Far Outliers

by Joel | 12 November 2004 · 7:55 am

Indochina Makeover, 1966-1981

In the space of fifteen years, from 1966 to 1981, the character of the three countries of former French Indochina that bordered the Lower Mekong changed dramatically; Many of the changes were tragic, almost all were irrevocable. In Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam the bitter years of the Second Indochina War ushered in a period of deeply flawed peace before, in the case of Cambodia and Vietnam, former comrades-in-arms became sworn enemies. The communist victories of 1975 were the prelude to a series of events far different from those most observers had predicted as likely to occur. It was not just that the names of cities and countries changed, so that in a unified Socialist Republic of Vietnam Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City, while Cambodia became Democratic Kampuchea. The changes that took place were much more fundamental than those associated with nomenclature. And in the case of Cambodia what took place was scarcely believable.

The bloodbath that many had thought likely to follow a communist victory in Vietnam never took place. Certainly, there was retribution. Of a million persons singled out for ‘re-education’ because of their links to the defeated regime, more than 100 000 endured harsh conditions as they were locked away for long periods in remote and unhealthy labour camps. There they were expected to reflect on their ‘sins’, absorb Marxist thought, and open new areas for agriculture. Yet it seems unquestionably the case that the 30 000 or 40 000 Lao sent for re-education–a dramatically higher proportion of the population–suffered even harsher treatment at the hands of the victors than those who were interned in Vietnam. It was as if the Lao communists were determined to show that their country’s legendary reputation for gentleness and an easygoing approach to life no longer had a place in the new; ideologically oriented scheme of things. But neither in Vietnam nor in Laos did anything take place to match the tyranny and slaughter that overtook the population of Democratic Kampuchea once Cambodia fell to the Khmer Rouge in 1975 and the victors began their radical restructuring of society.

SOURCE: The Mekong: Turbulent Past, Uncertain Future, by Milton Osborne (Grove Press, 2000), pp. 194-195

Asiapages finds that ultra-Maoist Pol Pot’s cremation site has turned into a tourist attraction.

Leave a comment

Filed under Vietnam

by Joel | 11 November 2004 · 6:27 pm

Good Soldier Outlier: Two Commanding Officers

During my stint as company clerk of HQ Co., 95th Civil Affairs Group, in Ft. Gordon, GA, in 1970-71, I served under two commanding officers (COs): one white, one black, both former enlisted men.

The white captain was a grizzled, foul-mouthed, unambitious hillbilly who took good care of his men but otherwise wasn’t officer material. However, I believe he had received a battlefield commission, which would indicate a capacity for inspirational leadership under extraordinarily dire circumstances–when push came to shoot, to coin a phrase.

I don’t remember his name, but I would sometimes get mysterious phone calls from supply sergeants or mess sergeants in other units with whom he had worked out some mutually advantageous exchange of rations or equipment. And on one occasion I became embroiled in his defense of one of his greenest soldiers, a 17-year-old who had bought a ring on credit from a jewelry store in Augusta whose letterhead motto was “Serving servicemen for over 50 years”–or words to that effect.

The owner had written to ask the CO to intervene and force his lowly private to stop defaulting on his ring payments. The CO was not sympathetic, and asked me to draft a letter saying the jeweler should have known better than to extend credit to a minor without an adult cosigner. In my response I included a gratuitous rhetorical slap at the end, asking whether the store’s motto might be more accurately rendered, “Serving ourselves at the expense of servicemen for over 50 years.” He read it, grunted, and signed it. I posted it, and we never heard anything more about that soldier or his ring.

Capt. Parham was the opposite in almost every respect: all spit-and-polish, demanding yet diplomatic, ambitious for himself and his men, and determined to make a difference. He was an inspiring boss.

In an effort to improve relations with the off-base community, he organized an excursion to Gracewood State School and Hospital for the mentally retarded, just down Tobacco Road a ways. (Tobacco Road runs right into Ft. Gordon.) We were all in uniform and caused quite a stir, with many shouts of “Look at all the soldier boys! Look at all the soldier boys!”

