Category Archives: industry

by | 19 August 2026 · 9:21 am

Migration into Mindanao

From The Making of the Modern Philippines: Pieces of a Jigsaw State, by Philip Bowring (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), Kindle pp. 183-187:

The island of Mindanao is the most misunderstood part of the nation. Decades of on and off conflict in its Muslim region has long stolen the headlines. Under President Duterte, this provided an excuse for declaring martial law over the whole island. The reality is that for decades the island proved a land of opportunity for hundreds of thousands who moved from over-populated islands, mostly the Visayas, to the relatively underpopulated Mindanao…. Movement from the Visayas to Mindanao long pre-dates the Spanish.

…

The big boost to settlement came with the Commonwealth government, President Quezon recognizing the agricultural and forestry potential of the region as a way to underpin the national economy and raise the Christian population to counterbalance the Moros.

…

The big boost to settlement came with the Commonwealth government, President Quezon recognizing the agricultural and forestry potential of the region as a way to underpin the national economy and raise the Christian population to counterbalance the Moros.

…

The Davao region, meanwhile, had attracted large numbers of Japanese to develop timber and plantation industries and Davao city was on its way to becoming the largest in Mindanao, with far more Japanese than Americans. Japanese ran shops, restaurants, fish canneries and export enterprises, often with sleeping Filipino partners to get around alien laws. The 1930s Japanese-led developments were key to making Davao the premier city of the island that it soon became. Although many Japanese left in 1945, their lands and enterprises were quickly taken over by immigrants from the Visayas and Luzon.

…

The scale of the internal colonization after 1935 was only partly a result of colonial rule or the Quezon initiatives. The underlying demographic driver was that because of improved government in the late Spanish period, and the impact of the US on public health, the population in the Visayas and Luzon in particular grew exceptionally fast. The people of Mindanao had far more land than they were able to occupy and cultivate.

…

Worst off have been the Surigao provinces where few benefit from mining and forest wealth. The Paper Industries Corporation of the Philippines (PICOP) once employed more than 10,000 people in and around Bislig on the coast of Surigao del Sur. At its peak it was the biggest pulp and paper operation in Asia.

…

Caraga encapsulates many of the problems of the wider nation. In theory, it is endowed with great forests, well-watered lowlands and lakes, a variety of mineral deposits, a coastline which offers opportunities for fisheries, and beaches and scenery to lure tourists. The regional capital, Butuan, is the oldest identifiable city in the country, dating back more than 1,000 years and with trading links to Java and China. In recent times, however, Butuan has been overshadowed by the growth not only of Davao City but also Cagayan de Oro to the west.

…

One large mining company, Nickel Asia, operates modern mines but much mining is small- to medium-scale and uncontrolled, raising little if any revenue for the government while polluting rivers and lakes.

Well, this will have to be my last post from this book, since I’ve nearly reached the publisher’s limit for copying. (I appreciate the warnings when I hit 80% of the limit.) The book has a fair number of little proofreading errors, and navigation to the helpful maps on the Kindle often drops you back into the Table of Contents. But the author covers a wide range of topics in great detail.

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Filed under economics, industry, Japan, language, migration, military, Philippines, religion, U.S.

by | 7 July 2026 · 4:39 am

Ukraine’s Economic Turnaround c. 2000

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 56-57:

In the fall of 1999, as Yeltsin was getting ready to step down and promote Putin as his successor, the president of Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma, was preparing to run for a second term. During his first term he had managed to stabilize the Ukrainian economy by launching large-scale privatization and working closely with Western donors, especially the International Monetary Fund. Kuchma had also brought Ukrainian politics into temporary equilibrium by adopting a new constitution that introduced a power-sharing agreement between president and parliament. Yet the system was anything but stable, as the two political actors did not agree on the political and economic direction of the country. The global financial crisis of 1997 and the Russian default of 1998 hurt the Ukrainian economy, enhancing the position of the communists as the most powerful parliamentary faction. In the parliamentary elections of 1998 they gained 25 percent of the popular vote. The national democrats, organized in Rukh and led by the former dissident Viacheslav Chornovil, came second with 10 percent of the vote, while the Kuchma-backed People’s Democratic Party garnered a mere 5 percent.

