Category Archives: nationalism

by | 10 July 2009 · 5:44 pm

China vs. Turkey over Uighurs

The East-West Center has just published a policy study with an interesting, big-power-rivalry take on the Uighur unrest in China: Ethno-Diplomacy: The Uyghur Hitch in Sino-Turkish Relations, by Yitzhak Shichor. Policy Studies 53. Honolulu: East-West Center, 2009. xii, 72 pp. (Available free online.) Here’s the abstract:

Beginning in 1949, China responded to so-called Uyghur separatism and the quest for Eastern Turkestan (Xinjiang) independence as a domestic problem. Since the mid-1990s, however, when it became aware of the international aspects of this problem, Beijing has begun to pressure Turkey to limit its support for Uyghur activism. Aimed not only at cultural preservation but also at Eastern Turkestan independence, Uyghur activism remained unnoticed until the 1990s, despite the establishment in 1971 of Sino-Turkish diplomatic relations. It has gathered momentum as a result of China’s post-Mao opening, the Soviet disintegration, increased Uyghur migration, the growing Western concern for human rights, and the widespread use of the Internet. Until the mid-1990s Turkey’s leaders managed to defy Chinese pressure because they sympathized with the Uyghurs, were personally committed to their leader Isa Yusuf Alptekin, and hoped to restore Turkish influence in Central Asia. By late 1995, however, both that hope and Alptekin were dead, and China was becoming an influential, self-confident economic power. At this time Ankara chose to comply with Beijing’s demands, which were backed by increased trade, growing military collaboration, and China’s veiled threats of support for Kurdish nationalism. Consequently, Turkish Uyghurs suffered a serious blow, and some of their organizations had to relocate abroad, outside Beijing’s reach. Nonetheless, Uyghur activism continues in Turkey and has become even more pronounced worldwide. Possibly less concerned about the Uyghur “threat” than it suggests, Beijing may simply be using the Uyghurs to intimidate and manipulate Turkey and other governments, primarily those in Central Asia.

This adds a bit more historical background to the especially harsh reaction from Turkey: “Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said Friday genocide was being committed in China’s northwest province of Xinjiang and called on Chinese authorities to intervene to prevent more deaths.” (via boingboing)

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Filed under Central Asia, China, nationalism, Turkey

by | 3 July 2009 · 9:23 am

A Costly Victory in Sri Lanka

Writing in The Atlantic, Robert Kaplan offers an awfully grim retrospective on how Sri Lanka won its 26-year war against the Tamil Tigers.

Though it was only a one-day news story in the United States, a momentous event occurred last spring, with worldwide military significance. After 26 years of heavy fighting, the Sri Lankan government decisively defeated an ethnic insurgency, killing all of its top leadership, whose bodies were displayed on national television. Massive victory parades followed.

The Tamil Tigers were no ordinary insurgency. Built on the ethnic hatred of the minority Hindu Tamils against the majority Sinhalese Buddhists, the movement was among the best organized and most ruthless to have emerged anywhere since the Second World War. The Tigers boasted their own air force and navy to go along with their unconventional ground troops. They helped pioneer the use of suicide bombers. (Recall that it was a female Tiger suicide bomber who killed Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.) They regularly embedded their fighters among noncombatants, using them as human shields. In other words, they were as organized and heartless as any insurgent group in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The Tamil Tigers, moreover, had a brilliant, charismatic leader by the name of Vellupilai Prabakharan, who was venerated by many ethnic Hindu Tamils to the same extent that radical Muslims have venerated Osama bin Laden. His following was cult-like and was largely responsible for the war that killed 70,000 people since 1983, in an island of only 22 million people. Compare that to the deaths of 3,000 in the World Trade Center out of a population of 300 million in the United States. So when the Sri Lankan government displayed Prabakharan’s body on television last May, it represented the culmination of a counterinsurgency campaign that the U.S. could only dream about….

The war was won using techniques like the following, which the United States could and should never employ.

The insurgents are using human shields? No problem. Just keep killing the innocent bystanders until you get to the fighters themselves.… The Sri Lankan military indiscriminately killed large numbers of civilians—as many as 20,000 in the final months of fighting, according to the United Nations.

Bad media coverage is hurting morale and giving succor to the enemy? Just kill the journalists.… No journalist I met in Colombo was willing to cross the line and publicly attack the government.

The international community disapproves of your methods and cuts off military aid because of the human rights violations you’ve committed? Again, no problem. Get aid from China, whose assistance comes without moral lectures. That’s just what the Sri Lankan Government did. In return, the Chinese got the right to help construct a deep water port in Sri Lanka, close to world shipping lanes….

via RealClearPolitics

Kaplan adds a few other harsh observations in an interview with Michael J. Totten.

The Sri Lankan government was elected in 2005 to win the war. And it has done that. Extremely brutally. It’s a government that’s very nationalist Sinhalese Buddhist. These are not the Richard Gere’s “peace and love” Buddhists. These are the real blood and soil Buddhists, where Buddhism is like any other religion when it’s threatened and it’s defending a piece of territory. It can be very brutal….

In Sri Lanka you have a majority Sinhalese Buddhist population that thinks like a minority. They have a minority sense of oppression. Although they have 75 percent of the population while the Tamils have only about 18 percent, there are 60 million more Tamils nearby in southern India. So they’re kind of like the Iraqi Shias and the Serbs, other majorities who feel like minorities, and can be twice as brutal because of it.

