by | 4 February 2005 · 8:36 am

Bird Brains over Mammals

Marginal Revolution‘s Tyler Cowen is for the birds:

… behavioral studies in recent years have proved that many birds have more pallium power than your average mammal.

Even seemingly moronic pigeons can categorize objects as “human-made” vs. “natural”; discriminate between cubistic and impressionistic styles of painting; and communicate using visual symbols on computers, according to evidence compiled by the consortium, which spent seven years on the project with input from scientists around the world.

Some birds can play games in which they intentionally tell lies. New Caledonian crows design and make tools. Scrub jays can recall events from specific times or places — a trait once thought unique to humans. And perhaps most impressive, parrots, hummingbirds and thousands of other species of songbirds are able to teach and learn vocal communication — the basic skill that makes human language possible. That’s a variant of social intelligence not found in any mammal other than people, bats, and cetaceans such as dolphins and whales.

Bats? Brainy as a bat? Whoa!

Leave a comment

Filed under science

by | 3 February 2005 · 8:25 pm

Vaclav Havel on EU Policy toward Cuba

Speaking of uncategorizable Czechs, here’s a bit of what Vaclav Havel had to say about the European Union’s policy toward Cuba.

Coexistence with dictators

It is suicidal for the EU to draw on Europe’s worst political traditions, the common denominator of which is the idea that evil must be appeased and that the best way to achieve peace is through indifference to the freedom of others.

Just the opposite is true: Such policies expose an indifference to one’s own freedom and pave the way for war. After all, Europe is uniting to defend its freedom and values, not to sacrifice them to the ideal of harmonious coexistence with dictators and thus risk gradual infiltration of its soul by the anti-democratic mind-set.

I firmly believe that the new members of the EU will not forget their experience of totalitarianism and nonviolent opposition to evil, and that that experience will be reflected in how they behave in EU bodies. Indeed, this could be the best contribution that they can make to the common spiritual, moral and political foundations of a united Europe.

Leave a comment

Filed under Cuba, Eastern Europe

by | 3 February 2005 · 7:53 pm

Was Kafka Czech, German, or Jewish?

Early in his acquaintance with Milena, who was living at the time with her (Jewish) first husband Ernst Pollak in Vienna, Kafka writes: “Of course I understand Czech. I’ve meant to ask you several times already why you never write in Czech…. I wanted to read you in Czech because, after all, you do belong to that language, because only there can Milena be found in her entirety … whereas here there is only the Milena from Vienna…. So Czech, please.” He continues in the same vein the following month: “I have never lived among Germans. German is my mother tongue and as such more natural to me, but I consider Czech much more affectionate, which is why your letter removes several uncertainties; I see you more clearly, the movements of your body, your hands, so quick, so resolute, it’s almost like a meeting.” Kafka’s reference here to German as his “mother tongue” is quite literal. His mother Julie, née Lowy, who came from a prosperous bourgeois family in Podebrady, preferred to speak German. He himself, however, never felt wholly at home in that mother tongue of which he is one of this century’s greatest prose writers….

“Mutter” is peculiarly German for the Jew, it unconsciously contains together with the Christian splendor Christian coldness also, the Jewish woman who is called “Mutter” therefore becomes not only comic but strange.

Kafka’s father Herman, on the other hand, was happier in Czech. He was the son of a kosher butcher in the entirely Czech-speaking little village of Osek in southern Bohemia. Franz’s own Czech seems to have been fluent. The family member to whom he was closest, his youngest sister Ottla, married a Czech Catholic … Josef David, against her parents’ opposition and with her brother’s wholehearted support. His sister Valli was involved in founding the first Jewish public elementary school in Prague in 1920, whose language of instruction was Czech.

