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Executive Editor, Journals Dept. University of Hawai‘i Press
by | 5 March 2009 · 9:14 pm

Rushdie on Slumdog Tourism

In a dyspeptic disquisition on screen adaptations from books in last Saturday’s Guardian, Salman Rushdie coughs up some colorful bile in the general direction of the recent Oscar favorite.

It used to be the case that western movies about India were about blonde women arriving there to find, almost at once, a maharajah to fall in love with, the supply of such maharajahs being apparently endless and specially provided for English or American blondes; or they were about European women accusing non-maharajah Indians of rape, perhaps because they were so indignant at having being approached by a non-maharajah; or they were about dashing white men galloping about the colonies firing pistols and unsheathing sabres, to varying effect. Now that sort of exoticism has lost its appeal; people want, instead, enough grit and violence to convince themselves that what they are seeing is authentic; but it’s still tourism. If the earlier films were raj tourism, maharajah-tourism, then we, today, have slum tourism instead. In an interview conducted at the Telluride film festival last autumn, Boyle, when asked why he had chosen a project so different from his usual material, answered that he had never been to India and knew nothing about it, so he thought this project was a great opportunity. Listening to him, I imagined an Indian film director making a movie about New York low-life and saying that he had done so because he knew nothing about New York and had indeed never been there. He would have been torn limb from limb by critical opinion. But for a first world director to say that about the third world is considered praiseworthy, an indication of his artistic daring. The double standards of post-colonial attitudes have not yet wholly faded away.

via LaurenceJarvikOnline

Like most Oscar winners, Slumdog had not yet enticed the Outliers to make an effort to go see it in a movie theater. Nor is it likely now to find a place in our never-very-long Netflix queue. We’ve already seen, courtesy of Netflix, Thom Fitzgerald’s award-winning, disgusting, poverty-porn movie, The Wild Dogs (2002), which views Romanians as nothing but beggars, con-men, sex workers, or dog catchers—and compares them with heavy-handed symbolism to the wild dogs of Bucharest, which the government is determined to euthanize. All foreigners there (or at least all Canadians!), on the other hand, are either corrupt exploiters or naive do-gooders. And the path from exploiter to do-gooder requires finding your own personal beggar to support: the Canadian ambassador’s wife takes on a legless beggar boy, who follows her around like a puppy; the Canadian pornographer tries to redeem himself by repeatedly giving stuff to a reverse-kneed, hand-walking beggar, whose companions promptly steal it from him; and the Romanian dog-catcher tries to redeem himself by creating a refuge for dogs he was supposed to have euthanized, only to be arrested and have his dogs taken away. I fully agree with the reviewer on Rotten Tomatoes, whose review (no longer available online) includes the quote, “No one in this sterile film is redeemed, condemned or even particularly humanized…. Ultimately, Fitzgerald’s gutless film is a muddled, grotesque travelogue.”

Sorry. Next time I’ll tell you how I really feel.

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Filed under anglosphere, Canada, cinema, economics, India, Romania, travel, U.S.

by | 3 December 2008 · 6:06 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: The Hazelnut Coast Shibboleth

My history-professor brother, who digs up many sources containing observations about the varied roles of mercenaries and conscripts in militaries ancient and modern, sent me the following excerpt from Michael E. Meeker’s (1971) “The Black Sea Turks: Some Aspects of Their Ethnic and Cultural Background,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 2:318-345.

It is said that the Laz when conscripted [by the Turkish state] are automatically placed in the navy … because Anatolians associate Black Sea men with the sea, even though many of them have little or no experience as sailors or fishermen. The eastern Black Sea men, realizing that the period of service for the navy is three years, while that for the army is only two, naturally try to hide their origins, but the recruiting officer simply asks each man to pronounce the word ‘hazlenut.’ The vowel sounds of this word are inevitably distorted by the eastern Black Sea men, and the recruiting officer places each man in the army or navy according to his pronunciation. The accents of the Black Sea Turks are by no means uniform even in one given local, but most accents east of Samsun feature a distortion of the vowel harmony typical of Anatolian Turks. As one proceeds eastward along the coast the accents tend to become more unlike the Anatolian accents, until in the province of Rize even some Anatolian consonants are distorted or changed [different]. For example geldim becomes jeldum, and balik become paluk. These consonantal changes are more localized than [the vowel harmony changes], therefore the latter remains the best test for detecting eastern Black Sea origins.

