by | 12 August 2004 · 7:54 pm

Republicans in Dallas, 1984

IT WAS in Dallas in 1984, at the Republican convention, that the idea of traveling in the American South, or Southeast, came to me. I had never been in the South before; and though Dallas was not part of the Southeast I later chose to travel in, I had a sufficiently strong sense there of a region quite distinct from New York and New England, which were essentially all that I knew of the United States….

It was mid-August, and hot. I liked the contrast on the downtown streets of bright light and the deep shadows of tall buildings, and the strange feel of another, more temperate climate that those shadows gave. One constantly played with contrasts like that. The tinted glass of the hotel room softened the glare of the hot sky: the true color of the sky, outside, was always a surprise. Air conditioning in hotels, cars, and the convention center made the heat, in one’s passages through it, stimulating.

The heat was a revelation. It made one think of the old days. Together with the great distances, it gave another idea of the lives of the early settlers. But now the very weather of the South had been made to work the other way. The heat that should have debilitated had been turned into a source of pleasure, a sensual excitement, an attraction: a political convention could be held in Dallas in the middle of August.

On the wall at the back of the podium in the convention center the flags of the states were laid flat, in alphabetical order. The flags of the older states were distinctive; they made me think of the British-colonial flag (and the British-given colonial motto, in Latin, from Virgil) I had known as a child in Trinidad. And for the first time it occurred to me that Trinidad, a former British colony (from 1797), and an agricultural slave colony (until 1833, when slavery was abolished in the British Empire), would have had more in common with the old slave states of the Southeast than with New England or the newer European-immigrant states of the North. That should have occurred to me a long time before, but it hadn’t. What I had heard as a child about the racial demeanor of the South had been too shocking. It had tainted the United States, and had made me close my mind to the South.

The convention center was very big. The eye could not take it all in at once. In that vast space the figures on the podium looked small. They could have been lost; but a big screen above them magnified their image, and scores of smaller screens all over the center repeated this living, filmed picture. It was hypnotic, that same face or gesture in close-up coming at one from so many angles. The aim might only have been communication and clarity; but no more grandiose statement could have been made about the primacy of men; nothing could have so attempted to stretch out the glory of the passing moment. And yet, almost as part of its political virtue, this convention dealt in piety and humility and heaven, and daily abased itself before God.

A famous local Baptist pastor spoke the final benediction. His church organization was prodigious; its property in downtown Dallas was said by the newspapers to be worth very many millions. His service, on the Sunday after the convention, was to a packed congregation. It was also being carried on television; and it was a full, costumed production, with music and singing. But the hellfire sermon might have come from a simpler, rougher time, when perhaps for five or six months of the year people had no escape from the heat, when travel was hard, when people lived narrowly in the communities into which they had been born, and life was given meaning only by absolute religious certainties.

I began to think of writing about the South. My first travel book–undertaken at the suggestion of Eric Williams, the first black prime minister of Trinidad–had been about some of the former slave colonies of the Caribbean and South America. I was twenty-eight then. It seemed to me fitting that my last [or, fortunately, latest] travel book–travel on a theme–should be about the old slave states of the American Southeast.

My thoughts–in Dallas, and then in New York, when I was planning the journey–were about the race issue. I didn’t know then that that issue would quickly work itself out during the journey, and that my subject would become that other South–of order and faith, and music and melancholy–which I didn’t know about, but of which I had been given an intimation in Dallas.

SOURCE: A Turn in the South, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1989), pp. 23-25

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by | 11 August 2004 · 9:55 pm

"Everything happens in the church."

The church inside was as plain and neat as it was outside. It had newish blond hardwood pews and a fawn-colored carpet. At the end of the hall, on a dais, was the choir, with a pianist on either side. The men of the choir, in the back row, were in suits; the women and girls, in the three front rows, were in gold gowns. So that it was like a local and smaller version of what we had been seeing on the television in Hetty’s sitting room.

At the back of the choir, at the back of the girls in gold and the men in dark suits, was a large, oddly transparent-looking painting of the baptism of Christ: the water blue, the riverbanks green. The whiteness of Christ and the Baptist was a surprise. (As much a surprise as, the previous night, in the house of the old retired black teacher, the picture of Jesus Christ had been: a bearded figure, looking like General Custer in Little Big Man.) But perhaps the surprise or incongruity lay only in my eyes, the whiteness of Jesus being as much an iconographical element as the blueness of the gods in the Hindu pantheon, or the Indianness of the first Buddhist missionary, Daruma, in Japanese art.

