a tome called The Truth about Religion in Russia, in which the weary remnants of a Church the Soviets had tried to destroy were displayed for foreign consumption. Beyond this there were no concessions. At Easter 1942 churches in Moscow were allowed to hold candlelit processions as the curfew was raised for a night. This was a meagre gesture given the enormous role that the Churches had played in the war effort. Starting with Alexei in Leningrad, sermons became appeals to donate money to the war effort. By January 1943, over three million rubles had been raised in Leningrad alone. Another five hundred thousand rubles funded a tank column named after Dimitri Donskoi. By the end of the war, the Church had contributed 150 million rubles.

In November 1942 metropolitan Nikolai became the first cleric since 1917 to have an official function, when he joined a government commission to investigate Nazi war crimes on Soviet territory. That included putting his name to accusations that the Germans had carried out massacres at Katyn for which the NKVD had been responsible. In January 1943, patriarch Sergei sent a telegram to Stalin requesting permission to open a central bank account where the Church could deposit such monies. When Stalin assented, relaying the gratitude of the Red Army, the Church effectively received corporate legal recognition for the first time. It was a sign of the times that in the same month a senior party official in distant Krasnoyarsk formally received a bishop, who was also a brilliant surgeon, the man still being a prisoner at the time. In September, the exiled Sergei was surprised to find himself brought back to Moscow and installed in the former residence of the German ambassador. At 9 p.m. the following night, he and metropolitans Alexei and Nikolai, were driven to the Kremlin for a session with Molotov and Stalin. The former improbably asked what the Church might need. Recovering from the shock of this request, Sergei said the reopening of churches and seminaries, a Church council and the election of a patriarch. As if it had nothing to do with him, Stalin gently inquired: 'And why don't you have cadres? Where have they disappeared to?' Rather than pointing out that most of these 'cadres' had died in camps, Sergei quickly joked: 'One of the reasons is that we train a person for the priesthood, and he becomes the Marshal of the Soviet Union.' This set Stalin off on a monologue about his days as a seminarian which went on until 3 a.m. Stalin helped the elderly Sergei down the stairs, saying, 'Your Grace, this is all I can do for you at the present time,' although he also appointed Georgi Karpov as the regime's liaison with the Orthodox Church. Karpov was the NKVD official who had arrested and shot most of the clergy, though Stalin added, 'I know Karpov, he is an obliging subordinate.' At some point in the course of that night there was oral agreement regarding the future status of the Orthodox Church. Within four days nineteen bishops were found who elected Sergei patriarch, successor to patriarch Tikhon who had died in 1925. They issued a joint exhortation to Christians around the world to unite against Hitler.

Vichy, 1940: 'Heaven-sent Defeat"

From Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to the War on Terror, by Michael Burleigh (HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 239-240:

Vichy used much of the moralising rhetoric that had been favoured by the French Catholic Church in the century since the Revolution. The regime denounced the 'esprit de jouissance' (pleasure-seeking) that was allegedly responsible for the defeat, promising 'moral recovery'. This resonated with a Catholic tradition of moralising major events, as in 1789, 1870, and 1914....

The Catholic hierarchy converted a complex national disaster into a moralising myth, which suited what the Jesuit Henri de Lubac called the 'masochistic' spirit of those times. Victory, some senior ecclesiastics argued, would have led to further moral degradation; defeat afforded a 'heaven-sent' opportunity for regeneration. Victory in 1918 had proved a wasted opportunity; perhaps 1940 could be different? The Catholic writer Claudel regarded defeat as a form of deliverance, confiding in his diary: 'France has been delivered after sixty years from the yoke of the anti-Catholic Radical party (teachers, lawyers, Jews, Freemasons). The new government invokes God ... There is hope of being delivered from universal suffrage and parliamentarism.'

Similar attitudes seem quite prevalent in the West these days, especially among our hordes of jet-setting Jeremiahs, but one wonders how many Japanese citizens felt the same way on this day 63 years ago. How many members of the ruling elite of Imperial Japan felt let down by their masses and determined to teach them a lesson? Certainly a good many ordinary citizens were ready to sacrifice their elites in return for peace.

Wordcatcher Tales: Kabure, Hamanasu

Sometime during my high school years in Kobe, Japan, I heard the term 西洋かぶれ seiyō kabure used to describe Japanese people who were ardent Westernizers. I never learned the real etymology of kabure, which I thought came from the verb kaburu (被る) 'to wear (on one's head), cover one's head', so that seiyō kabure suggested to me people who donned their Western thinking caps rather than their Eastern (東洋 tōyō) ones.