Was Kafka then a Czech or a German? Or both? Or neither? To what language did he belong, where could he be found in his entirety? Assuredly he was Jewish, but what that meant in relation to nationality was no clearer at the time. When in the first Czechoslovak state census of 1921 people were for the first time allowed to declare “Jewish” as their nationality, barely a fifth (5,900) of those in Prague who listed their religious faith as Judaism chose to do so. A quarter (7,426) described their nationality as “German,” more than half as “Czechoslovak” (16,342) [emphasis added]. Twenty years later, all three of Kafka’s sisters were to perish in the Holocaust at the hands of occupying Germans for whom it was quite clear that Jewish and German were mutually exclusive identities. Before she was transported to Terezin (which is better known by its German name of Theresienstadt), and thence to Auschwitz, Ottla Davidova had to divorce her husband Josef in order to protect their daughters Vera and Helena. Mercifully perhaps, Franz himself did not live to see his family massacred on the altar of “racial purity.” He died of tuberculosis in 1924 and is buried in Prague’s New Jewish Cemetery. He was not reclaimed for the national memory after 1945. For much of the latter part of this century his name was obliterated and his books banned in the “national state of Czechs and Slovaks” that rose from the ashes of World War II. When he was recalled at all–occasional moments of “thaw” aside–it was briefly and dismissively as “a Prague Jewish author writing in German”–a double exclusion. As for Milena Jesenska, we shall meet her again. She had a life, and a death, of her own, beyond being “mistress to Kafka.”

SOURCE: The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History, by Derek Sayer (Princeton U. Press, 1998), pp. 116-118

Leave a comment

Filed under religion

by | 2 February 2005 · 8:32 am

Sumo in Brazil

On 28 January, the International Herald Tribune ran a NYT story about the increasing popularity of Japanese sumo in Brazil.

Until the mid-1990s, sumo wrestling in Brazil was almost exclusively practiced by Japanese immigrants and their offspring.

Today, however, about 70 percent of all sumo aficionados in the country are Brazilians with no Japanese blood, in large part because of efforts by the local association to popularize the sport.

By holding sumo matches in city squares and other public arenas, “we managed to teach a lot of people to appreciate our sport,” said Oscar Morio Tsuchiya, the vice president of the Brazilian Sumo Confederation.

The group has more than 2,000 members and organizes an annual national championship for amateur wrestlers….

Sumo was brought to Brazil almost a century ago by Japanese immigrants, who started flocking to the South American country in the early 1900s in search of work, initially on coffee plantations and eventually in agriculture in general.

With coffee sacks as mawashis, the traditional loincloths worn by sumo wrestlers, the first matches in Brazil were held to honor the emperor of Japan’s birthday.

And in 1914, the first official Brazilian sumo championship was celebrated in Guatapará, in the interior of the state of São Paulo.

“They did everything they could to cultivate Japanese culture because they intended to return to Japan someday, and practicing sumo was a big part of that, but very few ended up going back,” said Célia Oi, the executive director of the Museum of the History of Japanese Immigration to Brazil in São Paulo.

The same story appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Women’s sumo also seems to be spreading in Brazil, but not everyone is happy about it.

1 Comment

Filed under Brazil, sumo

by | 1 February 2005 · 10:42 pm

North Korea Down for Another 8-Count?

On 30 January, NKZone blogged the Times of London‘s recent depiction of Chairman Kim’s Dissolving Kingdom. After hearing such reports for over a decade, I’m not holding my breath. Be sure to read the comments, both supporting and skeptical, to the NKZone post.

But, what the heck! I’ll just hazard a wild prediction: the technical knockout will come in Round 301, let’s say around 2007, shortly after the Dear Leader mysteriously disappears, leaving his video collection and fantasyland either to a half-brother, to be hailed as Demi Liter, or one of his sons, to be known as Double Shot or Weak Tea, depending on how long he lasts. Don’t even think about female succession. That’ll happen in Japan first.

Leave a comment

Filed under Korea

by | 1 February 2005 · 5:48 pm

Millionaires Against the Billionaires in Russia?

On 27 January, Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland shared an interesting take on Ukraine and its possible lessons for Russia.

A revolt of “the millionaires against the billionaires” helped fracture Ukraine’s corrupt power structure and lift Viktor Yushchenko to the presidency there. A similar upheaval may be bubbling next door against Russian President Vladimir Putin.

That is the well-buttressed argument put forth by Anders Aslund, a Swedish economist and former diplomat whose past readings of failure in the Kremlin and its political consequences have earned my attention and respect.

I first ran across Aslund in Moscow in the 1980s at the height of Gorbymania, as the West cheered Mikhail Gorbachev for pushing perestroika as a means of reforming and saving the Soviet Union. Aslund’s predictions that Gorbachev would be unable to manage the forces he unleashed and would be destroyed by them were seen at first as provocative, then profound — and ultimately prophetic.

