Category Archives: religion

by Joel | 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 Joel | 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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by Joel | 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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Filed under Czechia, democracy, Germany, Hungary, military, nationalism, religion, Romania, USSR

by Joel | 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 Joel | 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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by Joel | 19 January 2025 · 6:00 am

Spanish Shipboard Life, 1564

From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 103-105:

Life aboard the ships followed new rhythms and obvious improvements over Navidad. The mosquitos and other insects vanished almost instantly (though not the fleas and lice), and the ocean breeze provided effective relief from the heat. The expeditionaries also gained immediate access to foods that had been denied to them before. Each soldier received a daily ration of one pound of hardtack and either a pound of meat or half a pound of dried fish along with fava beans or chickpeas. Doled out in three square meals a day, this was more than enough. Every Sunday afternoon, some cheese was added to the ration for variety. The liquids on offer were also generous: three pints of water per day along with wine, enough not only to keep hydrated but also to soak and soften the hardtack. Commander Legazpi had said nothing to the four ship captains about the distribution of spirits, but we know that the crew members would never have consented to crossing the Pacific without this indispensable tonic for the body and mind. Indeed, alcohol was an important tool, deployed especially during storms to steel the mariners’ resolve and “warm their stomachs.”

These rations were tangible improvements. Yet the negatives far outweighed the positives, beginning with the cramped conditions. To understand the sailors’ circumstances in a way that makes sense to us, we must imagine a good-sized urban apartment occupied by about one hundred strangers. A single toilet—but no shower or sink—would have to do for everyone, along with a very rudimentary kitchen and no furniture other than sea chests (wooden boxes) scattered all over the deck and below and serving as chairs and tables as needed. Two or three times a day, pages brought out platters of food into which everyone stuck their fingers liberally to get the best pieces of meat or servings of chickpeas. At night, everyone but the most privileged had to find a reasonably level surface to sleep on—always too close to others—and try to get some rest in spite of the noises, odors, and constant movement. Spending merely a week in these conditions would have been taxing, yet the expeditionaries had to endure this for months.

Aboard the ships, there was strict regimentation. Everybody “without skipping anyone if not for illness” was assigned daily to a four-hour shift. This could occur at any time of the day or night, with the worst shifts having evocative names like “drowsiness,” or modorra (from midnight to four), “dawn,” or alva (from four to eight), and so on. The time was measured carefully with multiple hourglasses, or ampolletas, that had to be turned without fail every thirty minutes, and the assigned tasks ranged from moving barrels and serving as lookouts to pumping out the awful-smelling water that always collected at the bottom of the ship. Those on shift could also be ordered to perform navigational duties like hoisting and trimming sails, not only because the crew was spread too thin but also “to get everybody trained and accustomed to such work in case of necessity.” The remaining twenty hours of the day were far more leisurely. With so much time to kill, the expeditionaries were tempted to play cards or engage in other games of chance, betting their daily rations, clothes, and weapons. Of course, all of this was strictly prohibited, as was invoking the name of God in vain or using profanity, a constant occurrence among seamen. Any of these infractions could lead to punishments ranging from public shaming and withholding of one’s daily ration to imprisonment and torture for repeat offenders.

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Filed under food, labor, migration, military, Pacific, Philippines, religion, Spain

by Joel | 18 January 2025 · 6:56 am

New Spain Demographics, 1500s

From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 89-91:

Those who remained reasonably healthy and curious would have been immediately struck by Navidad’s sheer diversity. As the port’s population swelled from a few dozen to several hundred, it turned into something of a Babel of races, nationalities, classes, and occupations. Native Americans were ubiquitous. Coming from nearby towns such as Tuxpan and Xilotlán, they had been compelled to abandon their families, homes, and fields and go to Navidad to work for token compensation according to a system of corvée labor known as repartimiento. For these Indigenous peoples, service at the port was yet another labor sinkhole that they had to endure, like the silver mines or the road construction projects. Also common were African slaves, purchased by the viceroy and dispatched to Navidad to aid in the building effort. Some had been Christianized and spoke Spanish, but many others, the so-called negros bozales, had been imported directly from Africa. Particularly visible was a team of Black slaves constantly moving cargo from various towns into Navidad and managing a train of twenty-seven mules and two horses.

