Category Archives: philosophy

by | 5 March 2026 · 3:54 am

Kapuściński Joins the Party, 1953

From Ryszard Kapuscinski: A Life, by Artur Domoslawski (Verso, 2012), Kindle pp. 55-57:

In 1952 Kapuściński writes an application requesting to be ‘admitted as a candidate for the Polish United Worker’s Party’.

It is my greatest need and desire to join the ranks of our beloved Party. This necessity is on a par with my greatest aspiration, which is to serve the cause of our Party with all my strength and my entire being. Throughout my life, ever since I understood to whom I should devote it, I have felt how every victory brings me closer to the Party, and how every defeat or mistake demands that I make an even greater effort not to turn back on the road I have taken – the road to the Party.

Being admitted as a candidate for our Party will be a very great reward and honour for me, and also a very high obligation. I want even more and even better to live the Party life, to work and fight to fulfil the tasks set by the Party for the best Party comrades. I pledge to safeguard the recommendations which Comrade Stalin has vowed to protect and fortify in the name of all ‘people of a special cut’.

My guiding light shall be total dedication to becoming worthy of that title, and to remaining so for the rest of my life.

On the next few pages of his application to join the Party, Kapuściński provides a self-critical report, saying that the young communist in him did not awaken quickly enough: ‘My world outlook was still burdened by remnants of petty bourgeois ideology, there were many things I did not understand, and I did not feel the need to get involved.’

Among his mentors at this time he mentions Wiktor Woroszylski, a young socialist-realist poet and the editor of the culture section of the ZMP newspaper Sztandar Młodych, as well as several other poets and writers, above all Władysław Broniewski. (Someone later tells me that as president of the Young Writers’ Circle affiliated with the Polish Writers’ Union, Kapuściński made sure that the notoriously drunken Broniewski drank a bit less.)

In support of his application, Bronisław Geremek, Kapuściński’s fellow student in the year above, writes him a letter of recommendation: ‘I have known Comrade Ryszard Kapuściński since October 1951 from work within the ZMP organization at our college.’ As well as praising his ‘dedication and devotion, youthful enthusiasm and eagerness, militant attitude’, and also his ‘political sophistication’ and ‘exemplary moral attitude’, Geremek informs the Party of the candidate’s ‘serious mistakes and shortcomings’:

1) failure to understand the role of the Party organization within the faculty, an inappropriate, ill-considered attitude to his Party comrades in Year One,

2) an immature attitude to his studies, continuing from the previous year, which recently Comrade Kapuściński has managed to overcome, as evidenced by his good results in the summer session,

3) a not fully collective style for his work in managing the faculty organization, originating mainly from a lack of confidence in people and in the collective,

4) reluctance to accept criticism, and also too little self-criticism,

5) immaturity of decisions often involving youthful bluster and leftism.

‘That was the lyrical style required for recommending candidates to join the Party,’ explains the famous historian. ‘It wasn’t appropriate to give nothing but praise.’

Despite his critical words, Geremek supports Kapuściński’s request, ‘in the belief that our Party will gain a member worthy of it’.

On 30 June 1952 a meeting of the PZPR executive at the history faculty is held to discuss admitting Kapuściński to the Party. The participants include Bronisław Geremek, Adam Kersten, Jerzy Holzer and a few other activists. The candidate is present too.

Comrade Kersten takes the floor:

‘Comrade Kapuściński shows evidence of a certain failure to appreciate the value of academic studies. For Comrade Kapuściński, the chief measure of an activist is social work.’

Another comrade polemicizes:

‘Comrade Kersten is somewhat overcritical of Comrade Kapuściński’s academic situation. This issue came up in the winter session. Comrade Kapuściński’s attitude to his studies has now changed for the better.’

Comrade Geremek stipulates:

‘Comrade Kapuściński should be cut off from organizational work so that he can put more emphasis on his studies. Comrade Kapuściński does not always know how to work with colleagues who are not committed.’

Comrade Kapuściński defends himself:

‘What has been said in the discussion is fair, but I am sorry it has been limited to academic issues. I did indeed have a non-Party attitude to my studies, and I have not yet fully overcome that attitude.’

Comrade Holzer rushes to Comrade Kapuściński’s rescue.

