Category Archives: religion

by | 4 June 2025 · 5:33 am

Catholic Exodus to South Vietnam

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 804-805:

Lansdale also helped facilitate the mass movement of refugees from north to south—though almost certainly his role has been exaggerated in some accounts. Beginning in a serious way in the summer of 1954, waves of refugees, most of them Catholic, went to the south under the provisions of the Geneva Accords permitting civilian regroupment. (Article 14d: “Any civilians residing in a district controlled by one party who wish to go and live in the zone assigned to the other party shall be permitted and helped to do so.”) As hundreds of thousands of refugees descended upon Haiphong in August and awaited evacuation, the French Air Force and Navy, realizing they were unprepared for the onslaught, asked Washington for assistance. The Pentagon ordered the U.S. Navy to mobilize a task force to assist in the evacuation, and in short order, ships were steaming from Subic Bay in the Philippines, bound for Haiphong.

All told, French and U.S. ships would make some five hundred trips in three hundred days, ferrying almost nine hundred thousand people southward, in perhaps the largest civilian evacuation—and largest sea migration—in history to that point. Entire northern Catholic communities abandoned most of their worldly possessions and set off en masse, their priests in the lead, in what the U.S. Navy dubbed Operation Passage to Freedom. The result was a major reordering of the religious balance of Vietnam. Before the exodus, most Vietnamese Catholics lived north of the seventeenth parallel; afterward the majority lived south of it. By 1956, the diocese of Saigon had more Catholics than Paris or Rome. By then, more than a million of Vietnam’s Catholics lived in the south, 55 percent of them refugees from the north.

The United States and the State of Vietnam reaped significant propaganda benefits from the mass exodus to the south in 1954–55. It seemed a perfect example of refugees “voting with their feet,” a damning indictment of the Viet Minh regime, and it was especially notable for the fact that comparatively few people went in the other direction, from south to north. The evacuation received wide play in the American press, with readers learning that the travelers, once they completed the journey, were given “welcome kits” of soap, towel, and toothpaste, and tins of milk labeled “From the people of America to the people of Viet Nam—a gift.” Left out of the accounts was that the exodus was not altogether spontaneous. Though many Catholics needed no incentive to leave the north, Lansdale and his CIA team initiated a campaign to convince the skeptics. In Catholic areas in the north, they broadcast the messages that “Christ has gone to the south” and “The Virgin Mary has departed the north” in order to be with Diem, a devout Catholic. They promised “five acres and a water buffalo” to every relocated refugee. In another gambit, Lansdale arranged for leaflets to be dropped over the same areas showing a map of North Vietnam with a series of concentric circles emanating from Hanoi. The none-too-subtle suggestion: that Hanoi was a likely target for a U.S. atomic bomb.

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Filed under France, migration, military, nationalism, religion, U.S., Vietnam

by | 6 April 2025 · 2:46 am

Recruiting Chinese to South Africa

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 199-200:

THE IDEA OF RECRUITING Chinese to South Africa was not entirely novel. During the nineteenth century, nearly sixty thousand Chinese indentured workers labored on French plantation island colonies off the east African coast and in German, British, and French colonies on the continent. The Chinese presence in South Africa dates to the eighteenth century, when the Dutch East India Company shipped Malay and Chinese convicts from Batavia to the Cape Colony. During the 1870s and ’80s a few hundred Chinese artisans and workers arrived in the Cape Colony and Natal, along with greater numbers of Indians, contracted for infrastructure construction after the opening of the diamond fields. Voluntary merchant emigrants from southern China followed in their path. By 1904 there were 2,398 Chinese in all of British South Africa, more than half of them living in the Cape Colony. Chinese in the Cape worked mostly as small traders and also as cooks, carpenters, basket weavers, fish sellers, and wagon drivers.

There were hardly any Chinese in the former Afrikaner republics. The Orange Free State excluded Chinese from settlement altogether. The ZAR excluded from citizenship “any of the native races of Asia, including ‘Coolies’ [Indians and Chinese], Arabs, Malays and Mohammedan subjects of the Turkish Dominion.” It forbade Asiatics from walking on footpaths and pavements; from driving public carriages; from riding in first- and second-class railway compartments; and from buying or possessing liquor. The anti-Chinese laws of the former Afrikaner republics remained in place when power transferred to the British after the South African War.

Notwithstanding these restrictions and discriminations, Chinese carved out small niches in Johannesburg. By 1890 there were more than a hundred Chinese in the town, shopkeepers, laundrymen, and market gardeners; by 1904 the Chinese population of the Transvaal was about nine hundred. Chinese often did business in poorer white districts. Unlike white-owned shops, the Chinese sold at low prices, in small quantities, and on credit.