Spaniards constituted the largest share of the expeditionaries, as one would expect. The catchall appellation español, however, masked yet more diversity. Friar Urdaneta and Commander Legazpi were both from the Basque Country, so a disproportionate number of voyagers hailed from that region. As Basque is a non-Indo-European language, they enjoyed a private means of communication completely impenetrable to all other Spaniards—far more so than, say, English, German, or Russian. Galicia in the north of Spain, Castile in the middle, and Andalusia in the south were also well represented at Navidad. Although these historic kingdoms were linguistically and culturally closer to one another, the differences between them were greater in the sixteenth century than today and inevitably led to cliques and divisions within the crew and the two companies of soldiers.

A fixture of all early voyages of exploration was the high proportion of non-Spaniards. They could account for as many as a third (according to some regulations) and up to half (as in the case of Magellan’s expedition) of all crew members. The Navidad fleet was no different. The documentation mentions a Belgian barrel maker, a German artilleryman, an English carpenter, Venetian crew members, a French pilot, two Filipino translators, and so forth. Portuguese mariners made up the largest and most conspicuous foreign group: at least sixteen could be counted at Navidad. Spaniards regarded them as rivals but also valued their nautical skills. The Afro-Portuguese pilot Lope Martín, our protagonist, was among them.

Lope Martín was from Lagos, an old port near Portugal’s southwestern tip that had historically served as a stepping-stone from Europe to Africa. In the summer of 1415, a powerful fleet had gathered there before crossing the Mediterranean to capture Ceuta. In later years, Lagos had turned into Prince Henry the Navigator’s base of operations. Famous local pilots included Alvaro Esteves (who charted the “gold coast” of Africa) and Vicente Rodrigues (one of the foremost pilots to India). As Portuguese fleets had traced the contours of western Africa, Black slaves had flowed back into Lagos, giving rise to a sizable slave and free population of African ancestry. This contingent did much of the work around the city, in the harbor, and aboard the ships of exploration. Many of the apprentices and sailors in Lagos were Black slaves whose salaries were pocketed by their masters or free Blacks engaged in the harsh life of the sea.

Lope Martín was, as we have seen, a free mulatto, that is, a person of mixed Afro-Portuguese descent. Although little is known about his early years, he must have cut his teeth aboard Portuguese and Spanish ships of exploration, carrying sacks of flour and climbing ratlines to the top of the mast. The fleets outfitted all along the southwestern coast of Iberia, on both the Portuguese and Spanish sides, constantly required fresh recruits like him. Towns like Huelva, Moguer, and Palos de la Frontera had supplied Columbus with a crew willing to risk their lives across the great ocean in 1492. Less than one hundred miles in length, this stretch of Portuguese-Spanish coast was at the time the preeminent maritime region in the world. Somewhere in this exploited and often brutal milieu, where knife fights could erupt over insignificant incidents, Lope Martín went from page (children of eight to ten) to apprentice (older and more experienced) to mariner (twenty and older and in possession of a certificate), all the while voyaging to Africa, the Americas, and perhaps as far as Asia. Lope Martín’s passages likely ended in different Portuguese and Spanish ports. These comings and goings must have taken him away from his native Lagos, well inside Portugal, toward the Spanish border, and finally to Seville, the only Spanish port open to trade with the New World.

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by Joel | 12 January 2025 · 4:10 am

Returning Shinto Shrines in Hawaii

From Ghosts of Honolulu: A Japanese Spy, A Japanese American Spy Hunter, and the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor, by Mark Harmon and Leon Carroll, Jr. (Harper Select, 2023), Kindle pp. 209-211:

In December 1947, Hawaii’s Kotohira Shrine was finally allowed to reopen its doors, along with the other closed Buddhist and Shinto shrines. Rev. Isobe was still deported, so the religious services were nonexistent. As the shrine struggled to find its footing, the Justice Department swept in. In April 1948, citing the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, the government seized Kotohira’s assets. The Act cited was passed into law to confiscate German American property during World War I. Other shrines across Hawaii also had their assets seized, including the Izumo Taishakyo Mission, Hawaii Daijingu Temple and Wahiawa Daijingu.