‘He has done good work on the ZMP Faculty Board. He has a strong emotional attachment to the Party. He is highly enthusiastic and eager to work. He has not entirely overcome the following defects: an insufficiently serious attitude to his studies, not always fully considered decisions, and a not always self-critical approach. Being admitted as a candidate for the Party will help Comrade Kapuściński to overcome these faults.’

From the stenographic record: ‘Comrade Kapuściński was unanimously accepted as a candidate for the PZPR’; he becomes a Party member on 11 April 1953.

Leave a comment

Filed under biography, democracy, education, philosophy, Poland

by | 3 March 2026 · 8:42 am

Pole Useless in China, 1956

From Travels with Herodotus, by Ryszard Kapuscinski (Vintage,  2009), Kindle pp. 61-62, 71-72:

With each passing day I thought of the Great Wall more and more as the Great Metaphor. I was surrounded by people with whom I could not communicate, encircled by a world I could not fathom. I was supposed to write—but about what? The press was exclusively in Chinese, so I understood nothing of it. At first I asked Comrade Li to translate for me, but every article, in his translation, began with the words: “As Chairman Mao teaches us,” or “Following the recommendations of Chairman Mao,” etc., etc. Is that what was actually written? My only link to the outside world was Comrade Li, and he was the most impenetrable barrier of all. To my every request for a meeting, a conversation, a trip, he responded, “I will convey this to the newspaper.” And I would hear nothing more on the matter. Nor could I go out alone, without Comrade Li. But where could I have gone anyway? To see whom? I did not know the city, I knew no one, I had no telephone (only Comrade Li had one).

Above all, I did not know the language. Yes, I did try studying it, right from the start. I attempted to tear my way through the thickets of hieroglyphs and ideograms only to come up against the dead end of each character’s maddening multiplicity of meanings. I had just read somewhere that there exist more than eighty English translations of the Tao Te Ching (the bible of Taoism), all of them competent and reliable—and all utterly different! My legs buckled beneath me. No, I thought to myself, I cannot cope with this, I cannot manage.

…

I returned to Warsaw. The reasons for my bizarre situation in China, my lack of real purpose, my senseless suspension in a vacuum, quickly became clear. The idea of sending me to China arose in the aftermath of two thaws: that of October 1956 in Poland, and in China, that of Chairman Mao’s One Hundred Flowers. Even before I arrived in China, an upheaval was under way in Warsaw and in Peking. The head of the Polish Communist Party, Władyslaw Gomułka, initiated a campaign against the liberals, and Mao Tse-tung was launching the draconian politics of the Great Leap Forward.

Practically speaking, I should have left Peking the day after I arrived. But my newspaper was mum—fearful and fighting for its survival, it had forgotten about me. Or perhaps the editors had my interests in mind—perhaps they reckoned that away in China I would somehow be safe? In any event, I now think that the editors of Chungkuo were being informed by the Chinese embassy in Warsaw that the correspondent of Sztandar Młodych is the envoy of a newspaper hanging by a thread and it is only a matter of time before it goes under the ax. I think, too, that it was traditional Chinese principles of hospitality, the importance the Chinese ascribe to saving face, as well as their highly cultivated politeness, that kept me from being summarily expelled. Instead, they created conditions which they assumed would lead me to guess that the models of cooperation that had been agreed to earlier no longer obtained. And that I would say of my own accord: I am leaving.

Leave a comment

Filed under China, education, language, philosophy, Poland, travel

by | 1 March 2026 · 10:12 pm

Herodotus as a Child?

From Travels with Herodotus, by Ryszard Kapuscinski (Vintage,  2009), Kindle pp. 44-46:

When I immersed myself in various sources, however, I learned that we know little about Herodotus’s life, and that even the few facts we do have are not entirely reliable. For in contrast to Rabindranath Tagore—or, for instance, his contemporary Marcel Proust, both of whom meticulously parsed every detail of their childhoods—Herodotus, like the other great men of this epoch—Socrates, Pericles, Sophocles—tells us next to nothing about his. Was it not customary? Was childhood considered irrelevant? Herodotus says only that he came from Halicarnassus. Halicarnassus lies above a calm bay shaped like an amphitheater, in a beautiful part of the world, where the western shore of Asia meets the Mediterranean Sea. It is a land of sun, warmth, and light, of olive trees and vineyards. One instinctively feels that someone born here must naturally have a good heart, an open mind, a healthy body, a consistently cheerful disposition.