Capt. Parham and I were both taking college courses toward a degree, and I typed up more than a few of his term papers. One of them was about Flannery O’Connor, I remember. I took two extension classes from Augusta College: a physical anthropology course and then a humanities course that was mostly Greek and Roman classics. I remember reading Plato during one all-night shift guarding the motor pool.

It was during Capt. Parham’s time that a chess fad passed through the Orderly Room. In fact, he probably initiated it. I’ve never played much chess, but at that time I happened to know precisely one opening, the Queen’s Gambit, which I put to good use the one time I couldn’t avoid a challenge. I checkmated my opponent in about 3 moves, acquired a reputation as a chess genius, and no one challenged me again. At least not until Capt. Parham brought in a checkerboard one day, challenged me, and proceeded to wipe my checkers off the board in short order.

Capt. Parham had ambitions for his men, too. And I let him down big time. It wasn’t just that I didn’t meet his high standards of spit and polish. He recommended me for NCO (Non-Commissioned Officers) school, and I was too stupid to know what I was getting into. It wasn’t until I got to Ft. McClellan, AL, and met a few representatives of my prospective cohort that I started getting cold feet, despite their enthusiasm about the presence of so many women on base at the WAC School there. Fortunately, I was asked as soon as I reported for duty whether I really wanted to be there. I replied, “No, sir!” and was on the next bus back to Ft. Gordon.

1 Comment

Filed under military, U.S.

by Joel | 11 November 2004 · 11:05 am

Iris Chang, requiescat in pace

Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking and other works, has died at the age of 36.

via Arts & Letters Daily

Jonathan Dresner posts a brief assessment of her work at the Japanese history blog Frog in a Well, and re-examines his own reactions at the History News Network’s Cliopatria.

Leave a comment

Filed under China, Japan, U.S.

by Joel | 11 November 2004 · 10:40 am

Why All Reasonable People Agree

Mark Bauerlein explains in The Chronicle:

The first protocol of academic society might be called the Common Assumption. The assumption is that all the strangers in the room at professional gatherings are liberals. Liberalism at humanities meetings serves the same purpose that scientific method does at science assemblies. It provides a base of accord. The Assumption proves correct often enough for it to join other forms of trust that enable collegial events. A fellowship is intimated, and members may speak their minds without worrying about justifying basic beliefs or curbing emotions….

After Nixon crushed McGovern in the 1972 election, the film critic Pauline Kael made a remark that has become a touchstone among conservatives. “I don’t know how Richard Nixon could have won,” she marveled. “I don’t know anybody who voted for him.” While the second sentence indicates the sheltered habitat of the Manhattan intellectual, the first signifies what social scientists call the False Consensus Effect. That effect occurs when people think that the collective opinion of their own group matches that of the larger population. If the members of a group reach a consensus and rarely encounter those who dispute it, they tend to believe that everybody thinks the same way….

The final social pattern is the Law of Group Polarization. That law–as Cass R. Sunstein, a professor of political science and of jurisprudence at the University of Chicago, has described–predicts that when like-minded people deliberate as an organized group, the general opinion shifts toward extreme versions of their common beliefs.

via Arts & Letters Daily

Leave a comment

Filed under education

by Joel | 11 November 2004 · 10:23 am

Ed Ricketts and John Steinbeck

Bruce Robison reviews Beyond the Outer Shores: The Untold Odyssey of Ed Ricketts, the Pioneering Ecologist Who Inspired John Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell, by Eric Enno Tamm (Four Walls Eight Windows, 2004) in American Scientist Online:

Ricketts is perhaps best known for having been the prototype for “Doc,” the central figure in John Steinbeck’s novels Cannery Row (1945) and Sweet Thursday (1954). By most accounts the fictional Doc, who loved women, beer and truth, was much like the man who operated Pacific Biological Laboratories on California’s Monterey Peninsula from 1923 until his untimely death in 1948.

