Category Archives: U.S.

by | 14 December 2024 · 2:27 pm

Rising Nationalist Communism, 1960s

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 619-621:

Romania asserted itself more boldly in the international sphere. From late 1958, its trade expanded with the West and contracted with the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Bloc’s equivalent to West Europe’s Common Market, the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (or COMECON), Romania opposed the plans of its allies to make it the agricultural base for their more developed economies. In the eyes of Romania’s leaders, such a scheme would have condemned the country to backwardness; yet it also aggravated long-festering inferiority complexes among them toward other, better established Communist parties, but also toward their own population. The Six-Year Plan that commenced in 1960 provided for sharp increases in Romania’s rate of industrialization, and Marxism-Leninism became a tool for Romanian national development. In 1963 Ceaușescu accompanied Foreign Minister Ion Gheorghe Maurer on a trip to China, North Korea, and the Soviet Union, meeting with Mao, Kim Il Sung, and Khrushchev.

Ceaușescu became the party leader after Gheorghiu-Dej’s death in 1965 and built his popularity on defiance of Moscow. Neither legitimation through Marxian utopianism nor recourse to crude violence was enough to stabilize rule in an intensely anticommunist population, and Ceaușescu evolved into a nationalist extremist, whose personal power increased as did his personal identification with the nation. Romania was surrounded by hostile countries, Ceaușescu claimed, and he was the only force that could protect the people. A younger generation joined him in the Romanian Communist Party leadership, and together they promoted a collective identity based on cults of Romanian historical heroes as well as anti-Russian and anti-Semitic insinuations. They eschewed violent strategies of maintaining power. In the post-Stalinist period, these were not only inappropriate, they were no longer necessary. Earlier mass repression had smashed hostile social groups.

Marxism-Leninism tinged with nationalism thus permitted Romania’s Communists to develop a sense of their political legitimacy for the first time in their history, and also to make appeals to the population and tap “dormant social energies,” among workers and among intellectuals. While firming his grip on power, Ceaușescu permitted the publication of works of previously forbidden authors and fostered collusion with intellectuals that was not entirely new but was greatly intensified. The turn against the Soviet Union was a rupture with previous practice, however, and endeared Ceaușescu to the West. The French leader Charles De Gaulle visited Romania in May 1968, just as workers and students were testing his own regime. He found much to admire in a country that maintained independence against the superpowers and seemed so orderly. “For you such a regime is useful because it gets people moving and gets things done,” he told the Romanian dictator. In 1969, Richard Nixon became the first US president to visit Romania, and nine years later, Ceaușescu touched down in Washington, DC, as neither the first nor last repressive dictator to be accorded full state honors. What seems unusual in retrospect is that Jimmy Carter would celebrate Ceaușescu as a champion of human rights.

Such was the topsy-turvy world of East Central Europe after Stalin, where strategies of national legitimation brought Hungary toward economic reform but took Poland to the center of a very old and toxic nationalism, on a backdrop of slow economic disintegration. Bulgaria as well as Romania retained important facets of Stalinist control under strong party leaders and pervasive security apparatuses, yet one was inseparable in foreign policy from the Soviet Union, while the other treated Moscow almost as a hostile power. East Germany behind the Berlin Wall was modeling itself as Moscow’s most loyal student, but also building pride as the strongest economy in the East Bloc, pride that would evolve into a kind of minor nationalism, “socialist in the colors of the GDR,” black, red, and gold. In 1962 the Soviet Union would force Czechoslovakia to destalinize, and after that, this country also went on its own path, toward something called “socialism with a human face,” which, as it turned out, was initially a detour back to the 1930s, connecting with native traditions of democracy and Masaryk’s idea that truth will prevail.

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Filed under Bulgaria, Czechia, economics, Germany, Hungary, nationalism, philosophy, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, U.S., USSR

by | 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.

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Filed under Germany, migration, military, nationalism, religion, Romania, U.S., Ukraine, USSR, war

by | 4 December 2024 · 4:47 pm

Bulgaria Between Nazis and Soviets

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 484-485:

What had made the deportations from Thrace and Macedonia take place without resistance was that the Jews there were not Bulgarian citizens. Yet the conditions of their sojourn on Bulgarian territory on the way to Poland became known and shocked the public conscience. They had had been denied food, water, and sanitation and been subject to wanton violence. Now no one doubted the meaning of further deportations: they would be the first steps to total destruction. Subranie [National Assembly] Vice President Dimitar Peshev, supported by forty deputies, censured the government and a “hint from the highest quarters” followed (presumably from Boris), ordering the stop of all deportations planned from Old Bulgaria.