There are two intriguing terms in this passage, one an ethnic label of miragelike reference, the other a shibboleth of chameleonlike pronunciation.

The Laz language is not at all related to Turkish. It is a South Caucasian language (related to Georgian and Mingrelian) with a lot more complex system of consonants than Turkish, but a much simpler vowel system, just (a, i, u, e, o). Laz is spoken in the far southeast corner of the Black Sea coast, where Turkey meets Georgia. (See Dumneazu‘s post this past summer about Laz ethnorock music.)

Nowadays, most Turks seem to consider the Laz people to be any inhabitants of the northeastern coast of Anatolia (old Pontus), whose Trabzon dialect of Turkish is called Lazca. This usage may go back many centuries, to an era when the ancestors of the current speakers of the “Lazca” dialect of Turkish actually spoke a “Lazca” language related to Georgian. (The Pontic Empire of the Trebizond was the last remnant of the Byzantine Empire to fall to the Ottomans—in 1461.) The Turkish-speaking “Laz” now prefer to call themselves Karadenizli (‘from the Black Sea’), and the men would rather spend two years in the army than three years in the navy (according to Meeker 1971). Even though they eat a lot of anchovies, they are rarely fisherfolk; instead, they are mostly farmers growing tea and maize.

And hazelnuts (Corylus avellana). Turkey produces about 75% of the world’s hazelnuts, and half of those come from Ordu Province, smack in the middle of old Pontus, the Hazelnut Coast.

The Turkish word for ‘hazelnut’ is fındık, with a dotless ı that sounds like an unrounded u (like Tokyo-standard Japanese u). The word fındık (or funduk or finduk or whatever other variants fail the shibboleth) appears to have entered Turkish via Arabic bunduq/funduq, which derives in turn from Greek φουντούκι (funduki), from Ancient Greek ποντικόν κάρυον ‘Pontic nut’ (at least according to this thread in Projet Babel, Des mots turcs d’origine grecque). Etymologically then, Turkish fındık = Pontic (i.e., Black Sea) [nut].

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Filed under Caucasus, Greece, language, military, Turkey

by | 22 April 2007 · 10:36 pm

Rhodesia, 1927: Keeping Up Appearances

She found her way along the dark corridors to the library, where a lively fire was burning. Her husband was nowhere to be seen. Instead a servant whose name she had forgotten appeared as if from nowhere and led her wordlessly downstairs to the dining-room, where the long table had been set for dinner with one place setting at either end. [Stewart] Gore-Browne was standing at the window with his back to her, one arm folded behind his back and one hand in his pocket, but turned and came forward to take her hand as she entered. He was dressed stiffly in black lounge suit and white tie and looked as if he was fighting off an urge to look at his watch.

Nodding to a waiter who held out a chair for her at one end of the long table, Gore-Browne took a bottle of Pol Roger from a silver bucket on a side cabinet to celebrate their first night. There was no ice in the bucket and he apologized for it not being chilled, though the cellar kept bottles fairly cool. He always opened champagne himself, as the house servants tended to get so carried away shaking the bottles that guests ended up having a shower. Popping the cork with the suavity of one who has done so many times, he wrapped a white cloth round the neck of the bottle and poured it into two crystal flutes. Taking his place at the opposite end of the table, he waited for Jackson the servant to serve them, then lifted his glass in a toast. ‘Chin, chin, my dear Lorna. To life at Shiwa.’

‘Chin, chin.’ She raised her glass and drank, the tiny bubbles tickling her nostrils.