Biographers tend to agree that Herodotus was born between 490 and 480 B.C.E., perhaps in 485. These are greatly important years in the history of world culture. Around 480 B.C.E., Buddha departs for the other world; a year later, in the Lu principality, Confucius dies; Plato will be born fifty years later. Asia is the center of the world; even insofar as the Greeks are concerned, the most creative members of their society—the Ionians—also live in Asia. There is no Europe yet; it exists as myth only, in the name of a beautiful girl, Europa, daughter of the Phoenician king Agenor, whom Zeus, transformed into a white bull, will carry off to Crete to have his way with her.

The parents of Herodotus? His siblings? His house? All of this is in deep shadowland uncertainty. Halicarnassus was a Greek colony on land subject to the Persians, with a non-Greek native population—the Carians. His father was called Lyxes, which is not a Greek name, so perhaps he was a Carian. It was his mother who most probably was Greek. Herodotus was therefore a Greek Carian, an ethnic half-breed. Such people who grow up amid different cultures, as a blend of different bloodlines, have their worldview determined by such concepts as border, distance, difference, diversity. We encounter the widest array of human types among them, from fanatical, fierce sectarians, to passive, apathetic provincials, to open, receptive wanderers—citizens of the world. It depends on how their blood got mixed, what spirits settled in it.

What sort of child is Herodotus? Does he smile at everyone and willingly extend his hand, or does he sulk and hide in the folds of his mother’s garments? Is he an eternal crybaby and whiner, giving his tormented mother at times to sigh: Gods, why did I give birth to such a child! Or is he cheerful, spreading joy all around? Is he obedient and polite, or does he torture everyone with questions: Where does the sun come from? Why is it so high up that no one can reach it? Why does it hide beneath the sea? Isn’t it afraid of drowning?

And in school? With whom does he share a bench? Did they seat him, as punishment, next to some unruly boy? Or, the gods forbid, a girl? Did he learn quickly to write on the clay tablet? Is he often late? Does he squirm during lessons? Does he slip others the answers? Is he a tattletale?

And toys? What did a little Greek living two and a half thousand years ago play with? A scooter carved out of wood? Did he build sand castles at the edge of the sea? Climb trees? Make himself clay birds, fish, and horses, which we can study today in museums?

Which aspects of his childhood will he remember for the rest of his life? For little Rabi, the most exalted moment was the morning prayer at his father’s side. For little Marcel, it was waiting in a dark room for his mother to come and hug him good night. Which experience did little Herodotus anticipate in this way?

Leave a comment

Filed under China, education, Greece, Mediterranean, philosophy, religion, South Asia

by | 15 February 2026 · 12:18 am

Montagu vs. Montagu

From Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, by Ben Macintyre (Crown, 2010), Kindle pp. 84-87:

Montagu and Cholmondeley were blasé about the danger of being found out by an enemy agent in Britain, for the simple reason that they did not believe there were any. “There was almost complete security,” wrote Montagu. “We were able to put over what we liked to the enemy.” True, of the several hundred enemy spies dropped, floated, or smuggled into Britain, all but one was picked up and arrested: the exception was found dead in a bunker after committing suicide.

…

Montagu would cycle home every evening, his briefcase full of secrets, complacent that he was “the only deceptioneer in daily contact with the whole of special intelligence” and that his secrets were perfectly safe. Yet there were numerous spies living in London from supposedly neutral countries happy to furnish information to the Axis powers. Ewen Montagu never knew it, but there was one spy operating under his nose, a man with whom he shared a taste for exotic cheese, a love of table tennis, and both parents.

Ivor Montagu was addicted to founding, and joining, different clubs. From the Cheese Eaters League and the English Table Tennis Association, he had graduated to the Association of Cine Technicians, the Zoological Society, Marylebone Cricket Club, the editorial board of Labour Monthly, the World Council of Peace, the Friends of the Soviet Union, Southampton United Football Club, the Society for Cultural Relations with Soviet Russia, and chairmanship of the Woolwich-Plumstead branch of the Anti-war Congress.