In 1999 Kuchma was pretty much in the same place as Yeltsin on the eve of his reelection in 1996. He decided to take a page from Yeltsin’s electoral campaign, presenting himself as the only force capable of stopping a communist return to power. This stance appealed to the new industrial bosses in eastern Ukraine, who had managed to privatize former state-owned enterprises on Kuchma’s watch and with his assistance. Electors in the western regions, who cherished Ukrainian independence, oriented themselves toward Europe and against a return to the USSR.

Using his control of state-run media and obtaining support from media controlled by the regional bosses and oligarchs who had emerged during his first term, Kuchma managed to carry both eastern and western Ukraine, losing only in the center, where the countryside was still controlled by holdovers of the collective farm system. He gained 58 percent of the popular vote versus 39 percent for his opponent, the Ukrainian communist leader Petro Symonenko. Like Yeltsin, Kuchma decided to use his victory over the communists to push market reforms forward. He was luckier than his Russian counterpart, as there was no Asian financial crisis to interfere with his plans.

Upon his reelection, Kuchma initiated a new course toward integrating Ukraine into European political and economic structures. He appointed Viktor Yushchenko, the young head of Ukraine’s national bank who was strongly supported by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as the new prime minister. In slightly more than a year, Yushchenko and his ally Yulia Tymoshenko, who became deputy prime minister in the new government, managed to stop the economic decline, increase revenues by closing loopholes for big business and the newly emergent oligarchic clans, and repay unpaid wages, salaries, and pensions. The economy began a rapid recovery led by the metallurgical and mining industries, which doubled their exports. Economic growth would continue well into the first decade of the new millennium.

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by | 6 July 2026 · 2:51 am

Russian vs. Ukrainian Transitions, 1990s

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 43-44:

In Ukraine, as in Russia, the economy and public reaction to the dissolution of the USSR were the two key issues that turned national politics into a never-ending drama, casting president and parliament in opposing roles. But those issues played out differently in Ukraine, where, most importantly, the political elite enhanced rather than undermined the democratic institutions born out of the chaos of Gorbachev’s political and economic reforms. Russia’s “democratic moment” became an “era of democracy” in Ukraine.

Leonid Kravchuk was never the revolutionary that Yeltsin had become during the late Soviet period. If Yeltsin had served in the course of his party career as a regional boss responsible for administering large administrative and economic entities such as Sverdlovsk oblast (province) and Moscow, Kravchuk was a quintessential apparatchik, running the propaganda department of the Ukrainian Central Committee. While Yeltsin left the Communist Party early, protesting the slow pace of Gorbachev’s reforms, Kravchuk remained loyal to the end. If Yeltsin was elected to parliament and then became its chairman against the will of the party leadership, then Kravchuk took the helm of the Ukrainian parliament thanks to the support of the party bosses. And while Yeltsin ran for the Russian presidency against a communist candidate supported by the Kremlin, Kravchuk competed successfully against a pro-democratic candidate who also happened to be a former prisoner of the Gulag.

The differences between Yeltsin and Kravchuk extended to their styles of presidential leadership. If Yeltsin was a charismatic populist, highly voluntarist in his attitude to power, Kravchuk was a cunning apparatchik and consensus builder. He would need those skills in office, as he led a country very different from Russia and faced a very different parliament. Ukraine was divided by history, culture, and the political orientations and instincts of its people as the Russian Federation never was.

The east and south of Ukraine had been the industrial heartland of the Soviet Union, was highly Russified in culture, and had millions of ethnic Russians among its inhabitants. The center was largely rural and Ukrainian-speaking, a product of the Soviet Ukrainian national project of the 1920s, which tolerated Ukrainian cultural but not political identity. Then there was the west, which had long been part of central European states and empires. Its strongly exclusivist national identity had been strengthened by the interwar nationalist movement and the lengthy guerrilla war against Soviet rule waged by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

As in Russia, the Ukrainian “democrats” emerged as the most dynamic force in late Soviet and early post-Soviet politics. Their principal concern was not economic reform but state-building. By the end of 1991 Yeltsin had established control over all-Union managerial cadres and institutions that had plenty of experience in running an independent state; in Ukraine such institutions had to be built almost from scratch on the basis of ministries that in Soviet times had merely relayed orders from Moscow to the periphery, ensuring that production quotas and directives from the top were fulfilled in a timely manner.