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Filed under India, nationalism, religion, Sri Lanka, war

by | 2 July 2009 · 8:09 pm

Japan’s Puppet States in China

From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 481-483:

Japanese atrocities may have played some part in the refusal of Chiang’s government to contemplate a negotiated peace after 1937, despite German efforts to broker a truce. Of more importance was probably the manifest inability of the Japanese to inflict a decisive defeat on Guomindang forces, despite the poor leadership, low morale and appalling under-equipment that afflicted the latter.* Although the Japanese armies continued to advance steadily westwards in the course of 1938, capturing Canton, Wuhan and Xuzhou, they suffered increasingly heavy casualties as their lines of communication became overextended. At Taierhchuang [sic] in March 1938, for example, the 10th Division found itself all but surrounded and ended up losing 16,000 men in days of intense house-to-house fighting. Eighteen months later the 11th Army was heavily defeated at Changsha (Hunan). The invasion of Guangxi at the end of 1939 was short-lived; by the end of the following year the Japanese had been forced to abandon Chinhsien, Nanning and Pinyang. By 1940 they had more or less reached their limits in China and the location of the front line did not significantly change again until 1944. The effect of all this was to strengthen the hand of the more extreme elements within the Japanese military, the so-called ‘Control Faction’, who advocated ignoring the existing Chinese authorities and dealing with puppet regimes, as they had done in Manchuria.

Here, it might be thought, the Japanese had miscalculated. Who in China would want to lend his support to invaders capable of such terrible atrocities? As in other theatres of war, however, the key to securing collaboration turned out to have little, if anything, to do with the cruelty or kindness of the invading forces. The decisive factor was the extent to which the invaded people were divided among themselves. The Japanese invasion did not elicit national unity, as some Chinese Nationalists had hoped it might. It boosted support for the Communist Party, which under Mao Zedong’s leadership now committed itself to a campaign of protracted guerrilla warfare. At the same time, Japanese incursions tended to widen divisions within the Guomindang. The more recruits the Communists were able to find among impoverished and disillusioned peasants, the more tempted some Nationalists were to compromise with the Japanese. The further Chiang retreated to the west – and he did not stop until he reached Chongqing in the province of Sichuan, 800 miles from his starting point, Nanking – the greater the incentive for those left behind to make their peace with the Japanese.

Already by 1937 the Japanese had established three puppet regimes, in Chinese territory: the ‘Empire of Manchukuo’, the supposedly autonomous Mongolian regime of Prine Te [sic; = Prince Te(h), De Wang, Demchugdongrub/Dam-chukdangrub) and the East Hebei Autonomous Anti-Communist Council. By the middle of the following year, two more had been added: the Provisional Government of the Republic of China set up in Peiping by the North China Area Army, and the Reorganized Government of the Republic of China established in Nanking by the Central China Area Army. In March 1940 the Japanese pulled off a major diplomatic coup when they succeeded in persuading the former Nationalist leader Wang Jingwei to become the figurehead in charge of the latter. After renewed attempts to negotiate some kind of peace with Chiang had foundered, Wang’s regime was officially recognized as the legitimate government of China. Wang himself had been duped; he had been led to expect concessions like a definite date for Japanese troop withdrawals and a unification of the various puppet regimes under his authority. He ended up having to recognize the independence of Manchukuo, to allow the indefinite stationing of Japanese troops in China and to accept joint control of the maritime customs and other tax agencies. This meant that by 1940 the Japanese and their puppets controlled virtually the entire Chinese coast and a large proportion of the country’s eastern provinces. These were by far China’s most prosperous regions. Wang alone was nominally in charge of half a million square miles of territory and around 200 million people. Many Chinese agreed with the economist T’ao His-sheng [sic; = T’ao Hsi-sheng, Tao Xisheng], a leading collaborator in Wang’s regime: ‘China is a weak nation. In adopting a policy of being “friendly to distant countries and hostile to neighbours” [she] will inevitably bring about a situation which is summed up in the proverb: “Water from afar cannot extinguish a fire nearby.”’ Collaborationist slogans such as Tong Sheng Ghong Si [sic] (‘Live or Die Together’) were not wholly empty of meaning.

*The fighting strength of the Chinese army was around 2.9 million, divided into 146 divisions and 44 independent brigades. However, each division had just 324 machine-guns between nine and a half thousand men. In all, the Chinese army had little more than one million rifles and just 800 pieces of artillery.

Ferguson’s handling of Chinese names and terms seems very sloppy. If the slogan he mentioned is 同生共死 (lit. ‘same live both die’), a closer rendering might be Tong sheng gong si ‘Live together, die together’.