He had also joined a less public and even more exclusive club, as an agent for Soviet military intelligence.

In part to antagonize his patrician parents, Ivor Montagu had from an early age displayed a keen “enthusiasm for all things Russian” and a penchant for radical politics. In 1927, the twenty-three-year-old Ivor was contacted by Bob Stewart, a founding member of the British Communist Party and a recruiter of Soviet agents in Britain. Stewart told Ivor, “We have had a request from the Communist International for you to go at once to Moscow. How soon can you leave?” In Moscow, Ivor was feted and flattered: he played table tennis in the Comintern building with “the keenest players in Moscow,” went to the Bolshoi, and watched the revolutionary parade from a VIP stand in Red Square. Someone in the upper reaches of the Soviet state was taking good care of Ivor Montagu.

Back in Europe, Ivor’s film career blossomed, as did his interests in table tennis, small rodents, and Soviet movies. At the same time, his commitment to communism deepened. In 1929, he began to correspond with Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik revolutionary expelled from the Communist Party and now living in exile on the Turkish island of Prinkipo.

…

The meeting with Trotsky marked a turning point. Ivor Montagu was attracted to this “fascinating and commanding personality” but “repelled by his self-admiration,” the raw ambition of the revolutionary in exile: “I felt I understood now why he was impossible in a party, that his personality swamped his judgement.” Ivor was not yet thirty, but he was already a party disciplinarian and a fully committed Stalinist. Trotsky knew that Ivor was a willing tool of the Soviet regime. In 1932, he wrote: “Ivor Montagu has, or had, some personal sympathy for me, but now he is even on that small scale paralysed by his adherence to the party.”

That adherence was now absolute and permanent: he gave speeches, wrote pamphlets, and made films in support of communism. The more covert, and more dangerous, manifestations of that party obedience remained secret for the rest of his life.

Leave a comment

Filed under Britain, education, Germany, military, philosophy, USSR, war

by | 20 December 2025 · 6:25 am

W. E. Clarke’s Misspent Sunday

From The Misspent Sunday, by W. E. Clarke, in Robert Louis Stevenson: Interviews and Recollections, ed. by R. C. Terry (Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), pp. 164-169:

Abstract: From ‘Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa’, Yale Review, X (Jan 1921) 275–96. The Reverend William Edward Clarke (1854–1922) was the London Missionary Society’s representative in Samoa. About as knowledgeable a mentor as Louis could have hoped to meet, Clarke knew the people and their customs well, and took the new arrival around schools and communities on the island. A simple, devout man, Clarke had to keep Stevenson up to the mark where Sunday worship was concerned. For his part Stevenson, the one-time agnostic, probably benefited from Clarke’s practical Christianity. Louis wrote of Clarke: ‘A man … I esteem and like to the sole of his boots. I prefer him to anyone in Samoa, and to most people in the world’ (quoted in Field, This Life, 332). When Louis lay dying, Clarke was at his side. He accompanied the cortège to the burial place on Mount Vaea and recited Louis’s own prayer at the interment, part of which reads: Bless to us our extraordinary mercies; if the day come when these must be taken, have us play the man under affliction. Be with our friends; be with ourselves. Go with each of us to rest; if any awake, temper to them the dark hours of watching; and when the day returns, return to us, our sun and comforter, and call us up with morning faces and with morning hearts — eager to labour — eager to be happy, if happiness shall be our portion — and if the day be marked for sorrow, strong to endure it.

Leave a comment

Filed under Britain, education, literature, migration, philosophy, religion, Samoa

by | 4 December 2025 · 10:50 pm

RLS at Peak Productivity

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 447-449:

From 1884 to 1887 Louis produced an astonishing number and range of publications. Most notable were Kidnapped and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In addition there were The Silverado Squatters, Prince Otto, A Child’s Garden of Verses, other poems collected as Underwoods, stories collected as More New Arabian Nights and as The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables, the essay collection Memories and Portraits, and a Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin (his Edinburgh mentor had died at this time, at the early age of fifty-two). Prolific as this output was, he enjoyed telling friends that he was completing other works as well, such as Herbert and Henrietta: or The Nemesis of Sentiment, Happy Homes and Hairy Faces, and A Pound of Feathers and a Pound of Lead.

