Category Archives: Europe

by Joel | 16 June 2005 · 7:42 pm

When the Stars and Stripes Scooped L’Humanité in Algeria

On May 8, 1945, the day the [World War II] armistice was signed, Muslim Algerians paraded in most of the cities of Algeria, with banners bearing the slogan “Down with fascism and colonialism.” In Sétif, the police fired on Algerian demonstrators, who countered by attacking police officers and Europeans. It was the beginning of a spontaneous uprising, supported by the PPA [Algerian People’s Party] militants of Constantinois. In the rural areas, peasants revolted in La Fayette, Chevreuil, Kherrata, and Oued Marsa. Among the Europeans, 103 were listed as killed and 110 wounded. On May 10, the authorities organized a true “war of reprisals”–to borrow the Algerian historian Mahfoud Kaddache’s expression–which turned into a massacre. Shootings and summary executions among the civilian population continued for several days under the direction of General Duval. Villages were bombed by the air force, and the navy fired on the coast. The French general Tubert spoke of 15,000 killed among the Muslim population. Algerian nationalists put forward the figure of 45,000 dead.

SOURCE: Algeria, 1830-2000: A Short History, by Benjamin Stora (Cornell U. Press, 2001), pp. 21-22

The French Communist newspaper L’Humanité, obsessed with purging Vichyites in North Africa, and yet to develop its anti-colonialist stance, readily accepted the possibility that the [Sétif] affair was the work of Hitlerian elements: “Energetic action was taken in North Africa against Fifth Column criminals.” American and British correspondents also accepted the official account. “Rumours of food riots are confirmed in Paris by the Cabinet,” said the New York Times. “At Sétif what was described by the Governor General as ‘Hitlerian elements’ attacked the population while it was celebrating VE day. Troops were used.” Reynolds News even provided details: “Several people were killed when armed bands of Arabs, led by a violently anti-French party known as Manifesto marched down from the mountains on the Town of Setif and fired on the crowd.” Only the Christian Science Monitor’s correspondent Egon Karkeline questioned the official version. “Despite the veil of censorship with which the French government has surrounded the recent riots in Algiers,” he wrote, “it is manifest that these disturbances had a serious character.”

Then, more than a month after the French attack, the United States Army newspaper Stars and Stripes blew the whole story wide open. The Rome edition of the paper, quoting sources in Casablanca, gave a reasonably accurate account of what had occurred, hedging only with “the true picture of events and their cause was obscure.” The Stars and Stripes version was picked up and reprinted in the New York Times, the Manchester Guardian, the London Daily Telegraph, and many other newspapers. This sent Ch.-Andre Julien of the Socialist official daily, Le Populaire, after the story, and on June 28 he wrote the first account in France to give anything like the true picture of what had happened: “Senegalese and Legionnaires were allowed to massacre at will around Sétif. Their path could be followed by trails of fire. In the Jijelti region, where there had been no disorders, other Senegalese murdered and burned at leisure. Planes scattered bombs on Arab tent camps. The military gave the number of victims as between six and eight thousand.” This report brought revised figures from the Ministry of the Interior. The “more than 100” casualties now became 1,200, and it was officially admitted that 50,000 Arabs had taken part in the events of May 8.

All this time there had been an eye-witness account of the first trouble in Sétif. Pierre Dubard of Le Figaro had watched the demonstration and had seen the police violence, but he was unable to get his story past the censor until July 7, two months after the event. When it finally appeared, it confirmed not only Le Populaire’s story, but also most of what had appeared in Stars and Stripes. French official sources were completely discredited, the danger of accepting government statements at face value was amply illustrated, and the manner in which each newspaper’s political line had influenced its version of the Sétif attack had been clearly shown.

