Category Archives: war

by | 29 May 2006 · 2:29 pm

Validating the Road to Genocide

Finally, the role of validation must be considered. We saw that failures to adequately punish the perpetrators of earlier massacres either of Armenians in 1894–96, Jews in Ukraine in 1918–20, or Tutsi in Rwanda beginning in 1959 likely contributed to the perceived vulnerability of these groups.

With the rise of contemporary mass communications, perhaps even resulting in a global village in the half-century since the Holocaust, validation does not have to be confined to the earlier unpunished murder of the potential victims themselves. If the ongoing process of massacre is not addressed, then victimizers anywhere in the world may conclude that mass killing will not be interrupted or punished, even if in a different location and with different victims. A process of this type likely occurred prior to the Rwandan genocide, and specifically in the early stages of the Bosnian conflict two years earlier. At this time, it had all the appearances of genocide, at least to many observers. The fact that the apparent mass murder of tens if not hundreds of thousands in Bosnia went unopposed, at least militarily in the opening, most influential stages of the conflict, made it appear that genocidal activities could be accomplished without serious external constraint in the post-Cold War climate of the 1990s. In other words, “if they can get away with it, so can we.”

Regarding another African conflict, “I call it the copycat syndrome,” said Dame Margaret Anstee, who was the UN secretary general’s special envoy in Angola in the early 1990s. She said that, in 1992, when the rebel leader Jonas Savimbi “chose bullets over ballots,” he had been watching the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic [still at large!] “getting away with murder.” This interpretation accords with the finding of Stuart Hill and Donald Rothschild that receptivity to outside political violence is conditional upon a recent history of domestic strife, amply found in both Angola and Rwanda. The fighting between Hutu and Tutsi in 1959–64, the sporadic persecutions after independence (especially in 1973), and the ongoing strife after the RPF [Rwandan Patriotic Front] invasion of 1990 amply satisfy this condition.

Widespread massacres anywhere in the world, particularly in regions with powerful states such as Europe, have the potential to be extremely influential, especially if these states do nothing to stop the massacres. If power disparities between potential interveners and victimizers are substantial, again as in Europe in the early 1990s, and no intervention occurs, then validation of massacre, if not genocide itself, can be even more pronounced. Thus, prevention of genocide in one location is dependent on prior occurrences not only in that location, but in almost any place in the world in which successful intervention to prevent mass murder could have occurred, but did not. As in understanding the etiology of genocide, prevention is a complex matter requiring vigilance and awareness of the appropriate antecedent variables.

SOURCE: The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, by Manus I. Midlarsky (Cambridge U. Press, 2005), pp. 394-395

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by | 29 May 2006 · 2:27 pm

Genocide Prevention by Democracies: OIMBY?

And now we arrive at a paradox of genocide prevention. Although one of the best preventives of the genocide of a state’s minority population is the existence of a liberal democratic regime within that state, quite the opposite is true of democracy in bystander states. Here, the desire to be reelected, as in the case of the Allied governments at Versailles, or simply to avoid negative public reaction, may preclude any governmental action on behalf of endangered citizens of another state. Recall … President Roosevelt’s refusal to authorize the bombing of Auschwitz because of the fear of embarrassment, not to mention his earlier narrowing of immigration possibilities for Jews seeking refuge in the United States. Opinion polls had revealed the high level of anti-Semitism in the United States that might make his governing more difficult and, of course, his reelection as well. The British followed a similar path, as did President Clinton more recently in the Rwandan genocide.

At the Evian immigration conference in 1938 …, the only state to open its borders to Jewish immigration was the Dominican Republic under Rafael Trujillo, a dictator who was among the least responsive to public opinion. The Western democracies were extremely uncooperative in opening their borders. To be sure, public outcry on behalf of a threatened population potentially may reach a larger audience in a democracy than in an autocracy, if allowed, but on the whole the presumption in democracies, almost universally accepted, is that the electorate will be far more responsive to issues directly concerning its own perceived well-being than to the concerns of “alien” people….

Democracy, therefore, is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, its spread will make the lives of minorities more secure within states that democratize successfully. This conclusion is suggested by the findings of Rudolph Rummel and Barbara Harff. On the other hand, populations threatened with genocide may find fewer islands of refuge within democratic states. Recent restrictions on the granting of political asylum in European countries, not to mention greater difficulties generally in immigrating to Europe, and all of this even after the European Holocaust experience, suggest the importance of this distinction.