The Chinese in Johannesburg at the turn of the century followed the same patterns of social organization Chinese practiced across the diaspora. In the 1890s, they formed a huiguan called the Kwong Hok Tong (guanghetang) or Cantonese Club. It built a “clubhouse” on leased land in Ferreirastown, the original settlement of Johannesburg, which now lay at the city’s fringe. The house had several reception rooms, six bedrooms, a kitchen, and a latrine. Membership cost five pounds for initiation and dues according to one’s occupation. The club rented rooms at two pounds a month; kept a library of books and periodicals; and held social events and meetings that drew as many as 150 people. Yeung Ku Wan (Yang Feihong), a collaborator of Sun Yatsen who arrived in South Africa in 1896, formed a second group, the Xingzhonghui (Revive China Society). Photographs of members of both groups show educated men dressed in Western-style clothing.

Thus in 1903, when the idea of importing Chinese labor for the gold mines circulated, there was already a history of Chinese migration to South Africa and a small but established Chinese community in Johannesburg. These served as both precedent and warning—for both Chinese and whites.

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Filed under Britain, China, labor, migration, nationalism, Netherlands, religion, South Africa

by | 24 March 2025 · 12:05 pm

Gold Rush Translation Needs

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 72-74:

THE PROBLEM OF TRANSLATION shaped Chinese interactions with Euro-Americans from their very arrival at the two gold mountains. Among the earliest emigrants, those who were bilingual had usually acquired their linguistic skills in China or Southeast Asia. The San Francisco merchant Yuan Sheng went to a missionary school in Macao, and the Australian impresario Lowe Kong Meng attended an English private school in Penang; both men had experience in business dealings with Europeans and Americans before arriving on the goldfields. The first Euro-American missionaries in California and Victoria had previously served in China or Southeast Asia.

Chinese who went to the goldfields in groups often included one person who spoke English. Headmen accompanying Chinese emigrants to Australia all knew enough English to navigate their groups’ travel to and settlement on the goldfields. The same pattern existed in California. For example, the American miner Timothy Osborn wrote in his diary that a group of Chinese miners who were camped near him included a friendly English speaker, who wrote down various Chinese words and their translations for the curious American. Few Americans went so far as to learn Chinese. Jerome Millard was a rare exception.

Many Chinese merchants learned enough English to conduct business with local whites, or they employed a young clerk who learned enough to do so. Most were barely proficient in English, learning key words and phrases but rarely grammar. Often they inserted English words into Cantonese sentence structure. For example, Jung Ah Sing, a gold digger in Victoria, wrote a journal while imprisoned after a knife fight. Because the journal was actually a brief attesting to his innocence, he wrote in English: “My buy that hatchet that day months of January 1867 Cochran Diggings Chinamen gone away sell the my, my buy that hatchet that time my been Chinamen tent go home.” (“I bought that hatchet in January 1867 from Chinamen at Cochran Diggings. They were moving away and sold it to me. Then I left the Chinamen’s tent and went home.”)

Missionaries in California offered English classes to bring Chinese to Christianity, a strategy that attracted many students but few converts. The Rev. William Speer conceded that the young men who came for English classes stayed long enough to learn a few words and phrases. It would be fairer to say that, apart from well-educated men like Yuan Sheng and Lowe Kong Meng, most Chinese communicated with Euro-Americans not really in English but in pidgin. The limits of pidgin were most clearly displayed when Chinese tried to express themselves in the courtroom and in other legal matters, usually to sad outcomes.

It was necessary, therefore, to use interpreters when there was important business to conduct. The larger huiguan had “linguists” on their staffs to assist individual members as well as to represent the association to mainstream society. San Francisco’s police courts employed on an ad hoc basis not only Chinese but also French, German, Russian, and Spanish interpreters, reflecting the city’s international population. But even in San Francisco, few Chinese could speak English well enough to meet the needs of the police and the courts; the situation did not improve until a second generation of Chinese Americans came of age in the 1870s.

During the 1850s and ’60s, the city’s interpreters included Euro-American missionaries and educated Chinese merchants. Yuan Sheng frequently appeared in court when Chinese faced criminal charges and acted as both interpreter and as advocate. In one case of larceny, for example, Yuan successfully persuaded the judge to discharge A-He, who was accused of stealing ten dollars, on grounds that he was a “crazy man.” Yuan promised to send him back to China.

In Australia the goldfield commissioners in each district hired Chinese interpreters and “scribes” to support the heavy work of issuing mining licenses and compliance with goldfield regulations. Two brothers, Ho A Low (He Yale) and Ho A Mei (He Yamei), were typical of the first Chinese interpreters in Victoria. They had been educated at the Anglo-Chinese school at the London Missionary Society station at Malacca. Ho A Low first came to Victoria as a missionary worker in 1857 and was fast recruited to work as an interpreter by the Beechworth resident warden. Both brothers held positions as interpreters, but neither stuck with the job.