SOURCE: The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-maker from the Crimea to Kosovo, by Phillip Knightley, with an introduction by John Pilger (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2000; first published in 1975), pp. 393-394

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by Joel | 6 June 2005 · 9:32 pm

Ultimului Strajer al Capitalei, 1916

Halfway Down the Danube shares a telling snapshot of the monument To the Last Defender of Bucharest against the Germans in 1916.

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Filed under Eastern Europe, Germany, Romania, war

by Joel | 4 June 2005 · 7:14 pm

Ernest Hemingway, Lousy Reporter

One other symbol in Spain was Ernest Hemingway, by far the most famous of the English-language writers there during the war, an influential figurehead in the fight against Fascism–“How could this fight be lost now, with Hemingway on our side.” Hemingway had already worked on one propaganda film, Spain in Flames, and had agreed to help with another, The Spanish Earth, when he accepted an offer from the North American Newspaper Alliance [NANA] to report the war. He arrived in Spain for his first visit in March 1937, and altogether made four trips. He travelled widely, usually with Martha Gellhorn, Herbert Matthews, and Sefton Delmer, saw a lot of the fighting, and got to know many of the Republican leaders and supporters. Yet his performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad. On a technical level, his descriptions of battle and bombardments are monotonous; his emphasis on his own close location to the action smacks of boastfulness; his accounts of blood, wounds, and severed legs are typical of his desire to shock; and his reporting of conversations is so totally Hemingway in style as to make the reader doubt their authenticity. NANA had to ask him to confine his work to human-interest features and, when that failed, to report only developments of vital importance. As his biographer, Carlos Baker, puts it, “His eye for telling details and individual traits was not nearly so sharp as that of Dos Passos, nor did he commonly rise to the meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness which characterised the best work of Matthews and Delmer.”

True, Hemingway grew up politically in Spain and believed it was the place to stop Fascism, before Hitler’s Brownshirts and Mussolini’s Blackshirts could precipitate a second world war. But he was unjustifiably optimistic about the Republicans’ chances of doing this. One of his principal informants was Mikhail Koltzov–the Pravda and Izvestia correspondent who quarrelled with Louis Fischer over an accurate but pessimistic dispatch Fischer had written–and this might explain the views Hemingway expressed to reporters in New York in June 1938. Franco was short of troops, Hemingway said, and handicapped by friction among the foreign elements in his army; the Republicans were well organised and their chances of winning were good. Actually, at that moment the Republicans were only six months away from defeat. But these criticisms are the least serious of Hemingway’s shortcomings as a war correspondent. The most important concerns his total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of “untrustworthy elements” on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this….

In the end, Hemingway did write it all, in For Whom the Bell Tolls, but from a war correspondent the reader has the right to expect all the news the correspondent knows at the time, not as interpolations in a work of romantic fiction published when the war is over. The truth was that Hemingway, for all his compassion for the Spaniards, for all his commitment to the Republican cause, used the war to gain a new lease on his life as a writer. As Baker says, “Refusing to waste the best of his materials in his newspaper dispatches … he had gathered and salted away a body of experience and information which he described to [his editor Maxwell] Perkins as ‘absolutely invaluable’.” For a novelist, this was understandable. For a war correspondent, it was unforgivable.

Okay, the price for this second excerpt from the chapter on the Spanish Civil War is a total embargo on excerpts from several chapters on the two world wars.

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by Joel | 3 June 2005 · 9:23 pm

Reporting Both Sides from Spain, 1936-39

Ideological partisanship during the Spanish Civil War was every bit as blindly irresponsible as it is today with regard to the war in Iraq.