When it came to market reforms, the Ukrainian parliament lacked a strong lobby to advocate or adopt them, and the public was not ready to support them. Economic reform meant hardship, which might very well split the country and scupper its independence. A poll conducted in 1993 suggested that only 19 percent of Ukrainians were prepared to endure economic reforms in order to strengthen and maintain independence, while 44 percent were not. Most of the former resided in the west, while most of the latter lived in the east and south. Thus, Ukraine found itself first resisting, then delaying, and finally emulating reforms.

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by | 17 May 2026 · 12:17 am

Mare Island Navy Yard, 1879

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 105-107:

Captain De Long scrutinized his weather-beaten ship in the golden California light, going over every valve and fitting, every strake of her long hull. He wondered where her weaknesses lurked. Were there rotten timbers? Leaky seams? The smallest flaw could mean his death, and the deaths of the men who would serve with him in the Arctic. The Jeannette had survived the trip—had performed admirably, in fact—but he knew she was not ready for the coming battle with the ice. There was still much work to be done, and only a few months in which to do it. To withstand the pressures of the pack, the Jeannette would have to be reinforced in a way that no Arctic-bound vessel had ever been reinforced before.

For most of the month of January 1879, the ship lay moored at the Mare Island Navy Yard, near San Francisco, awaiting inspection from a specially appointed board of naval engineers. Mare Island was the only Navy shipyard on the West Coast, a place where new vessels were sometimes constructed and where the existing ships of the Pacific Squadron routinely came in for maintenance and inspection. It was a complex of foundries, pipe shops, machine shops, pitch houses, sawmills, smokestacks, and derricks clustered around a floating dry dock, all of it set on a marshy island where the Napa River emptied into a remote estuary of San Francisco Bay.

Each morning, the bell announced the start of the shift, and the crews of tradesmen—carpenters and coppersmiths, tinsmiths and teamsters, plumbers and painters, caulkers and coopers—went about their smoky, cacophonous work. Mare Island was the western outpost of America’s burgeoning might, the well-equipped repair shop of her still tiny but soon to be ascendant Navy, which was slowly converting from canvas to steam, and from wood to metal. Perched atop the headquarters building was a copper-sheathed statue of an American eagle, the huge bird cocked at an angle toward the water, as if to bid farewell to the nation’s ships as they ventured to the far reaches of the Pacific.

Many great ships had been launched or overhauled at Mare Island—brigs, monitors, corvettes, schooners, sloops of war. But the shipyard’s most storied fixture throughout much of the nineteenth century was the old Boston-built fifty-four-gun frigate the USS Independence, which, according to one Navy historian, was for nearly seventy years “as much a part of the Mare Island waterfront as the seagulls.”

Among the warships moored beside the yard, the slender Jeannette looked fragile and unobtrusive. When Navy engineers commenced a formal study of her, they were not impressed. To withstand the ice, they thought, the Jeannette still needed a considerable amount of work—on her hull, especially. How this exploring yacht, as the Pandora, had survived three journeys in the Arctic was a mystery to them.

Of course, these men were paid to be cautious, and they knew their recommendations would carry little consequence within the Navy hierarchy, especially since Bennett would be covering all expenses. Still, the engineers’ assessment was sweeping: Decks would have to be ripped out, they declared, bulkheads constructed, new boilers installed, coal bunkers rearranged, the entire hull reinforced with additional layers of planking. They talked of adding ambitious networks of beams and braces. As their checklist of repairs and renovations kept growing, they envisioned a price tag as high as $50,000.

De Long was shocked, even though he knew many of the repairs were necessary, and even though he and his men would be the beneficiaries of the contemplated improvements. He saw deep trouble in the engineers’ recommendations. “We must stop them,” he wrote, “or they will ruin us.” While Bennett rarely blanched at a bill, De Long believed it his duty to make sure the engineers did not concoct unnecessary repairs in order to swindle the faraway—and notoriously profligate—publisher. “I consider your interest identical to my own,” De Long wrote Bennett not long after his arrival in California. “I am laboring to keep down expenses with as much zeal as if I were to foot the bills instead of you.”