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Filed under Australia, Britain, China, education, language, migration, religion, U.S.

by | 12 March 2025 · 5:24 am

U.S.–Russia Tensions, 1880s

From Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin’s Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 95-96:

Alexander’s assassination at first drew the United States and Russia even closer because of the still traumatic American memory of Lincoln’s assassination. The US Senate passed a resolution of sympathy for Russia emphasizing the “relations of genuine friendship that have always existed between the people and governments of Russia and of the United States.” Former president Grant recalled fond memories of his 1878 meeting with the late tsar. The New York Times ran an editorial attacking the “Nihilism” of the assassins as the “chief foe of the liberty of the Russian people.” The Russian government reciprocated the sympathy when Charles Guiteau mortally wounded President Garfield a few months after Alexander’s assassination.

But the policies of the new tsar, Alexander III, managed to blunt the American sympathy for Russia generated by his father’s assassination. A foreign diplomat anonymously reported that the tsar and his advisers were preparing to “adopt rigorous repressive measures, having no example in Russian history.” Among the measures was a decree allowing the regime, without a trial, to jail or exile to Siberia anyone whose presence in Russia was deemed “prejudicial to the public order” or “incompatible with public tranquility.” A former head of the Department of the Police remarked that the decree caused the fate of the “entire population of Russia to become dependent on the personal opinions of the functionaries of the political police.”

Simultaneously with political repression, Alexander III tolerated, if not encouraged, a wave of brutal pogroms against Jews in European Russia. In some places Russian soldiers, mobilized to restore order, joined the mob in ransacking Jewish homes and businesses, and raping Jewish women. As historian Edward Crankshaw observed, “it was under Alexander III, and thanks to Alexander III, that anti-Semitism in Russia became institutionalized, respectable—and violent.” Influential Americans began to debate the true nature of the Russian regime. Harper’s Weekly, which previously had run issue after issue with festive illustrations of Russian life, editorialized that there is “no question as to the existence of the most cruel, arbitrary and oppressive despotism in Russia.”

Just as he had defended Russia’s role in the Great Game in Central Asia several years earlier, Kennan again came to Russia’s defense. He publicly addressed only the emerging criticism of the Siberian exile system, and not the pogroms, but privately he expressed the belief that the Russian government had been “grossly misrepresented” in the reports of the mistreatment of Jews even though he did not then have “the facts” to prove it. In a widely publicized lecture in 1882 at the American Geographical Society, Kennan argued that while the exile system was hardly without flaws, “whatever exile may have been in the past, it is not now, in any just sense of the words, a cruel or unusual punishment,” but on the contrary should be regarded as a “more humane punishment than that inflicted upon criminals generally in other European states.”

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Filed under democracy, economics, migration, nationalism, religion, Russia, U.S.

by | 4 March 2025 · 4:58 am

PTSD vs. Moral Injury

From What the Taliban Told Me, by Ian Fritz (Simon & Schuster, 2023), Kindle pp. 222-224:

ACCORDING TO MY OFFICIAL Air Force records, I do not have, and in fact have never had, PTSD. Formally receiving this diagnosis would have required an official admission that what I did and saw and heard was in fact traumatic and that it wasn’t normal, which would only have served to justify my reasons for not wanting to go back. You can see why the powers that be wouldn’t want to admit this. And while this diagnosis wasn’t true when the Air Force made it, it might be now. Time doesn’t heal all wounds—some simply can’t be treated—but eventually your mind can bring the edges together, and while the scar is ugly and imprecise, the gaping hole has, finally, closed. These days I can listen to Pashto without breaking out in a cold sweat, get on a plane without thinking about the guns that ought to be attached to it, and talk about war without wanting to curl up in a ball and die. This, then, is understood as meaning that my PTSD has been cured (never mind that curing something that was never supposed to have existed creates some mild metaphysical stickiness).

In the time since I wasn’t diagnosed, the military has embraced a different terminology to attempt to describe the turmoil that I and so many others experienced: moral injury. The idea of moral injury has been around since at least the 1980s, though the explicit term was coined by Jonathan Shay in the nineties, when his work with Vietnam veterans led to his writing Achilles in Vietnam. Today, Syracuse University’s Moral Injury Project not only defines moral injury but attempts to explain why and when it happens:

Moral injury is the damage done to one’s conscience or moral compass when that person perpetrates, witnesses, or fails to prevent acts that transgress one’s own moral beliefs, values, or ethical codes of conduct.

This is a good definition; it is thorough while simultaneously casting a wide enough net to embrace the myriad reasons any warfighter could suffer such an injury. Being a DSO allowed for perpetration, witnessing, and failure. Certainly, my moral code was violated. But I don’t think moral injury fully encompasses just what happened. It’s not that I, along with almost every other Pashto DSO, wasn’t morally injured. We were. But it’s not entirely accurate to say that there was “damage done to [my] conscience or moral compass.” It’s more like, along with the many men I killed, my consciousness was blown the fuck up.