Ricketts, who supplied prepared biological specimens to schools, was a gifted field ecologist. His coastal collecting trips led to a seminal book on intertidal ecology, Between Pacific Tides (Stanford University Press, 1939). It went beyond taxonomy to describe intertidal animals holistically, placing them in the dynamic context of their habitat and ecology. Concepts that we now take for granted, such as competitive exclusion, and habitat descriptors such as wave shock, were novel then and seemed to threaten the established order. Ricketts was “a lone, largely marginalized scientist” with no university degrees, and he had to struggle long and hard against the “dry ball” traditionalists of the time just to get the book published. Yet today it is widely regarded as a classic work in marine ecology and is now in its fifth edition.

Ricketts’s lab on Cannery Row was a magnet for scientists, writers, prostitutes, musicians, artists, academics and bums. Gatherings there included discussions of the interplay of philosophy, science and art, and often evolved into raucous, happy parties that went on for days.

Steinbeck was a frequent visitor, and Ricketts had a strong humanistic and naturalistic influence on the writer’s work in the 1930s and 1940s. Ricketts’s persona appeared in several of Steinbeck’s most powerful novels, including In Dubious Battle (1936) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Steinbeck occasionally referred to himself as a biologist, and ecological themes run through much of his finest work, as Tamm points out. Tamm also notes that except for East of Eden (1952), Steinbeck’s fiction and his literary reputation declined after Ricketts’s death.

via Arts & Letters Daily

Leave a comment

Filed under literature, science

by Joel | 10 November 2004 · 2:52 pm

Prewar Japanese Fantasies of Invading Hawai‘i

Japanese scenarios of a Hawaii invasion were generally episodes within books about imaginary wars with the United States. Such scenarios surfaced in 1913 and appeared from time to time until 1941. Japanese fantasies about a Pacific War, like analogous works appearing in the United States, grew out of deepening tensions and distrust between the two countries after 1905. Offended by anti-Japanese prejudice in California, frustrated by American obstacles to peaceful expansion in the Pacific, writers conjured up consoling victories in the realm of fantasy.

The earliest scenarios, written by authors innocent of technical knowledge about naval warfare, have a whimsical quality. Among these is Nichi-Bei kaisen yume monogatari [Fantasy on the outbreak of a Japanese-American war], which appeared in 1913 under the editorship of the National Military Affairs Association (to all appearances a private group). The book opens with the destruction of the American fleet by a Japanese squadron between Luzon and Taiwan. Japanese forces then take the Philippines and occupy Hawaii (the author noted that Hawaii presented fewer obstacles than did the Philippines). Hawaii’s fall prompts the Kaiser, Tsar, and president of France to mediate a peace settlement. The United States cedes Hawaii to Japan, and the islands are incorporated “forever” into the Empire. This book conveys two perceptions that thereafter crop up regularly in Japanese literature about Hawaii: Hawaii is a natural part of Japan, and Americans are not terribly disturbed about losing the Islands.

In 1914 Yoshikatsu Oto brought out a similar fantasy entitled Nichi-Bei moshi kaisen seba [If Japan and America fight] with a preface by a retired admiral, Seijiro Kawashima. Oto echoed the theme of Hawaii belonging to Japan, adding that this was so because doho [‘compatriots’ of Japanese ethnicity, regardless of citizenship] had developed the local economy. He even suggested that doho already held de facto political power in the Islands. Like the author of the earlier fantasy, Oto assured readers that Hawaii could be captured more easily than could the Philippines. About forty thousand troops, he estimated, should be able to land on Oahu’s north shore and deal with the fifteen thousand American defenders. The book then proceeds to describe a successful Japanese assault, followed by formal acquisition in the peace treaty.