Upon hearing of the move to liquidate the land, the Kotohira Jinsha solicits the services of the law firm Robertson, Castle & Anthony, which files suit on March 31, 1949, against the United States attorney general, the State of Hawaii and the Federal Alien Land Office. They’re challenging the apparent misuse of the Trading with the Enemy Act.

It’s the first such lawsuit initiated by a Japanese organization, and many eyes across Hawaii and the mainland are eagerly watching to see who wins.

…

Judge Joseph McLaughlin knows the value of a good legal fight. That’s why he refuses both the plaintiff and the defendant requests for a summary judgment in Kotohira Jinsha v. McGrath.

It would have been easier to just rule from the bench and save months of judicial headache. The shrine wants its property back, and the government just wants the whole matter ended. But some scraps are worth having in the open forum.

Several trial dates were set and changed, delayed by both sides’ trips to Japan to gather evidence. The trial began on March 27, paused as attorneys travelled to Japan and resumed on May 3. The trial ended May 17, after a “two-day argument upon the facts and the law,” as the court puts it.

Today, McLaughlin dismantles the government’s case one blow at a time. His ruling finds the government presented no justification for Kotohira Jinsha’s closure. “The evidence does not establish any Japanese governmental control, direct or indirect, of this plaintiff, nor any direct or indirect doctrinal or financial control by any state shrine in Japan,” he states in his decision. “Nor is there any evidence upon which I could possibly find or hold that the national interests of the United States required that this little insignificant shrine in Hawaii, with not more than five hundred members, should be deemed to be an economic, military, or even ideological threat to the United States.”

The judge includes a pocket history of how the imperial government used religion to foster war. “To accomplish the ends desired by the militarists of Japan, Shinto was distorted and state Shrine loyalty became a test of patriotism and the false doctrine of Japanese supremacy and eventual world domination was fostered, which led to its ultimate defeat in World War II.”

He reserves some editorial commentary to the shrine’s form of Shinto, finding an umbrella approach to spirituality confusing. “Plaintiff and its members did not even understand what it was they believed or why,” he writes in the court’s ruling. “I am not even prepared to find on this evidence that this plaintiff, operating in the United States of America, held beliefs which could be agreed to constitute a religion . . . Its members practiced by way of prayers and ceremonies a primitive mythology known as Shinto or Way of the Gods, with special attention to three gods, but whether the plaintiff’s tenets were the same as state Shintoism in Japan, or even Sect Shintoism in Japan, has not been established by either party.”

Aside from these sharp elbows under the robe, the ruling is an unambiguous victory, not just for the shrine but for the democratic system tested by governmental overreach. “We have not yet come to the point nor will we ever while ‘this Court sits’ where the government can take away a person’s property because it does not approve of what that person believes in or teaches by way of religion or philosophy of life,” Judge McLaughlin writes. “The First Amendment forbids.”

The property is returned to the shrine. Getting legal permission for its leader, Rev. Isobe, to return from Japan will take longer. But the legal victory paves the way for more lawsuits and more overturned seizures.

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Filed under Hawai'i, Japan, migration, military, nationalism, religion, U.S., war

by Joel | 6 January 2025 · 5:40 am

U.S. Patriots at “Tokyo High”

From Ghosts of Honolulu: A Japanese Spy, A Japanese American Spy Hunter, and the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor, by Mark Harmon and Leon Carroll, Jr. (Harper Select, 2023), Kindle pp. 79-81:

People in Honolulu have called McKinley “Tokyo High” since the 1920s. The majority of Nisei in Hawaii attend the public school here; it’s more responsible for the Americanization of Japanese Hawaiians than any other institution besides the city’s movie theaters.