SOURCE: The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, by Manus I. Midlarsky (Cambridge U. Press, 2005), pp. 392-394

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by | 8 May 2006 · 1:38 am

European Attitudes toward the Confederacy

Although Napoleon III of France wished to recognize the Confederacy from almost the beginning, he was unwilling to take this step except in tandem with Britain. (All other European powers except perhaps Russia would have followed a British or French lead.) British policy on recognition of a revolutionary or insurrectionary government was coldly pragmatic. Not until it had proved its capacity to sustain and defend its independence, almost beyond peradventure of doubt, would Britain risk recognition. The Confederate hope, of course, was for help in gaining that independence.

Most European observers and statesmen believed in 1861 that the Union cause was hopeless. In their view, the Lincoln administration could never reestablish control over 750,000 square miles of territory defended by a determined and courageous people. And there was plenty of sentimental sympathy for the Confederacy in Britain, for which the powerful Times of London was the foremost advocates. Many Englishmen professed to disdain the vulgar materialism of money-grubbing Yankees and to project a congenial image of the Southern gentry that conveniently ignored slavery. Nevertheless, the government of Prime Minister Viscount Palmerston was anything but sentimental. It required hard evidence of the Confederacy’s ability to survive, in the form of military success, before offering diplomatic recognition. But it would also require Union military success to forestall that possibility. As Lord Robert Cecil told a Northern acquaintance in 1861: “Well, there is one way to convert us all—Win the battles, and we shall come round at once.”

But in 1861 the Confederacy won most of the battles—the highly visible ones, at least, at Manassas [Virginia], Wilson’s Creek (Missouri), and Balls Bluff. And by early 1862 the cotton famine was beginning to hurt….

The Times stated that if England could not “stop this effusion of blood by mediation, we ought to give our moral weight to our English kith and kin [Southern whites], who have gallantly striven so long for their liberties against a mongrel race of plunderers and oppressors.” The breakup of the United States, said the Times in August, would be good “riddance of a nightmare.”

SOURCE: Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam: The Battle That Changed the Course of the American Civil War, by James M. McPherson (Penguin, 2003), pp. 37-38, 58. Originally published by Oxford University Press in its series, Pivotal Moments in American History, which seeks “to encourage interest in problems of historical contingency,” according to the editor’s note by David Hackett Fischer, who continues:

Ideas of contingency are drawing more attention in historical scholarship, for several reasons. They offer a way forward, beyond the “old political history” and the “new social and cultural history,” by a reunion of process and event. They also restore a lost element of narrative tension to historical writing. A concept of contingency makes history more teachable and learnable, more readable and writable, more important and even urgent in our thinking about the world, and most of all more true to itself.

UPDATE: Jim Bennett leaves a well-informed comment that makes me want to add a few more points about the contingencies that McPherson’s account highlights:

It has become almost an article of faith in alternate histories that Britian was chomping at the bit to recognize the Confederacy. However, the balance of forces between the pro-Confederate and pro-Union forces was more nearly even than is sometimes recognized. The legacy of the British abolitionist movement was very strong, particularly in the Liberal Party, and in the powerful evangelical movement (to the extent that these three phenomena were not entirely congruent…). The subject cannot be discussed without reference to the mass pro-Union rallies in places like Birmingham and Manchester, by cotton workers who were often unemployed because of the Union blockade and who had every economic incentive to be pro-Confederate. Sympathetic Britons had explained many times to high-ranking Confederates that recognition would almost certainly have to entail a committment to emancipation, however gradual and compensated it might be. Yet the Condererates never took the hint. Once the Emancipation Proclamation had been made, the door to recognition was closed in terms of the realities of British politics.

Here’s a bit more from McPherson on European attitudes toward slavery:

Next to events on the battlefield and the worsening cotton famine [due to Southern embargoes as well as the Northern blockade], the slavery issue influenced European attitudes. Something of a paradox existed on this question, however. The American cotton wanted by British and French mills was nearly all grown by slaves. Yet most Europeans were antislavery. Britain had abolished slavery in its New World colonies in 1833 and France had done the same in 1848. The British were proud of their navy’s role as the world’s police against the African slave trade. Many in Britain who were inclined to sympathize with the Confederacy found slavery a large stumbling block.