Yet the Germans continued to apply pressure. Foreign Minister Ribbentrop complained personally to King Boris during his visit to Berlin in April 1943 about his government’s failure to honor an agreement from January to deport 6,000 Jews. Boris explained that he needed them for road building. German observers on the ground reported other methods of deception: rather than prepare Sofia’s Jews for the promised deportations to Poland, Bulgarian authorities were planning to settle them in the countryside. Even the fanatic Beckerle felt there was no hope in prodding the Bulgarians to further action. They had been living so long with other peoples, like the Armenians, Greeks, and Gypsies, he wrote to the Foreign Office, that Bulgarians did not see the Jews as a special enemy. Indeed, within Bulgarian society, the plans to remove Jews from Sofia was seen as a threat and an outrage, and were preceded by street demonstrations and interventions of Jews with Christian acquaintances, including members of the Orthodox Synod, as well as the Dunovist Christian sect. The Dunovists, who incorporated worship of the rising sun in their Christian beliefs, were strong at the royal court and included Princess Eudoxia, Boris’s advisors, and perhaps Boris himself. One rabbi, Daniel Tsion, a mystic and student of comparative theology, managed to deliver a note to the king with what he claimed was a warning from God against persecuting Jews.

Despite this unusual engagement of Bulgarian politicians and church leaders in saving their Jewish neighbors, the resistance had its limits. King Boris still thought Jews were a serious problem that had to be dealt with. In April 1943, he told members of the Orthodox Synod that Jews and their “profiteering spirit,” were in large measure responsible for the present “global cataclysm.” Like politicians throughout the region, he was primarily interested in strengthening his nation-state, and that is why he had subjected Jews and other non-ethnic Bulgarians to a demeaning status, depriving them of civil rights. King Boris may well have approved deportations of Jews to the death camps had Germany prevailed against the Soviet Union. And if Jews had not lost their lives in virtually every other European state, Bulgaria would be remembered as a hell for Jews.

Yet Boris and other influential Bulgarians could not ignore the fact that Germany was losing the war, and they feared allied retribution. When US bombers attacked the oil fields at Ploieşti in Romania, Boris rejected German requests for assistance in turning them back. He also refused to alienate the Soviets and never permitted anti-Soviet propaganda in the Bulgarian press that was routine everywhere else. The only thing that might have changed the Bulgarian position, German diplomats wrote, would be “new activation of the German war effort,” that is, evidence that Germany could win. Yet as Soviet forces pushed ever closer to Berlin, anti-German forces in Bulgaria showed greater courage, carrying out attacks on right-wing leaders, like General Hristo Lukov in February 1943. The assassinations lasted into the spring, showing that the war was “coming home” to the streets of Sofia. In August, the king died of heart failure, shortly after a meeting with Hitler in East Prussia, his third of the year. Perhaps he had been poisoned, but more likely he was worn out from the stress of navigating among a plethora of competing demands.

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Filed under Bulgaria, democracy, Germany, migration, military, nationalism, religion, U.S., USSR, war

by | 9 November 2024 · 9:36 am

“Imperialist” Founding of Czechoslovakia

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 346-347:

Basic agreements were made about Czechoslovakia during the war years, far away from the would-be country’s territory or population, by Czechs and Slovaks in exile, but also by Western statesmen. In 1915 representatives of Czechs and Slovaks in Cleveland agreed to form a common state, and in May 1918, Czechs, Slovaks, and Ruthenians gathered in Pittsburgh and agreed on the formation of the state of Czecho-Slovakia. The agreement said that Slovakia would have its own administration, parliament, and courts, and some Slovaks believed that implied autonomy. In October 1918, Tomáš G. Masaryk proclaimed Czechoslovakia’s existence from Independence Hall in Philadelphia, and neither he nor his followers doubted that the state would be governed from Prague, just as France was governed from Paris.

Czech statesmen and their Slovak supporters were resolute on this point because they feared that anything short of unanimity might cost them support in Western capitals. They also worried about the dangerous examples that would be set by any talk of autonomy or regionalism. If Prague accorded the Slovaks self-rule, then demands for the same would pour in from Germans, Magyars, and Ruthenians. Slovakia itself was highly heterogeneous, with Magyars dominating cities and the southern edge, and three large German “islands” in the west, center, and northeast. Some Slovak politicians hoped there might be a chance at a later date to negotiate the details of local rule, but in the meantime, they had to act to counter demands from Hungary. A new ideology of Czechoslovakism (of one people in two tribes) papered over doubts, and the constitution of 1920 referred to “a Czechoslovak” language. In practice, that meant that Czech administrators in Slovakia felt free to use Czech, which Slovaks understood almost perfectly. Yet by doing so they began grating on local sensitivities, creating a sense of differences that had never before existed, because the two peoples did not know each other.