Today’s rally is the work of the Oahu Citizens Committee for Home Defense, a new group formed to promote patriotism on the island. The committee is led by Dr. Shunzo Sakamaki, a University of Hawaii teacher. He’s been at the forefront of the Japanese loyalty movement in Oahu, forming aid groups to assist dual citizens to renounce their Japanese citizenship and promoting student military service.

Behind the scenes, Sakamaki is one of six Nisei leaders who meets Shivers to advise the FBI on domestic security. He endorses incarceration of Shinto and Buddhist priests in the event of war, citing elements of emperor worship in their rituals. He himself is Christian, rare even among the Nisei in Hawaii.

“This meeting is not an end in itself,” Sakamaki tells the crowd. “It’s a step toward the goal of complete national unity, preparedness and security.” If war comes, he adds, “we will do everything we possibly can, giving our lives if necessary, in defense of those democratic principles for which other Americans have lived and fought and died.”

The outreach that produced this display at McKinley would not have been possible if not for Masaji Marumoto, whose relationship with Shivers has developed into a close personal one. Their families vacation together, and Shivers makes sure to invite other government officials to meet the charming attorney. Marumoto makes connections with the military intelligence apparatus amid dinners in Hawaii and bouts of bridge. One of the people he meets through Shivers is Col. Morrill Marston, the new assistant chief of staff for military intelligence for the Hawaiian Department.

The FBI man also gains connections. Marumoto has introduced him to a wide swath of his community, and it’s borne fruit in the form of patriotic citizen groups like the Oahu Citizens Committee for Home Defense, formed earlier this year. The committee’s seventy-five directors, men and women, meet with Shivers or other FBI agents once a week. One goal of the group, Shivers says, is “to prepare the Japanese community psychologically for their responsibilities toward this country in the event of war, and for the difficult position in which the war would place them.” The group’s publicly stated purpose is to “promote racial cooperation, unity and unswerving loyalty to the United States.” That message is certainly on display at the McKinley rally, with each speech and song.

…

News of the rally is carried across the islands and the nation. It’s a high point of Nisei patriotism in Hawaii, and those in the crowd act on the emotion it inspires. As a direct offshoot of the rally at McKinley, multiple small community advisory groups form to promote unity. A “Speak English” campaign begins, aimed at replacing Japanese characters on public signs and businesses.

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Filed under education, Hawai'i, migration, military, nationalism, religion, U.S., war

by Joel | 5 December 2024 · 7:45 am

Romania Between Nazis and Soviets

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 487-490:

In early July, the Romanian army, assisted by local populations, shot the Jewish inhabitants of villages in southern Bukovina and then extended the killing eastward. In the regional metropolis Czernowitz/Cernăuţi/Chernivtsi, until recently a center of Habsburg Jewish cultural life, German regular soldiers as well as SS troops joined with Romanian forces in rounding up and murdering much of the town’s Jewish population. German units claimed to be shocked by their allies’ brutality, and SS mobile killing units (Einsatzgruppe D) received orders to entice Romanians into “a more planned procedure in this direction.” They objected that the Romanians failed to bury victims, took bribes, or engaged in rape and plunder (for example, taking gold from corpses).

Jews who survived were driven toward the river Dniester, where many were shot into the waters while others were kept in unspeakable conditions in newly established “ghettos” on Bessarabian territory. Next, after occupying and then annexing territory of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic on the other side of the Dniester—called “Transnistria”—the Romanians set up camps there, where unknown numbers of Jews were killed. They permitted no regular food distribution, and some inmates attempted to eat grass. In the infamous camp at Bodganovka, the bakery sold bread for gold, but when the gold ran out, the commandant ordered mass shootings. Romanian forces shot some 40,000 Jews over a precipice into the Bug River, and then took a break for the Christmas holiday. They had seized the regional capital Odessa after stiff resistance in October, yet after a bomb exploded killing Romanian officers, Antonescu ordered reprisals; in one of the cruelest mass murders of the Holocaust, 18,000 Jews lost their lives. By the spring of 1942, this human-made hell had consumed the lives of at least 100,000 Jews.