A more extravagant scenario unfolded in Nichi-Bei senso yume monogatari [Japanese-America war fantasy] (1921) by Kojiro Sato, a retired army general. Sato portrayed the destruction of the U.S. Pacific Fleet after it has been lured to Midway, an uncanny forerunner of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s ill-fated plan twenty-one years later. Japan then seizes Hawaii and from its mid-Pacific base strikes San Francisco. Building air bases in California, Imperial forces launch bombing missions across the Rocky Mountains into the Midwest. Allies materialize from among American minorities. Ten million blacks revolt, led by Marcus Garvey.* Jews and German-Americans also rise up against the Anglo-Saxons. Eager to rectify past injustices, Mexico invades Texas. Sato brought his tale to a climax with a grand finale in New York at 9:00 A.M. Sunday morning (“when people are still asleep”). Japanese commandos blow up the Brooklyn Bridge and–using dirigibles–land on the Woolworth Building. Washington sues for peace, and Lothrop Stoddard** joins the surrender negotiations.

Footnotes:

* Marcus Garvey (1887-1940). Jamaica-born black nationalist who lived in New York from 1916 until his deportation to Jamaica in 1927.

** Lothrop Stoddard (1883-1950). Author of a notorious racist tract, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy (1920).

SOURCE: Hawaii Under the Rising Sun: Japan’s Plans for Conquest After Pearl Harbor, by John J. Stephan (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1984), pp. 59-60

Leave a comment

Filed under Hawai'i

by Joel | 10 November 2004 · 2:28 pm

Collaboration Potential in Hawai‘i: Universal

Collaboration is a pejorative word. Often misused, it is inappropriate for those Japanese-Americans whose circumstances and inclinations led them to serve Japan during World War II. On the other hand in Hawaii, potential collaboration was by no means confined to Japanese-Americans. Any resident of the Islands in 1942, regardless of ethnicity, probably speculated on what life would be like in the event of a successful Japanese invasion. Any rational mind considering that contingency would most likely conclude that a degree of collaboration would be hard to avoid. Unlike the Philippines, Hawaii was physically too small for anyone to avoid contact with occupation authorities. A guerrilla movement would have been virtually suicidal. There is little evidence that either the military or civilians were prepared to fight to the last man should Hawaii have been assaulted. On the contrary, many probably shared the views of a State Department special agent who in a report written several weeks before 7 December 1941 acknowledged: “If the Japanese fleet arrived, doubtless great numbers of them [Hawaii Japanese] would then forget their American loyalties and shout a ‘Banzai’ from the shore. Under those circumstances, if this reporter were there he is not sure that he might not do it also to save his own skin, if not his face.”

These words were not written by a coward. Dying to the last man, woman, and child (gyokusai as the Japanese called it in those desperate defenses of Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa) was neither a tenet of American military doctrine nor consonant with American historical experience, the Alamo notwithstanding….

Consequently, if the choice were to collaborate or face suicidal odds, there is little doubt but that Hawaii’s residents would have opted, in the British phrase, to “carry on” with as much dignity as possible. The scale and degree of collaboration would probably have depended upon many obvious and subtle factors, among them individual character, the content and style of occupation policies, the conduct of occupation authorities and garrison troops, and the local assessment of Japan’s prospects for winning the war or at least for repelling an American counterattack.

SOURCE: Hawaii Under the Rising Sun: Japan’s Plans for Conquest After Pearl Harbor, by John J. Stephan (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1984), pp. 8-9

Leave a comment

Filed under Hawai'i

by Joel | 8 November 2004 · 7:53 am

Gunboat Diplomacy in Cambodia, 1880s

Between 1881 and 1887 France steadily, and in many cases bloodily, moved to assert its control over the whole of Vietnam…. Yet France’s position in Cambodia was only assured after three uncertain years between 1884 and 1887, after French gunboat diplomacy on the Mekong led to a major rebellion against French control.

Ever since the conclusion of the treaty granting France a ‘protectorate’ in 1863, French officials in Phnom Penh, and their superiors in both Saigon and Paris, had looked on King Norodom with an ambivalent eye….