Yet there was also a practical side to this “Czech imperialism.” Because the Hungarian administration had stifled the development of Slovak elites for generations—in 1910, of 6,185 state officials at all levels in Slovakia, only 154 were Slovaks—educated and skilled Czechs were needed to build schools, create jobs, form the networks of cultural institutions, and simply run the state. For example, in the capital city of Bratislava (called Pozsony in Hungarian, Pressburg in German), as late as 1925 there were 420 Czechs to 281 Slovaks in the police directorate. But the Czechs also exported condescension. Slovaks were a small population, foreign minister Beneš said, “insufficient to create a national culture on their own.” Tomáš G. Masaryk, though his father was Slovak, insisted that

there is no Slovak nation. That is the invention of Magyar propaganda. The Czechs and Slovaks are brothers.… Only cultural level separates them—the Czechs are more developed than the Slovaks, for the Magyars held them in systematic unawareness. We are founding Slovak schools.

Uncomfortable facts were swept under the rug. Masaryk had attended the Pittsburgh agreement promising Slovaks some kind of autonomy, yet he failed to regard it as binding. And when the constitution was drafted, representatives of the German, Polish, Magyar, and Ruthene communities—one-third of the new state’s population—had no part in it. The Slovak delegates in the assembly were not elected but chosen by Vávro Šrobár, the Slovak chairman of the Czechoslovak National Council, a physician active in Slovak politics who happened to know Masaryk. Šrobár and the Slovak delegates came from the Protestant minority, which was more enthusiastic about union with the Czechs than was the Slovak Catholic majority. They assented to a centralized state because the largely illiterate Slovak population was not “mature” enough for local autonomy and also because the threat of a return of Magyar power seemed to necessitate close cooperation with the Czechs.

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Filed under Czechia, democracy, education, Germany, Hungary, language, migration, nationalism, Slovakia, U.S., war

by | 7 September 2024 · 5:46 am

Capt. Cook’s Americans

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle p. 345-347:

WHILE IN MACAU, Captain Gore learned the distressing news that not only was the American Revolution going badly for the English, but both France and Spain had declared war on Britain. Consequently, for the voyage home, facing the danger of seizure or attack, his two ships would remain on a war footing. The Resolution and the Discovery left Macau in January 1780, stopping briefly south of Vietnam and then in the Sunda Strait, between Sumatra and Java, not far from the seething volcano on Krakatoa. By April, the vessels were anchored in False Bay, near Cape Town. In early August, as the two ships approached England, contrary winds forced them far to the west. Gore had to make a long, awkward circuit around Ireland and over Scotland’s Orkney Islands. The vessels plied down the east coast of Britain, finally arriving in London on October 7, 1780. The Resolution had been gone from England for 1,548 days. At the time, it was believed to be the longest exploratory voyage—in terms of both miles and duration—ever undertaken on the high seas. And yet, despite the odyssey’s historic length, once again, not a single person on either ship had died of scurvy.

…

AFTER RETURNING TO London, the Americans on board the ships had to face the difficult decision whether to cast their loyalties with Britain or find their way back to their native-born colonies and take up the cause against the mother country under whose flag they had been sailing for the past four years. Because he was still a member of the Royal Marines, John Ledyard was promptly sent to Canada to fight for the British in the waning actions of the American Revolution. He deserted, returned to his native New England, and in 1783 published an unauthorized account of his travels with Cook that became the first written work protected by copyright in the United States. In 1786, not done with epic traveling, Ledyard embarked on a trek of more than six thousand miles, mostly on foot, across Europe and Russia in an attempt to reach Alaska, but he was arrested in Siberia under orders from Catherine the Great. Ledyard died in Cairo in 1788, aged thirty-seven, while preparing an expedition to search for the source of the Niger River.

Ledyard’s fellow countryman John Gore, on the other hand, had no interest in returning to the land of his birth. The Admiralty appointed him as one of the captains of the Greenwich Hospital, the same position Cook had vacated when he embarked on his final voyage. Gore served ten years at Greenwich. He was a popular figure among the old salts and died there in 1790.