Another servant entered, mincing uncomfortably in the black patent shoes which Gore-Browne insisted all waiting staff wore, and bearing a silver tray in his white gloves from which he served slices of chicken liver pate on to their gold-rimmed Meissen plates. It must have made an odd scene, the husband and wife so far apart, the large silver candelabra in the centre casting shadows on the white linen cloth, the room silent except for the grind of their cutlery on the plates and the loud tick of the grandfather clock in the hall. Various oil-painted ancestors looked down on them from the walls. In the centre was Gore-Browne’s grandfather, Sir Thomas Gore-Browne, Ethel’s late father, who had been Governor of St Helena, New Zealand, Tasmania and Bermuda, and whose prominent nose had clearly been inherited by his grandson. Next to him was a chubby-faced man in bishop’s robes, Gore-Browne’s uncle Wilfred Gore-Browne, the first Bishop of Kimberley. On the other side of Sir Thomas was his wife, the beautiful raven-haired Lady Harriet, Gore-Browne’s late grandmother from the Campbell family of Craigie in Ayrshire, whom he had always called Grammy.

Having cleared away the first course, Jackson and another servant entered with silver platters of wild duck in orange sauce, sweet potatoes and green peas. The servants were always forgetting to warm up the plates, to the irritation of Gore-Browne, who found cold plates a particular dislike, even noting the event in his diary. His rebuke unnerved Jackson, who was already having difficulty manipulating the serving fork and spoon with the tight-fitting gloves. Nervous herself, and not used to champagne, young Lorna must have found it hard not to giggle, but she had been warned to behave by her uncle Major Goldman, who had always complained that she was an unruly creature, and she was eager to impress her new husband and show him that she was a worthy mistress of this great house.

SOURCE: The Africa House: The True Story of an English Gentleman and His African Dream (HarperCollins, 2004), by Christina Lamb, pp. 143-145

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Filed under Africa, U.K., Zambia

by | 22 April 2007 · 10:35 pm

Rhodesia, 1922: “A Very Desirable Kind of Socialism”

The whole village had turned out to make bricks, as well as some other Bemba who, to [Stewart] Gore-Browne‘s delight, had returned to the lake on hearing of the ‘mad English bwana‘ and the chance to earn a few shillings. Having never seen a building made from bricks before, they were all intrigued by the process and everyone wanted to join in. ‘We had seen Europeans before and knew they liked building houses,’ recalls Paramount Chief Chitimukulu, who as a young boy worked as a brick carrier at Shiwa, ‘but we had never seen anything like this and it was wonderful to see right in the middle of the bush.’ Already the biggest employer in the whole Chinsali District, Gore-Browne had 110 people on the work register; men at 5d a day, and women and children at 2d. Two men cut the clay out of anthills and the river bed, then others took it to a pit where it was mixed with water brought from the river by small boys. The women mixed the mud and carried it from the kneading pit to the brickmaker who cut and levelled it into a rectangular mould. Once the bricks were made, the women then carried them on their heads to the drying floor, making a jolly sight, Gore-Browne noted in his diary, walking with that classic grace which English women seem to have lost. Behind them follow the old chief and his wife, rounding them up, everyone singing all the while. By midmorning the whole place is resonant with harmony as different work-gangs go back and forth in various directions, all singing. Some came with bundles of grass for thatching, others with poles and blocks of wood which they took to Cowie and Austin who were in charge of the carpentry, building the wooden frame for the house as well as furniture. Gore-Browne smiled as he saw a group of children, none of whom looked older than five, carrying spears, returning from an expedition to search for lime. They had obviously been successful and had chalked their faces with it, causing the dogs to bark in fright.

I feel like a missionary but without the hymn singing, he wrote, watching the scene. He assured his aunt and uncle that he was not about to start urging the natives to copy white man’s ways, and give up their beer-drinking, drumming and polygamy, though he had no qualms about dressing them in European clothes. In fact he hoped that in years to come the skills he was imparting would be passed on, so that the children and grandchildren of his workers would be building their own red-brick houses rather than primitive mud huts. He told Ethel:

It seems a wonderfully right state of affairs and a very desirable kind of socialism. I am cleverer and better equipped than these people so they all work to provide me with what I want, a roof and a garden, but I get them meat and protect their crops from marauding eland and find them money for their tax and few luxuries they can’t get otherwise. Also if an enemy came and burnt their houses or carried off their women, they’d expect me to take up their cause. It’s a fair arrangement and we don’t pretend we’re all equal which we obviously aren’t and when I pass through the village, they fall down and clap their hands and shout my praises. But I know that if I renege on my side of the bargain and take their crops or rape their women, they would soon rise up. In the old days they would have killed me, now I suppose they would go to the magistrate. Or maybe not.