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Filed under China, economics, Japan, nationalism, war

by | 22 June 2009 · 6:06 am

WW2: National Armies vs. Imperial Armies

From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 516-518:

The Axis powers were fighting not only against the British, Russians and Americans; they were fighting against the combined forces of the British, Russian and American empires as well. The total numbers of men fielded by the various parts of the British Empire were immense. All told, the United Kingdom itself mobilized just under six million men and women. But an additional 5.1 million came from India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Victories like El Alamein and even more so Imphal were victories for imperial forces as much as for British forces; the colonial commitment to the Empire proved every bit as strong as in the First World War. Especially remarkable was the fact that more than two and a half million Indians volunteered to serve in the British Indian Army during the war – more than sixty times the number who fought for the Japanese. The rapid expansion of the Indian officer corps provided a crucial source of loyalty, albeit loyalty that was conditional on post-war independence. The Red Army was also much more than just a Russian army. In January 1944 Russians accounted for 58 per cent of the 200 infantry divisions for which records are available, but Ukrainians accounted for 22 per cent, an order of magnitude more than fought on the German side, and a larger proportion than their share of the pre-war Soviet population. Half the soldiers of the Soviet 62nd Army at Stalingrad were not Russians. The American army, too, was ethnically diverse. Although they were generally kept in segregated units, African-Americans accounted for around 11 per cent of total US forces mobilized and fought in all the major campaigns from Operation Torch onwards. Norman Mailer’s reconnaissance platoon in The Naked and the Dead includes two Jews, a Pole, an Irishman, a Mexican and an Italian. Two of the six servicemen who raised the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima were of foreign origin; one was a Pima Indian. More than 20,000 Japanese-Americans served in the US army during the war….

The Germans, as we have seen, had made some efforts to mobilize other peoples in occupied Europe, as had the Japanese in the Far East, but these were dwarfed by what the Allies achieved. Indeed, the abject failure of the Axis empires to win the loyalty of their new subjects ensured that Allied forces were reinforced by a plethora of exile forces, partisan bands and resistance organizations. Even excluding these auxiliaries, the combined armed forces of the principal Allies were already just under 30 per cent larger than those of the Axis in 1942. A year later the difference was more than 50 per cent. By the end of the war, including also Free French* and Polish forces, Yugoslav partisans and Romanians fighting on the Russian side, the Allies had more than twice as many men under arms. Fifty-two different nationalities were represented in the Jewish Brigade formed by the British in 1944. They followed an earlier wave of 9,000 or so refugees from Spain, Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia who had joined the so-called Alien Companies, nicely nicknamed the ‘King’s Own Loyal Enemy Aliens’.

The best measure of the Allied advantage was in terms of military hardware, however, since it was with capital rather than labour – with machinery rather than manpower – that the Germans and the Japanese were ultimately to be defeated. In every major category of weapon, the Axis powers fell steadily further behind with each passing month. Between 1942 and 1944, the Allies out-produced the Axis in terms of machine pistols by a factor of 16 to 1, in naval vessels, tanks and mortars by roughly 5 to 1, and in rifles, machine-guns, artillery and combat aircraft by roughly 3 to 1.

*It is seldom acknowledged that for most of the period from 1940 until D-Day, black Africans constituted the main elements of the rank and file in the Free French Army. Even as late as September 1944, they still accounted for 1 in 5 of de Gaulle’s force in North-West Europe.

I did not quote the immediately preceding section that compares the mismatch in purely economic terms, but I cannot resist quoting the footnote appended to the end of it (on p. 516):

‘We must at all costs advance into the plains of Mesopotamia and take the Mosul oilfields from the British,’ declared Hitler on August 5, 1942. ‘If we succeed here, the whole war will come to an end.’ But three-quarters of total world oil production in 1944 came from the United States, compared with just 7 per cent from the whole of North Africa, the Middle East and the Gulf.

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Filed under Africa, anglosphere, Asia, Britain, economics, Europe, France, Germany, industry, Japan, labor, military, nationalism, U.S., USSR, war

by | 17 June 2009 · 6:16 pm

Iran: It All Depends Who You Talk (and Listen) to …

Stratfor‘s George Friedman weighs in on what’s going on in Iran in his characteristically hard-nosed way. Here are some excerpts from his take on the situation as of 15 June (via RealClearPolitics).

In 1979, when we were still young and starry-eyed, a revolution took place in Iran. When I asked experts what would happen, they divided into two camps.

The first group of Iran experts argued that the Shah of Iran would certainly survive, that the unrest was simply a cyclical event readily manageable by his security, and that the Iranian people were united behind the Iranian monarch’s modernization program. These experts developed this view by talking to the same Iranian officials and businessmen they had been talking to for years — Iranians who had grown wealthy and powerful under the shah and who spoke English, since Iran experts frequently didn’t speak Farsi all that well.

The second group of Iran experts regarded the shah as a repressive brute, and saw the revolution as aimed at liberalizing the country. Their sources were the professionals and academics who supported the uprising — Iranians who knew what former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini believed, but didn’t think he had much popular support. They thought the revolution would result in an increase in human rights and liberty. The experts in this group spoke even less Farsi than those in the first group.

Limited to information on Iran from English-speaking opponents of the regime, both groups of Iran experts got a very misleading vision of where the revolution was heading — because the Iranian revolution was not brought about by the people who spoke English. It was made by merchants in city bazaars, by rural peasants, by the clergy — people Americans didn’t speak to because they couldn’t. This demographic was unsure of the virtues of modernization and not at all clear on the virtues of liberalism. From the time they were born, its members knew the virtue of Islam, and that the Iranian state must be an Islamic state.

