Far Outliers

Yangzhou was occupied by Shi Kefa, a 44-year-old general with fanatical loyalty to the Ming dynasty. The Manchus tried to win Shi Kefa over in a number of ways, sending numerous letters in the name of Dorgon, but actually drafted by turncoats. Shi Kefa had famously berated the Emperor of Grand Radiance on military matters, using language that would have led to the reprimand or imprisonment of a less valuable soldier. [Manchu Prince] Dorgon’s messages capitalised on this, reminding Shi Kefa that, loyal to the Ming or not, he was currently serving a depraved master. While the Manchus fought the Ming loyalists, wrote Dorgon’s scribes, both sides lost out on the opportunity to unite and pursue the true enemy: the remnants of the forces of [northern warlord] Li Zicheng. Dorgon urged Shi Kefa at all costs to avoid a situation in which there were ‘two suns in the firmament’. But it was too late; already there were two people claiming to be the emperor of China–three, if one was prepared to count the fugitive Li Zicheng.

When the Manchu army finally began the assault of Yangzhou, Shi Kefa’s [Jesuit-designed] guns killed them in their thousands. The bodies piled up so high, that after a time, there was no need for siege ladders, and fresh Manchu troops climbed a mountain of corpses to reach the battlements.

The defenders of the city began fleeing the walls by jumping onto the houses immediately below, tearing off their helmets and throwing down their spears, creating an unearthly clatter as their feet smashed tiles on the rooftops. The noise brought townsfolk out of their houses in time to see the defenders running away, and soon the streets were full of refugees. But there was nowhere to run. Someone opened the south gate, and the last possible escape route was cut off by more Manchu soldiers.

In the aftermath Shi Kefa ordered his men to kill him, but his lieutenant could not bring himself to strike the death blow. With the town now in Manchu hands, Shi Kefa was brought to [Manchu Prince] Dodo. The prince advised him that his loyalty had impressed his Manchu enemies.

‘You have made a gallant defence,’ he said. ‘Now that you have done all that duty could dictate, I would be glad to give you a high post.’

Shi Kefa, however, refused to abandon his beloved Dynasty of Brightness [= Ming].

‘I ask of you no favour except death,’ he replied. Over several days, the Manchus made repeated attempts to persuade Shi Kefa to join them, but he was adamant that the only thing he wanted was to die with his dynasty. On the third day, an exasperated Prince Dodo granted Shi Kefa his wish, and beheaded him personally.

Despite his pleas to Shi Kefa, Dodo was intensely irritated at the human cost of taking Yangzhou. He told his troops to do whatever they wanted with the city for five days, and the ensuing atrocities reached such heights that it was a further five days before Dodo regained control of his men. The surviving Manchus avenged their fallen comrades on the population of the town, slaughtering the menfolk and raping the women. The clemency shown to turncoat towns further in the north was nowhere in evidence here, as Manchus and Chinese traitors looted what they could, and murdered all the witnesses they could find. Fires broke out in numerous quarters of the city, but were largely put out by heavy rain.

A survivor reported that the corpses filled the canals, gutters and ponds, their blood drowning the water itself, creating rivulets of a deep greenish-red throughout the city. Babies were killed or trampled underfoot, and the young women were chained together ready to be shipped to the far north. Many years later, travellers in Manchuria and Mongolia would still report sightings of aging, scarred female slaves with Yangzhou accents, clad in animal skins.

SOURCE: Coxinga and the Fall of the Ming Dynasty, by Jonathan Clements (Sutton, 2005), pp. 116-118

The contrarian Spengler at the Asia Times weighs in on the Cartoon Offensive.

The global relationship among literacy rates, secularization and population growth makes clear that the fragility of Muslim traditional society is not a Muslim problem as such. But the Muslim world is far more vulnerable than the numbers suggest, for two reasons. The first reason is chronological, and the second is theological.

It is not a good thing to come late to the table of globalization. China and its neighbors have emerged from the maelstrom of revolution and the violent loss of tens of millions of lives to become actors on the world economic stage. Of China’s 1.3 billion people, 400 million are integrated into the world division of labor, and millions more are becoming urbanized, literate and productive by the year. India remains behind China but has good prospects for success. Against these formidable competitors, few countries in Western Asia, Africa or Latin America can hope to prevail. In a world that has little need of subsistence farmers and even less need of university graduates with degrees in Islamic philosophy, most of the Muslim world can expect small mercy from the market.