With the exception of spies mythical and real, most warfighters throughout history have not been tasked with killing people they know. Even in our modern wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the majority of killing is done by complete strangers. There is, I assume, a feeling of knowing associated with killing someone in close combat, even though you may have no knowledge of anything that defines that person as a unique human. But this is different from understanding what makes that person a person, from killing someone you know. With modernity came the ability to have this knowledge.

The most famous of these warriors are drone operators. These men and women face issues that I can’t begin to understand, as the cognitive dissonance that they experience is so strange as to be something out of science fiction. If anything, it seems that their injury is arguably worsened by the moral contradiction of being so far away from the “threat.”

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Filed under Afghanistan, military, religion, U.S., Vietnam, war

by | 3 March 2025 · 4:51 am

Problems of Knowing Thine Enemy

From What the Taliban Told Me, by Ian Fritz (Simon & Schuster, 2023), Kindle pp. 230-234:

No single individual is held responsible for the people that our planes kill. It’s a crew effort. There is no ammunition without a loadmaster to balance the plane; a FCO [Fire Control Officer] can’t fire that ammunition without gunners loading the weapons; the gunners won’t ready the weapons till the sensor operators find a bad guy; the sensor operators couldn’t find that bad guy without pilots flying the plane; the pilots couldn’t have flown the plane to the location where the sensors found that bad guy without a navigator guiding them across the country; the navigator couldn’t have safely gotten across that country without an EWO [Electronic Warfare Officer] making sure no one hit the plane with a rocket; the EWO couldn’t have used his equipment without a flight engineer making sure everything was in working order.

I didn’t mention the role of DSOs because DSOs, while nice to have around, are not remotely necessary for a C-130 to carry out its mission. And so, if I heard something that proved to be the key piece of information that resulted in us shooting, a piece of information, that, if lacking, would have prevented us from shooting, then didn’t I kill someone on my own? Conversely, if I didn’t hear anything that was related to why we shot, then did I kill anyone at all?

The problem with this argument is that according to my official records I have in fact killed 123 people. The actual wording is “123 insurgents EKIA” (EKIA = enemy killed in action, so not quite people, but definitely killed). These records don’t say that I was part of a crew that killed these people, or that I supported other people who did the killing, just that I killed those 123 humans. I can’t know, and will never know, if all of these kills belong to me. I do know, and will always know, that I belong to all of them.

…

These are the things I wish I hadn’t heard.

If I hadn’t heard those things, infinity would have remained, well, infinite. I would have been able to tell myself that the Taliban were not men, were not even human, that they were in fact Enemies, whose only purpose was to be Killed in Action. If I hadn’t heard those things, I wouldn’t have loved the men I was listening to. If I hadn’t loved them, killing them would have been easy. If killing them had been easy, my consciousness would have remained intact.

To say that I loved the Taliban is surely anathema to most anyone who reads this. It doesn’t feel good, or right, for me to say it. But I checked, and of the many definitions that exist for the word love, one of them is the following: “strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties.” I most certainly had personal ties to the men I was listening to; they told me shit they wouldn’t tell their best (non-Talib) friends, their wives, their fathers. And at some point, not because they were Talibs, in fact in spite of that, because they were human, I came to have the strong affection for them that I firmly believe it is impossible not to develop for virtually any other person if you can get past your own bullshit and just accept that they’re people too.

Let me be clear about something here: I in no way support the Taliban, their stated goals, their practices, or really anything about them. Nor do I support the individual men who comprise the greater Taliban. Their movement and many of their beliefs are an affront to modernity in all of its complicated, messy, but ultimately better than the shit that actively and gleefully removes myriad human rights from everyone who isn’t a God-fearing man, splendor. They are not the good guys.

None of these things detract from the fact that they’re still human. They’re still people. I have no desire for you to identify with them or wish for their lives to be spared. What I do ask is that you understand that I did identify with them. I had to. My job required it. All that talking with my teachers in language school, so I could figure out how they think? That’s what made me a good linguist. The translation we did isn’t something that can be done by a computer or a robot, it isn’t the simple transformation of the sounds of one language into another. You have to understand the intent, the tone, the playfulness, the fear, the anger, the confusion, all of the nuances that attach themselves to spoken words and drastically change their meanings.

It was impossible for me to do this without internalizing the speakers’ logic (it’s possible for others, but I don’t understand that process). It was also impossible, despite all this knowing and feeling, for me to wish for their lives to have been spared. To have spared their lives would have been to guarantee that many others would have been taken.

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Filed under Afghanistan, language, military, religion, U.S., war

by | 20 February 2025 · 5:19 pm

Whence Eastern European Nationalism?

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 798-800:

Thus capitalism did not produce nationalism in Eastern Europe; instead, it was a device that helped reshape and spread national ideas and identities that already existed. What generated those ideas and identities, and the commitment to live for them, was the consuming fear of oblivion, profound resentment over condescension, and smoldering hatred of subjugation. Why these emotions emerged across the East European map in the late eighteenth century had to do with imperial powers being themselves (that is, trying to outdo one another for power and glory). Joseph II wanted to be France and Great Britain—simultaneously nation-state and vast empire—Catherine the preeminent European land power, and the sultans wanted to ensure that they were not driven from Europe altogether. Thus their dangerous acts of rooting out corruption in the Greek and Serb lands.