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by | 3 September 2024 · 9:02 am

Capt. Cook & the Americans, 1778

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 226-227:

On the other side of North America, the revolt against England had deepened into a bitter war that showed no signs of abating. At that very moment, British troops were occupying Philadelphia, while George Washington’s bedraggled army was beginning to stir from its winter quarters at Valley Forge. The war was taking on an international flavor. Shortly after the Resolution and the Discovery left the Hawaiian Islands, Benjamin Franklin and two other American commissioners had signed a treaty in Paris that intimately bound France to the rebellious colonies. With the stroke of a pen, France became the first nation to recognize the United States as a sovereign country. An outraged Britain would soon declare war on France, thus fully bringing the French into the American conflict.

Despite all of this, Benjamin Franklin would later make a point of lobbying among his colleagues for Captain Cook and the Resolution to be granted special immunity not afforded to other British ships. Should American vessels encounter Cook anywhere on the high seas, they were to give him leeway and clemency. Cook was on an assignment of transcendent importance for humanity, Franklin’s proclamation asserted, one too important to be detained by squabbles between nations. Franklin made his remarks in what he called a “passport” addressed to the captains and commanders of all American ships. In case Cook’s vessel should “happen to fall into your hands,” Franklin advised, “you should not consider her as an enemy, nor suffer any plunder to be made of the effects contained in her, nor obstruct her immediate return to England.” Americans, he said, should “treat the said Captain Cook and his people with all civility and kindness, affording them as common friends to mankind, all the assistance in your power which they may happen to stand in need of.”

The Spanish, who would soon be joining France in declaring war against England, were already well aware that Captain Cook was supposed to be somewhere in the Pacific, headed for the northwest coast of America—and they were highly displeased with England’s encroachments upon the region. They had informed officials in Mexico to keep a lookout for Cook and, if possible, to intercept and arrest him. Spanish shipwrights were constructing two new vessels—one in Mexico, another in Peru—for a voyage that aimed to halt and overtake Cook while reasserting Spanish claims in the Pacific Northwest.

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Filed under Britain, Canada, France, military, nationalism, Pacific, science, Spain, U.S., war

by | 13 August 2024 · 6:06 am

The Sugar Revolution in Barbados

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 139-142:

Initially, the character of British settlement in Barbados resembled the first successful British colonial experiments on the North American mainland. As in Virginia, the first group of Barbadian colonists had been sent out by a charter company that intended to “plant” them there in the sense discussed above. Little is known about the first years in Barbados, but it seems as if the colony almost failed. As in Virginia, the British policy was to give out land grants to settlers and to employ the labor of indentured servants (Barbados had no indigenous population). The first commercial crops in Barbados were tobacco and, to a lesser extent, cotton—largely because the Barbadians tried to emulate the tobacco-driven success story Virginia had experienced in the 1620s. But tobacco cultivation in Barbados turned out to be a failure. Although the European tobacco market remained good until the late 1630s, the Barbadian product was considered vastly inferior to that of Virginia.

Nevertheless, in the 1630s the population of Barbados grew rapidly. As in Virginia, a majority of its inhabitants arrived as servants hoping to acquire land after the expiration of their term. Quite a large number of them, however, came involuntarily: they had been rounded up in British cities as vagrants, criminals, or seditious agitators and sentenced to “transportation.” This practice of deporting surplus populations from the metropole became so common that the phrase “to Barbados someone” (meaning to spirit away innocent people to servitude in the Caribbean) entered the lexicon of everyday English speech at the time. Many of the Irish defeated by Cromwell, followers of dissident sects, and royalists sentenced by Parliament during the English Civil War likewise found themselves aboard ships bound for the West Indies.

Temporary servitude was not uncommon in England at the time. As in the North American mainland colonies, most settlers to Barbados were attracted by the promise of eventually acquiring freehold status, but the margin of opportunity gradually shrunk as wealthier planters increased their holdings through purchase. Land available to ex-servants or free newcomers to Barbados virtually ran out at the end of the 1630s, and, unlike in Virginia, there was nowhere else to go. Also unlike the situation in England, where servants and apprentices enjoyed a certain amount of legal protection, was that Barbadian masters exercised almost unrestrained control over their servants and often abused them in ways entirely unprecedented in the mother land. As early as 1634, white servants rebelled on Barbados: and, as in the case of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia (1675), there are good indications that these servants, particularly the Irish, repeatedly tried to join forces with similarly maltreated Africans.