Americans and Europeans have been misreading Iran for 30 years. Even after the shah fell, the myth has survived that a mass movement of people exists demanding liberalization — a movement that if encouraged by the West eventually would form a majority and rule the country. We call this outlook “iPod liberalism,” the idea that anyone who listens to rock ‘n’ roll on an iPod, writes blogs and knows what it means to Twitter must be an enthusiastic supporter of Western liberalism. Even more significantly, this outlook fails to recognize that iPod owners represent a small minority in Iran — a country that is poor, pious and content on the whole with the revolution forged 30 years ago.

There are undoubtedly people who want to liberalize the Iranian regime. They are to be found among the professional classes in Tehran, as well as among students. Many speak English, making them accessible to the touring journalists, diplomats and intelligence people who pass through. They are the ones who can speak to Westerners, and they are the ones willing to speak to Westerners. And these people give Westerners a wildly distorted view of Iran. They can create the impression that a fantastic liberalization is at hand — but not when you realize that iPod-owning Anglophones are not exactly the majority in Iran….

Ahmadinejad enjoys widespread popularity. He doesn’t speak to the issues that matter to the urban professionals, namely, the economy and liberalization. But Ahmadinejad speaks to three fundamental issues that accord with the rest of the country.

First, Ahmadinejad speaks of piety. Among vast swathes of Iranian society, the willingness to speak unaffectedly about religion is crucial. Though it may be difficult for Americans and Europeans [at least their elite classes—Joel] to believe, there are people in the world to whom economic progress is not of the essence; people who want to maintain their communities as they are and live the way their grandparents lived. These are people who see modernization — whether from the shah or Mousavi — as unattractive. They forgive Ahmadinejad his economic failures.

Second, Ahmadinejad speaks of corruption. There is a sense in the countryside that the ayatollahs — who enjoy enormous wealth and power, and often have lifestyles that reflect this — have corrupted the Islamic Revolution. Ahmadinejad is disliked by many of the religious elite precisely because he has systematically raised the corruption issue, which resonates in the countryside.

Third, Ahmadinejad is a spokesman for Iranian national security, a tremendously popular stance. It must always be remembered that Iran fought a war with Iraq in the 1980s that lasted eight years, cost untold lives and suffering, and effectively ended in its defeat. Iranians, particularly the poor, experienced this war on an intimate level. They fought in the war, and lost husbands and sons in it. As in other countries, memories of a lost war don’t necessarily delegitimize the regime. Rather, they can generate hopes for a resurgent Iran, thus validating the sacrifices made in that war — something Ahmadinejad taps into. By arguing that Iran should not back down but become a major power, he speaks to the veterans and their families, who want something positive to emerge from all their sacrifices in the war….

Western democracies assume that publics will elect liberals who will protect their rights. In reality, it’s a more complicated world. Hitler is the classic example of someone who came to power constitutionally, and then preceded to gut the constitution. Similarly, Ahmadinejad’s victory is a triumph of both democracy and repression….

What we have now are two presidents in a politically secure position, something that normally forms a basis for negotiations. The problem is that it is not clear what the Iranians are prepared to negotiate on, nor is it clear what the Americans are prepared to give the Iranians to induce them to negotiate. Iran wants greater influence in Iraq and its role as a regional leader acknowledged, something the United States doesn’t want to give them. The United States wants an end to the Iranian nuclear program, which Iran doesn’t want to give.

I suspect he’s right, unfortunately. And that’s why I don’t put much stock in analysis by either international media twits or high-flying professional diplomats, both of whom tend to talk too much with fellow elites, and then just repeat what they hear, as if their interlocutors deserve to speak for everyone else. (I’m waiting for a noncomprehending elitist like Thomas Frank to write What’s the Matter with Iran?)

UPDATE (in response to comments on my Blogger blog): A whole lot of people who are already fairly well off seem to be quite willing to trade economic progress for social justice or traditional values or some set of religious or ideological goals, especially if other, ideologically offensive people take the biggest economic hit, not themselves. And political leaders who haven’t a clue about how to achieve economic progress are only too willing to pander to those other values to stay in power, not just in Iran.

Friedman mentions the high likelihood of electoral fraud, but seems to think it didn’t make the crucial difference. Perhaps he now realizes he underestimated the fraud and is backtracking in his latest analyses.

When I look at the results of the 1979 revolution in Iran, the 1989 counterrevolt in China, and the fate of so many revolutions that only led to devolution and repression, I find it hard to be optimistic. When the dust settles (without too much blood in it, I hope), the liberal internationalists we’re all so fond of will not be the ones in control. It’ll be either the same old corrupt clergy of the revolutionary generation (perhaps with a more human face), or the bizarre new populist nationalists of the war generation.

Finally, one also has to ask, Who does Friedman listen to? The same types of status-quo-favoring spooks who failed to predict the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989?