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by | 15 May 2026 · 12:31 am

Centennial Exhibition, 1876

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 55-57:

Throughout the first week of July 1876, the week of America’s hundredth birthday, the nation’s attentions were focused on Philadelphia. Not only was the City of Brotherly Love the place where the Declaration of Independence had been signed a century earlier; the city was hosting a world’s fair, which, on this sultry summer week, was drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the globe. The Centennial Exhibition, host to thirty-seven nations, was situated on a campus of nearly four hundred acres in Fairmount Park, across the Schuylkill River from Philadelphia. It was America’s first world exposition, and by summer’s end nearly ten million people would have come to gawk at the nearly thirty thousand exhibits nestled inside the fair’s 250 pavilions and halls. The grounds were so sprawling that a newly devised elevated rail system—an early type of monorail—was used to shuttle crowds back and forth between two of the most popular buildings.

The crowds had come to be dazzled, and they were not disappointed. Among the many new creations on display were the Remington typewriter, an intricate stringed apparatus called a Calculating Machine, and a curious gizmo that a bearded Scotsman named Alexander Graham Bell was calling his “telephone.” (Bell would read from Hamlet’s soliloquy at one end of the hall, and attendees at the other could plainly hear the inventor’s voice issuing from a little speaker. “My God, it talks!” exclaimed one prominent visitor, Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil.)

All summer the exposition had been the talk of the land. James Gordon Bennett had been to the fair several times, and he’d made sure his best reporters stayed in Philadelphia to work the grounds and cover the comings and goings of dignitaries from around the world—the lords and monarchs, the authors and artists, the scientists and railroad magnates. The Herald ran Centennial Exposition stories every day—in fact, by special arrangement, thousands of copies of Bennett’s paper were printed on an enormous press right on the grounds. Young entrepreneurs like George Westinghouse and George Eastman could be seen at the centennial, hungrily prowling the exhibits for ideas cross-fertilized with other ideas. The twenty-nine-year-old Thomas Edison was there, too, showcasing a strange little device called the electric pen. Another brilliant American inventor, Moses Farmer, drew crowds with his electric dynamo, which he used to power a set of artificial lights—called arc lamps—that blazed through the Philadelphia night.

There were other puzzlements and oddities. At the Japanese pavilion, a miraculously fast-growing pea plant called kudzu was unveiled to an unsuspecting Western world. Elsewhere, the crowds could gaze upon new works by Rodin, listen to concerts played on the world’s largest pipe organ, or marvel at the immense handheld torch of Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi’s Lady Liberty (the rest of her was still under construction in France). It was here, at the Centennial Exhibition, that the American masses were introduced to a new condiment called Heinz ketchup, to a fizzy sassafras concoction sold under the name Hires Root Beer, and to the perfect novelty of a tropical fruit, served in foil with a fork, known as a banana.

BY FAR THE most popular attraction of the exposition, however, was Machinery Hall, a cavernous greenhouse structure that covered fourteen acres—nearly three times the square footage of St. Peter’s Basilica at Vatican City. The hall was a temple to machines of all kinds, and it thrummed and whirred and whined with the operation of countless pumps, turbines, generators, lathes, saws, and ingenious new fixtures of tool-and-die equipment. The floor was packed with aisle after aisle of inventions—most of them American, many of them revolutionary. There was, for example, the Line-Wolf Ammonia Compressor, a contraption for making ice. There was the Brayton Ready Motor, a practical early prototype of the internal combustion engine. There was a seven-thousand-pound pendulum clock manufactured by Seth Thomas that was calibrated to control twenty-six other clocks interspersed throughout the hall. There were new kinds of locomotive brakes, new kinds of elevators, and improved versions of the rotary cylinder press.