SOURCE: The Africa House: The True Story of an English Gentleman and His African Dream (HarperCollins, 2004), by Christina Lamb, pp. 86-88

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Filed under Africa, U.K., Zambia

by | 20 April 2007 · 8:51 pm

How Korea Became Illegal in 1907

In the summer of 1907, the world declared Korea illegal. The previous autumn, Emperor Kojong of Korea sent three representatives on his behalf to the Second International Conference on Peace at The Hague. Their mission was to register the emperor’s protest against Japan’s 1905 protectorate agreement over Korea. According to the well-known account of their travels overland to Europe, Yi Sangsol, Yi Jun, and Yi Uijong reached the Netherlands in late June 1907, during the second week of the conference. They carried a letter from their emperor detailing the invalidity of the protectorate and demanding international condemnation of Japan. Although the three young men appealed to diplomats from countries that had long-standing relations with Korea, none except the Russian envoy gave them more than a passing notice. Not coincidentally, of course, Japan’s shocking military victory against Russia two years earlier made St. Petersburg eager to support any protest of Japan.

On arriving at The Hague, the Korean emissaries confronted a belief system to which even the Russians had acquiesced. According to the terms of international law—the same ones used to script the conference at The Hague and legitimate the participant states—the Koreans could not legally attend the forum. The Portsmouth Treaty of 1905 secured peace between Japan and Russia, granted Japan the privilege to “protect its interests in Korea,” and garnered a Nobel Peace Prize for President Theodore Roosevelt, who orchestrated the negotiations. Shortly thereafter, the Second Japan–Korea Agreement named Korea a Japanese protectorate and gave international legal precedent to Japan’s control over Korea’s foreign affairs. As a result, the Koreans could not conduct their own foreign relations. Instead, all of Korea’s foreign affairs would be conducted by Tokyo. According to international law, without Japan, Korea no longer existed in relation to the rest of the world.

At The Hague, the Koreans’ appeal was collectively shunned by the delegates sent from the forty-three countries discussing world peace. The Koreans’ attempt to protest—to tell their story—interfered with the world order that the delegates sought to legitimate. According to anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, some historical moments run so deeply against prevailing ideologies that they are “unthinkable.” In these situations, Trouillot notes, “worldview wins over the facts.”

Because the Korean envoys demanded rectification in the very terms that oppressed them, they were unable to bring the international community to recognize Korea as an independent country. As a result, their story was “unthinkable” to the organizers of the conference. Conversely, recognition of the Koreans’ claims to independence would have dismantled the worldview that not only determined Korea’s dependence on Japan but also legitimated the conference’s claim to define the meaning of international peace. In practice, of course, this definition of peace meant that certain countries legally controlled and colonized others.

SOURCE: Japan’s Colonization of Korea: Discourse and Power, by Alexis Dudden (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2005), pp. 7-8

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Filed under Europe, Japan, Korea, Russia, U.S.

by | 19 April 2007 · 9:22 pm

Foreigners Purifying Islam in Indonesia

On Tuesday, Bret Stephens had another column in Opinion Journal on Islam in Indonesia, this time highlighting Arab influences.

JAKARTA, Indonesia–The headquarters of the Front for the Defense of Islam is reached by a narrow alley just off a one-lane street in a residential neighborhood near downtown Jakarta. But step inside the carpeted reception area, decorated by a mural of a desert mosque and partially open to the sky, and it’s as if you’ve arrived in a bedouin kingdom.Your host is Habib Mohammad Rizieq Shihab, 41. He is dressed entirely in white, a religious conceit far from typical of most Indonesian ulama, or experts in Islamic theology. To the question, “Where are you from?” Mr. Rizieq is quick to explain that he is descended from the Quraishi tribe, from what is now Yemen. Just how he knows this isn’t clear, but it’s the symbolism that counts: The Prophet Mohammad was a Quraishi, and the tribe is entrusted with the responsibility for protecting God’s House, the Qe’eba, in Mecca. Mr. Rizieq, in fact, is a native of Jakarta.