By the early 1880s French officialdom’s patience with Norodom was wearing thin. French troops had had to put down a rebellion led by one of Norodom’s half-brothers, Si Vatha, who then retreated to the jungle fastnesses beside the Mekong near the Sambor rapids. In actions that echoed King Satha’s attempt to gain support from Manila in the sixteenth century; the king himself had tried unsuccessfully to enter into a secret treaty with the Spanish government. And, against strict French direction, Norodom had allotted the rights to the kingdom’s opium farm to one of his court cronies, without consulting his ‘protectors’. This last act he sought to excuse as the result of his having been drunk at the time. Two factors finally brought a French decision to act against him in 1884. There was renewed concern that the British were seeking to increase their influence in Siam, a prospect that prompted French officials to tighten their grip over Cambodia. At the same time, the newly appointed Governor of Cochinchina, Charles Thomson, decided to increase French control over the kingdom and that an end had to be put to Norodom’s financial profligacy. To achieve this goal Thomson told the king that, henceforth, France would be responsible for collecting the kingdom’s customs duties….

The stage was now set for one of the best known tableaux in nineteenth century Cambodian history. On 17 June 1884, Thomson strode into the king’s private chambers within the palace in a brusque display of lèse-majesté, waking Norodom with the noise of his entry. He then read aloud the terms of new administrative arrangements for the kingdom which gave France much greater power over Cambodia’ s affairs than it had previously exercised. Hearing these terms, Norodom’s interpreter, Coi de Monteiro, a Cambodian of Iberian ancestry who had once also acted as an interpreter for [Mekong explorer] Doudart de Lagrée, is said to have cried: ‘Sire, this is not a convention, it is an abdication’. Thomson’s aides hurried de Monteiro from the room, leaving a furious Thomson confronting a worried Norodom.

At this point, if one of the accounts of this dramatic encounter can be trusted, Thomson pointed to the gunboats moored within sight of the palace. If Norodom refused to sign the new convention, Thomson told him, he would be confined aboard one of the gunboats. ‘What will you do with me aboard the Alouette?’ the king is supposed to have asked. ‘That is my secret,’ was Thomson’s reported reply.

Literally outgunned, knowing that his half-brother Sisowath was a French pawn, and recognising that Thomson would indeed force him from the throne if he failed to sign the new convention, Norodom buckled under. The gunboats returned down the Mekong and the kingdom seemed, for the moment, at peace. It was an illusion, and within less than a year a full-scale rebellion against French control was in force. Given the fact that gunboats on the Mekong were vital to Thomson’s having gained Norodom’s acquiescence, there is historic irony in the fact that a French army post sited on the Mekong just below the Sambor rapids was the first target for a rebel attack when the rebellion began. More than two years were required before the French, making major concessions to Norodom, were once more able to claim that their ‘protection’ of Cambodia was untroubled.

SOURCE: The Mekong: Turbulent Past, Uncertain Future, by Milton Osborne (Grove Press, 2000), pp. 125-129

Leave a comment

Filed under Vietnam

by Joel | 8 November 2004 · 7:03 am

Far Outlying Election Reactions

On U.S. election day, Oxblogger Patrick Belton had an article in The Hill on How world capitals see Bush and Kerry. Here’s what he had to say about Africa.

Ambassador Princeton Lyman, a former envoy in Nigeria and South Africa, fears a Kerry victory “might spell difficulty in obtaining congressional support for Bush’s various initiatives for Africa–President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the Millennium Challenge Account–since Republicans in Congress would be less likely to support these for a Democratic Administration at the same level.”

Many African leaders, accordingly, prefer Bush. According to an official in the Central Intelligence Agency who studies the region, he has shown greater interest in Africa than its predecessor. Africa policy has been largely guided by energy interests, combined with a need for military support for regional peacekeeping missions such as in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Bush has formed close personal relationships with many west African heads of state, including the evangelical Christian Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria and Paul Biya of Cameroon, whose invitation to a state dinner in Washington in March 2003 represented a breaking point with his country’s traditional alignment with the Elysée. (The shift was reinforced one year later, when Biya visited London and was greeted by working sessions with ministers and a reception by the Queen.) Conversely, there is growing discontent in Nigeria with the increasingly authoritarian and corrupt Obasanjo, whom the same analyst notes in 2003 received from Washington and London “a free pass in a very flawed election.” Whichever administration finds itself in power during the next cycle of African elections in 2007 will have to choose whether to side with Washington’s friends, or withhold its blessing should elections again result–as in 2003–in massive irregularities and evidence of violence and voter intimidation.