Being right once is no sign of being right always, or even often. There is a human tendency to analogize from the past and to miss what has changed. The rough-and-tumble years of Russia’s robber-baron politics and capitalism under Boris Yeltsin’s government, which Aslund initially advised, must have changed something.

But in conversation the other day and in several recent articles he has written, Aslund persuasively illuminated domestic conflicts that he sees leading toward “an unraveling of the Putin regime.” Parallels exist both with Gorbachev’s failure and with the political success of the reformer Yushchenko, with whom Aslund worked at Ukraine’s Central Bank.

Corruption and mismanagement have begun to sap the strong public support that Putin commanded in his first term, Aslund reports. And the campaign to line the pockets of Putin’s former KGB associates by jailing, intimidating and/or dispossessing the “oligarchs” who assembled fortunes under Yeltsin has turned much of the business community against the Russian president — as corruption did for Ukraine’s former rulers.

Ukraine’s “millionaires” — the big, but not the biggest, businesspeople — helped create and finance a political opposition that they hope will implement the rule of law and let them keep most of what they have already made, suggests Aslund, who directs the Carnegie Endowment’s Russian and Central Asian projects from Washington.

Siberian Light also notes an article in Mosnews about the importance of big-city mayors during revolutions.

Leave a comment

Filed under economics, Russia

by | 31 January 2005 · 9:01 am

A Chinese Lotus in an Indian Swamp

My name is Laileen. It means “beautiful lotus.” I was born in Jamshedpur, a steel city with a population of two million, in the state of Bihar, not too far from Calcutta. Both my grandfathers came to India around 1911 from Guangdong Province.

My paternal grandfather was from Shunde. He first worked on the railroads allover Northern India. While there, he was introduced to a Chinese family in the Nainital area, and a marriage was arranged with my grandmother around 1925. She was born in India. Her father, my great-grandfather, was one of about ten Chinese tea experts that the British brought to India around 1890 to grow tea. We still have a picture of him in his pigtail. He went to different parts of India before he found the perfect soil for the Dumlot tea in the Kumaon region in the foothills of the Himalayas. He settled near Nainital, and owned some tea estates, walnut groves, and farms. His wife, my great-grandmother, was from the nomadic tribal people along the India-China border. We were told that she wore a long dress in the Tibetan style. Although not a Han, she was Chinese because her daughter, my grandmother, used kinship terms according to the Chinese custom….

India and China had been bickering over the border for some time and they actually went to war in 1962…. The war and the restrictions really affected me. I was a lost soul at that time. I think as a young person I hated that I was Chinese. I was the minority; I stood out. I could not speak, read, or write Hindi as well as I thought I should. The Indian girls could talk about Hinduism and living in India generations upon generations, but for me only my parents were born in India. Even though it was a private school, kids still picked on you if they did not like you. It was bad enough being teased about your flat nose or slant eyes, but being considered the enemy was very scary. When the war came along, I wished I could just blend in with the majority. I wanted to disown my background….

There was something, thank goodness, that kept us reasonably sane. I remember one incident when I was in grade seven or eight.. I could write an essay in Hindi but did not have the floral characteristics of someone who was conversant with Indian literature. I wrote an essay on Prem Chand. He was an Indian who wrote about Hindu and Muslim conflicts. I guess he hit a nerve, and I took to his books. I sort of purged myself of all the hurt by focusing on the issue and relating to it on a personal level. When I wrote, something simply flowed through me. My essay was so good that the teacher read it to the class. My classmates were incredulous that I, a “foreigner,” a “pugnose,” and a “nobody,” could write so well in Hindi. The teacher, Miss Lily–I’ll never forget her–told the whole class: “I know you are all amazed that a student can write Hindi this well even though it may not be her first language. You may think that this person’s background is not like yours. But sometimes the most beautiful thing is found in the most unexpected place. If this surprises you, just remember that you can find a lotus flower even in a swamp.”