The main target for the [pro-Franco] Catholic press was Herbert Matthews. His newspaper, the New York Times, was determined to cover the war with impartiality and had formulated a plan to achieve this: it would print the news from both sides and would give both equal prominence, equal length, and equal treatment. This scheme, fine in theory, was a disaster and pleased no one. To begin with, the Times’ correspondent with the Franco forces was William P. Carney, a Catholic, who felt strongly about Republican excesses against the clergy, and who was simply not in Matthews’ class as a correspondent. Giving his stories equal length with Matthews’ often meant overplaying a bad story and cutting a good one. Next, the Times’ “bullpen,” its group of senior editors who read the news as it comes in and decide how much of it will be printed and where it will appear in the paper, was dominated at that time by Catholics who were known to reflect a Catholic viewpoint when assessing the news, with results ranging from playing down stories about birth control to playing up stories expressing alarm over Communism. And, third, the Catholic opposition to Matthews was much more active in pressing its campaign against him than his admirers were in supporting him.

How the New York Times’ plan worked out in practice can best be assessed by … examples….

In March of 1937, a large Franco force had struck towards Guadalajara, north of Madrid, but was stopped well short of its objective. Matthews went there and found that the attacking troops had been Italian. They had been routed and had left behind prisoners, rifles, machine guns, and some disabled tanks. Matthews talked to the prisoners (he knew Italian), examined the arms, and watched the dead Italians being buried. Back in Madrid, he filed his story, an important one because it contained the first positive evidence that Mussolini had sent not only arms and advisers but also an expeditionary force–a fact, at that time, of great political and emotional significance. To emphasise this point, Matthews wrote that the attacking troops “were Italian and nothing but Italian.” In New York, on the instructions of the assistant managing editor, Raymond McCaw, wherever the word “Italian” appeared in Matthews’ copy it was struck out and the word “insurgent”–one used to describe the Franco troops–was substituted. This was done even to the extent of making the quoted phrase read “they were Insurgent and nothing but Insurgent,” thus completely distorting Matthews’ point. To make matters worse, McCaw sent a cable to Matthews saying that the only papers to emphasise the Italian point had been those in Moscow and pointing out that, as far as the New York Times was concerned, “we cannot print obvious propaganda for either side even under bylines.”…

Small wonder that the editor at the New York Times responsible for the “Letters” column complained, “No matter who writes the dispatch [from Spain] the other side will accuse him of broadcasting propaganda or downright lying. In all my ten or twelve years’ experience with letters to the editor, I have never encountered a situation in which so much absolutely rabid partisanship was manifested. It is partisanship that cannot be reasoned with and which, consequently, gets nowhere.”

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Filed under publishing, Spain, war

by Joel | 8 May 2005 · 10:11 am

Forced Repatriation of Soviet Citizens after VE Day

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

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

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

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

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

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by Joel | 1 May 2005 · 2:59 pm

German and Chinese Classmates in My "Curs de Perfecţionare"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next installment: the three weird Americans in my class.

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Filed under China, Germany, Romania

by Joel | 29 April 2005 · 9:39 pm

Language Hat on Barbarian Names

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

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

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

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

I particularly like the first comment, from John Emerson:

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

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

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

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by Joel | 11 March 2005 · 9:28 pm

Erazim V. Kohák’s "Requiem for Utopia"

In the context of reviewing the book, Legacy of Dissent, invisible reader Mithras the Prophet posts “a long excerpt from Erazim V. Kohák’s “Requiem for Utopia”, written after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Kohák went into exile from Czechoslovakia in 1948, and continues to write and teach at Boston University and Charles University in Prague.”

[Dubcek and his colleagues] were determined to be humane authoritarians, respecting the rights of their subjects. In their seven months in power they discovered that the idea of a humane authoritarianism, the standard illusion of well-intentioned rhetorical revolutionists, is an illusion, a contradictio in adiecto. A humane authoritarianism would respect the freedom of its subjects, and so inevitably create the possibility of dissent and opposition. Faced with opposition, the human authoritarian faces the choice of ceasing to be authoritarian — or ceasing to be humane. Repression, whatever its overt aim, can be humane only in rhetoric — in practice it necessarily means breaking men. Czechs and Slovaks, including Dubcek, were too familiar with the logic of terror to opt for the latter alternative. After seven months, the program which started out as a program of humane communism became a program of social democracy….

