by | 13 June 2008 · 9:25 pm

Fates of Resistance to the Partition of Africa

From The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence, by Martin Meredith (PublicAffairs, 2005), pp. 3-4:

Scores of African rulers who resisted colonial rule died in battle or were executed or sent into exile after defeat. Samori of the Mandingo was captured and died in exile two years later; the Asantehene, King Agyeman Prempeh, was deposed and exiled for nearly thirty years; Lobengula of the Ndebele died in flight; Behazin of Dahomey and Cetshwayo of the Zulu were banished from their homelands.

In the concluding act of the partition of Africa, Britain, at the height of its imperial power, set out to take over two independent Boer republics, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, and incorporate them into the British Empire, assuming that a war of conquest would take at most a matter of months. It turned into a gruelling campaign lasting three years, required nearly half a million imperial troops to finish it, and left a legacy of bitterness and hatred among Afrikaners that endured for generations. Faced with guerrilla warfare for which they were unprepared, British military commanders resorted to scorched-earth tactics, destroying thousands of farmsteads, razing villages to the ground and slaughtering livestock on a massive scale, reducing the Boers to an impoverished people. Women and children were rounded up and placed in what the British called concentration camps, where conditions were so appalling that some 26,000 died there from disease and malnutrition, most of them under the age of sixteen. All this became part of a Boer heritage passed in anger from one generation to the next, spawning a virulent Afrikaner nationalism that eventually took hold of South Africa.

Small-scale revolts against colonial rule continued for many years. The Baoulé of Côte d’Ivoire fought the French village by village until 1911; the Igbo of Nigeria were not fully defeated until 1919; the Jola of Senegal not until the 1920s; the Dinka of southern Sudan not until 1927. In the desert wastelands of Somaliland a fiery Muslim sheikh, Muhammad ’Abdille Hassan, dubbed by his adversaries the ‘Mad Mullah’, led Dervish warriors in a holy war against the British for twenty years until his death in 1920. Bedouin resistance against Italian rule in Libya ended only in 1931 after nine years of guerrilla warfare. By the 1930s, however, the colonial states of Africa were firmly entrenched; they had, moreover, acquired a legitimacy in the eyes of their inhabitants.

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Filed under Africa, Britain, France, Italy, nationalism, Netherlands, war

by | 13 June 2008 · 8:34 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Hack, Buckboard, … Democrat

From Plain Buggies: Amish, Mennonite, and Brethren Horse-Drawn Transportation (Intercourse, Penn.: Good Books, 1998), by Stephen Scott, pp. 46-47:

The open spring wagon, the utility vehicle with one seat and a hauling space in back, has a wide variety of local names. In Holmes County, Ohio, it is a “Hack”; in Arthur, Illinois, a “Buckboard”; in Dover, Delaware, a “Durban”; in Adams County, Indiana, a “Johnny wagon”; in Daviess County, Indiana, a “Long John”; and in Aylmer, Ontario, a “Democrat.”

A recent style of spring wagon, featuring an open bed or long storage compartment in back and an enclosed driver’s seat will be referred to as a “cab wagon” in this book. In Pennsylvania a carriage-like vehicle with heavier suspension on the rear axle is called a “market wagon” or “peddle wagon.”

A number of vehicles used by the plain people are somewhat out of the scope of this book. These include heavy farm wagons and other agricultural vehicles. The special wagons designed to transport benches from one Amish meeting place to the next are found in each Amish church district. In Lancaster County the Old Order Amish and Mennonites make use of specially designed hearses. In Holmes County vehicles resembling a cab wagon transport the coffins.

Sleighs, cutters, and bobsleds are rarely used in most communities and are not of any special style. Few new snow vehicles are produced. Enough antique vehicles are around to serve the limited demand.

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by | 12 June 2008 · 9:34 pm

European Horsetrading for Backwaters

From The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence, by Martin Meredith (PublicAffairs, 2005), pp. 1-2 (reviewed here, here, and here):

During the Scramble for Africa at the end of the nineteenth century, European powers staked claims to virtually the entire continent. At meetings in Berlin, Paris, London and other capitals, European statesmen and diplomats bargained over the separate spheres of interest they intended to establish there. Their knowledge of the African hinterland was slight….