“Lotus in the Swamp,” by Laileen Springgay, in Being Chinese: Voices from the Diaspora, by Wei Djao (U. Arizona Press, 2003), pp. 83-88

Leave a comment

Filed under China

by | 31 January 2005 · 8:36 am

Coming Out Gay and Asian in Vancouver

Being gay and an Asian, I am very blessed. There is certainly a discussion among the gay Asians about not fitting into the Asian communities, nor into the gay communities. The gay male culture is built around the “buffed” Caucasian male: pumped biceps, beautiful body and appearance. If you don’t look like the ads in the magazines, you are marginalized. You are not seen as desirable as others. This is something that some support and discussion groups want to deal with.

When we came out, Mama was teaching in Women’s Studies at SFU [Simon Fraser U.]. This is not a place for the timid of heart because there are women who either have been involved in feminism, are lesbians and out of hiding, or militant! Father is a notary public and has an office in downtown Vancouver. He had been notarizing domestic partnership agreements for a long time. I was twenty-six, and Andy, my little brother, was nineteen. He was attending Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. He had heard that people in Vancouver were spreading word about him being gay. He decided that Mom and Dad would hear about his being gay from him first instead of someone else. He wrote to them saying that he had something important to share with them the next week. And they said, “O god, he is going to quit school and become a poet!” In a separate note to me, Andy gave me warning that he couldn’t keep it a secret any longer and he would have to tell them.

We don’t necessarily consider siblings as sexual beings. He guessed it about me, but I hadn’t a clue about him! We weren’t as close as we are now. I called him saying, “I know I cannot tell you not to write the letter. But you realize that it is going to be a package deal.” He replied that he knew but he had to tell them. He wrote his letter and it arrived. I knew it was coming, and I just stayed out late that evening with some friends. Went home and it was there. I penned my own letter and left it. The next day, my parents went out, so we didn’t talk about it until much later in the day. They said, “Well, we sort of guessed about you, but we never guessed about him. Perhaps a little bit about him.”

It was tough for my parents, harder than they let on. But they have been supportive always.

SOURCE: “Pomelo,” by Walter Keoki Quan, in Being Chinese: Voices from the Diaspora, by Wei Djao (U. Arizona Press, 2003), pp. 92-93

Leave a comment

Filed under Canada

by | 30 January 2005 · 2:10 pm

In the Gulag on the Day Stalin Died

Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History (Anchor Books, 2003) describes what happened in the camps on the day Stalin finally died.

Throughout the last years of his life, political prisoners hoped and prayed for Stalin’s demise, discussing his death constantly, if subtly, so as not to attract the attention of informers. People would sigh and say, “Ah, Georgians live a long time,” which managed to convey a wish for his death without actually committing treason. Even when he grew sick, they were still cautious. Maya Ulyanovskaya heard the news of what was to be his final illness from a woman she knew to be an informer. She responded carefully: “So? Anyone can get sick. His doctors are good, they will cure him.”

When his death was finally announced, on March 5, 1953, some maintained their caution. In Mordovia, the politicals studiously hid their excitement, which they feared might earn them a second sentence. In Kolyma, women “diligently wailed for the deceased.” In one Vorkuta lagpunkt, Pavel Negretov heard the announcement read aloud in the camp dining hall. Neither the commander who read out the notice of death, nor any of the prisoners, said a word. “The news was greeted with a tomb-like silence. Nobody said a thing.”

In a Norilsk lagpunkt, prisoners assembled in the courtyard, and solemnly heard the news of the death of the “great leader of the Soviet people and of free human beings everywhere.” A long pause followed. Then a prisoner raised his hand: “Citizen Commander, my wife sent me some money, it’s in my account. I have no use for it here, so I would like to spend it on a bouquet for our beloved leader. Can I do that?”

But others openly rejoiced. In Steplag, there were wild cries and yells of celebration. In Vyatlag, prisoners threw their caps in the air and shouted “Hurrah!” On the streets of Magadan, one prisoner greeted another: “I wish you great joy on this day of resurrection!” He was not the only one overwhelmed by religious sentiment: “There was a light frost, and it was very, very quiet. Soon the sky would be turning blue. Yuri Nikolaevich held up his arms and with passion declared, ‘To Holy Russia let the cocks crow! Soon it will be daylight in Holy Russia!'”