But the most extraordinary thing about Machinery Hall was the great motor that powered everything else. The Grand Central Engine, sometimes simply called the Centennial Steam Engine, was the largest engine in the world. Weighing more than 650 tons, constructed by the brilliant American engineer George Corliss, it supplied free steam power, via a network of underground shafts totaling a mile in length, to the more than eight thousand smaller machines on display throughout the hall.

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by | 14 March 2026 · 8:37 am

Gierek’s Poland Redefines Socialism

From Ryszard Kapuscinski: A Life, by Artur Domoslawski (Verso, 2012) Kindle  pp. 225-227:

Kapuściński does not watch the Polish drama from close up, because at the time he is in Mexico. When he comes home from his posting, he finds a totally different atmosphere in Poland.

There is not a trace remaining of Gomułka’s plebeian socialism. At the beginning of the new decade it is far easier than in previous years to get basic goods: food, clothing, household equipment. Life for the Poles becomes more bearable, and Gierek’s slogan in the first years of his government – ‘May Poland grow in strength and may people live more affluently’ – is not far from the daily experience of the decided majority. The miners are thrilled, because they are getting fabulous salaries and bonuses; the farmers complain less, because Gierek does away with compulsory annual supplies of agricultural products to the state at fixed prices.

The Gierek era is also a time when the PRL opens up to the West. It is easier to get a passport, and if someone goes off on a journey to the other side of the Iron Curtain he can officially buy a hundred dollars (earlier this was possible only on the black market, and was a hundred times more expensive). Previously condemned or ridiculed Western popular culture gains ‘civic rights’ – American films and serials on television are virtually one of the trademarks of the decade. Home-grown entertainment of a fairly good standard also appears; a boom in popular songs begins, and a couple of excellent cabarets open. Poland is having a good time drinking and dancing.

His Highness showed particular vivacity and keenness. He received processions of planners, economists, and financial specialists, talking, asking questions, encouraging, and praising.

As the new leader, Gierek has ambitious plans. On the advice of Party experts he considers some sort of semi–market reform but quickly drops these complicated ideas. Why bother? Poland can live on the reserves saved up by the previous first secretary, and shortly afterwards a miracle occurs – Western credits start to pour in.

The capitalist countries of the West are experiencing a boom, there is cheap money looking for an outlet, and socialist Poland willingly accepts loans of any size. There is no need to rationalize anything: abracadabra, and goods which previously you could only dream about appear in the shops. Salaries go up, and the hope returns that finally the affluent life everyone has been waiting for is just around the corner.

If you use foreign capital to build the factories, you don’t need to reform. So there you are – His Majesty didn’t allow reform, yet the factories were going up, they were built. That means development.

Prefabricated concrete construction takes off; people still have to wait for flats, but they are relatively cheap. Young couples get special credits, they buy fridges, washing machines, television sets and furniture – all on hire purchase, and if someone’s really lucky he’ll also get hold of a coupon for a car (still a deficit item).

One was planning, another was building, and so, in a word, development had started.

After a year of hard work there are cheap holidays and, for those who can manage it, even trips abroad – to Bulgaria, Romania or the Crimea. Youth organizations which in the years when the foundations of socialism were being built stood for ideological zeal, altruism and personal sacrifice are now concerned with ‘fixing’: first to arrange the supply of some deficit, hard-to-acquire goods for their activists, then some foreign travel.

Something like a socialist middle class emerges – a broad group consisting of most Poles, geared to consumerism. One of the leading dissidents of the era admits years later that this was the only period when he really did fear society and felt marginalized. Because almost all Poland approves of Gierek’s socialism at the beginning of the decade, very few people are bothered by the lack of elections, the rule of a single party, or the limited freedom of speech. To live and not to die! Long live socialism and Comrade Gierek! Bravo, bravo, bravo!

[H]e even liked progress – his most honourably benevolent desire for action manifested itself in the unconcealed desire to have a satiated and happy people cry for years after, with full approval, ‘Hey! Did he ever develop us!’

Kapuściński comes back from a world where socialism means a heroic struggle, the sacrifice of one’s personal peace and quiet. Latin America is a revolutionary volcano: Cuba sí, yanquis no; the idol of the young is the recently assassinated Che Guevara; Salvador Allende is conducting a peaceful socialist revolution in Chile, which the Americans, the local oligarchs and the middle class want to overthrow.