FURTHER UPDATE: Doug Muir at Fistful of Euros has two interesting, well-informed (and pessimistic) posts about future prospects in Iran: From Yerevan to Tehran? notes the close historical and economic ties between Armenia and Iran, as well as the close personal ties between Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian/Sargsyan and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Why Ahmadinejad will win compares factors that affected the outcomes of similar protests in Armenia, Burma, China, East Germany, Georgia, the Philippines, Romania, Serbia, and Ukraine. (via Randy MacDonald)

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Filed under democracy, Iran, nationalism, publishing, religion, U.S.

by | 16 June 2009 · 6:29 am

Civil Wars on the Eastern Front, 1940s

From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 455-457:

Collaborators could be found not only in countries that allied themselves with Germany – Italy, Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria – but also in Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, France, Yugoslavia, Greece and the Soviet Union, countries the Germans invaded and occupied. Some were undoubtedly motivated by a hatred of the Jews as violent as that felt by the Nazi leadership. Others were actuated by envy or base greed, seizing the opportunity afforded by German rule to steal their neighbours’ property. Self-preservation also played its part. There were even Jewish collaborators, like the uniformed men of the Office to Combat Usury and Profiteering who policed the Warsaw ghetto, or the leaders of the various Jews’ Councils who helped organize the liquidation of the ghettos, or the concentration camp prisoners who accepted a measure of delegated authority in the (usually vain) hope of saving themselves.

The experience of Jedwabne typifies the way German rule also fomented civil war. It was as if even the approach of German troops encouraged conflict to erupt in multi-ethnic communities. Poles were not the only killers, Jews not the only victims. Germans themselves could fall victim to this kind of violence. Between four and five thousand ethnic Germans were murdered in Poland in September 1939 as Poles took revenge for their country’s invasion. They then retaliated by forming ‘self-protection’ groups, which were ultimately subordinated to SS leadership. By the time that had happened, however, these groups had already massacred more than four thousand Poles. As a philologist, Victor Klemperer was struck by the way the Nazis delighted in euphemistic neologisms like Volkstumskampf (ethnic conflict) and Flurbereinigung (fundamental cleansing). This daily subversion of the German language, he believed, was far more effective than the more overt kinds of propaganda. Sanitized language also made the cycle of ethnic violence easier to live with.

The Ukraine was perhaps the most blood-soaked place of all. In Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), egged on by the Germans, massacred between 60,000 and 80,000 Poles. Whole villages were wiped out, men beaten to death, women raped and mutilated, babies bayoneted….

Waldemar Lotnik, a Polish teenager who escaped from a German labour camp and joined a Polish ‘Peasant Battalion’, was just about to rape a girl when he realized he knew her family and remembered her as a child. As another Pole recalled, ‘Stories abounded of Polish mothers being held by the Ukrainian Nationalists and forced to watch as their families were dismembered piece by piece; of pregnant women being eviscerated; of vivisected pregnant women having cats sewn into their bleeding abdomens; of Ukrainian husbands murdering their own Polish wives; of Ukrainian wives murdering their own Polish husbands; of Ukrainian fathers murdering their own sons in order to prevent them from murdering their own Polish mothers; of sons of Polish-Ukrainian heritage being sawn in half because, the Nationalists said, they were half Polish; of children being strung up on household fences; of helpless infants being dashed against buildings or hurled into burning houses.’ Here was ethnic conflict not merely between neighbours, but within families. The internecine war in the Ukraine only grew more ferocious as the war progressed, with some Ukrainians fighting for the Axis, some for the Allies and others for an independent Ukraine.

In the Balkans, too, there were multiple civil wars along ethnic, religious and ideological lines. Yugoslavia had fallen apart in the wake of the German invasion of April 1941. Seizing the moment, the Croatian leader Ante Pavelic had pledged to side with Hitler. In the ensuing chaos, his Ustašas waged a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing against their Serbian neighbours in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina, torturing and killing hundreds of thousands of them. The populations of entire villages were packed into their churches and burned to death, or were transported to be murdered at camps like Jasenovac.

Serbian Četniks and Partisans repaid these crimes in kind. Of the million or so people who died in Yugoslavia during the war, most were killed by other Yugoslavs. This included nearly all of Bosnia’s 14,000 Jews. In Greece the German occupation was the cue for bitter conflict. There, as in Yugoslavia, a three-cornered war raged – between the foreign invaders and nationalists, but also between nationalists and indigenous Communists. When Bulgaria annexed southern Dobruja from Romania, tens of thousands of people were expelled from their homes on either side of the new border.

Most empires purport to bring peace and order. They may divide in order to rule, but they generally rule in pursuit of stability. The Nazi empire divided the peoples of Europe as it ruled them – though, ironically, the divisions that opened up in Central and Eastern Europe generally had as much to do with religion as with race (most obviously in the conflicts between Poles and Ukrainians or between Croats and Serbs). But the ‘skilful utilization of inter-ethnic rivalry’ the Germans consciously practised did not lead (in the words of one German officer) to the ‘total political and economic pacification’ of occupied territory. On the contrary, in many places their rule soon degenerated into little more than the sponsorship of local feuds; the institutionalization of civil war as a mode of governance.

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by | 3 June 2009 · 5:23 pm

Peking Duck’s Interview with a 1989 Demonstrator

To mark the 20th anniversary of the PRC government crackdown on the democracy movement in 1989, Peking Duck has reposted an interview from 2003 with a former student who was caught up in the demonstrations in Shanghai, not Beijing. It’s quite a nuanced retrospective, mixing cynicism about government with (too much, IMHO) respect for Chinese leaders, lost idealism with rising optimism. Here are a few excerpts:

In the 1970s, if you said anything disrespectful of Mao, you’d be executed. In 1989, if you said something negative about Deng in public you could still be in serious trouble.