This torrent of writing may seem surprising, since as Rosaline Masson noted in her biography of Louis, he had been almost constantly incapacitated by illness since sailing to America in 1879.

He had been a chronic invalid, submitting to an invalid’s life, at Monterey and San Francisco; in the Highlands—Pitlochry and Braemar; at Davos; at Stobo Manse; at Kingussie; again at Davos; in France—St. Marcel and Hyères—ever seeking for health, never finding it. And now at Bournemouth there awaited him a life of accepted invalidism spent chiefly in the sickroom, suffering constant pain and weakness, often forbidden for days or even weeks to speak aloud, and having to whisper or write on paper all he wanted to say to his wife or his friends. And yet these three years proved a very industrious and successful time in Stevenson’s life.

But it’s equally possible that if he had been more active, he would have written less.

George Eliot once wrote, “To know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an enthusiastic soul.” Louis didn’t care for Eliot’s novels—he thought they were too preachy—but he did have an enthusiastic soul, and experienced joy even at the darkest times. Although he often declared that action was more important than writing, for him writing was action.

Louis remarked that he was living in an age of transition, and that was a widely used term when traditional assumptions about art were giving way to modernism. Reacting against the dense and earnestly moralizing Victorian novels, writers were now emphasizing individuality of vision and skillfully crafted style. The author of Treasure Island and Kidnapped would never have espoused the slogan “Art for art’s sake,” but the contemporary critic William Archer was right to call him “a modern of the moderns, both in his alert self-consciousness and in the particular artistic ideal which he proposes to himself. He professes himself an artist in words.” Alan Sandison takes this statement as the keynote for his Robert Louis Stevenson and the Appearance of Modernism, showing convincingly that “his experiments, his ceaseless questing among forms, ensured that of all his contemporaries his works show the greatest and most radical diversity.”

Louis did take offense at Archer’s suggestion that he indulged too freely in “aggressive optimism.” Louis wrote to Archer to say that far from devoting his life to manly exercise, as Archer had assumed, he had been a perpetual invalid, and his art was compensation for that. “To have suffered, nay, to suffer, sets a keen edge on what remains of the agreeable. This is a great truth, and has to be learned in the fire. Yours very truly, Robert Louis Stevenson.” Archer quickly made amends, and they became friends.

At this time Louis fell under the spell of Dostoevsky, reading Crime and Punishment in French translation since there was no English version as yet. In a letter to Henley he exclaimed, “Dostoieffsky is of course simply immense—it is not reading a book, it is having a brain fever to read it.”

Leave a comment

Filed under biography, disease, labor, literature, migration, philosophy, publishing

by | 26 November 2025 · 7:01 pm

Slovakia in 1939

From The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, by Jonathan Freedland (HarperCollins, 2022), Kindle pp. 27-29:

Pupils at the gymnasium were given a choice of religious instruction: Catholic, Lutheran, Jewish or none. Walter chose none. On his identity papers, in the space set aside for nationality, he could have entered the word ‘Jewish’ but instead chose ‘Czechoslovak’. At school, he was now learning not only German but High German. (He had struck a deal with an émigré pupil: each boy would give the other advanced lessons in his native tongue.) In the class picture for 1936, his gaze is confident, even cocky. He is staring straight ahead, into the future.

But in the photograph for the academic year 1938–9 there was no sign of fourteen-year-old Walter Rosenberg. Everything had changed, including the shape of the country. After the Munich agreement of 1938, Adolf Hitler and his Hungarian allies had broken off chunks of Czechoslovakia, parceling them out between them and, by the spring of 1939, what was left was sliced up. Slovakia announced itself as an independent republic. In reality it was a creature of the Third Reich, conceived with the blessing and protection of Berlin, which saw in the ruling ultra-nationalist Hlinka, or Slovak People’s Party, a mirror of itself. A day later the Nazis annexed and invaded the remaining Czech lands, marching in to declare a Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, while Hungary seized one last chunk for itself. Once the carve-up was done, the people who lived in what used to be Czechoslovakia were all, to varying degrees, at the mercy of Adolf Hitler.