As the haggling in Europe over African territories continued, land and peoples became little more than pieces on a chessboard…. Britain traded the North Sea island of Heligoland with the Germans for Zanzibar, and parts of northern Nigeria with the French for fishing rights off Newfoundland. France exchanged parts of Cameroon with Germany in return for German recognition of the French protectorate over Morocco. By the time the Scramble for Africa was over, some 10,000 African polities had been amalgamated into forty European colonies and protectorates.

Thus were born the modern states of Africa.

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Filed under Africa, Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal

by | 1 June 2008 · 5:38 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Lē‘ahi ‘Tuna Point’

Most people who have lived in Hawai‘i for a while know that Diamond Head crater got its English name from the sparkle of worthless crystals in its rocky exterior, and not from real diamonds. And many know that it got its Hawaiian name, Lē‘ahi, from the resemblance of the crater’s ridgeline to the dorsal fin of a tuna. But the name doesn’t exactly mean ‘dorsal-fin of tuna’.

I gave the etymology a closer look after finding a bogus etymology on the historical plaque that marks Diamond Head Lighthouse. Lē‘ahi does not come from lei ‘wreath’ plus ahi ‘fire’, and thus has nothing to do with Hawaiian practices of navigational bonfires imagined by the builders of the modern lighthouse. Haw. ahi ‘fire’ comes from Proto-Polynesian (PPN) *afi ‘fire’, a good and widely reflected Austronesian root. In Numbami, a language I studied in Papua New Guinea, the word for ‘fire’ is yawi (with the /w/ slightly fricative before front vowels). Even highly aberrant Yapese seems to have a cognate, nifiy ‘fire’. But Haw. ‘ahi ‘tuna’ comes from Proto-Nuclear Polynesian (PNP) *kasi (with *k > /‘/, *s > /h/), which seems not to be so widely attested beyond Polynesia.

The first part of the compound is trickier. According to Place Names of Hawaii, lē comes not from lei ‘wreath, garland’, but rather from lae, which in place names usually translates ‘cape’ or ‘point’. However, the Hawaiian Dictionary lists a wider range of meanings: ‘forehead, brow; cape, headland, point, promontory; wisdom’ (< *la‘e). So some of the tourist literature now translates Lē‘ahi inappropriately as ‘tuna brow’ or ‘brow of the tuna’. Tuna Head(land) would be just as accurate, but Cape Tuna or Tuna Point would be more in keeping with the glosses in Place Names of Hawaii. (I think we can also rule out Tuna Wisdom!)

UPDATE: But what about Aku Head?

There used to be a well-known radio personality in Hawai‘i who called himself “J. Akuhead Pupule” (= ‘J. Tunahead Crazy’), reputedly after being called as much by irate listeners. I’m not sure why aku-head would be a sharper insult than ‘ahi-head, but it might be because aku is the Hawaiian name for the bonito or skipjack tuna genus Katsuwonus, whose name derives from Japanese katsuo, which in Japan is usually dried into a woodlike block, katsuobushi, from which flakes are shaved off for use as a flavoring. So maybe akuhead = blockhead.

From my fieldwork experience long ago in Papua New Guinea, where I elicited far more fishnames than I had ever heard of before, I would guess that Haw. ‘ahi matches pretty well with the genus Thunnus while Haw. aku names tuna of the genus Katsuwonus (and perhaps a few other similar genera).

In checking Wikipedia entries for other members of the family Scombridae (tunas, bonitos, and mackerals), I see that the one for wahoo, Haw. ono (< PPN *‘ono), offers entirely unsupported speculative etymologies for both names. Wikipedia should not confirm one person’s speculation with that of another. Leave that to the news media.

UPDATE 2: The cape at the southwestern tip of O‘ahu—a long, flat counterpart to Lē‘ahi at the southeastern tip—was for a time called Barber’s Point, but has now reverted to its Hawaiian name, Kalaeloa ‘The Long Point’.