…

Nevertheless, by the end of the 1630s, Barbados still had not developed into a genuine plantation society. Although demographic data for this period are notoriously unreliable, toward the end of the 1630s the island had a population of almost 6,000; of these, some 760 held land—a proportion comparable to that in the European countryside, which is especially noteworthy because Barbadian landholdings still greatly varied in size. Some of the larger planters held tracts of several thousand acres, but the majority of freeholders farmed small parcels between 10 and 50 acres each. This situation changed drastically in the 1640s. Within less than a decade, most members of the white yeomanry on Barbados were squeezed off their land: servants were replaced by African slaves, and the social organization of the island irreversibly switched from that of a society with slaves to that of a society organized around the legal institution of slavery.

…

The reason for this dramatic transformation was sugar. Understanding the Barbadian “sugar revolution” requires stepping back to look at the development of sugar planting in the Americas after the decline of the early Spanish experiments. Both figuratively and literally, sugar arrived in Barbados from Brazil and aboard Dutch ships. It took hold there not because of British metropolitan intentions, but in spite of them.

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Filed under Africa, Britain, Caribbean, economics, labor, migration, military, slavery, Virginia, war

by | 11 July 2024 · 11:09 am

Domestic Abuse Law in China, 2011

From Seeing: A Memoir of Truth and Courage from China’s Most Influential Television Journalist by Chai Jing, trans. by Yan Yan, Jack Hargreaves (Astra House, 2023), Kindle pp. 88-90:

In 2011, Kim Lee, an American citizen, posted a picture on the Internet in China. In it, her ninety-kilogram husband rode on her back, pulling on her hair and smashing her head into the ground. After he’d struck her over ten times, she sustained injuries to her head, knees, ears, and more. Her husband was Li Yang, a Chinese celebrity who’d founded a famous English-language education brand. They used to work together.

The day the assault occurred, Kim needed her husband’s help with paperwork. She wanted to take their three children to the United States to visit her mother, but her driver’s license and teacher’s certificate were expired. Li Yang said he didn’t have time to provide the assistance she needed because he was only at home two days a month, otherwise occupied with touring the country. After arguing for several hours, he screamed, “Shut your mouth.”

Kim said, “Everything in my life is under your control, you can’t tell me to shut my mouth.”

When he held her hair and pinned her head to the ground, he shouted, “I will end this once and for all.”

Had it gotten any more serious, he later admitted, “I might have killed her.”

For the first time, it made the violence in elite urban families public and caused a strong social reaction. Kim refused to give any interviews, but when Old Fan sent her the footage we’d shot at the women’s prison, she agreed to talk to us. “I did not know that there were so many women living like this in China. If I stay silent, who will be there to protect my daughters?”

In the footage, I asked the female inmates, “When you testified in court, did you talk about the domestic abuse you suffered?”

They all said no.

No one bothered to ask them. The murder of a husband by an abused woman was considered ordinary murder, not “self-defense,” because it did not occur while the abuse was “ongoing” and the “abuse” was not considered a long-term process. During questioning, when an inmate wanted to talk about how her years of marriage had been, the prosecutor would interrupt her: “Are we here to listen to your life story? Get to the part where you murdered someone!”

After being assaulted, Kim Lee reported it to the police. A police officer tried to dissuade her: “You know, this isn’t America.” She said, “Of course, but there must be a law in China that says men can’t go around beating up women.” He said, “You’re right, men can’t beat up women, but husbands can beat up wives.”

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Filed under China, family, philosophy, publishing, U.S.

by | 10 July 2024 · 5:34 am

No Peace Dividend for Japan’s Navy

From Geography and Japan’s Strategic Choices: From Seclusion to Internationalization, by Peter J. Woolley (Potomac Books, 2005), Kindle pp. 145-147:

While Japan’s participation in UN operations constituted a dramatic change in defense policy, it was not the only change. A number of unforeseen circumstance were converging in the post-Cold War age, some in Japan’s favor, others not.

In the early 1990s predictions abounded that the U.S. economy would falter without the huge Cold War expenditures on defense. But after a brief recession in 1992 the U.S. economy boomed while it was the Japanese economy that stalled. The stock market was depressed, GNP stagnated, and commercial bank debt mounted to alarming levels. The United States sought a “peace dividend” from the Cold War’s end and cut defense spending. Japan did not.