Over there: For their belief in socialism, the young idealists are ending up in prison, being tortured, or dying in the jungle, and are often completely misunderstood by those whose rights they are demanding. Over here: For their belief in socialism, the young wheeler-dealers are the first to get a flat, a car and a trip to Sochi. There: great ideas, the clank of rifles; here: fairly OK cash, idle gawping at the TV, having a ball. There: rebellion, nonconformism, adrenaline; here: fake smiles, making the right faces for the authorities. If that is socialism, is this socialism too? Where can a man go, where can he find a place, how can he fit into life on this other planet?

Now he is a star on a national scale. During the past few years, while he has been away, several of his books have come out, strengthening the position of the talented reporter and expert on Africa and Latin America. Despite the limitations imposed by the system, it is much easier to write significant texts about the Third World; censorship is not as sensitive to an ‘incorrect’ tone in these as it is in articles and books on national topics or the West.

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by | 6 March 2026 · 7:15 am

Kapuściński Exposes Nowa Huta

From Ryszard Kapuscinski: A Life, by Artur Domoslawski (Verso, 2012) Kindle pp. 81-83:

Kapuściński and Szczęsnowicz share a rented room in one of Nowa Huta’s small hotels. They expect to have a boring time trudging about the building site and having cliché conversations with the workers. And suddenly they discover an unknown world whose existence they have never imagined.

In his report to the Central Committee, Szczęsnowicz writes that ‘you won’t be able to educate the young people building Nowa Huta with the help of a church and a wretched pub selling vodka’. The image that Kapuściński paints in his report, entitled ‘This Is Also the Truth about Nowa Huta’, prompts the editor-in-chief of Sztandar Młodych to say, ‘This will never get through.’

What won’t get through?

The story about the pimping mother, who sits in one room collecting money for services provided by her daughter in the next room. Or the one about the fourteen-year-old girl who has infected eight boys and ‘described her exploits in such a vulgar way that one felt like vomiting’. Or the young married couples who spend their wedding nights in gateways and ditches (‘whoever thought up the brilliant idea that married couples can only stay together in a hotel room until eight p.m.?’).

A worker friend tells Kapuściński that he will never marry, because in these conditions he would be bound to ‘have no respect for his wife’.

[A]t Huta the bureaucracy reaches a degree of barbarity. For example, a woman living in a workers’ hotel is going to give birth. There are six other girls living in the same room. After three months she is supposed to go back to work. She doesn’t: she works at Huta, several kilometres from the hotel, but she has to feed her baby four times a day. Nevertheless, they tell her to bring a certificate proving that she is working. Yes, but she cannot get one. Then along comes the hotel man, takes away her bedding, takes away everything that is not her property, and the woman and her baby are left on the bare floor-boards.

Kapuściński hears about the fortunes of his friends from a few years earlier who have had enough and refuse to put up with ‘all these obscenities’. One has written complaints and petitions, for which he has been punished by having his accommodation allotment withheld, despite the fact that he has a sick mother and his wife lives out in the countryside because they have no home of their own in the town. Another critic has been sacked from his job. Still another has been stymied by lethal rumours that ‘he is a shirker and troublemaker. Not the worst method either!’ he writes. ‘People can see what’s going on. It is as if some monstrous bureaucratic fungus has sprung up here, which is proliferating and crushing everything, but no one seems at all concerned.’ In his report, Kapuściński reveals that complaints about what is going on at Nowa Huta have reached the ZMP authorities in Warsaw, but no one cares and they have gone unanswered.

Instead of painting the world of Ważyk’s poem in rosy colours, Kapuściński adds even more black to it. He is on the side of the workers, who feel hurt by the poet’s words: ‘rabble’, ‘semi-deranged soul’, ‘inhuman Poland’, ‘a shambles’. ‘To them these expressions,’ writes Kapuściński, ‘are wrongful, untrue and insulting’; they feel as if ‘they are of no use to anyone, as if they are invisible’. ‘But they admit that many of the images in the poem are true, all the more since they all too rarely read the whole truth about themselves.’