The theological problem I have discussed in other locations, most recently in reporting the pope’s seminar at Castelgandolfo. Christianity and Judaism have adapted to doubt, the bacillus of modern thought, by inviting doubt to serve as the handmaiden of faith. No better formulation of this can be found than in Benedict XVI’s classic Introduction to Christianity. The object of revelation, the believer, becomes a participant in revelation, in dialogue with the Revealer. This great innovation has not prevented the death of traditional, autonomic Christian belief, but it has left an enduring core of Christian faith in the West well inoculated against skepticism. As the pope explained, the eternal, unchanging character of the Koran that the Archangel Gabriel dictated verbatim to Mohammed admits of no doubt. Muslim belief is not dialogue, but submission. It is as defenseless before the bacillus of skepticism as the American aboriginals were before the smallpox virus.

That is why Muslims cannot respond to Western jibes at the person of their Prophet except as they did to the Jyllens-Posten cartoons. I do not sympathize with scoffers but, like Benedict, I see doubt as an adversary to be won over, rather than as an enemy to be extirpated. I would not have drawn nor published these cartoons, but when the lines are drawn, I stand with Western freedom against traditional authority. I write these lines over a Carlsberg and shall drink no other lager until the boycott of Danish product ends.

Okay, I have many doubts about Spengler’s broad brush. Plenty of Muslims nowadays are full of doubt, and perhaps even more full of justifiable fear–from all sides. But societies that brook no doubt and no dissent are destined for the dustbin of history.

I swim in doubt–I drown in doubt–and have done so for as long as I can remember. My closest brother, who was baptized at the same time I was in the dunking pool of the First Baptist Church in Winchester, Virginia, says we laughed on the way home from church in the rear-facing third seat of our family’s Nash Rambler station wagon. I don’t really remember. I just vaguely remember being shy about being down front and having to read our testimony before the congregation. But I remember all too well the last Sunday school class I attended several years later at my last mission meeting at Amagi Sanso before returning to the States to face college, the draft, or whatever else awaited a newly 18-year-old male citizen of the U.S. in 1967.

A new missionary, half a generation younger than our parents, was our Sunday School teacher that year. Some of us MKs were borderline delinquent, infected with both doubt and rebelliousness, and perhaps our missionary parents thought Uncle Jim’s testimony might connect with us. He had been a delinquent himself until he found the Lord, as he testified in some detail. Not entirely boring detail. Postconversion joy was far less interesting. But how do you know that God even exists, some of us asked. The experience he described was foreign to some of us. Well, it says so right here, he answered, and read the Bible to us to prove the existence of its imputed author (“as told to” quite a string of ghostwriters). But haven’t you ever doubted the scriptures, some of us asked. Never! Not since I found the Lord, he assured us. Well, that didn’t connect too well.

That night I asked my Dad if he had ever had doubts about his beliefs. He had been raised a Quaker, but joined the Baptist church in his youth (dunked in a mill pond near his country church). Of course I’ve had doubts, he said. But Uncle Jim says he had never doubted the scriptures since his conversion! Well, Dad hesitantly replied, anyone who says he’s never had any doubts about his beliefs is either a fool or a liar. What a relief it was to hear that! I can’t convey how much I appreciated his honesty that night. And still do. He doesn’t shy away from unpleasant truths. I think Uncle Jim eventually came to the same realization. His own kids later turned out no less delinquent and disoriented as teenagers than the older MKs he failed to connect with that night.

A generation later, it was my daughter’s turn to go through confirmation class at a UCC church in Honolulu–a church imbued with doubt about most elements of the Christian tradition. Even so, I rarely attended. And even though I was welcome to partake of communion there, I couldn’t bring myself to do so. I didn’t feel part of the community of belief, even though my wife and daughter were regular members of that community of believers (or at least seekers).

One of the confirmation class activities was to interview your parents (or guardians, etc.) about their religious beliefs. I had to confess that I find it hard to believe in a Supreme Being. Even so, I have too many doubts to be an outright atheist. And one of the major sociological goals of the confirmation class (in fact, most of the goals seemed to be more sociological than theological) was to to prepare Christians for an age in which they constitute a minority in global society, in which (as the pastor once put it) “the church is not the chapel of the state.” That is a most worthy goal, in my estimation. One that militant evangelicals of all religions would do well to adopt.

I neglected to link to Macam-Macam‘s recent post on Nhem En, photographer of death. It starts with a wall of 50 mugshots.

It is a modern tragedy that these photographs are amongst the most famous photos ever taken by a South East Asian – meticulous mug shots of Cambodian prisoners accused of counter-revolutionary crimes by the Khmer Rouge and admitted to S-21, an institution dedicated solely to the incarceration, torture, extraction of “confessions” and documentation of enemies of the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979. Almost all prisoners who passed through S-21 were eventually executed, or “smashed”.

The man who took most of these shots is Nhem En, a country boy who joined the Khmer Rouge in 1970, aged only ten. Sent overseas to China to study because of his academic promise, his job as photographer at S-21 started in 1976 when he returned to Cambodia and was sent to Tuol-Sleng, the site of S-21. He was only sixteen at the time.

Read and view the whole thing.