A reader asks why I don’t simply consult a fluent native speaker of Hawaiian. One reason is that native speakers with encyclopedic knowledge are extremely rare in any language, but especially for Hawaiian these days, where most fluent speakers learned the language in a classroom, not from their parents and grandparents long resident on a plot of land. (In fact most have lost the lands of their ancestors.) Another reason is that local residents are usually content to offer folk etymologies and wild guesses when asked about anything not utterly transparent linguistically and historically. At least that is my experience from incessantly asking just such questions of local drivers, store clerks, wait help, baristas, sushi chefs, and random passers-by in my travels to odd parts of the globe over many years.

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by | 31 May 2008 · 5:25 pm

Applebaum Sour on Baker and Blogs

In a review entitled The Blog of War, Anne Applebaum first parodies then purees Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (via A&L Daily).

Baker never answers the questions that he asks. That is, he has not undertaken the historian’s task of hearing multiple arguments, listening to myriad explanations, looking at a wide range of evidence and then marshaling the evidence in order to draw a conclusion. He has not even carefully examined, as other historians have done, the various arguments about the aerial bombardment of civilians–the military tactic that appears to bother him most–to make a judicious argument against its use. Instead, he has used his license as a “novelist” to excuse himself from all of the tedious work of genuine knowledge. By way of research, he has read back issues of The New York Times and The New York Herald Tribune, along with a notably limited group of other historical sources, all long familiar. From them, he has plucked bits of information, shards of the historical record that he finds compelling, or perhaps contrary to what he imagines to be the conventional wisdom–and left his readers to draw their own conclusions.

Here is where I should note, and gladly, that there are many legitimate ways to write history, even many avant-garde, non-linear, novelistic ways to write history, as the historiography of World War II itself well illustrates. There are, after all, political histories of that war, diplomatic histories, social histories, military histories, and intellectual histories, as well as histories written from American, British, Polish, Russian, German, Jewish, Japanese, Slovak, Estonian, Bulgarian, Chinese, and Italian points of view, among dozens of others. Besides all that, there are shelves of memoirs of victims and the children of victims, and perpetrators and the children of perpetrators. There are more purely literary accounts, such as W.G. Sebald’s semi-autobiographical novels, which mix fact and fiction but are nonetheless deeply committed to understanding precisely what happened and why….

But what Baker has produced is nothing like this, nothing like history. You cannot fault his scholarship, because aside from the process of accumulating a set of anecdotes, no scholarship has been conducted. Though the book purports to pronounce upon the international situation, all of Baker’s sources are in English. Almost all of the stories take place in America, Britain or Germany, as if the war was not really happening in Eastern Europe or Russia, let alone Indonesia and Singapore. He has not worked with many primary sources, other than a few memoirs, and he has not discovered any new material. He leaves out enormous chunks of the story. His description of the invasion of Poland in September, 1939, is limited to two sentences–Goering “ordered a thousand planes into Poland. There were dive-bombers over Danzig”–and he does not mention the Soviet invasion of Poland seventeen days later at all.

You cannot disagree with Baker’s argument, because no argument has been made. Baker does not build a case, he insinuates something, leaving the reader to guess what. My best paraphrase of his view goes like this: Churchill was a bully and a drunk. The Roosevelts were snobs and anti-Semites. Therefore they were not good people. Therefore their so-called “good” war must have been hypocritical. Therefore they could only have been fighting because they were in hock to the military industrial complex and they had a bloodthirsty fondness for bombing raids. Moreover, the Holocaust was in part a German response to British aggression, and the Japanese invasion of China was a response to Chinese aggression, and Britain’s very participation in the war was the result of Churchill’s aggression, especially his stubborn refusal to respond to Hitler’s “peace offensive.” Therefore the pacifists were right….

Perhaps, I wondered at one point, the whole book is a gigantic practical joke, a stunt intended to provoke scholars, anger Jews, infuriate Poles, and thereby create massive publicity for Nicholson Baker. And so my initial reaction to Human Smoke was to throw it across the room. Subsequently, I discovered that this reaction was very common, especially among practicing historians.