In Slovakia, the teenage Walter Rosenberg felt the difference immediately. He was told that, no matter the choice he had made for religious studies classes and the word he had put in the ‘nationality’ box on those forms, he met the legal definition of a Jew and was older than thirteen; therefore, his place at the Bratislava high school was no longer available. His education was terminated.

All across the country, Jews like Walter were coming to understand that although the new head of government was a Catholic priest – Father Jozef Tiso – the state religion of the infant republic was Nazism, albeit in a Slovak denomination. The antisemites’ enduring creed held that Jews were not merely unreliable, untrustworthy and irreversibly foreign, but also endowed with almost supernatural powers, allowing them to wield social and economic influence out of all proportion to their numbers. So naturally the authorities in Bratislava moved fast to blame the country’s tiny Jewish community – 89,000 in a population of two and a half million – for the fate that had befallen the nation, including the loss of cherished territory to Hungary. Propaganda posters appeared, pasted on brick walls; one showed a proud young Slovak, clad in the black uniform of the Hlinka Guard, kicking the backside of a hook-nosed, side-curled Jew – the Jew’s purse of coins falling to the ground. In his first radio address as leader of the newly independent republic, Tiso made only one firm policy commitment: ‘to solve the Jewish question’.

Leave a comment

Filed under Czechia, education, Germany, Hungary, language, military, nationalism, philosophy, religion, Slovakia

by | 4 September 2025 · 12:02 am

Venezuela’s “Dutch Disease”

From Venezuela’s Collapse: The Long Story of How Things Fell Apart, by Carlos Lizarralde (Codex Novellus, 2024), Kindle pp. 118-119, 126-128:

The early theorists of Dutch disease studied how real economies, including those with robust consumer markets, reacted to a commodity boom. These writers did not consider what might happen to a small, barely functioning country, which did not even have a modern state in place when the first oil gusher blew out. The existing capital in Venezuela was negligible, which means that other, less measurable, factors came into play.

Arturo Uslar Pietri was the first person to pick up on the cultural strands of Dutch disease well before American academics started modeling the phenomenon. He was a descendant of landowners and had seen first-hand the death of the cocoa and coffee industry upon oil’s arrival. More importantly, he could see what oil was doing to the country as far back as the 1930s and 1940s. In a feat of uncanny prediction, he also foresaw the tragedy of the 2010s.

His brief analysis of the new economy was offered in a now-famous op-ed piece, “Sowing Oil,” published in 1936. For him, conditions were such that the newfound riches “could make Venezuela into an unproductive and lazy country, a giant oil parasite, swimming in a temporary and corrupting abundance, and driven toward an inevitable and imminent catastrophe.”

The main issue, he feared, was that either oil would run out, or that something synthetic would replace it, as had happened to other commodities familiar to South Americans, such as rubber or indigo. His thesis mirrors what the early theorists of Dutch disease would later acknowledge. What the academics ignored but Uslar could sense all around him were the broader, less tangible ways in which oil would permeate and dull Venezuelan society.

Uslar wrote his op-ed to counter the increasingly influential views of Rómulo Betancourt, who thought that oil was, and should be, everything. Alluding to Betancourt, he writes in “Sowing Oil” that having the state focus exclusively on the rent from oil was the “suicidal dream of naive men.” He believed the oil money should be used to develop a vigorous national industry, including modern agriculture.

…

While a lot has been written about how governments wasted oil revenues for decades, Dutch disease was very much a part of the private sector as well. Mid-sized and large companies that, in retrospect, had a real chance of global success, were never able to do anything about those prospects.

The shoe industry born in the Catia neighborhood of Caracas is a perfect example. The know-how of Sicilian and Neapolitan families that had emigrated from the old country to continue their shoe trade in Venezuela could never become globally competitive with a strong bolivar. Their companies were very prosperous for decades because the Ministries of Education and Defense would buy millions of shoes and boots. But the future was bleak without a consumer market big enough for the factories to reach substantial scale. The overvalued bolivar never let them export successfully, and cheap Chinese manufacturing eventually hit them hard. Later, they would be crushed by globally integrated and truly competitive retailers such as Zara.