For the better part of the past decade, Mr. Rizieq and his Front–known by its Indonesian initials FPI–have played a prominent role in Indonesian political life, although the FPI is not a political party. It is an Islamist vigilante group, with the self-appointed mission of policing and, if necessary, violently suppressing “un-Islamic” behavior. Squads of FPI militants have forcibly shut down hundreds of brothels, small-time gambling operations, discos, nightclubs and bars serving alcoholic beverages. They have also stormed “unauthorized” Christian houses of worship, attacked peaceful demonstrators from Indonesia’s renascent Communist party, trashed the office of the National Commission on Human Rights and rampaged through airports looking for Israelis to kill.

“Non-Muslims from Dar el-Harb [countries at war with Muslims], if they are in Indonesia, then it is the duty of Muslims to oppose them to the last drop of blood,” he says. “George Bush can be killed, too.” As for the legitimacy of attacks on American diplomats and civilians, “this is a dilemma,” though after a moment’s reflection he concludes that they “cannot be disturbed” since they are here with the consent of a Muslim government….

Then there is the Institute for Islamic and Arabic Studies, or LIPIA, a Saudi-funded university in Jakarta, which offers full scholarships to top students. “LIPIA was designed to create cadres,” says Mr. Rahmat. Its graduates include Jafar Umar Thalib, the founder of Laskar Jihad, a terrorist group responsible for the death of thousands of Indonesian Christians in the Moluccas.

For his part, Mr. Rizieq tries to distance himself from that kind of violence–although not by much. “If I wanted to I could always bomb these places,” he says. “I’d rather have a physical confrontation.” He adds that he is in contact with Jemaah Islamiyah, responsible for the 2002 Bali bombing, but only in order to persuade it to change its ways. Why would he set his troops upon mere gamblers or prostitutes while conversing with murderers? “When there is universal agreement among Muslims on [the immorality of] adultery or fornication then we will act violently. When there is no agreement [on issues like terrorism] then the approach is dialogue.”

It’s a curious form of tolerance, conceived by a man who arrogates to himself the right to define what is and is not Islamic. Is it a harbinger for Indonesia? That will depend on whether his country seeks to remain a part of Asia, or become a satellite of the Middle East.

Robert MacNeill’s series on PBS, America at a Crossroads, just concluded a segment about the rich diversity of Islam in Indonesia.

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Filed under Indonesia, religion

by | 17 April 2007 · 8:14 pm

On Cultural Explanations for Lightning Strikes

I think what depresses me most about the state of the world is not so much what happens—so much of which is out of any free society’s control—as what the Politically Voiced make of what happens after the fact: the international news media, political leaders, and the blogosphere. Lightning cannot strike in the forest without someone being vilified for letting it happen—or conspiring to make it happen. What a world of Tuesday-morning totalitarians the Voiced have become.

Of course I’ve been following the unfolding of events at Virginia Tech, as have people in India, Kenya, Moldova, Peru, Romania, the UAE, and elsewhere around the world. This hits close to home for me for several reasons. My maternal roots go back to Southwest Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley. My maternal grandmother died at Lewis-Gale Hospital in Salem, and my mother died at Roanoke Memorial Hospital—neither of them from gunshot wounds. My mother is buried on a hillside south of Roanoke overlooking her beloved Blue Ridge Mountains. After resigning from the mission field, my father served as chaplain of Virginia Baptist Children’s Home in Salem, and later as pastor or interim/supply pastor for just about every other little Baptist church between Lynchburg and South Boston, Va. And some old family friends from Honolulu (orginally from Sri Lanka) sent both their daughters to Virginia Tech after they moved to Fairfax, Va.

My heart goes out to all the victims of the shooting and their families and friends, including to the parents and elder sister of the shooter. Cho Seung-hui graduated from high school the same year as my own daughter.