But then she segues into a sour diatribe on blogs and Wikipedia.

Unlike Nicholson Baker or the editors of Gawker, I cannot really supply an anecdote that will explain, in a hundred words or less, why I decided to pick up the book again and write this review. But a few days after finishing Human Smoke as well as Baker’s treatise on Wikipedia, I happened to be sitting with a group of writers, historians, and critics, all fellows at the American Academy in Berlin, talking about it. As fate would have it–Baker loves portentous and possibly significant coincidences, and who doesn’t?–we were sitting in a villa overlooking the Wannsee. Just across the lake, we could see the Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz, the place where, in 1942, the Nazis decided to exterminate the Jews of Europe.

Had the drunken Churchill and the anti-Semite Roosevelt not decided to fight World War II, none of us would have been there. There would have been no American Academy in Berlin, of course, with its prominently hung portrait of the villa’s original Jewish owners, now the Academy’s patrons; indeed, there would have been no Jews in Berlin, no Americans in Berlin, and no critics and writers in Berlin, save those approved by the Third Reich. Instead, a happy Nazi family would have been looking out over the lake, enjoying the same view.

Yet the dull truth is that we arrived at the topic of Nicholson Baker not because we were talking about the war, but because we were talking about the contemporary cult of the non-expert, or rather the anti-expert: the bloggers who assume that the “mainstream media” is always wrong, the Wikipedia readers who think that a compilation of random anecdotes is always preferable to a learned study, and of course the college students who nowadays prefer to get their news in emails from friends because it is too bothersome to read a newspaper. And the even duller truth is that Human Smoke belongs to this cult, and not to the more exotic outer reaches of the historiography of World War II.

Now, I have great respect for Applebaum’s knowledge of history and her writing of it. In fact, I think I have blogged more excerpts from her fascinating and well-done Gulag: A History than from any other book I’ve read. Nor do I have any sympathy for Baker, nor any desire to inhale the smoke he’s blowing in the book under review. I’m also getting more sour on the blogosphere these days, as it becomes less and less distinguishable from 24-hour journalism’s endless gotcha coverage and partisan shouting matches. And I’m also pretty routinely dismayed by the sloppy amateurishness of much of the stuff I find in Wikipedia (to which I’m contributing more and more these days, but only on subjects I know well).

But, geez, Anne, give us a break. Baker’s book was published by Simon and Schuster, not Gawker Media. Book publishers supposedly employ rigorous editors that blog media so often lack. Your review appeared in The New Republic, a magazine whose writers include fabulists and whose fact-checkers have repeatedly fallen down on the job. Most major media outlets have suffered similar embarrassments in recent years. Do you seriously believe that the reliability and expertise of the world’s legions of newspaper reporters are any more impressive than those of Wikipedia’s legions of contributors? News reports may claim to be the first draft of history, but they are usually the umpteenth draft of tired conventional wisdom. Finally, did the writing of purblind, partisan, and provincial-minded history only begin with blogging? Surely the writing of such history began with the advent of writing, the beginning of history.

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Filed under blogging, democracy, publishing, war

by | 28 May 2008 · 6:34 pm

Inciting Backlash in Spain, 1931

From: Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to the War on Terror, by Michael Burleigh (HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 128-129:

The newly elected left-Republican and Socialist coalition in June 1931 further provoked the religious with controversial articles in the new Constitution, Spain’s first experiment in democracy. This went much further than a legal separation of Church and state. It extruded the Church from education, restricted its property rights and investments, and dissolved the Jesuits, who played a role in liberal and leftist mythology equivalent to that of freemasons, Jews and Marxists in the demonology of their opponents. This last measure was a bitter pill to swallow in the homeland of St Ignatius Loyola. Civil marriage and divorce were legalised, while the agreement of the authorities was henceforth necessary for any public celebration of religion – another indigestible measure in a society where religious processions were a highly developed art form. A supplementary law in 1933 nationalised all Church property, including secularising the cemeteries by putting them under local authority control and dismantling the walls which separated the dead religious from their non-believing fellows. Having nationalised Church property, thereby ignoring the wishes of those who had donated it, the government then taxed the clergy who used it. Measures against Church charities simply hurt poor people. The government also closed all religious schools, which since they educated 20 per cent of Spanish children, and were not replaced by secular alternatives, sat oddly with the Republic’s expansion of education.