The degree to which the out of context desarrollista policies failed the country is made evident by comparing two key Venezuelan companies and their Mexican counterparts. As early as 1979, well before NAFTA, Mexico’s Grupo Modelo managed to reinvent their weak and cheap working-class beer Corona into a “cool and light” alternative for American “Yuppie” consumers. The venture’s success turned Modelo into one of Latin America’s most valuable companies while Venezuela’s brewery Polar, awash in 1970s overvalued bolivars, did not take export markets seriously. Decade after decade Polar’s businesses expanded domestically, remaining tied to the price of oil and the swings of Venezuelan politics. Another Mexican company, Cemex, exploded out of humble beginnings to become the biggest cement company in the world. While its take-off did not happen until the 1980s, everything started with a financial consolidation, a series of acquisitions, and a listing in the local stock exchange in 1976. Right around that time, Cementos de Venezuela was happy to feed the building boom driven by the strong bolivar, a prelude to its eventual bankruptcy.

Rather than getting ready to expand through exports, the simplistic theory of import substitution allowed the Venezuelan private sector to use overvalued bolivar revenues to obtain dollar-denominated loans. Foreign banks at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s were ready to lend dollars against future bolivars. On top of every other challenge, the borrowing proved catastrophic.

Leave a comment

Filed under economics, education, energy, industry, Mexico, military, philosophy, Venezuela

by | 3 June 2025 · 4:39 pm

North Vietnam in 1955

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 797-800:

For Ho and the DRV, the economic problems at year’s end were overwhelming. Most factories in the north were shuttered, and many of the owners had left the country. In Hanoi, foreign journalists reported that scores of restaurants and shops had gone out of business, while in the port city of Haiphong only one of thirty French-owned factories remained open. Fuel for motor vehicles was in short supply, and the railroads were idle. Even more pressing, rice production continued to decline, and floods in December along the central coast raised the specter of major famine. The price of the commodity in the markets skyrocketed. And whereas Tonkin had traditionally been able to rely on the more fertile Cochin China for much of its food, now the Saigon government blocked economic exchange between the two zones. In 1955, only emergency rice imports from Burma, financed by the Soviet Union, prevented a recurrence of the disastrous famine of 1945. Nor did it help the economic recovery that many urban professionals and shopkeepers and Catholics—fearing what Communism would bring—fled to the south.

At first, the government moved cautiously as it grappled with these problems. To reassure well-to-do farmers and the urban bourgeoisie, it initially vowed to respect private property and religious freedom. To Sainteny and members of the ICC, it continued to pledge support for the Geneva Accords and a desire to maintain harmonious relations with neighboring countries. But much as in China, where an initial policy of moderation in 1949–50 was followed by much harsher measures, officials in short order adopted more radical approaches.

The centerpiece was an ambitious land reform program first implemented in liberated areas of the north in late 1953 and now expanded to cover the whole of North Vietnam. The aim was to alleviate food shortages (the 1945 famine was still fresh in the mind) and break the power of the large landowners—to bring about, as the regime put it, equality for the greatest number among the rural masses—and over the long term it achieved considerable results in this regard. But the cost was immense. Instead of offering incentives to the people to spur production, doctrinaire officials categorized people in five groups, from “landlord” to “farm worker,” then sent platoons of cadres to arraign the landlords and other “feudal elements” in what were called “agricultural reform tribunals.” In reality, however, the distinction between social categories was not always clear, and many families of modest means saw their land seized. Small landholders were classified as large ones. Panic set in. Fearful of arbitrary indictment, peasants trumped up charges against their neighbors, while others accused their rivals of imaginary crimes. Anyone suspected of having worked for the French was subject to execution as a “traitor.” Others were condemned merely for showing insufficient zeal and ardor for the Viet Minh.

…

Executions became commonplace, though the scale of the killing is still unclear—estimates have run as high as 50,000 victims, but more credible assessments put the figure between 3,000 and 15,000. Thousands more were interned in forced labor camps. Most of the victims were innocent, at least of the stated charges. Ho Chi Minh, it seems, knew about the arbitrary persecution and violence but did little to prevent it. When Mrs. Nguyen Thi Nam, an important landlord and Viet Minh sympathizer, was condemned to death by a people’s tribunal and executed, Ho expressed frustration but did little more. “The French say that one should never hit a woman, even with a flower,” he reportedly declared, “and you, you allowed her to be shot!” Later, on February 8, 1955, Ho used the occasion of a conference on the land reform to condemn the use of torture and humiliation: “Some cadres are using the same methods to crush the masses as the imperialists, capitalists, and feudalists did. These methods are barbaric.… It is absolutely forbidden to use physical punishment.”