It was the students who were most sensitive to this. Our parents all worked for the state, and there was still little or no private enterprise. They were not as concerned about ideology and change. They only had to worry about feeding their families. But as students we were more liberal, more free-spirited and more engaged in ideologies. We weren’t concerned about raising a family. We were not necessarily practical; we were very idealistic….

I don’t have regrets and I don’t think what we did was in vain…. But I have to admit I am no longer interested in politics, especially now that China is undergoing a natural transition toward democracy, with the economy being the core and the catalyst for that change. And nothing can stop that change, no matter how much the Communists want to preserve their old values….

There was nothing like the martial law that took place in Beijing. The Mayor of Shanghai at the time was extremely competent, and he made an appeal to the city on TV and he calmed everyone down. I’ll never forget, he said something that was ambiguous and politically brilliant: “Down the road, truth will prevail.” That could have meant he was sympathetic to the students or totally with the government. But it was very calming to hear him say it.

The mayor organized factory workers to clear the roads, not the army. These workers were the parents and uncles and aunts of the students. Some members of the student body tried to stir up these factory workers, and I think that was a very dangerous thing to do. Students demonstrating was one thing, but if it was factory workers – that would need to be stopped, and there would have been a riot. That’s why Beijing was much more tense.

Bringing in the factory workers truly showed the leadership and tact and common sense of Shanghai’s mayor – Zhu Rongji. Beijing is the political center, but Shanghai is the financial center, and it could absolutely not fall into chaos, no matter what. That’s why you saw factory workers and not the army….

That was part of being 20 years old in China when you haven’t seen the world, no Hollywood movies, you’ve only read Stalin-style textbooks. I matured ten years overnight, and I also became a little cynical.

For so many years China had a stringently controlled educational system. From kindergarten to college, we all read the exact same books and took the exact same exams. We always believed everything that the government told us, and they told us it was an honor for ‘the people without property’ to shed their blood and sacrifice their lives for the cause of communism, fighting against the two great enemies, the Nationalists [KMT] and the Capitalists. We were brainwashed….

You have to realize that Deng changed my life – everybody’s life. He opened new doors for all of us. In 1982, my mother was among the first batch of scholars who were sent abroad to study, and she went to Harvard. She returned to become the director of a major Shanghai hospital. So we are grateful. And soon so many other changes happened.

I feel a great respect for our leaders. There are some, like Li Peng, who I still have no respect for. But Deng – soon we felt as though he had torn down the Berlin Wall. I wondered, if Deng had not handled the demonstrations the way he did would China be the country it is today? The whole nation is changing and people are more affluent, and I feel proud of being Chinese. People once looked down at us, and now they have respect for us….

I believe that one day, China will have Taiwan-style democracy, but it has to be built on a strong economy.

via the Korea Blog Aggregator at The Marmot’s Hole

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by | 30 May 2009 · 10:01 am

Poland’s Double Decapitation, 1939

From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 417-419:

Central Europe had a mirror-image quality after September 1939. For it had not only been Hitler who had ordered his troops to invade Poland. Under the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Pact signed in Moscow that August, Josef Stalin had done the same, on September 17. To conservatives like Duff Cooper or Evelyn Waugh, it seemed a moment of revelation, laying bare the essential identity of the two totalitarian systems, National Socialism and ‘socialism in one country’. The signatories themselves appreciated the irony of their partnership. When he flew to Moscow to sign the pact, Ribbentrop had joked that Stalin would ‘yet join the Anti-Comintern Pact’, Hitler and Mussolini’s anti-Communist alliance. Nevertheless, the partition of Poland did not produce exactly identical totalitarian twins. The Soviet zone of occupation was in many respects a mirror image of the German zone but, as with a true mirror image, right and left were transposed.

On September 15, several days after the Germans had taken the town, the 29th Light Tank Brigade of the Red Army rolled into Brest. They had seen little action since crossing the frontier, for the Poles had concentrated their efforts on resisting the invasion from the West. Indeed, most of the fighting was over by the time the Soviets arrived on the scene. The demarcation line between the two occupation zones was, under the terms of the Boundary and Friendship Treaty signed ten days later, to pass just to the west of the fortress. After an amicable joint parade, the Germans therefore withdrew back across the River Bug and the Russians took over. On the Soviet side of the line, thirteen million Poles – including 250,000 prisoners of war – were about to discover for themselves the distinctive charms of life in the workers’ paradise.

The Germans and Soviets had pledged in their latest treaty ‘to assure to the peoples living … in the former Polish state … a peaceful life in keeping with their national character’. Actions on the German side of the new border had already given the lie to those fine words. The Soviet approach was slightly different. At first, attempts were made to woo a sceptical local populace, many of whom remembered all too clearly the last Soviet invasion of 1920, when the Red Army had advanced as far as the Vistula. Soviet soldiers received as much as three months’ salary in advance, with orders to spend it liberally in Polish villages. This honeymoon did not last long, however. Soviet officials lost no time in throwing Poles out of choice apartments in Brest and elsewhere, commandeering them without compensation. Meanwhile, Soviet promises of plentiful jobs in the Donbas region proved to be illusory. Worst of all, Poles soon came to know the Stalinist system of organized terror. ‘There are three categories of people in the Soviet Union,’ people were told: ‘Those who have been in jail, those who are in jail, and those who will be in jail.’ Soon Poles began to joke bleakly that the initials NKVD stood for Nie wiadomo Kiedy Wroce do Domu (‘Impossible to tell when I will return home’). Incredibly, a substantial number of Polish Jews who had fled East at the outbreak of war sought to be repatriated to the German zone of occupation, not realizing that it was only Volksdeutsche who were wanted. This speaks volumes for their experience of nine months of Russian rule.