Although these measures were implemented with varying local intensities, there can be no doubt that preventing the ringing of church bells, removing religious symbols from classrooms, and bureaucratising the procedures for those wanting religious funerals grievously irked many Catholics. Officious insistence that dying people fill out forms to get the send-off they wanted failed to charm their friends and relatives. These measures were condemned by Pius XI in the forceful 3 June 1933 encyclical Dilectissima nobis, which, while carefully professing indifference to forms of government, stressed the hypocrisy of these measures in terms of ‘those declared principles of civil liberty on which the new Spanish regime declares it bases itself’. These laws were the product of ‘a hatred against the Lord and His Christ nourished by groups subversive to any religious and social order, as alas we have seen in Mexico and Russia’. Republican Spain had become part of a ‘terribile triangolo’ whose object was the eradication of religion. Anticlericals in the Cortes responded in kind, with snide remarks about the ‘Mercantile Society of Jesus’, while the Socialist leader Azaña crowed that with these 1931–3 measures Spain had ceased to be Catholic.

Of course, things had been tending that way far longer than the wave of measures introduced in 1931–3 may suggest. In 1881 the Churches had lost control of the universities. In 1901 religion had become optional within the curriculum leading to the school leavers’ certificate. In 1913 non-Catholic parents could exempt their children from religious instruction. With a few exceptions, the arts and intelligentsia were dominated by secular-minded people. The Catholic presence among the urban working class and the southern rural poor was also exiguous. In 1935 a Jesuit calculated that, taking the eighty thousand parishioners of a Madrid working-class suburb, 7 per cent attended mass on Sundays; 90 per cent died without the benefit of the sacraments; 25 per cent of children were unbaptised; and of couples marrying, 40 per cent could not recite the Lord’s Prayer. Similar levels of indifference and ignorance were revealed in studies of Bilbao and Barcelona. The Church was also like an alien presence in the villages of Andalucia, with anarchist and Socialist activists converting peasant indifference or quasi-pagan superstition into outright hostility. Churches were falling into disrepair, when they even existed, and priests were poorly paid with government stipends equivalent to the lowest grade of janitors. The priesthood was not an attractive career option, with recruitment for seminaries falling by 40 per cent between 1931 and 1934.

Is the lash or the backlash the driving force of history? Who was the Prime Lasher?

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by | 27 May 2008 · 5:50 pm

The Gulag Economy’s Peace Dividend

From The Whisperers: Private Lives in Stalin’s Russia, by Orlando Figes (Metropolitan, 2007), pp. 467-468:

Forced labour played an increasingly important part in the post-war Soviet economy, according to a policy dictated by Stalin and his ‘kitchen cabinet’ of advisers. With the ending of the war the pool of unpaid labour available for exploitation by the state grew enormously. Apart from Gulag prisoners and labour army conscripts, there were 2 million German POWs, and about another million from other Axis nationalities, who were mostly used for timber-felling, mining and construction, although those with skills were employed occasionally in Soviet industry. In some factories German POWs were so integral to production that detention camps were built on the factory grounds and officials tried to block the prisoners’ repatriation to Germany. The Gulag population also grew, despite the release of many prisoners in the amnesty of 1945; the camps took in well over a million new prisoners between 1945 and 1950, largely as a result of the mass arrest of ‘nationalists’ (Ukrainians, Poles, Belorussians, Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians) in territories captured or reoccupied by the Red Army but never really reconciled to Soviet power. The Gulag system expanded into a vast industrial empire, with 67 camp complexes, 10,000 individual camps and 1,700 colonies, employing a captive labour force of 2.4 million people by 1949 (compared with 1.7 million before the war). Overall, it is estimated that conscript labourers represented between 16 and 18 per cent of the Soviet industrial workforce between 1945 and 1948. They were especially important in the mining of precious metals in cold and remote regions where free labour was very expensive, if not impossible, to employ (hence their contribution to the Soviet economy was even more significant than the figures would suggest). Slave labour also made up the workforce in the big construction projects of the late 1940s which came to symbolize, officially at least, the post-war confidence and achievements of the Soviet system: the Volga–Don Canal; the Kuibyshev hydro-electric station; the Baikal-Amur and Arctic railways; the extensions to the Moscow Metro; and the Moscow University ensemble on the Lenin Hills, one of seven wedding-cake like structures (‘Stalin’s cathedrals’) in the ostentatious ‘Soviet Empire’ style which shot up around the capital in these years.