If the Germans were shocked by the brutality of Romanian policies against Jews, they were also impressed by the apparent peace and prosperity of Ukraine under Romanian rule. After the violence against Jews subsided in the fall of 1941, the city of Odessa recovered quickly. The venal Romanian administration took its cut, but then stood back and watched as individual enterprise flourished, with new hairdressers, cafes, shops, taverns, and movie theaters. Rather than terrorize the local population, Romanian authorities allowed each village in Transnistria to vote on the language it wished to be taught to its children and set up a Ukrainian auxiliary police force.

The Antonescu regime’s eagerness to kill Jews in Bessarabia and Transnistria had left the Germans convinced that it would follow through with the complete destruction of Jewry in the Romanian heartlands. Indeed, Antonescu had wanted to deport the Jews there to Bessarabia, but the Germans stopped him in August 1941, afraid of overburdening SS Einsatzgruppe D. Romanian authorities constricted the rights of Jews in the Regat [the Old Kingdom] as well as Transylvania: seizing their property, forcing them into labor brigades, and expelling them from the professions. The process was called “Romaniazation.” If Romania had behaved like Germany, the next step would have been mass murder, and in fact plans surfaced to transport Romanian Jews to killing camps in occupied Poland. The German railways had even set aside cars and drawn up routes. Yet in the summer of 1942, Romania stopped cooperating.

Explanations vary. Radu Lecca, Romanian commissar for Jewish affairs, a man already wealthy from bribes, supposedly took offence at being snubbed during a visit to Berlin in August 1942. He and his colleagues had become tired of being treated as representatives of a second-class power and being told what to do with “their” Jews. But the moment for a shift also seemed apt. The Romanian government had sent more troops to the eastern front than anyone else, and vividly sensed the coming catastrophe of the Third Reich. Two desperately undersupplied Romanian armies were just taking up positions near Stalingrad in the fall of 1942 when Antonescu requested new weapons from Hitler. This and all other requests were rebuffed.

The leadership also grew hypersensitive to warnings coming from the West about its mistreatments of Jews. President Franklin D. Roosevelt told the World Jewish Congress in New York that “punishment of countries which had persecuted Jews represented one of the aims of the war,” and he promised “fearful retribution” for those who perpetrated “barbaric crimes” against civilian populations in Axis-occupied countries. With the legacies of Versailles and Trianon in mind, Romanian elites knew that punishment meant loss of territory.

That same month, Romanian university professors, writers, and schoolteachers signed a memorandum to the Palace linking deportations of Jews to the postwar territorial settlement: “We must bring ourselves in line with international law and guarantee the right to life and legal protection of every Jew of the territories which we claim.” Ringing through this declaration was the ethnic perspective according to which human life, especially of aliens, was of secondary importance to the nation’s territory. But now the fear of losing territory kindled concern for the fate of aliens, as well as some contrition. Deportations of Jews were in fact a “methodical and persistent act of extermination.” The authors acknowledged that “we have been at the forefront of the states which persecute the Jews.” “I have said it once and will go on saying it,” Romanian Peasant Party leader Iuliu Maniu added in September, “we will pay dearly for the maltreatment of the Jews.”

Rumors of planned deportations to Poland had leaked that summer, panicking Jews in Transylvania, and Maniu and others in the Romanian Peasant Party intervened to put a stop to them. In December, Roosevelt and now Churchill reiterated the threats. “Those responsible for these crimes,” they declared, “shall not escape retribution.” Warning voices also came from the Red Cross, the Turkish Government, the Orthodox Metropolitan of Transylvania, the Papal Nuncio, as well as the Romanian Jewish community (led by Alexandru Safran, the youngest chief rabbi in the world, who had worked closely with members of the royal family as well as the dictator’s wife). Thanks to the insistence of several women active in social welfare, the Romanian Jewish community also mobilized to rescue some 2,000 orphans who had survived the punishing camps in Transnistria.