The first visible substance that the new nationalisms nurtured in this vast space on the edges of empires was language, and language is the most arresting blind spot in the analyses of the best-known theorists. In [Benedict] Anderson’s scheme, the vernacular was a given that had only to be transcribed; in fact, the vernacular emerged only after decades of contentious “imagining” brought it to life despite internal dissension among patriots, and against the wishes of recalcitrant censors. The Czech case again is paradigmatic: every inch of Czech newspaper space, every minute of Czech theater performance, each new Czech classroom were objects of human effort—effort for which neither Anderson, nor the other major theorists have time, because they are not universal.

Anderson imagined nationalism moving across borders in a chain reaction beginning in France. In basic outline this claim is incontrovertible. That a nation should control its destiny from within defined boundaries, was a lesson people in and beyond Europe drew from Paris. But where Eastern Europe is concerned, the reality of transfer was more paradoxical. The first to absorb the French model—Germans—simultaneously rejected it and molded their version of nationhood around things that had supposedly eluded the model nation, namely, the language and culture the French took for granted. East Europeans then formed their own ideas of nationness against Germany, while also focusing on culture and language. To an outsider visiting Prague in 1860, the Czech anti-world seemed indistinguishable from the local German variant: Czechs ate the same food, wore the same clothes, loved similar music and stories, had the same local saints, and the same professional ambitions and aspirations for the good life. That was the impression one had until one began listening to what Czechs were saying in their distinct, precious, and, for the Germans, vexingly difficult vernacular.

They spoke of the fate of being a small nation, controlled like a colony, desperately in need of secure borders in a way that citizens of long-established and powerful states like Britain and France could not understand. T. G. Masaryk—an outsider who became an insider—first had to master that language to build the Czechoslovak nation-state. It’s a message that still eludes Western observers, oddly enough, precisely for their insistence on seeing Eastern Europe simply as an extension of their own European space. (Rejoining Europe, after all, was the prime goal of the dissident movements.) In Cold War terms, what happened after 1989 appeared to be the first world embracing and absorbing the second in a concluding act of history.

Yet beginning in about 2010, we have seen that East Central Europe stubbornly carries its own past. This morning, January 4, 2019, the New York Times printed a letter on the injustice of Trianon! The fact is that East Central Europe is a place where the first, second, and third worlds persist and overlap, each making claims on the same and different pasts. After 1989, the Czech lands, for example, came under the sway of the determined neoliberal Václav Klaus, a local nationalist of sorts, but before that they were a center of the second world’s anticapitalism, and before that, colonial subjects, co-inventors of the idea of national liberation struggles, going back to the late eighteenth century.

The scholar-patriots of that distant time, together with the Czech students of 1968 and 1989, Polish workers of 1956 and 1988, and Yugoslav intellectuals of the 1960s or 1980s, all intertwined three strands of struggle for liberal, social, and national rights: for responsible political representation, lives in dignity without want, protection of their national cultures. The stories of 1938, 1948, and 1968 were not a radical break but a refreshed version of older stories of self-assertion against foreign domination. In many ways the big-bang of 1919, or Budapest’s 1956 and Prague’s 1968, were a replay of the ferment of 1848/1849. The miraculous 1989 was a national liberation struggle, as well as an assertion of deeper traditions of local democracy, and basic civic rights, traditions going back centuries. See, for example, the Polish constitution of 1791 or the very old Hungarian traditions of local self-rule.

If there is a lesson from these stories, it is that when the demands of any of these three worlds are met with contempt, forces emerge claiming to set things right, forces that are rarely liberal. The Habsburg monarchy, under siege from many claimants, liberal and otherwise, opened the Pandora’s box of representative government in the 1860s, and what came forth, especially after the liberals’ failure of 1879, has been various kinds of populism, left and right, all briefly united in 1882 at Linz. The intervening generations have witnessed the temporary victories of liberal nationalism; national socialism; socialist nationalism; and most recently after the “return to Europe,” yet again an intense nationalism, connected to the past—to events like Trianon—but also to a politics for which a name has yet to be found.

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Filed under democracy, Eastern Europe, economics, education, language, nationalism, philosophy, religion

by | 15 February 2025 · 5:57 am

Romania’s Bizarre Revolution, 1989

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 733-736:

Like its East German counterpart, the Czechoslovak regime had discovered it lacked the will and conviction to escalate beyond truncheon and tear gas to live ammunition. Remarkably, these two well-armed hardline regimes had accepted oblivion with little protest. Except for the beatings and arrests in the early Leipzig demonstrations, those that followed in East Berlin and Dresden in early October, and the “massacre” (in which no one actually died in Prague) on November 17, the neo-Stalinist dictators departed the scene peacefully if not always gracefully. The transfer of power in Czechoslovakia became known as the Velvet Revolution.