The post-war years saw a gradual merging between the Gulag and civilian economies. Every year about half a million Gulag labourers were contracted out to the civilian sector, mostly in construction, or wherever the civilian ministries complained of labour shortages; about the same number of free labourers, mostly specialists, were paid to work in Gulag industries. The Gulag system was increasingly compelled to resort to material incentives to motivate even its forced labourers. The population of the camps had become more unruly and difficult to control. With the amnesty of about a million prisoners in 1945, mainly criminals, who had their sentences either reduced or annulled, the camps were left with a high proportion of ‘politicals’ – not the intellectual types who filled the camps in the 1930s but strong young men who had fought as soldiers in the war, foreign POWs, Ukrainian and Baltic ‘nationalists’ – who were hostile to the Soviet regime and not afraid of violence. Without a system of rewards, these prisoners simply refused to meet the set targets. The cost of guarding the prisoners was also becoming astronomical. By 1953, the MVD was employing a quarter of a million guards within its camps, spending twice as much on the upkeep of the Gulag than it received in revenue from its output. Several senior MVD officials were seriously questioning the effectiveness of using forced labour at all. There were even mooted plans, supported by Beria and Malenkov, to dismantle sections of the Gulag and convert the prisoners into partially civilian workers, but since Stalin was a firm supporter of the Gulag system, none of these ideas was seriously proposed.

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by | 25 May 2008 · 1:20 pm

Soviet Wartime Disunity and Unity

From The Whisperers: Private Lives in Stalin’s Russia, by Orlando Figes (Metropolitan, 2007), pp. 419-421:

Contrary to the Soviet myth of wartime national unity, Soviet society was more fractured during the war than at any previous time since the Civil War. Ethnic divisions had been exacerbated by the Soviet state, which scapegoated certain national minorities, such as the Crimean Tatars, the Chechens and the Volga Germans, and exiled them to regions where they were not welcomed by the local populace. Anti-Semitism, which had been largely dormant in Soviet society before the war, now became widespread. It flourished especially in areas occupied by Hitler’s troops, where a large section of the Soviet population was directly influenced by the Nazis’ racist propaganda, but similar ideas were imported to places as remote as Kazakhstan, Central Asia and Siberia by Soviet soldiers and evacuees from the western regions near the front. Many people blamed the Jews for the excesses of the Stalinist regime, usually on the reasoning of Nazi propaganda that the Bolsheviks were Jews. According to David Ortenberg, the editor of Krasnaia zvezda, soldiers often said that the Jews were ‘shirking their military responsibilities by running away to the rear and occupying jobs in comfortable Soviet offices’. More generally, this gulf between the front-line servicemen and the ‘rats’ who remained in the rear became the focus of a widening divide between the common people and the Soviet elite, as the unfair distribution of the military burden became associated in the popular political consciousness with a more general inequality.

But if there was no genuine national unity, people did unite for the defence of their communities. By the autumn of 1941, 4 million people had volunteered for the citizens’ defence (narodnoe opolchenie), which dug trenches, guarded buildings, bridges and roads, and, when their city was attacked, carted food and medicine to the soldiers at the front, brought back the injured and joined in the fighting. In Moscow the citizens’ defence had 168,000 volunteers from over thirty nationalities, and another half a million people prepared for defence work; in Leningrad, there were 135,000 men and women organized in units of the citizens’ defence, and another 107,000 workers on a military footing, by September 1941. Fired up with civic patriotism, but without proper training in warfare, they fought courageously but died in shocking numbers in the first battles.