Kapuściński ends with a challenge to the Party and the ZMP: ‘At Nowa Huta they must see that we are on the side of the working man every day of the week . . . The people at Nowa Huta are waiting for justice. They cannot wait for long. We have to go there and dig up everything that has been carefully hidden from human sight, and respond to a very large number of different questions.’

…

Now the Party reformers go on the counter-offensive. Jerzy Morawski, one of the leading lights of the thaw (and soon to become Tarłowska’s second husband), devises a Central Committee commission to investigate the situation at Nowa Huta. The commission goes to the site and sees . . . the same things as Kapuściński. The ‘commissars’ try to get in touch with the reporter, but the ZMP members at Nowa Huta, who have given him shelter, say they won’t give up their colleague until the Party provides a guarantee that nothing bad will happen to him. The Party not only provides the guarantee but gives him a national decoration – the Gold Cross of Merit. Tarłowska and the friendly censor return to their jobs. Soon Trybuna Ludu (The People’s Tribune), the organ of the Central Committee, is writing about the social ills at Nowa Huta. The paper brands the local Party organization as the culprits, the board of the conglomerate is replaced, and the local Party authorities offer their resignation.

Kapuściński learns three lessons from this story. He discovers that writing is a risky business and that written words carry consequences. He also becomes convinced that the written word can change reality. Finally, as he learns from the story with the censor, success in the public sphere also depends on taking care of things through informal channels, and on building a network of personal contacts with people in power. If you have friends here and there, they will help you in times of need.

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by | 4 February 2026 · 8:15 am

Parajutes in Burma, 1944

From Burma ’44: The Battle That Turned World War II in the East, by James Holland (Grove Atlantic, 2024), Kindle pp. 329-330:

Watching the ground operations at the airfields, [Gen. William] Slim was surprised by the range and flexibility of Snelling’s air supply. Rations, fuel and ammunition were, for obvious reasons, the priority, as well as mail, grain for animals and a host of other supplies. ‘The emergency and fancy demands made,’ he noted, ‘were also met with the promptitude and exactness of the postal order department of a first-class departmental store.’ These included blood plasma, instruments, drugs, spare parts for guns and other weapons, boots, clothing, the daily issue of SEAC (the new troops’ newspaper), typewriter ribbons, cooking pots and even replacement spectacles. The sheer range and logistical effort was mind-boggling.

From 2.30pm that afternoon, the first of a number of Dakotas and Commandos dropped supplies over the Admin Box. The multicoloured parachutes had been another bit of clever forward-thinking. Snelling had been unable to get enough parachutes supplied from India and there was no hope of acquiring the number needed from back home in Britain; SEAC was still bottom of the priority list for parachutes, as for everything. The answer was to make them of paper or jute instead – there were a great many paper mills in Calcutta and Bengal was the jute capital of the world. Paper parachutes, it turned out, would not work, but jute ones would. Slim now contacted the leaders of the British jute industry in Calcutta, asking for their help. He told them that to save time they were to deal with him and Snelling direct and warned them that he had no idea when exactly they would be paid. Despite this, within ten days they were experimenting with various types of ‘parajutes’, as they called them. By trial and error they soon arrived at the most efficient shape and weight of cloth, and within a month they had parajutes that were 85 per cent as reliable as normal silk parachutes. It was agreed they would be colour-coded – red, green, yellow, black, blue and orange, each denoting a different type of load. The cost of producing a parachute was around £20 at that time; the cost of a parajute was £5.

Despite this, Slim was rebuked for not going through the proper channels in securing these essential additions to the air-supply operation – not that he was bothered; some things were more important, and in South-East Asia they all had to use their initiative and think outside the box, no matter what some desk-wallahs thought. The entire war there was becoming an exercise in lateral thinking.

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by | 23 December 2025 · 10:56 pm

Liberating Slave Labor Camps

From Victory ’45: The End of the War in Eight Surrenders, by James Holland and Al Murray (Grove Atlantic, 2025), Kindle pp. 135-136:

The 3rd Infantry Division might have been first to Berchtesgaden, first to be able to crawl over the Berghof and first to reach the dizzy 6,000-foot heights of the Kehlsteinhaus, but they were not allowed to remain for long. Colonel Heintges had expected to be there for at least a week, but the following day the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment reached the town, part of the 101st ‘Screamin’ Eagles’ Airborne Division, and much to Heintges’ disappointment the Cottonbalers were relieved, while Leclerc’s men moved in on the Obersalzberg.