It wasn't until I decided to blog about an extremely seiyō kabure establishment at the top of Mt. Hiei, one of Japan's leading early centers of tōyō kabure (when it was importing Buddhism from China 1200 years ago), that I discovered a more direct source for kabure. It's from kabureru 'to break out in a rash; be (noxiously) influenced by (lacquer, poison ivy, communism, Western goods/values, etc.)'. However, I suspect that kaburu 'to cover one's head' and kabureru 'to be covered (with rash)' might ultimately be related etymologically, even though one can obscure the connection by writing kabureru with an unrelated kanji combination, 気触 lit. 'feeling+touch'. Perhaps the native Japanese root kabu in both forms even relates to the now various kabu that mean 'head' (頭), 'stump, stock' (株), or 'root, turnip' (蕪).

The place that set me off on this etymological goose-chase was the Garden Museum Hiei, which I visited because I wanted a view of Lake Biwa and because I enjoy botanical gardens. It was well worth the serendipitous visit. (I attended 2nd grade at Camp Botanical Garden in Kyoto in 1956-57, the last year before the U.S. Army closed the base and the land reverted to its earlier use, at which point several missionary families ordered Calvert School materials and started up Kyoto Christian Day School, the predecessor of what is now Kyoto International School.)

The Garden's Rose Gate faces the Kyoto side of the mountain and the Eizan Ropeway station. The Provence Gate at the other end faces the Lake Biwa side and the parking lot and bus station. I entered through the rose garden, but never made it as far as the herb garden and the Provence Gate. I was especially entranced by the water lily pond with bridges and arbors designed to replicate scenes painted by Claude Monet, one of the most Japonisme-kabure of French Impressionists. It was a Japanese tribute to French Japonisme. Carefully placed throughout the garden are large replicas on easels of famous paintings by Monet and Renoir (above all), but also Manet, Cezanne, Degas, van Gogh, and other masters of Impressionism.

It was nearly noon and I was hot and hungry, so I soon repaired to the Café de Paris for a leisurely lunch, where I ordered a bowl of Renoir's favorite cold turnip (kabu!) soup, a plate of surprisingly familiar "European-style" curry rice, and a half bottle of imported chardonnay. I was the only seiyōjin 'Westerner' in the place, but perhaps not the most seiyō kabure. A nice selection of bread rolls and a spaghetti ratatouille were the only other foods on the menu.

On my way back out, I dawdled in the rose garden, where I noticed a sign for Rosa rugosa, the Japanese rose with the incongruous name hamanasu (浜茄子) lit. 'seashore eggplant'. Not only was the plant itself awfully far from the nearest seashore, but the kanji for the 'eggplant' part of its name is another case where the kanji has no relation to the native Japanese reading (nasu or nasubi), only to the Chinese (Mandarin) reading qiezi (茄子), which shows up on so many Chinese restaurant menus in 魚香茄子 yuxiang qiezi lit. 'fish-flavor eggplant', usually translated as 'garlic eggplant' (one of my regular favorites).

UPDATE: I queried Matt of No-sword about the likely etymologies of the various kabu-. He confirmed that the various nouns kabu that mean 'head; stump, stock; root, turnip' are generally thought to come from the same etymon, but that the verbs are not likely related.

Ono Susumu says that /kabureru/ is related to /kabi/ as in mould, which kind of makes sense, but I can't find anyone who backs him up. (The Nihongogendaijiten does list a couple of unreliable sources claiming it's from 蚊触, 'mosquito-touch', which is pretty amusing.) 香触 ['fragrance-touch'] is also common.

/kaburu/ is originally from /kagafuru/ -> /kaufuru/ -> /kaburu/ ... but that was Nara-Heian times, and I don't think /kabureru/ is attested pre-Edo, so I suppose there could be a connection ... although, I can't really see how 'come out in a rash' could come out of 'cover one's head'.

Wordcatcher Tales: Miharashi, Okurina

As soon as I arrived at Kyoto Station, I got maps from the tourist information office, called the Palace Side Hotel to book a room for the night, and found a post office ATM to withdraw cash from my U.S. bank account. Then I headed straight for the top of Hieizan (比叡山), not for the famous Enryakuji (延暦寺) temple complex so much as for the panoramic views and the cooler air.