Comradeship was also crucial to military cohesion and effectiveness. Soldiers tend to give their best in battle if they feel some sort of loyalty to a small group of trusted comrades, or ‘buddies’, according to military theorists. In 1941–2, the rates of loss in the Red Army were so high that small groups seldom lasted long: the average period of front-line service for infantrymen was no more than a few weeks, before they were removed by death or injury. But in 1942–3, military units began to stabilize, and the comradeship that men found within them became a decisive factor in motivating them to fight. The closeness of these friendships naturally developed from the dangers the men faced. The mutual trust and support of the small collective group was the key to their survival. ‘Life at the front brings people closer very fast,’ wrote one soldier to the fiancée of a comrade, who had been killed in the fighting.

At the front it is enough to spend a day or two together with another man, and you will find out about all his qualities and feelings, which on Civvy Street you would not learn in a year. There is no stronger friendship than the friendship of the front, and nothing can break it, not even death.

Veterans recall the intimacy of these wartime friendships with idealism and nostalgia. They claim that people then had ‘bigger hearts’ and ‘acted from the soul’, and that they themselves were somehow ‘better human beings’, as if the comradeship of the small collective unit was a cleaner sphere of ethical relationships and principles than the Communist system, with all its compromises and contingencies. They often talk as if they found in the collectivism of these groups of fellow soldiers a type of ‘family’ that was missing from their lives before the war (and would be missing afterwards).

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by | 23 May 2008 · 5:54 pm

The Rise of Salazar in Portugal

From: Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to the War on Terror, by Michael Burleigh (HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 140-142:

In contrast to Spain, where the presence of Catholics on both sides of a vicious civil war dictated a cautious response by the Vatican, there were two countries where Pius XI’s vision of a ‘golden mean’ between invasive totalitarianism and weak democracy was apparently being realised by authoritarian governments. The first was Portugal, where in 1911 the new Republican regime had introduced some of the most anticlerical legislation in Europe. The Church was an easier target for urban radicals, many of whom were freemasons, than either the army or the large landowners of the south. Church property was nationalised, the university of Coimbra’s famous theology faculty was abolished, and feast days were restored to the world of work. Foreign priests and Jesuits were expelled, and both civil marriage and divorce were introduced. Religious teaching was prohibited in all schools. Both women and the 65 per cent of the population who were illiterates were disfranchised to destroy any potential Catholic voting base. Virtually the entire hierarchy were either exiled or expelled and in 1913 the Republic broke off diplomatic relations with Rome.

The fight-back against the efforts of a radicalised minority to impose French-style laicisation began among students in the devoutly Catholic north, and particularly among students at Coimbra. Two leaders emerged, Manuel Gonçalves Cerejeira and Antònio de Oliveira Salazar, of the Academic Centre for Christian Democracy, out of which developed a political party called the Portuguese Catholic Centre Party. Circumstances enabled this moderate party to make its influence felt. During the First World War, the Republic needed the Church to provide chaplains to its army of Catholic soldiers, while missionaries became crucial to the retention of a vast overseas empire at a time when the military was overstretched. By 1919 the Republic and the Vatican had restored diplomatic relations.

Initially, Salazar, an academic economist, subscribed to democracy as ‘an irreversible phenomenon’, but by the 1920s he and many others had become disenchanted with what was a highly corrupt local version of it. When he was elected to parliament in 1921, his revulsion for the opening session was so great that he walked out and returned to university teaching the same day. Between 1911 and 1926 Portugal had eight presidents, forty-four governments and twenty attempts at coups or revolution.

In 1926 the parliamentary republic was finally overthrown by general Manuel de Oliveira Gomes da Costa. Within two months, he was in turn deposed by general Carmona. Since Carmona had few ideas of his own, he depended upon conservative lay Catholics, including Salazar, who was twice brought in to right Portugal’s parlous finances. Salazar was careful to separate his political ambitions from his Catholicism, even if this meant tensions with his old student friend Cerejeira, who had become archbishop of Lisbon. When Salazar told the latter that he represented ‘Caesar, just Caesar, and that he was independent and sovereign’, Cerejeira shot back that he represented ‘God … who was independent and sovereign and, what’s more, above Caesar’. Salazar’s dictatorship retained the Republic’s separation of Church and state.