Yet while capturing Nazis and vast numbers of German troops was very much the Allies’ ongoing mission and a key part of securing Germany’s surrender, so too was liberating the astonishing number of concentration and forced labour camps. Nordhausen, a vast slave labour camp that fed workers into the Mittelbau-Dora factory where the V-2s had been manufactured, had been liberated on 11 April. The stench had been so bad that the American and British liberators had nearly all started vomiting. Buchenwald had been liberated the same day. A few days later, on 15 April, British troops had reached Bergen-Belsen, where tens of thousands of Jews had been left to starve. The arrival of Allied troops at these places of human degradation, misery and death was a watershed moment. Most found it hard to comprehend that fellow humans could be treated with such untold cruelty. Photographs and film footage of skeletal survivors, but also of piles of dead between the disease-infested huts, were quickly shown around the free world and prompted understandable feelings of shock, outrage and, of course, revulsion against the people responsible for this. It was hardly surprising that feelings towards the Germans hardened further; the enemy had continued fighting long after Germany had lost the war. Needless lives had been lost. Anger had already been rising among Allied troops, who saw no reason why they should risk their lives in this pointlessness. Now they were coming across scales of inhumanity that few could comprehend. Anger, disgust, horror and diminishing compassion for a subjugated enemy were the feelings aroused in many of the liberators.

And there were just so many camps. Every day Allied troops reached another, invariably presaged by the noticeable absence of birdsong and the rising stench that filled the air. On 4 May, the same day that Lieutenant Sherman Pratt and his men reached the Obersalzberg, it was the turn of the 71st ‘Red Circle’ Infantry Division. In sharp contrast to the battle-hardened 3rd Infantry Division, the 71st was one of the newest units to arrive in the ETO, landing in France only on 6 February 1945 and not heading into combat until early March. They’d seen plenty of action since then, however, and done well too, first attached to Patch’s Seventh Army and then moved to join Patton’s Third Army as it swept on into Austria and Czechoslovakia on the northern flank of 6th Army Group. And it was into Upper Austria, on the road to Hitler’s home city of Linz, that the Red Circle Division came across the horrifying site of Gunskirchen Lager.

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Filed under Austria, Britain, disease, Germany, industry, labor, military, slavery, U.S., war

by | 3 December 2025 · 1:04 am

Polish Gym Terms

To help us endure the long, cold winter here, we joined what appears to be Poland’s largest chain of fitness centers. Its name and motto hints at its international connections: Zdrofit: Więcej niż Fitness. The motto translates into ‘More than Fitness’ and the name itself is a mashup of Zdro[wie] ‘health’ plus fit[ness].

Much of its equipment is manufactured by Matrix Fitness, a division of Johnson Health Tech Co. Ltd., out of Taichung, Taiwan, with several subsidiaries in Cottage Grove, Wisconsin. The exercise machines are named in either Polish or English, but each comes with a list of instructions in Polish.

For instance, the LAT PULL and PECTORAL FLY machines both show diagrams with Polish labels Faza Początkowa (starting position) and Faza Końcowa (ending position). Some machines mark those positions in English. Underneath, they show human figures with the zaangażowane mięsnie ‘engaged muscles’ in red. (Compare mięso ‘meat’ with mięsień ‘muscle’.)

Step-by-step instructions for Wykonanie Ćwiczenia ‘performing the exercise’ follow.

Our branch of the gym at the Galeria Korona shopping mall had a major plumbing disaster about a month ago, so users of the restrooms in the Szatnia Męska (men’s locker room) and Szatnia Damska (women’s locker room) were invited to make use of the shared łazienka i przysznic dla osób z niepełnosprawnościami ‘bathroom and shower for people with not-full-efficiency-Inst’ (in instrumental case).

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Filed under industry, language, Poland, Taiwan, travel, U.S.