Whatever they felt, and whether they dared to show their feelings or not, most prisoners and exiles were immediately convinced that things would change. In exile in Karaganda, Olga Adamova-Sliozberg heard the news, began to tremble, and put her hands over her face so that her suspicious workmates could not see her joy. “It’s now or never. Everything’s got to change. Now or never.”

Leave a comment

Filed under USSR

by | 28 January 2005 · 8:50 pm

When Germans Threatened the Soviet Gulag

Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History (Anchor Books, 2003) describes what happened when the German Army’s Operation Barbarossa in 1941 threatened camps full of Soviet prisoners.

The experience of being on a prisoner train during an air raid was relatively unusual, however–if only because prisoners were rarely allowed on the evacuation train at all. On the train leaving one camp, the families and the baggage of camp guards and administrators took up so much space that there was no room for any prisoners. Elsewhere, industrial equipment took priority over people, both for practical and propaganda reasons. Crushed in the West, the Soviet leadership promised to rebuild itself east of the Urals. As a result, that “significant proportion” of prisoners–in fact, the overwhelming majority–who [former Gulag system chief administrator Victor] Nasedkin had said were “evacuated on foot,” endured long forced marches, descriptions of which sound hauntingly similar to the marches undertaken by the prisoners of the Nazi concentration camps four years later: “We have no transport,” one guard told an echelon of prisoners, as bombs fell around them. “Those who can walk will walk. Protest or not–all will walk. Those who can’t walk–we will shoot. We will leave no one for the Germans … you decide your own fate.”

Walk they did–although the journeys of many were cut short. The rapid advance of the Germans made the NKVD nervous, and when they became nervous, they started shooting. On July 2, the 954 prisoners of the Czortkow jail in western Ukraine began their march to the east. Along the way, the officer who wrote the subsequent report identified 123 of them as Ukrainian nationalists and shot them for “attempted rebellion and escape.” After walking for more than two weeks, with the German army within 10 to 20 miles, he shot all those still alive.

Evacuees not killed were sometimes hardly better off. Nasedkin wrote that “the apparat of the Gulag in the frontline regions was mobilized to ensure that evacuating echelons and transports of prisoners had medical-sanitary services and nourishment.” Alternatively, here is how M. Shteinberg, a political prisoner arrested for the second time in 1941, described her evacuation from Kirovograd prison:

Everything was bathed in blinding sunlight. At midday, it became unbearable. This was Ukraine, in the month of August. It was about 95 degrees [Fahrenheit] every day. An enormous quantity of people were walking, and on top of this crowd hung a hazy cloud of dust. There was nothing to breathe, it was impossible to breathe …

Everyone had a bundle in their arms. I had one too. I had even brought a coat with me, since without a coat it is hard to survive imprisonment. It’s a pillow, a blanket, a cover–everything. In most prisons, there are no beds, no mattresses, no linen. But after we had traversed 20 miles in that heat, I quietly left my bundle by the side of the road. I knew that I would not be able to carry it. The vast majority of the women did the same. Those who didn’t leave their bundles after the first 20 miles left them after 130. No one carried them to the end. When we had gone another 10 miles, I took off my shoes and left them too …

When we passed Adzhamka I dragged behind me my cell mate, Sokolovskaya, for 20 miles. She was an old woman, more than seventy years old, completely gray-haired … it was very difficult for her to walk. She clung to me, and kept talking about her fifteen-year-old grandson, with whom she had lived. The last terror in Sokolovskaya’s life was the terror that he would be arrested too. It was difficult for me to drag her, and I began to falter myself. She told me to “rest a while, I’ll go alone.” And she immediately fell back by 1 mile. We were the last in the convoy. When I felt that she had fallen behind, I turned back, wanting to get her–and I saw them kill her. They stabbed her with a bayonet. In the back. She didn’t even see it happen. Clearly, they knew how to stab. She didn’t even move. Later, I realized that hers had been an easy death, easier than that of others. She didn’t see that bayonet. She didn’t have time to be afraid.

In all, the NKVD evacuated 750,000 prisoners from 27 camps and 210 labor colonies. Another 40,000 were evacuated from 272 prisons, and sent to new prisons in the east. A significant proportion of them–though we still do not know the real numbers–never arrived.

Leave a comment

Filed under Germany, Ukraine, USSR