The ideals of human freedom and social justice remain valid. Democracy — democracy for blacks as well as whites, in economics as well as politics, at home as well as in remote reaches of Latin America or Eastern Europe — remains valid. Socialism, the ideal of social justice and social responsibility in industrial society, remains valid. Human and civil rights, the right of every man to personal identity and social participation, all remain valid. But the utopian myths of self-proclaimed rhetorical radicals do not advance these ideals. The detour on which too many socialists embarked in 1917 is over, finished, discredited, revealed as an exhiliarating, aristocratic, and ultimately reactionary social sport, not the radical social progress it claimed to be. The task that remains is the work of social progress — not the aristocratic sport of revolution, but the solid work of redical, deep-rooted transformation of society. Men may still demand their daily dose of illusion, the exhilaration of revolution or “confrontation” rather than the down-to-earth facts and figures of a Freedom Budget; but those who cater to this demand can no longer do so in the name of social progress — or in the name of socialism.

Utopia is dead. Czechoslovakia has been a graveyard of illusions.

And not just Czechoslovakia, about which I’ve posted once or twice, and intend to post again. For me, a long winter–including a Dean’s December–in Ceausescu’s Romania first began turning shovelfuls of earth into a graveyard for illusions.

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by Joel | 7 March 2005 · 7:58 pm

Danny Reviews Ibn Battuta

Danny Yee reviews The Adventures of Ibn Battuta, by Ross Dunn (U. California Press, 2005):

Ibn Battuta set off from Tangier in 1325, visiting Egypt, Mecca, Syria, Iraq, Anatolia, the Central Asian steppe, India, the Maldives and possibly China before returning home nearly twenty five years later. After additional trips to Spain and West Africa he settled down and his story was turned into a Rihla (travel narrative) by Ibn Juzayy….

Dunn provides information about the people Ibn Battuta met and the places he visited and background on the broader history, society and culture. So the opening chapter “Tangier” looks at the geography of the city and the Straits of Gibraltar and the history of the Almohad dynasty, for example, while the chapter on Persia and Iraq begins by describing the impacts of the Mongols and Turks on Mesopotamia. More general material includes explanations of the different schools of Islamic law, Sufism, the role of Arabic, and other aspects of the common culture of the Islamic world.

The result makes The Adventures of Ibn Battuta almost a guide to the Islamic world in the second quarter of the 14th century. With the travel and biographical material providing an extra attraction — Ibn Battuta’s adventures get more exciting than the consumption of watermelon! — it would make an excellent entry work for those with no background knowledge of Islam or Islamic history.

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Filed under China, Spain

by Joel | 4 February 2005 · 8:44 am

Volga Germans Steer for Home

The invaluable Argus notes a story about Volga Germans in Kazakhstan.

ALMATY, 1 February (IRIN) – For Irina Geisler, a young ethnic German in the Kazakh commercial capital of Almaty, ‘returning’ to Germany, couldn’t be more natural. “I feel German. It’s my dream,” the 19-year-old linguistics student told IRIN. Her application for German citizenship currently awaits approval.

“All my life I’ve heard about Germany. It’s part of my life,” she said with a German accent heavily influenced by the Schwabian roots of her ancestors. Such dreams remain strong for thousands of such ethnic Germans in today’s Kazakhstan, with many of Irina’s friends torn between both countries. “Half of the young ethnic Germans would like to return, the other half don’t want to leave Kazakhstan,” Geisler conceded, describing it as an individual decision many young people like her still face.

“I’ve thought about going to Germany but I’ve finished my education already,” 29-year-old Evgenija Mayer, an employee at the Fredrich Ebert Stiftung in Almaty, told IRIN. “I worry I would have to start all over again.” But starting again is precisely what hundreds of thousands like her have done already. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, more than 900,000 ethnic Germans and their families have emigrated to Germany, the German Embassy in Almaty told IRIN.

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