Restoring the Portuguese economy at a time when the world was sliding into depression lent Salazar a wizardly mystique, which he used to civilianise the military dictatorship from within. In 1930 he proclaimed a new National Union, an authoritarian nonparty whose primary purpose was to demobilise opinion. One of its first casualties was the Catholic Centre Party, which, Salazar argued, would impede the march to dictatorship. Thereafter Catholic Action became the main vehicle for the Church’s plans to reconquer Portuguese society for Catholicism.

President Carmona appointed Salazar premier in July 1932. He proclaimed the New State a year later. Catholic corporatist teachings, however misunderstood, were combined with a form of integral nationalism derived from Charles Maurras. The quiet professorial dictator, who avoided public speaking and staffed his regime with numbers of fellow academics, faced one remaining challenge. Portuguese disillusioned with the low-key tone of Salazar, and suffering under his austere economic policies, turned to the National Syndicalist Blue Shirts, who modelled themselves on the Fascists and Nazis. Salazar dealt with this radical Fascist threat deftly. He co-opted its more opportunist members into the regime, and then in July 1934 dissolved the remainder. This hostility to the National Syndicalists was similar to that of the Portuguese Catholic hierarchy. Referring to their desire for a ‘totalitarian state’ he asked: ‘Might it not bring about an absolutism worse than that which preceded the liberal regimes? … Such a state would be essentially pagan, incompatible by its nature with the character of our Christian civilization and leading sooner or later to revolution.’

Salazar saw little difference between the Communists, Fascists and Nazis, all of whom were wedded to a totalitarian ideal ‘to whose ends all the activities of the citizen are subject and men exist only for its greatness and glory. Portugal had no imperial ambitions – its empire was already the world’s fourth largest – and the regime dissociated itself from Nazi antisemitism, welcoming Jewish refugees fleeing their oppressors. The regime’s object was to entrench and intensify conservative Catholic values rather than to experiment with a ‘new man’ or woman. That lack of ambition, which extended to an aversion to modernising the nation’s economy, may partly explain why Salazar remained in power in this backwater until 1968.

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by | 22 May 2008 · 5:58 pm

Kotooshu, Gambare!

I haven’t been following sumo very closely these days, but this week when I checked the standings of the May tournament that concludes this coming Sunday, I noticed that the undefeated Bulgarian ozeki Kotooshu had handed the senior yokozuna Asashoryu the latter’s second loss. But I didn’t get my hopes up because Kotooshu was scheduled to face the other yokozuna, Hakuho, yesterday, even though he has a better record against Hakuho than against Asashoryu. Well, this morning I saw that Kotooshu was now 12-0, having handed Hakuho (10-2) his second loss. Better yet, veteran Japanese ozeki Chiyotaikai (4-8) had saddled Asashoryu (9-3) with his third loss. If Kotooshu can win two out of the three remaining bouts, he won’t have to face either yokozuna for a tie-breaker, and will win his first tournament championship in sumo’s highest division (Makuuchi).

UPDATE: Reader Thomas of Nihonhacks provides a JapanProbe link to video of the two bouts on Youtube.

DAY 13: All the leaders lost, so Kotooshu (12-1) now has to win just one of his two remaining bouts to win the Emperor’s Cup. Hakuho dropped to 10-3, Asashoryu to 9-4.

DAY 14: He did it! Kotooshu (13-1) got behind the scrappy Mongolian Ama (another crowd favorite) and shoved him down to clinch his first Emperor’s Cup. The last day’s results won’t matter to him, but they will matter to everyone who is 7-7 and needs a winning record to maintain their ranking, like Tochinoshin (‘horse-chestnut-heart’), the Georgian rookie who just made his Makuuchi debut this tournament.

Of the 42 rikishi in the top division this tournament, there are 8 Mongolians, 3 Russians, 2 Georgians, 1 Bulgarian, 1 Estonian, and 1 Korean.

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