From Stalin’s point of view, the Nazi vision of a Germanized, western Poland, denuded of its social elites, seemed not menacing but completely familiar. Stalin had, after all, been waging war against the ethnic minorities of the Soviet Union for far longer and on a far larger scale than anything thus far attempted by Hitler. And he regarded few minorities with more suspicion than the Poles. Even before the outbreak of war, 10,000 ethnic Polish families living in the western border region of the Soviet Union had been deported. Now the entire Polish population of the Soviet-occupied zone was at Stalin’s mercy. Beginning on the night of February 10, 1940, the NKVD unleashed a campaign of terror against suspected ‘anti-Soviet’ elements. The targets identified in a set of instructions subsequently issued in November of the same year were ‘those frequently travelling abroad, involved in overseas correspondence or coming into contact with representatives of foreign states; Esperantists; philatelists; those working with the Red Cross; refugees; smugglers; those expelled from the Communist Party; priests and active members of religious congregations; the nobility, landowners, wealthy merchants, bankers, industrialists, hotel [owners] and restaurant owners’. Like Hitler, in other words, Stalin wished to decapitate Polish society.

Esperantists and philatelists are such a menace to society!

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by | 18 May 2009 · 5:44 pm

Sudetenland, Ireland, and Rand Uitlanders

From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 346-347:

The term Sudetenland was not much used before the 1930s. At the end of the First World War an attempt had been made to associate the predominantly Germanophone periphery of Bohemia and Moravia with the new post-imperial Austria by constituting Sudetenland as a new Austrian province, but this had come to nothing. The Germans who found themselves under Czechoslovakian rule after the First World War – they accounted for over a fifth of the population, not counting the mainly German-speaking Jews – had at no time been citizens of the Reich of which Hitler was Chancellor. They were first and foremost Bohemians. The role of Bohemia in the evolution of National Socialism had nevertheless been seminal. It had been there that, before the First World War, German workers for the first time defined themselves as both nationalists and socialists in response to mounting competition from Czech migrants from the countryside. It had been in Bohemia that some of the most bitter political battles in the history of inter-war Czechoslovakia had been fought, over issues like language and education. The industrial regions where German settlement was concentrated were hard hit by the Depression; Germans were over-represented among the unemployed, just as they were under-represented in government employment. On the other hand, Czechoslovakia was unusual in Central and Eastern Europe. It was the only one of the ‘successor states’ that had arisen from the ruins of the Habsburg Empire that was still a democracy in 1938. It also occupied a strategically vital position as a kind of wedge jutting into Germany, dividing Saxony and Silesia from Austria. Its politics and its location made Czechoslovakia the pivot around which inter-war Europe turned.

The first and greatest weakness of Chamberlain’s foreign policy was that by accepting the legitimacy of ‘self-determination’ for the Sudeten Germans, it implicitly accepted the legitimacy of Hitler’s goal of a Greater Germany. Chamberlain’s aim was not to prevent the transfer of the Sudeten Germans and their lands to Germany, but merely to prevent Hitler’s achieving it by force.* ‘I don’t see why we shouldn’t say to Germany,’ so Chamberlain reasoned, ‘give us satisfactory assurances that you won’t use force to deal with the Austrians and Czecho-Slovakians and we will give you similar assurances that we won’t use force to prevent the changes you want if you can get them by peaceful means.’ His comparison with the English settlers in the Transvaal on the eve of the Boer War said it all; Chamberlain did not mean to imply that a war was likely, but that the German demands for the Sudetenlanders were as legitimate as his father’s had been for the Uitlanders. To use a different analogy, it had taken generations for British Conservatives to reconcile themselves to the idea of Home Rule for the Irish; they conceded the Sudeten Germans’ right to it in a trice. Since Versailles, Germany had been aggrieved. The transfer of the Sudetenland was intended to redress her grievances in what Chamberlain hoped would be a full and final settlement.

* The ‘Uitlanders’ (Afrikaans for ‘foreigners’) were the British settlers who had been drawn to the Transvaal by the discovery of gold. They were treated by the Boers as aliens, furnishing the British government with a pretext for intervention in the region. Joseph Chamberlain, the arch-enemy of Home Rule for Ireland, demanded ‘Home Rule for the Rand’, meaning that the Uitlanders should be granted the vote after five years’ residence.

POSTSCRIPT, pp. 367-368:

What was more, Hitler gained immediately from Munich. With Czechoslovakia emasculated, Germany’s eastern frontier was significantly less vulnerable. Moreover, in occupying the Sudetenland, the Germans acquired at a stroke 1.5 million rifles, 750 aircraft, 600 tanks and 2,000 field guns, all of which were to prove useful in the months to come. Indeed, more than one in ten of the tanks used by the Germans in their Western offensive of 1940 were Czech-built. The industrial resources of Western Bohemia further strengthened Germany’s war machine, just as the Anschluss had significantly added to Germany’s supplies of labour, hard currency and steel. As Churchill put it, the belief that ‘security can be obtained by throwing a small state to the wolves’ was ‘a fatal delusion’: ‘The war potential of Germany will increase in a short time more rapidly than it will be possible for France and Great Britain to complete the measures necessary for their defence.’ ‘Buying time’ at Munich in fact meant widening, not narrowing, the gap that Britain and France desperately needed to close. To put it another way: it would prove much harder to fight Germany in 1939 than it would have proved in 1938.