Yet a little to the south, also in former Habsburg lands, this time in Romania, an inflexible dictator was sending militia to quell protest, and the violence he unleashed cost hundreds of lives. The situation there differed from the countries to the north in the absolute separation of the nepotistic regime from society; the extraordinary sacrifices that had been demanded for years—electricity and gas were limited to a few hours a day—and the outrage that resulted, along with revulsion and active hatred. Ceaușescu sought no understanding with groups in the party, let alone beyond the party, and, in contrast to the lands farther north, virtually no opposition groups emerged in Romania’s civil society to articulate interests separate from those of the state. The dictator had regularly cleared the terrain of contenders and destroyed all loci of opposition, producing a “remarkable atomization of Romanian society, in which fear and distrust became the currency of human relations.” The regime and its supporters had no doubt that they would be held responsible for the injustice and misery when the inevitable accounting came, and they fought with corresponding desperation. By 1989 alienation was countrywide, and when demonstrations erupted in one place, they spread quickly, despite—but then because of—knowledge of the numbers of victims.

Protest flared in former Habsburg Transylvania because it had suffered not only privation but also the destruction of local Hungarian culture, including the bulldozing of villages and the deportation of their inhabitants to Eastern Romania. Anger crystalized in mid-December, when authorities scheduled the ejection of the popular Hungarian Reformed Pastor László Tőkés from the city of Timișoara. His memoirs make clear that the Reformed church’s hierarchy was colluding with the state’s plans to help erase his independent voice; Tőkés had routinely acted without bothering to get approval from his superiors, for example, in organizing inter-denominational services at his church.

On December 15, protesters who had been camping near his residence marched toward the city center, where they took control of public offices and looted the well-stocked stores reserved for the Securitate. The following day, security forces fired on the protesters, but instead of extinguishing the embers of revolution, they caused them to spread, and even more citizens of Timișoara converged on the city center. Many were Hungarian-speakers with access to informative media broadcasts from Hungary and Yugoslavia, and word of their demonstrations was carried eastward by railway workers, troops who had rotated out of the city, and the international media. On December 18, Nicolae Ceaușescu left Romania to visit some of his last supporters, the theocratic rulers of Iran. Kept apprised of the growing unrest though his embassy in Bucharest, Soviet Foreign Minister Shevardnadze said he would welcome Ceaușescu’s fall.

On returning on the afternoon of December 20, Ceaușescu declared a state of emergency in Timișoara, claiming that the demonstrators were terrorists who were serving foreign espionage agencies. He then attempted to organize mass rallies in his own favor in Bucharest. Until recently, individuals summoned by the party for mass spectacles could be counted on for abject expressions of adulation; now they demanded Ceaușescu’s resignation. On the evening of December 21, the dictator sent in security forces to disperse the crowd and hundreds were injured. The following day, the armed forces defected to the people, and Ceaușescu and his wife Elena fled Bucharest by helicopter. Under still unexplained circumstances, they touched down in the countryside and were apprehended, placed on trial before a military tribunal, and then executed before television cameras on Christmas Eve. But the fighting between security forces and crowds, now supported by the army, lasted until December 27, spreading to other cities. In all, 1,104 Romanians lost their lives in the revolution.

One explanation that has emerged for the haste in doing away with the rulers was concern that they might lead a counterrevolution against an emerging challenger, the “Front of National Salvation” that suddenly announced its existence over state radio on December 22, just as crowds were seizing the Communist Central Committee building and television station in Bucharest. The Front consisted not of leaders of civil society, let alone dissident groups—none existed—but of formerly high-placed Communists, some of whom had been disgraced by Ceaușescu. Prominent was the onetime apparatchik Ion Iliescu, who enjoyed support among top officials of the police and army. In his first speech, Iliescu called Ceaușescu a “man without a heart or soul or common sense, a feudal fanatic, who destroyed the country” and “perpetrated the worst crimes upon the people.”

Even in its time, this revolution seemed bizarre. Beyond the chilling spectacle of the execution of the dictator and his wife before running cameras, still dressed in heavy winter clothing and looking more like ragged senior citizens than all-powerful rulers, were the sudden change of heart of the crowd facing Ceaușescu in Bucharest; the inexplicably sudden defection of the military; and the sudden rise out of nowhere of a de facto countergovernment. Even in Timișoara, pastor Tőkés had registered an uncanny shift in mood, beyond his control or anyone else’s, perhaps the work of provocateurs from within the police. Was the revolution orchestrated by Ceaușescu’s rivals in the party? Was it in fact staged with demonstrators acting as unwitting actors in someone else’s drama? Afterward rumors spread that the secret services of the United States and the Soviet Union were informed about the activities of anti-Ceaușescu forces.