While the United States drew down its navy, its intelligence operations, and its active duty army divisions, Japan continued to spend at its Cold War pace for several years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. By 1994 its defense budget had increased in constant dollars by almost a third over what it was in 1984. In 1995, the government made some cuts not because it apprehended a favorable change in the strategic environment but because the economy was stalled and the budget pressures were irresistible. Even so, the cuts were minimal. The maximum number of troops authorized for the ground forces was cut to 145,000 from 185,000. Since the GSDF only employed 150,000 and not the maximum of 185,000, the effect of the cut was small. The maritime forces retired the oldest vessels and gave up the equivalent of just one escort division consisting of a few destroyers and some antisubmarine aircraft. The air forces eliminated one F-4 fighter squadron. Not only did Japan not draw down its forces significantly but its relative strength in force stood out all the more starkly against the background of international change in defense postures—the most significant being the deterioration of Russia’s Pacific fleet.

For many years the old Soviet fleet continued to be regarded in official reports as large and potent but unofficial reports suggested otherwise. Sailors were underfed and in ill health, while ships were undermanned. Many had left or deserted the service and had not been replaced. Supplies, including fuel, had become tenuous and supply officers corrupt. The ships deployed less and less frequently and confined their exercises to local waters. Repairs were not made as spare parts were scarce. Not only were some ships not sea-worthy but some had sunk at their moorings. Since it takes many years and great efforts to build an effective navy, it was less and less likely that the Russian fleet could recover. By the end of the decade, Japan had sixty principle surface combatants compared to forty-five for Russia’s Pacific fleet. Neither fleet had an aircraft carrier.

As the demise of the Russian fleet became more obvious, analysts scrutinized Chinese naval forces more closely. Many suggested that China had hegemonic ambitions and its naval force, the PLAN, was growing quickly. The U.S. assistant secretary of defense asserted, “the Chinese are determined, through concealment and secrecy, to become the great military power in Asia.”

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Filed under China, economics, Japan, Korea, military, Russia, U.S.

by | 9 July 2024 · 7:53 am

Japanese Navy in the Persian Gulf, 1990

From Geography and Japan’s Strategic Choices: From Seclusion to Internationalization, by Peter J. Woolley (Potomac Books, 2005), Kindle p. 143:

Japan’s final contributions [to the 1990 war on Iraq] totaled $13 billion. Only three countries had spent more: Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. Japan had also frozen Iraqi assets and embargoed Iraqi oil. And its initial financial commitment in August of 1990 beat Germany’s announcement by ten days. Nonetheless, it was, as critics had charged, largely “checkbook diplomacy,” which incurred no substantial risk to the Japanese people.

The deployment of minesweepers, even after the hostilities were over, was a signal departure from the policies of the past. [Prime Minister] Kaifu was forced to deploy them without the aid of any legislation from the Diet, claiming that they were not going to a war zone but would be in international waters, merely clearing obstacles for international shipping. It would take some time for the Japanese public and the parliament to come around. The LDP leaders believed, however, that if the minesweeping mission was successful, the public would support a substantial change in defense policy and allow the SDF to be deployed on other missions.

Six ships and a crew of 511 made the trip to the Persian Gulf. The vessels were small but relatively modern. The largest of the six was a ship-tender of 8,000 tons. The mine warfare ships were just 510 tons and did indeed have wooden hulls. But then, recent minesweepers all had wooden hulls as a precaution against magnetic devices.

The minesweepers probably would not have been more useful had they been sent sooner. Before the UN deadline expired, little minesweeping was done because the allied commander did not want to risk touching off an early confrontation. After the deadline expired, minesweeping was mainly to give the appearance that the allies might make an amphibious assault on the Kuwaiti coast. Japan might have joined the allied minesweepers somewhat sooner but even its arrival in late May was useful. Iraq had dropped over a thousand mines in a long swath off the Kuwaiti coast. It took more than two dozen minesweepers and ten support ships from eight different countries over four months to clean up the mess.

According to a map in the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force Museum in Kure (near Hiroshima), Japan itself laid 55,347 mines to defend its perimeter: 15,474 along the Tokai and southwestern island chain, 14,927 in the northern Honshu and Shikoku regions, 10,012 along the coast of Kyushu, 7,640 along the south coast of Korea and across the Yellow Sea, and 7,294 around Taiwan.

The same map shows that the U.S. laid most of its 10,703 naval mines in the Inland Sea and along the Japan Sea coast (to destroy economic supply routes). When we visited the museum in 2015, a total of 297 American naval mines from World War Two remained unaccounted for. Mine disposal efforts continue to this day.

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