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by | 13 May 2009 · 6:13 am

Ferguson on the Origins of World War II

From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 312-314:

For obvious reasons, we tend to think of the years from 1933 to 1939 in terms of the origins of the Second World War. The question we customarily ask is whether or not the Western powers could have done more to avert the war – whether or not the policy of appeasement towards Germany and Japan was a disastrous blunder. Yet this may be to reverse the order of events. Appeasement did not lead to war. It was war that led to appeasement. For the war did not begin, as we tend to think, in Poland in 1939. It began in Asia in 1937, if not in 1931, when Japan invaded Manchuria. It began in Africa in 1935, when Mussolini invaded Abyssinia. It began in Western Europe in 1936, when Germany and Italy began helping Franco win the Spanish Civil War. It began in Eastern Europe in April 1939, with the Italian invasion of Albania. Contrary to the myth propagated by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg that he and his confederates were its only begetter, Hitler was a latecomer to the war. He achieved his foreign policy objectives prior to September 1939 without firing a shot. Nor was it his intention to start a world war at that date. The war that broke out then between Germany, France and Britain was nearly as much the fault of the Western powers, and indeed of Poland, as of Hitler, as A. J. P. Taylor contended forty-five years ago in The Origins of the Second World War.

Yet Taylor’s argument was at best only half-right. He was right about the Western powers: the pusillanimity of the French statesmen, who were defeated in their hearts before a shot had been fired; the hypocrisy of the Americans, with their highfaluting rhetoric and low commercial motives; above all, the muddle-headedness of the British. The British said they wanted to uphold the authority of the League of Nations and the rights of small and weak nations; but when push came to shove in Manchuria, Abyssinia and Czechoslovakia, imperial self-interest trumped collective security. They fretted about arms limitation, as though an equality of military capability would suffice to avoid war; but while a military balance might secure the British Isles, it offered no effective security for either Britain’s continental allies or her Asian possessions. With withering irony, Taylor called the Munich agreement a ‘triumph for British policy [and] … for all that was best and most enlightened in British life’. In reality, war with Germany was averted at the price of an unfulfillable guarantee to the rump Czechoslovakia. If handing the Sudetenland to Hitler in 1938 had been the right decision, why then did the British not hand him Danzig, to which he had in any case a stronger claim, in 1939? The answer was that by then they had given another militarily worthless guarantee, to the Poles. Having done so, they failed to grasp what Churchill saw at once: that without a ‘grand alliance’ with the Soviet Union, Britain and France might find themselves facing Germany alone. As an indictment of British diplomacy, Taylor’s has stood up remarkably well to subsequent scholarship – though it must be said that he offers few clues as to why Britain’s statesmen were so incompetent.

Where Taylor erred profoundly was when he sought to liken Hitler’s foreign policy to ‘that of his predecessors, of the professional diplomats at the foreign ministry, and indeed of virtually all Germans’, and when he argued that the Second World War was ‘a repeat performance of the First’. Nothing could be more remote from the truth. Bismarck had striven mightily to prevent the creation of a Greater Germany encompassing Austria. Yet this was one of Hitler’s stated objectives, albeit one that he had inherited from the Weimar Republic. Bismarck’s principal nightmare had been one of coalitions between the other great powers directed against Germany. Hitler quite deliberately created such an encircling coalition when he invaded the Soviet Union before Britain had been defeated. Not even the Kaiser had been so rash; indeed, he had hoped he could avoid war with Britain. Bismarck had used colonial policy as a tool to maintain the balance of power in Europe; the Kaiser had craved colonies. Hitler was uninterested in overseas acquisitions even as bargaining counters. Throughout the 1920s Germany was consistently hostile to Poland and friendly to the Soviet Union. Hitler reversed these positions within little more than a year of coming to power. It is true, as Taylor contended, that Hitler improvised his way through the diplomatic crises of the mid-1930s with a combination of intuition and luck. He admitted that he was a gambler with a low aversion to risk (‘All my life I have played va banque’). But what was he gambling to win? This is not a difficult question to answer, because he answered it repeatedly. He was not content, like Stresemann or Brüning, merely to dismantle the Versailles Treaty – a task that the Depression had half-done for him even before he became Chancellor. Nor was his ambition to restore Germany to her position in 1914. It is not even correct, as the German historian Fritz Fischer suggested, that Hitler’s aims were similar to those of Germany’s leaders during the First World War, namely to carve out an East European sphere of influence at the expense of Russia.

Hitler’s goal was different. Simply stated, it was to enlarge the German Reich so that it embraced as far as possible the entire German Volk and in the process to annihilate what he saw as the principal threats to its existence, namely the Jews and Soviet Communism (which to Hitler were one and the same). Like Japan’s proponents of territorial expansion, he sought living space in the belief that Germany required more territory because of her over-endowment with people and her under-endowment with strategic raw materials.

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