In the years since, no evidence has emerged to support claims of a wider or deeper conspiracy; what seems clear is that formerly highly placed officials wanted Ceaușescu out of the way. But they themselves were surprised and overwhelmed by the revolutionary events of those late fall days and adapted well to the events as they unfolded, posing as saviors to a deeply traumatized society. The revolution had resulted from a mix of planning and spontaneity. Opposition leaders emerged who, inspired by the example of Timișoara, had hoped to turn the Bucharest demonstration against the dictator. Their hopes proved justified. Many thousands arrived on December 21 in central Bucharest because they had been instructed to do so; they had no plans to oppose, much less topple the dictator. Yet once others, especially young people, began demanding the dictator’s fall, they joined in, suddenly and decisively, at great personal risk, propelled by years of humiliating privation.

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by | 13 February 2025 · 9:26 pm

Nonviolent Protest in Plauen, 1989

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 726-729:

Citizens of Leipzig also knew that in East Berlin and Dresden, small groups had taken to the streets two days earlier on the national holiday of the state’s founding; they had been beaten brutally. The exception to violence on that October 7 was Plauen, a manufacturing town on the border to Bavaria, where some 15,000 had marched for reforms and dispersed peacefully, thanks to the intervention of that city’s Protestant Superintendent. Like many citizens of southern East Germany, Plaueners had suffered poor air quality and provisioning, and they were still electrified, recalling the fourteen trainloads of fellow East German refugees from Prague that had rushed through their town on September 30, southward to freedom. But the October 7 demonstration in Plauen, the largest to that date in East Germany, would not have happened but for the act of one young man, the toolmaker Jörg Schneider. The previous week, he had distributed dozens of leaflets around town calling townspeople to a demonstration for reforms and basic rights. As a result, thousands descended on central Plauen that rainy Saturday afternoon. Authorities did nothing to stop them, because they too had called on citizens to come into town that day: for a celebration of the state’s founding. The crowds had no leader, but they morphed into a demonstration when police pummeled a man who had unfurled a banner reading simply “we want reforms!” The huge crowd then marched around the city center and finally gathered at Plauen’s city hall, the seat of power, where local party officials were sequestered, not knowing what to expect. Guarding them were police armed with enough ammunition to frustrate any attempt to storm the building.

Fortunately, the superintendent, Thomas Küttler, a man of peace, went through the cordon, spoke with the party secretary, a man he knew well, and elicited a pledge to receive a citizens’ delegation in the coming days. He assured the crowd over a megaphone that their demands had been heard, and it dispersed peacefully. Within a few weeks, Plauen had its own round table, as did virtually every East German town.

But before that point was reached, the regime had to be openly tested in its will to use violence to maintain power, and that test occurred on Monday, October 9 in Leipzig. For reasons that are still debated, the regime backed down and let the largest demonstration to date—an estimated 70,000 people—take place without incident. Honecker’s heir apparent, the “youth functionary” Egon Krenz (a man famous for a big smile), later took credit, but actually decisive were three other factors: an impromptu intervention of six prominent local figures, including the SED first party secretary as well as Maestro Kurt Masur, who drafted and read a call for peace on the radio; the fact that no commander in the huge assemblage of well-armed troops and police (with ambulances at the ready) was ready to take responsibility for a bloody showdown; and the fact that the demonstration started as a peace prayer. The October 9 demonstration commenced with thousands of East Germans departing a church holding lit candles as a sign of their commitment to nonviolence.

Thanks to cameras that Roland Jahn had smuggled into the GDR, audiences in the East and West could watch on television the tens of thousands who joined them the next day. They had chanted the authorless words, “We are the people!,” a phrase more daring and challenging than it sounds. For decades, authorities had claimed—in posters and other propaganda draped all over the country—to represent the people. For example, their social policies were “all for the good of the people!” Here on the streets of Leipzig, the people were in fact speaking, revealing the regime’s claim as a lie. You are not the people—we are.

Without the example of a Soviet leader who sanctioned thoughts of radical change, and circumstances that desperately needed change, the demonstrations in Plauen or Leipzig would not have happened. But they also would not have happened without the courage of thousands of anonymous citizens who wanted change and believed that it would come that day or never. They marched and chanted, knowing that the police and militia might fire. After this point, the police and military seemed defanged, their ability to intimidate broken, the regime’s claim to incorporate the will of a “socialist community of human beings” an obvious fiction. Within a week, more than 300,000 came for the Monday demonstration in Leipzig, and they were joined by hundreds of thousands in towns across the GDR, men, women, and children, hands often raised as a sign of peace. A little more than a week later, the leadership of mostly eighty-year-olds submitted its resignation.

In their banners and chants, the demonstrators used an eloquent German word to tell what they had come to detest in the state socialist welfare state: having been treated like children. But they were “mündig,” adults (literally, “people with mouths,” that is, voices). One banner mocked Honecker’s successor Egon Krenz, the man of the irrepressible grin, placing him in a crib above the inscription: “What big teeth you have, Grandma.”