McPherson stresses that Lincoln’s issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation was contingent upon an important Union victory, specifically, the very costly one at Antietam/Sharpsburg. (Lincoln didn’t want the Proclamation to be seen as a measure of desperation.) That victory in turn was contingent partly on Union officers intercepting Gen. Lee’s Special Order 191, which revealed how he had divided his forces; on the success of both Gen. McClellan and the citizens of northern Maryland in raising the morale of dispirited Federal troops; and on the general failure of Marylanders to rally to the Confederate cause, even though Maryland was a slave state. Finally, Lee’s decision to invade the north in the fall of 1862 reflected a desire to deal a knockout blow in the east to follow on a series of Union losses there and Confederate counteroffensives in Kentucky and Tennessee after the loss of New Orleans and most of the Mississippi River (except Vicksburg) in the spring of 1862. McPherson continually emphasizes the pendulum swings in domestic morale, political momentum, and foreign diplomacy that hinged on a web of contingencies that could have gone either way.

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by | 17 April 2006 · 6:18 pm

Speaking German in Moscow, 1941

Vova must have been frightened, bearing a German name [Knipper] at this moment of pitiless struggle [as the Wehrmacht closed in on Moscow]. Daily bulletins from Informburo were attached to trees and walls. On one of them he was shaken to see an excerpt from a letter taken off the body of a German soldier called Hans Knipper. And a schoolfriend of his, a Volga German about to be transported to Siberia, came to see them in despair. Vova’s father, Vladimir, advised him to volunteer for the army to save himself from an exile of forced labour which would be as bad as the Gulag, but Vova’s friend replied that the description ‘German’ was stamped on his papers and they would not accept him in the army. Those of German origin were implicitly categorized as potential enemies of the state. The NKVD had not wasted time assembling records on every Soviet citizen of German descent, some 1.5 million people. Local NKVD departments ‘from Leningrad to the Far East’ began a programme of arrests immediately after the Wehrmacht invasion. Yet no member of the Knipper family was touched [presumably because Vova’s cousin Lev Knipper worked for the NKVD].

Other Germans in Moscow were also in a strange position, but for different reasons. In the same building as the Knippers lived the family of Friedrich Wolf, the famous German Communist playwright, who had left Germany soon after Hitler came to power in 1933. They were part of the so-called ‘Moscow emigration’ of foreign Communists seeking sanctuary and would have faced instant execution at Nazi hands if the city fell. Vova used to act a roof-top fire-watcher, ready to deal with incendiary bombs, along with Wolf’s two sons, Markus and Koni. Markus later became the chief of East German intelligence and the original of Karla in John Le Carré’s novels, and his younger brother, Koni, became a film-maker, writer and the president of East Germany’s academy of arts. During air raids, Vladimir Knipper and Friedrich Wolf sat in the cellar, chatting together in German. ‘People sitting around us,’ wrote Vova, ‘turned to look at the two of them with anger and fear. There they were in the centre of Moscow arguing about something in the enemy’s language.’

SOURCE: The Mystery of Olga Chekhova: The true story of a family torn apart by revolution and war, by Antony Beevor (Penguin, 2005), pp. 173-174

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by | 6 April 2006 · 3:05 pm

Italian POWs in India, 1944

One of the most intriguing organized units involved in road building [in India] was the Italian Auxiliary Pioneer Corps. This was raised from so-called Italian ‘co-operators’. During 8th Army’s campaigns against the Italians in 1941 and 1942, thousands of Italians had been brought to POW camps in India as they could not be taken to Britain. At first, the Italians were something of a nuisance in a jocular sort of way. They were adept at spreading anti-Allied propaganda to the Indian population – for example on the backs of cigarette packs with one or two cigarettes left in them. British military intelligence was particularly struck by one jape. The POWs had fabricated an Italian fascist flag from old clothes. They captured a vulture which flew into their compound and tied the flag to it. The unfortunate bird was seen flapping around the surrounding villages for hours displaying the insignia of Mussolini’s new Roman Empire. After the fall of the dictator and the German invasion of Italy, however, many Italian soldiers who were not committed fascists agreed to work on the Allied side. The valleys of Assam were alive with the sounds of the songs of Sorrento.