To get there I took a bus to the Demachiyanagi (出町柳) Station, where I bought a round-trip (往復 ōfuku lit. 'go-again') combined ticket (for about ¥2000) on the Eizan (叡山) Railway to Hiei Sanchō (比叡山頂 'Hiei Mountaintop'). The first leg to Yase-Hieizanguchi was by one-car train. (Yase 八瀬 'Eight Rapids' is about where the upper eastern fork of the Kamo River, the Takano River, ceases to be navigable.) The next leg was by cable car to Keiburu Hiei, and the final leg was by ropeway to the "summit"—not actually the highest point, but close enough. The Eizan Railway opened in Taishō 14 (1925), the year my father was born.

(I can recall how much older it suddenly seemed to make my father when I first saw Taishō 14 on his Japanese driver's license—he was a man from another era! He also happened to be the first foreign driver picked up for speeding down Shirakawa-dōri by the Sakyō-ku police with their newfangled radar gun in the late 1950s, when we still had an American car (a 1956 Chevy) and Shirakawa-dōri was still unpaved north of Kitashirakawa, where the road east went up through the mountains to Otsu City.)

From the top of the ropeway, you could look back down toward Kyoto, but the view of Lake Biwa was obstructed by the walls of Garden Museum Hiei (about which more later). So I paid the ¥1000 fee and walked along a path through a rose garden that offered beautiful views of Lake Biwa to my right. At the highest point on the path was a lookout point labeled 見晴らし on the guide map. Although I discerned the basic meaning from the kanji ('see-clear'), I wasn't sure how to pronounce the combination. The trailing kana (okurigana) indicated a native Japanese reading, and I had learned from listening to weather reports as a kid the verb 'to be clear, to clear up' (晴れる hareru), usually in the ubiquitous phrase 晴時々曇 hare, tokidoki kumori 'clear, occasionally cloudy'. But I had not encountered the agentive transitive form, harasu, and I wasn't sure if the combination of two verbs together was pronounced miharashi or mibarashi.

According to the New Nelson kanji dictionary, transitive harasu means to 'dispel, clear away (gloom); refresh (oneself)', and my Canon Wordtank electronic dictionary adds to 'chase away the blues' and 'dispel doubts, clear oneself of a charge'. The nominalized verb combination miharashi means 'view' in the sense of 'the viewer's ability to see', as in 'observation platform' or 'lookout point', and not 'view' in the sense of 'that which is seen' (景色 keshiki 'scenery, landscape').

I was enjoying the lovely sights from the 見晴らし and the genuine sounds of real uguisu (Japanese bush warblers)—not the recordings they play in the massive urbanity of Kyoto Station—when I caught a glimpse of a Japanese red maple (momiji) and a Buddhist memorial in a sheltered nook off to the left. When I went down to investigate, I found a stele with the name Dengyō Daishi on it. I didn't take the time to decipher the explanatory plaque, so I'm not sure about the exact significance of that spot, which was certainly out of place in a Garden Museum that otherwise celebrated French Impressionism.

Dengyō Daishi (傳教大師) was the posthumous name of Saichō (最澄, 767-822), the monk who brought back Tendai Buddhism from China, founded Enryakuji (still the headquarters of Tendai), and convinced the court to recognize Tendai as Japan's first autonomous Buddhist sect (in 822). He was also the first Japanese monk to be awarded the posthumous title of Daishi 'Great Master' (in 866). The native Japanese word for posthumous title is okurina, clearly a compound etymologically, meaning something like 'bestowal-name' (贈り名), but it's written with a single kanji, 諡, which otherwise seems to occur only in the Sino-Japanese compounds 諡号 shigō 'posthumous name' or 贈諡 zōshi 'posthumous title' (both synonyms of 贈号 zōgō lit. 'bestowal-number/item/title/name').

Dengyō (傳教, now usually written 伝教) means 'transmit-teaching', but 伝 has a lot of different shades of meaning. It occurs in 伝承 denshō 'legend, tradition, folklore', 伝言 dengon 'verbal message', 伝馬 tenma 'post horse', and 伝声器 denseiki 'speaking tube'. But one of its most interesting compounds is 伝法 denbō lit. 'spreading Buddhism', but also 'bullying, ostentatious bravado', perhaps reflecting the behavior over many centuries of too many militant monks from Mt. Hiei.