Four of my classmates in advanced Romanian language classes at the University of Bucharest in 1983-84 were German girls from Leipzig University. They were adding Romanian to their translator/interpreter skills repertoire; they already knew Russian. Two of them seemed strict party-liners but the other two seemed more open to exploring new ideas and I ran into one of them (a fellow redhead) at a West German embassy art exhibit in Bucharest. She panicked and begged me not to tell anyone. Of course, I kept silent about it. I ran into the redhead again just before leaving Romania when I went to their dorms to give away my shortwave radio/cassette recorder to one of the two Chinese classmates who became a friend. (They worked for Radio Beijing’s Romanian broadcast service.) The daring redhead insisted on giving her capitalist classmate a good-bye kiss. I’ve lost track of my German classmates’ names but wonder what happened to them in 1989 and where they ended up.

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by | 11 February 2025 · 5:43 am

Collapse of Eastern Europe, 1989

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 685-686:

The East European revolutions of 1989 brought an end to complex ways of organizing and experiencing virtually everything, and even the most basic activities were suddenly new: students learned western languages instead of Russian and read books previously called “poisonous.” No one cared who went to church or what was said there. Spaces opened for entrepreneurship, and within months, advertising and small shops proliferated, transforming even villages. Newsstands featured glossy entertainment, even pornography, and restaurants served “exotic” dishes like pizza or Thai noodles. Scaffolding went up around apartment buildings unpainted for decades, while below high-powered German and Italian sedans raced over streets still paved in cobblestone. In the summers, cities emptied as populations fled for the beaches, often in the west, and the divide through Europe began to fade. I remember a mother telling her child as they changed trains at Friedrichstrasse in East Berlin two days after the Wall opened: “At school you can tell everyone that you went to a different country [ein anderes Land] this weekend.” That was an understatement. In West Berlin, the child had visited not a different country but a different world. Yet soon, downsides of the new reality also became evident: East Europeans could become unemployed. Violence, too, returned to the streets, often directed against ethnic others.

How did this radical shift occur? Television footage shows crowds filling the streets in 1989. Perhaps they were seizing power like revolutionaries of the distant past. But appearances deceived, a fact with a long tradition. “The people” did not take the reins of government in France in 1789, Petrograd in 1917, or Manila in 1986. Similarly, the crowds that formed around the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 did not break Communism. The party elite had lost its grip on power weeks earlier, and the border point opening—due to a misstatement on television about travel regulations by SED spokesman Günter Schabowski—confirmed, and hastened, a transfer of power that was already under way. Some two weeks later, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators began pouring into the streets of Czechoslovakia, but a few weeks after that, power traded hands behind closed doors. By the summer of 1990, a new elite was forming that revolutionaries never imagined, favoring neoliberalism and national exclusivism. In Romania, revolutionaries fought and died for their cause, but when the air cleared, the “victors” saw that one set of Communist leaders had traded places with another. Still, state socialism everywhere gave way to some form of pluralism.

No one had expected the old regimes to collapse, and no single act was calculated to bring about their end. In early 1989, it seemed that change would be limited to tinkering with the planned economy, still based on single-party rule. As late as February, an East German died trying to escape over the Berlin Wall. The democratic opposition of 1989 had initially wanted to infuse the regimes with “greater momentum,” advocating respect for human rights, political pluralism, freedom of speech, and the right of assembly. It did not expect a transition to democracy.2 Even the seasoned revolutionaries of Poland’s Solidarity trade union, permitted to field candidates in the elections of June 1989, anticipated at first an advisory role in a liberalized Communist regime allied with the Soviet Union. East German protesters of October 1989 wanted a democratic socialism that did not exist in the West—and did not imagine their country leaving the Warsaw Pact to become part of the European Community, allied to NATO. (That happened just a year later.)

The collapse of 1989 grew out of a social and economic crisis that had been building for decades, yielding a malaise that reached deep into the Communist Party. For Communist regimes, faith was crucial. If Western modernity approximated a business model of rationality, where the state acts as caretaker of economic growth and social stability, the Eastern variant was ultimately a religion with legitimacy tied to claims about ultimate truths. State publishing houses printed pamphlets answering basic questions like: why am I alive? Yet by the 1980s, Communism had become a church where people not only forgot their prayers but also scoffed at basic teachings—finding them hypocritical, fictitious, damaging, and irrelevant. In the final years, neither functionaries nor citizens thought the party had a clear right to rule, because any such right was vested in a vision of history that few continued to accept. In the late 1980s, believers among the leadership were considered naïve or worse. According to an East German joke, three attributes never went together in a party functionary: belief, intelligence, and honesty. Those who were honest and intelligent did not believe; those who believed and were intelligent could not be honest. Those who believed and were honest could not be intelligent.

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