The South Korean government, for what I hope to be invalid reasons, seems to expect the U.S. government to exploit the shooting for xenophobic purposes, just as the ROK government, media, and Netizens exploit every crime committed by foreigners in Korea. I don’t understand why this should have any effect on Korean–American relations, or why the shooter should be considered representative of Koreans in general—or Americans in general, or immigrants in general, for that matter. Should the ROK foreign minister resign? The ROK interior minister did so in the wake of the worst spree killing on record, that of Woo Bum-Kon, a deranged policeman who killed 58 people and wounded 35 in South Korea in 1982?

Nevertheless, two Korea blogs, the Marmot’s Hole and the Metropolitician have compiled lengthy examples of critical Koreanalysis, with long comment threads full of arguments and counterarguments about cultural factors. I don’t think cultural explanations make much sense when one is attempting to explain individual pathologies that constitute statistical blips within huge sample populations.

Last September, a Canadian journalist of Chinese ancestry, Jan Wong (Huáng Míngzhēn), caused a huge popular outcry by suggesting cultural explanations for three notable killing sprees in Quebec: at Dawson College in September 2006, at Concordia University in August 1992, and at the École Polytechnique in December 1989. Of course, Wong is (or was) a Maoist, so perhaps she tends to see cultural traditions as the root cause of most of the world’s problems—and great proletarian cultural revolutions as their solution.

A large number of spree killings around the world have occurred on school campuses, from kindergartens to universities. What is it about academic culture around the world that encourages such reactions? Or are schools just prime locations for finding large herds of sheep for the slaughter? What is it about the culture of post offices in the U.S.?

Would someone please attempt a cultural explanation for the Bath School killings in Michigan in 1927, in which anal-retentive school superintendent and tax protestor Andrew Kehoe killed 45 people and injured 58—all without the use of guns or the lure of television cameras. The Ku Klux Klan managed to blame it on Kehoe’s Roman Catholicism. Those nowadays who cannot let any tragedy pass without using it to advance their political agendas are in good company.

The Wikipedia entry on school massacres also notes:

In contrast to Columbine, the 1927 Bath School disaster, in which 45 people died, engendered no copycat attempts. Following the forty-five deaths that resulted from the Bath School disaster in Bath, Michigan, there was much less media reporting on the event and no legislative response on any level other than local legislation to appropriate small amounts of money for the victims’ families.

In some respects, those were good old days.

UPDATE: Liminality offers some thoughtful ruminations about differing reactions by Koreans and Americans.

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Filed under education, Korea, U.S.

by | 13 April 2007 · 6:16 pm

Japan Focus on Ethnic Koreans in Yanbian, China

I’ve been preoccupied with other matters lately and slacked off blogging a bit, but I meant to excerpt a few passages from an interesting portrait of ethnic Koreans in Yanbian, China, that appeared recently in Japan Focus.

The current Korean population in China is of rather recent origin. A wave of migration from the Korean Peninsula began in the 17th century. However, most of the migrants arrived during the tumultuous decades between the middle of the 19th century and the end of the Second World War. Northeast China was first a refuge for poor peasants and later a base for Korean nationalists, who fought against the Japanese colonial rulers in the period 1910–45. After Japan annexed Northeast China in 1931, hundreds of thousands of Koreans migrated to the new Japanese-dominated state of Manzhouguo, including many forcibly sent to work in factories and mines. However, the vast majority of migrants from Korea came allured by the promise of land.

When Japan was defeated in 1945, there were 1.7 million Koreans in Northeast China. When the People’s Republic of China was established in 1949, some 600,000 Koreans returned to the Korean Peninsula, while 1.1 million remained in China. China’s ethnic Korean minority presently totals roughly two million people. Most live in Northeast China, with a dense Korean population in Yanbian on the North Korean border. The number of ethnic Koreans in Yanbian is about 200,000, 38 percent of the prefecture’s population. An estimated 80 percent of the Yanbian Koreans have their roots in contemporary North Korea, and 20 percent have their roots in South Korea….