SOURCE: Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire & the War with Japan, by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper (Penguin, 2004), p. 426

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by | 2 April 2006 · 1:33 pm

Gandhi’s ‘Soul Force’ Turns Violent, 1942

Quit India began as another of Gandhi’s great non-violent displays of ‘soul force’. There were huge demonstrations and sit-ins (hartals) in major towns in the first two weeks of August [1942]. These were put down with police firings and baton charges. Labour unrest was quelled with particular vigour because the government was fearful of its consequence for war production. Within a few weeks this popular movement had taken on a rather different character. An organization began to appear at the grass roots rather than among the homespun-clad leadership, who were by now almost all in jail. By 15 August a new pattern had emerged of a systematic attempt to sabotage Britain’s war effort based on smaller population centres along major lines of communication or near important factory complexes. Telegraph lines were cut, railway lines were ripped up and bridges dynamited. In all 66,000 people were convicted or detained, of whom about a quarter, including most of the Congress leadership, were still in jail in 1944. About 2,500 people were shot dead.

This was undoubtedly a serious revolt, and one that directly threatened the war effort. Armed groups attacked several of the weakest points of the Indian railway network, derailing trains and bombing signal boxes at essential junctions. In one incident two Canadian military officers were pulled off a train and murdered…. Even sixty years on it is still difficult to say whether this month-long campaign was organized to a plan or whether the enraged local political leadership was reacting to British repression on the hoof. The savagery of the British response – police shootings, mass whipping, the burning of villages and sporadic torture of protestors – was testimony to the fact that the Raj was seriously rattled.

SOURCE: Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire & the War with Japan, by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper (Penguin, 2004), pp. 247-248

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by | 29 March 2006 · 1:54 pm

Vengeful Attacks on Burmese Buddhists, 1943

The negative consequence of the first Arakan campaign [on Burma’s border with Assam] was further to envenom relations between the Arakanese Buddhists and the local Muslim population. Zainuddin, a Muslim civil officer posted to the areas which the British temporarily reconquered in Arakan, wrote a confidential account of the hostility between the communities. The British Baluch troops in the area treated the local Buddhist population very badly, he recorded, telling them that the Muslims who had suffered at their hands during the Japanese invasion of the previous year ‘would take full revenge on the Arakanese “Mugs”‘. The coolies and other camp followers who flooded into the region in the wake of the British stole large numbers of local boats and brutalized the people. Zainuddin compared the British treatment of the civilian population very unfavourably with that of the Japanese. Indeed, [Viceroy of India] Wavell himself was worried by rumours that British troops had shot out of hand village headmen in Japanese-occupied areas. All in all, these events seem to reverse the usual stereotypes of Japanese brutality and British solicitude for the civilian population. They were also part of a pattern common to the whole crescent [of British colonies in Southeast Asia]: inter-community conflict became endemic in the wake of the fighting and would persist for at least a generation. Finally, Zainuddin delivered his most savage observation. On the appearance of the Japanese the indifferent and lethargic British troops ‘began to run as no deer had ever run when chased by a tiger’.

SOURCE: Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire & the War with Japan, by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper (Penguin, 2004), pp. 275-276

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by | 22 March 2006 · 12:43 am

Along the Road out of Burma, 1942

By the middle of May [1942], with the monsoon beginning, the situation was desperate. Thousands had already died and the survivors were almost all diseased, starving and totally demoralized by the constant rain. The route through the Hukawng valley to Assam was the worse of the two remaining escape routes. It was a green hell of mud, human excrement and chaos snaking through the hills. The lower parts of the valley consisted of huge tracts of thirteen-foot-tall elephant grass or stretches of near impenetrable jungle, broken up by small paddies which quickly became lakes of mud. Higher up, the track became more precipitous and the jungle thicker. Near-starving people ate poisonous fruits from roadside shrubs or rotting food from tins. If they collapsed with diarrhoea, they were left behind to perish. Even healthy males could travel no more than eight miles a day in a sea of mud which stretched for mile after mile across the mountains. The only way to make progress was to slither along the roots of trees by the side of the track. Women and children collapsed and drowned in the mud. Cholera became epidemic as exhausted people sheltered in bivouacks to escape the rain and relieved themselves on the floors. Porters refused to touch the dead so they lay decomposing until medical staff arrived with kerosene to burn them. The butterflies in Assam that year were the most beautiful on record. They added to the sense of the macabre as they flitted amongst the corpses….