Some did not get the message, or did and ignored it. The brutal actions continued. In August 1956, Ho Chi Minh issued a public acknowledgment that “errors have been committed,” and he promised that “those who have been wrongly classified as landlords and rich peasants will be correctly reclassified.” Other officials dutifully echoed his admission, disclosing that even loyal Viet Minh veterans had been wrongly tried and executed. Truong Chinh, general secretary of the party and a key proponent of the program, was relieved of his post, as were other senior officials, including the minister of agriculture. The tribunals were ended. These measures helped reduce the tensions but not fully—late in the year in coastal Nghe An province, where Ho was born and raised, farmers in one district openly rioted, requiring the dispatch of government troops to restore order. In Hanoi, meanwhile, intellectuals chafed under what they saw as authoritarian state cultural policies.

Leave a comment

Filed under economics, food, labor, migration, military, nationalism, philosophy, Vietnam

by | 24 April 2025 · 5:36 am

Vietnamese Uprising of 1930

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 42-43:

The Moscow interlude must have been a heady time for Ho, as he communed with what he called “the great Socialist family.” No longer did he have to fear that the French police were watching his every move, ready to arrest him and charge him with treason. He was seen in Red Square in the company of senior Soviet leaders Gregory Zinoviev and Kliment Voroshilov and became known as a specialist on colonial affairs and also on Asia. In the autumn of 1924, the Soviets sent him to southern China, ostensibly to act as an interpreter for the Comintern’s advisory mission to Sun Yat-sen’s Nationalist government in Canton but in reality to organize the first Marxist revolutionary organization in Indochina. To that end, he published a journal, created the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League in 1925, and set up a training institute that attracted students from all over Vietnam. Along with Marxism-Leninism, he taught his own brand of revolutionary ethics: thrift, prudence, respect for learning, modesty, and generosity—virtues that, as biographer William J. Duiker notes, had more to do with Confucian morality than with Leninism.

In 1927, when Chiang Kai-shek began to crack down on the Chinese left, the institute was disbanded and Ho, pursued by the police, fled to Hong Kong and from there to Moscow. The Comintern sent him to France and then, at his request, to Thailand, where he spent two years organizing Vietnamese expatriates. Then, early in 1930, Ho Chi Minh presided over the creation of the Vietnamese Communist Party in Hong Kong. Eight months later, in October, on Moscow’s instructions, it was renamed the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP), with responsibility for spurring revolutionary activity throughout French Indochina.

Initially, the ICP was but one of a plethora of entities within the Vietnamese nationalist movement. The more Francophile reformist groups advocated nonviolent reformism and were centered in Cochin China. Most sought to change colonial policy without alienating France and vowed to keep Vietnam firmly within the French Union. Of greater lasting significance, however, were more revolutionary approaches, especially in Annam and Tonkin. In the cities of Hanoi and Hue, and in provincial and district capitals scattered throughout Vietnam, anticolonial elements began to form clandestine political organizations dedicated to the eviction of the French and the restoration of national independence. The Vietnamese Nationalist Party—or VNQDD, the Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang—was the most important of these groups, and by 1929 it had some fifteen hundred members, most of them organized into small groups in the Red River Delta in Tonkin. Formed on the model of Sun Yat-sen’s Nationalist Party, the VNQDD saw armed revolution as the lone means of gaining freedom for Vietnam, and in early 1930, it tried to foment a general uprising by Vietnamese serving in the French Army. On February 9, Vietnamese infantrymen massacred their French officers in Yen Bai. The French swiftly crushed the revolt, and the VNQDD’s leaders were executed, were jailed, or fled to China. The party ceased to be a threat to colonial control.

Leave a comment

Filed under France, migration, military, nationalism, philosophy, Thailand, USSR, Vietnam