A closer look at certain elements of Koreanness that Yanbian wished to rely on reflects the complexity of ethnic ties as a resource for promoting economic cooperation. Ethnic background or family ties do not automatically generate business. When the Yanbian Koreans won the opportunity to visit South Korea, they were surprised at not receiving a warmer welcome there. Indeed, South Koreans tended to look down on them. For political and cultural reasons, North Koreans were held in even lower esteem in South Korea. As Korean-Chinese were often mistaken for North Koreans when visiting South Korea, due to similar dialect and appearance, they often met rather harsh treatment.

As contacts between Korean-Chinese and South Koreans intensified, the differences in their habits and values also became quite clear. Korean-Chinese and South Koreans had drifted apart during forty years of separation. The resulting differences led to conflicts over values and other misunderstandings between the two groups….

Some Chinese government officials also wanted to avoid the problems which contacts with South Koreans might create. This, especially, seems to have hindered cadres of Korean origin. Due to the strong South Korean connection with Yanbian, and the pan-nationalistic activities aimed at creating a united Great Korea, including Yanbian, Yanbian was classified as one of the four sensitive regions in China where the Central Government fears separatism. The fear is that pan-nationalistic South Koreans might infiltrate Yanbian in the guise of economic cooperation. Some officials, who wished to render their career secure by avoiding all trouble, chose to block cooperation with South Koreans and other foreigners….

In addition to political ideas, religious activities spread through transnational ties. Christianity was not only perceived by the Chinese leadership as a threat to the “Chineseness” of the Yanbian Korean culture, but Christian congregations were considered to be a disguise for political infiltrators who aimed to disintegrate the country through peaceful means. South Korean missionaries worked not only among Korean-Chinese but also among North Korean migrants and refugees. While in South Korea, many Korean-Chinese encountered Christianity. Until the 1980s, the role of religion had been limited among Korean-Chinese, while in South Korea, one-third of the population were Christians. One contact assumed that the Korean-Chinese migrants were initially attracted to Christianity when they got support from South Korean believers while working under adverse social and economic conditions: Christian organisations provided practical help, like free medical treatment, as well as social and political support. Christian organisations also won support by backing Korean-Chinese demands that South Korean authorities guarantee humane treatment.

Korean churches worked among Korean-Chinese actively not only in South Korea but also in China. They sent both money and personnel to local churches and ran welfare projects. Some churches had established congregations in Yanbian and other areas of China. Many returning migrants joined a local Christian congregation. By the year 1996, the Christian community in Yanbian had grown to include nearly 10 percent of the ethnic Korean population. In addition to return migrants, these congregations also appealed to locals who looked for support in the midst of deteriorating socio-economic conditions.

In order to counteract foreign political and religious infiltrators, three measures were taken in Yanbian in the late 1990s. Firstly, education emphasizing patriotism, socialism and religious policy was intensified. Secondly, leadership was strengthened. Thirdly, control of foreign religious activities was intensified.

via Frog in a Well

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Filed under China, economics, Japan, Korea, religion

by | 12 April 2007 · 10:24 am

Less Street Theater, More Thought Crime, Please

While the lemming media and political office-seekers fall all over themselves seeking to demonstrate their selectively outraged sensitivities, at least one lucid commentator steps away from the stampede: John McWhorter in the New York Daily News.

What, really, is the goal of these monthly performances over something someone says in passing and usually in jest? If the goal is to stop people from ever uttering anything that can be construed as belittling to people of color, it doesn’t appear to be working.

We have already succeeded in making the outright abusive wielding of racial slurs unacceptable in American society. Nicholas (Fat Nick) Minucci, the Howard Beach, Queens, twentysomething who assaulted a black man with a bat while shouting the N-word, deserved to go to prison.

However, the quest for an America where no one ever makes passing observations that are less than respectful of minority groups is futile. And why are so many of us so obsessed with chasing that rainbow anyway? The truth is that black people who go to pieces whenever anyone says a little something are revealing that they are not too sure about themselves.

Imus hosts a radio show and a lot of people listen to it. During a few seconds last week he said something tacky. The show went on, as did life. Black people continued to constitute most new AIDS cases, black men continued to come out of prison unsupervised. And we’re supposed to be most interested in Imus saying “nappy-headed ho’s”?