Some brave people helped others. Frank Sinclair Gomes, an Anglo-Indian telegraphist from Maymyo, three times rescued people from the river at Mogaung, on the southern edge of the valley, saving a Gurkha and a Madrasi woman and her child as their boats overturned. Two Gurkhas died as they tried to rescue starving people on the far side of another river by putting a rope across. All along the route hundreds of Kachins and Naga villagers helped, providing food and transport. They were the mostly unacknowledged heroes of the civilian evacuation, as they were to be the heroes of the later military resistance to the Japanese. Hundreds of thousands of refugees tramped through their lands, polluting their homes and bringing disease and death with them, but their traditions of hospitality were too strong to wither even in this crisis….

Pathetically weak in social services of all sorts, the Indian authorities had to fall back on one of the few efficient organizations in the subcontinent: the Assam Tea Planters Association. Alongside forest officers it was the planters who gave a semblance of order to the chaos….

These people, many of whom were Scots, seemed to come into their own in the crisis. ‘Planters,’ one wrote, ‘are practical, early rising, hard-working people,’ good at dealing with scholarly government officials as well as ‘mobs of ignorant workers’. Many had fought in the First World War and were from factories and business, not from universities. They were particularly adept at handling ‘men, materials, money and motor transport’. Despite their reputation, they had long since given up polo and fishing trips. The planters supplied their greatest resource, labour. As early as February 1942 the government asked the Tea Association for assistance on military projects in the northeast, 25,000 men for the Manipur road and 75,000 for the northerly road from Ledo into Burma. By March every small railway station had its contingent of tea-garden labourers ready to entrain. Each one was equipped with a hoe, two blankets, sufficient food for a fortnight and a hurricane lamp. They were sent off to build roads and carry supplies but many never returned, dying of cholera and exhaustion.

SOURCE: Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire & the War with Japan, by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper (Penguin, 2004), pp. 182-185

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by | 15 March 2006 · 3:01 pm

British Malaise in Malaya, 1941

The lack of civil preparation, the general ‘Malaise’, was to be a persistent charge against the British in Malaya. But, by the outbreak of war, the people of Malaya had experienced more intrusive government than at any time in its history, especially in the form of food controls and price fixing. Mindful of Malaya’s dependence on imported rice, the authorities had by 1940 built up reserves for 180 days. The state also took on new functions such as surveillance and propaganda. By April 1940 there were 312 officers involved in censorship in Singapore and 58 in Penang, plus a number of part-time workers, many of them European wives reading each other’s mail…. However, the Ministry of Information in Singapore soon had a staff of over 100 and issued Chinese newspapers and illustrated propaganda in four languages at a rate of a million pieces a month. Before December 1941 the Japanese could not be mentioned. Instead was broadcast – in the style of Orson Welles’s adaptation of War of the Worlds – a ‘nightmare’ of conquest by the fascists. The dire situation was disguised by over-confident propaganda which encouraged complacency about the scale of the threat. When the war began, the need to maintain this posture immobilized the British regime. The Japanese-owned daily the Singapore Herald fought against the mood by applauding Chinese cabaret girls for dancing with Japanese men and with such headlines as ‘Down with alarmism’ and ‘Prepare for peace’. In October, around 600 Japanese and their families were evacuated, and the consul-general was recalled at the end of the month. But many remained.

SOURCE: Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire & the War with Japan, by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper (Penguin, 2004), p. 67

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by | 25 February 2006 · 3:22 pm

Raymond Yoshihiro Aka, 1915-2006

Saturday’s Honolulu Star-Bulletin notes the death of one of the key behind-the-scenes people responsible Japan’s postwar reconstruction.

Raymond Yoshihiro Aka, who was honored by the Japanese emperor for his work strengthening U.S.-Japanese relations, will be buried Friday at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl.

Aka was 90 when he died Jan. 5 in Walnut Creek, Calif. The son of Japanese immigrants, Aka was born in Wailuku in 1915 but spent much of his childhood in Okinawa. He graduated from McKinley High School in 1939.

In September 1941, a few months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Aka was drafted while he was a student at the University of Hawaii. He served in the Military Intelligence Service during World War II and then as a warrant officer in the Japanese Liaison Office in Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s Tokyo headquarters after the war.

After his honorable discharge in 1947, he became a civilian employee of the U.S. Department of the Army during Japan’s postwar reconstruction and was involved in the drafting of the Japanese Constitution, civil service, election reform and the establishment of the police reserves.

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