Armenian Merchant Information Networks, 1600s-1800s

The latest issue of the Journal of World History (vol. 19, no. 2) leads off with an article that somehow caught my fancy. Whitman College professor Sebouh Aslanian writes on “The Salt in a Merchant’s Letter”: The Culture of Julfan Correspondence in the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean (Project MUSE subscription required). Here's a bit of the introduction (omitting footnotes and page numbers).

The crucial role of information flows was particularly important for Armenian merchants from New Julfa, a suburb of the Safavid capital of Isfahan founded in 1605 by Armenian silk merchants forcibly displaced by Shah Abbas I from the town of Old Julfa on the Ottoman-Persian frontier [in the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic in Azerbaijan]. These merchants managed a remarkable achievement by coming to preside, within a short time of their forced displacement, over one of the greatest trade networks of the early modern era. By the eighteenth century, the Armenian merchants of New Julfa had branched out from their small mercantile suburb to form a global trading network stretching from Amsterdam in the west to Canton (China) and Manila (Philippines) on the rim of the Pacific Ocean in the east. Their mercantile settlements in the Indian Ocean, Mediterranean, and northwest Europe and Russia spanned several empires, including the three most significant Islamic empires of Eurasia—that is, the Ottomans, the Safavids, and the Mughals—as well as several European seaborne empires, including the British, Dutch, French, Portuguese, and Spanish.

In the case of Julfan society, information sharing was important not only for merchants for their daily commercial affairs, but also for maintaining the integrity of the Julfan network as a whole. Letter writing connected far away commenda agents to their masters in New Julfa and also unified the trade settlements in the periphery to the nodal center of the entire network in New Julfa....

The sources for this study derive from a remarkable archive of eighteenth-century documents I discovered while doing research at the Public Records Office (PRO) in London. This archive consists of approximately 1,700 Julfan mercantile letters seized in the Indian Ocean in 1748 on board an Armenian-freighted ship called the Santa Catharina. The majority of these letters were carried by Armenian overland couriers across the Mediterranean littoral and Asia Minor to the Persian Gulf port city of Basra, where they were relayed to other merchant-couriers traveling by ship to Bengal with the purpose of being delivered to recipients there and farther east in China. What makes these letters valuable for the present investigation is that their journey was unexpectedly cut short when the ship on which they were traveling was captured as a war time “prize” by a British naval squadron patrolling the waters off the southern coast of India. The letters were confiscated along with the Santa Catharina’s other cargo and shipped to England to be presented as “exhibits” in a high-stakes trial in London. Luckily for us, this event not only ensured their survival, but also transformed them into a kind of Julfan geniza. In addition to relying on this vast trove of documents, I shall also use two other collections of business and family correspondence stored in the Archivio di Stato di Venezia (henceforth ASV) and the All Savior’s Monastery Archive (ASMA) in Julfa/Isfahan. Both collections are valuable because they contain thousands of commercial letters sent from Europe and India, many of which are examined here for the first time....

This is the kind of bottom-up, data-rich spadework that I really respect in historians, and many of the observations give one a vivid sense of what life was like as a farflung member of the Armenian (silk) trade network, such as how long it took to get a letter from Isfahan to Venice (often 6 months or so, if it got there at all). Even some of the footnotes are interesting, although the sources cited in Armenian orthography are completely opaque to me. I'll cite just one example that relates to the language used in the letters.

In general, most correspondents maintained high levels of penmanship, a skill most likely taught to them in a commercial school operating in Julfa in the 1680s. In addition to a solid reputation and competence in the arts of mathematics and commercial accounting, literacy and good penmanship were also attributes merchants sought in a factor. Nonetheless, there are occasional letters that exhibit rather poor levels of penmanship, but, fortunately for the historian, these are rare exceptions. The language of Julfan correspondence is the defunct peculiar dialect of Julfan Armenian that flourished between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries throughout the commercial settlements where Julfans resided, especially in India and the Far East. This dialect is so distinct from other dialects of Armenian and from modern standard Armenian that it was and still is nearly incomprehensible to most Armenians. It was, therefore, an ideal medium for confidential communication in an age when information sharing was regarded as the lifeline of merchant communities and when a merchant could never be certain that his letters would not be intercepted and read by rivals in commerce or politics. Julfan letters, like most writing before the nineteenth century, do not have standard punctuation or spelling and no paragraph breaks except those indicated by the word dardzeal (again). Some letters also had important bills of exchange or notarized powers of attorney enclosed in them.