What creates that hypersensitivity is a poor racial self-image. Where, after all, did Imus pick up the very terminology he used? Rap music and the language young black people use themselves on the street to refer to one another.

What Imus said is lowdown indeed, but so is the way blacks refer to each other. And life goes on.

Street theater is not strength. It saps energy better put to other uses.

What the world desperately needs now is much less street theater, many fewer witch hunts, far less name-calling, and much less street crime—but far, far, far more productive thought crime in the public sphere.

I don’t have much patience with talk radio, TV talk shows, or opinion-mongering in general, but I find these tedious cycles of talk crimes followed by ginned-up public outrage, struggle sessions, and rectification campaigns in the media far too totalitarian for my tastes. I’ll take thought crimes over mind control and reeducation camps any day.

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Filed under language, U.S.

by | 11 April 2007 · 9:37 pm

Exorcising Radical Islamist Demons in Indonesia

In Tuesday’s Opinion Journal, Bret Stephens profiles an Indonesian who is attempting to preserve the traditions of religious tolerance and syncretism long characteristic of Indonesia.

SENDANG AYU, Indonesia–In the fall of 2005, Abdul Munir Mulkhan returned to his childhood village to exorcise a demon.

Belief in the spirit world persists in this corner of southern Sumatra, as it does throughout most of Indonesia. In this case, however, the demon took human form as an itinerant Islamic preacher named Mun Faasil. He had appeared as if from nowhere the year before and had promptly set about “purifying” the villagers’ religious practices. For instance, he objected to sacrificing water buffalo (a local practice) instead of sheep (an Arab one) for the annual feast of Eid ul-Adha. He also disapproved of the villagers’ custom of giving couples an envelope of cash on their wedding day, on the grounds that there was no Quranic basis for it.

What happened next is a portrait-in-miniature of the assault being waged against traditional Indonesian Islam by its totalitarian variant. “Mun Faasil’s speeches created a crisis of faith,” recalls a village elder. “One group started implying that the others were not true believers.” Things got worse when the preacher began extolling the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), a radical Islamist party modeled on Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, while attacking the Muhammadiyah, the century-old, 30 million-strong, apolitical Islamic social movement to which most of the villagers belong. Soon PKS cadres started arriving in the village.

It was at this point that some of the villagers called on Mr. Mulkhan, 60, to offer a “clarification” on the true teachings of Islam. They were fortunate in their native son. A leading scholar of Islamic theology and history, Mr. Mulkhan had only recently stepped down as vice secretary of the Muhammadiyah and continues to wield influence as a reformer within the organization. It did not take much to persuade his old neighbors that good Muslims do not use narrow theological pretexts to condemn fellow Muslims as infidels. Mun Faasil and his cadres were told to go.

For Mr. Mulkhan, however, what happened in Sendang Ayu was not the end of the matter but only the beginning. If the PKS could reach a remote rural community of 150 people, he reasoned, where had they not penetrated? The problem was compounded by the PKS’s use of clandestine cells to infiltrate the Muhammadiyah’s institutions–hospitals, universities, schools, mosques, charities, student associations–and recruit new members. “We had a situation where people in positions of trust were suddenly revealing themselves as PKS,” he says. “If we had allowed this to continue they would have consolidated their position with a purge of their opponents.”

The rise of the PKS nationally is itself a thing to marvel at. Barely eight years old, it won just 7% of the vote in the 2004 elections and has made itself conspicuous with its support of radical cleric Abu Bakir Bashir. Yet it has already managed to seize key institutions of prestige and patronage throughout Indonesia, including the speakership of the national Parliament, the ministry of agriculture and key municipal posts. As with Hamas in the Palestine Authority, it has burnished a reputation for incorruptibility.

But the Muhammadiyah, with its immense network of social services, is the organization the PKS must first seize if–in the spirit of Antonio Gramsci’s “long march through the institutions”–it is to achieve its longer-term political objectives. As a takeover target, it also helps the PKS that the Muhammadiyah has espoused a relatively strict form of Islam, making its members all the more susceptible to tarbiyeh, the form of Islamic indoctrination practiced by the Muslim Brotherhood and adopted by the PKS.

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