South Africa, which harbors ambitions of a global role via a permanent seat in the U.N. Security Council, is in the opposing camp and prefers Kerry as more likely to support the institution, notes Murray Wesson, a South African law researcher at Oxford.

In light of the results, Macam-macam summarizes the reactions of several Southeast Asian leaders, and Siberian Light discusses the prospects for Russian-American relations.

Leave a comment

Filed under Africa, democracy, U.S.

by Joel | 7 November 2004 · 9:32 am

Melville’s Model of Madness

BEFORE SHIPPING ON the fictional Pequod, the narrator, Ishmael, was warned that Ahab “was a little out of his mind for a spell” on the passage home from his last voyage. “He’s sick, they say,” Ishmael admitted in reply, “but is getting better, and will be all right again before long”–at which the prophet who had delivered the advice snorted derisively, “All right again before long!”

Captain Ahab had a brilliant mind and was extremely brave, but was also clearly crazy. Captain Norris of the Sharon was all of these, too–he was sharp-witted, courageous in the boats, and patently deranged. On a whaleship, just as on a southern plantation, a brutal master might whip those under him, but only an insane master would whip any of his hands to death, because he was depriving himself of labor.

The character of Captain Ahab is popularly assumed to be based at least in part on the real-life commander of the Acushnet, Captain Valentine Pease. The novelist noted later that Pease ended up “in asylum at the Vineyard”–and this, it seems, was not all that uncommon. The Rev. Joseph Thaxter, minister of the Edgartown Congregational Church from 1780 to 1827, flatly declared, “Insanity prevails much.” Strangely, he attributed it to “the Purity of the air and Water.” Whatever the cause, it does indicate that mental instability was not at all unknown in the clannish communities of New England–which also infers that the shipowners might have had an inkling that some of the men they entrusted with their ships were a danger to their own crews. Perhaps, as Melville suggested, they even believed that a half-mad captain “was all the better qualified and set on edge, for a pursuit so full of rage and wildness as the bloody hunt of whales.”

However, this is hard to credit where the managing owners of the Sharon, Gibbs & Jenney, were concerned–Jenney in particular. The family featured prominently in Fairhaven whaling, the Jenney name cropping up repeatedly in whaling crew lists. While the Gibbs & Jenney-owned Sharon cruised unhappily about the western Pacific in 1842, no less than nineteen family members were at sea in whaleships. They ranged in rank from greenhand upward: six were boatsteerers, five were either first or second mates, and three were captains. Hardheaded as shipowners were reputed to be, it is scarcely likely that Jenney would knowingly appoint a potential murderer to the quarterdeck of one of his vessels.

The two other Jenney-owned ships that departed from Fairhaven in 1841–Hesper and Columbus–had men of good reputation in command. Captain Ichabod Handy of the Hesperus was well thought of by the missionaries, later on playing a crucial part in the establishment of a mission in the Caroline Islands. He had a very good relationship with the Pacific Islanders he dealt with, going down in history as one of the pioneers of the coconut oil trade. Captain Frederick Fish of the Columbus, as well as being famous for short voyages and good cargoes, was considered “free-hearted” by a whaling wife who gammed [= visited on board] with him, Mary Brewster of the Connecticut whaleship Tiger–a woman who was not known for her charitable opinions of her husband’s fellow skippers.

If the firm had known what Norris was doing, they would have wanted him stopped. However, the only man on board with the authority to restrain the captain was the first officer–Thomas Harlock Smith. In fact, it was his obligation. The brutality was bad enough, but the murder was the last straw. According to Section Three of the Seamen’s Act, it was Thomas Harlock Smith’s duty to arrest Captain Norris, confine him to his quarters, sail to the nearest port with a U.S. consul–Guam–and hand him over for commitment for trial. But he did nothing, and neither did his cousin, Nathan Smith.