The singing ended. It was time for “Reports, Announcements, and Recognition of Visitors.” The short black man in a dark suit who announced this–not the pastor–spoke the last word in an extraordinary way, breaking the word up into syllables and then, as though to extract the last bit of flavor from the word, giving a mighty stress to the final syllable, saying something like “vee-zee-TORRS.”

He spoke, and waited for declarations. One man got up and said he had come from Philadelphia; he had come back to see some of his family. Then Hetty stood up, in her flat blue hat and pink dress. She looked at us and then addressed the man in the dark suit. We were friends of her son, she said. He was outside somewhere. She explained Jimmy’s tieless and jacketless appearance, and asked forgiveness for it.

We got up then, I first, Jimmy after me, and announced ourselves as the man from Philadelphia had done. A pale woman in one of the front rows turned around and said to us that she too was from New York; she welcomed us as people from New York. It was like a binding together, I thought. And when, afterwards, the man in the dark suit spoke of brothers and sisters, the words seemed to have a more than formal meaning.

The brass basin for the collection was passed up and down the pews. (The figure for the previous week’s collection, a little over $350, was given in the order of service.) The pastor, a young man with a clear, educated voice, asked us to meditate on the miracle of Easter. To help us, he called on the choir.

The leader of the choir, a big woman, adjusted the microphone. And after this small, delicate gesture, there was passion. The hymn was “What About Me?” There was hand-clapping from the choir, and swaying. One man stood up in the congregation–he was in a brown suit–and he clapped and sang. A woman in white, with a white hat, got up and sang. So I began to feel the pleasures of the religious meeting: the pleasures of brotherhood, union, formality, ritual, clothes, music, all combining to create a possibility of ecstasy.

It was the formality–derived by these black people from so many sources–that was the surprise; and the idea of community.

Someone else in a suit got up and spoke to the congregation after the black man in the dark suit had spoken. “This is a great day,” the new speaker said. “This is the day the Lord rose. He rose for everybody.” There were constant subdued cries of “Amen!” from the congregation. The speaker said, “A lot of people better off than we are didn’t have this privilege.”

Finally the educated young pastor in his elegant gown with two red crosses spoke. “Jesus had to pray. We have to pray. Jesus had to cry. We have to cry…. God has been so good to us. He has given us a second chance.”

Torture and tears, luck and grief: these were the motifs of this religion, this binding, this consoling union–union the unexpected, moving idea to me. And, as in Muslim countries, I understood the power a preacher might have.

As Howard said afterwards, as he and Jimmy and I were walking back to the house, “Everything happens in the church.”

Amen.

SOURCE: A Turn in the South, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1989), pp. 14-15

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by | 11 August 2004 · 5:31 pm

Football/Soccer Hooliganism in East Asia

The new, multilingual East Asian International Affairs group blog has a long post by Muninn‘s KMLawson on Reading the Asian Cup in greater historical and geographical context. It’s a long post, worth reading in its entirety, but I’ll just quote the last three paragraphs.

Survey results from an annual study done by Mitsubishi’s Research Institute’s China Handbook show that Japanese feelings of “intimacy” towards the Chinese people has been dropping almost every year since the 1978 signing of the Peace and Friendship Treaty, with a small boost around 1997 (the latest results I saw were from 2000, let me know if you have newer results). It is difficult to gauge exactly how important such data is, but it casts some doubt on the idea that Japan is the warm and fuzzy partner in the relationship. In the aftermath of the Asia Cup, when the Japanese media pointed to the anti-Japanese postings on the many online bulletin boards, the Japanese graduate student Iida Takeshi (飯田健) studying political science at the University of Texas wrote on his blog’s 8/9 entry, “Japan is just the same. If you go to Japanese bulletin boards, you’ll find plenty of postings that are discriminatory towards Koreans and Chinese.” Sean Curtin in an Asia Times article on the final game quotes a Yomiuri article as saying that “Chinese society condones insulting Japan.” This is again not much different in Japan, where those who insult China [or the U.S.] seem to have little difficulty in getting elected governor of Tokyo.

If we accept the idea that fans the world over generally believe that a soccer stadium is, as one Japanese graduate student I spoke to put it, “A place for us to make a ruckus” (我々が騒ぐ場所) and we don’t assume that Chinese soccer fans and hooligans represent the “character of the Chinese people,” then there is plenty of reason to believe that the future of Sino-Japanese relations is bright. In addition to a growing trade relationship and growing interaction between Japanese and Chinese as tourists, students, etc., there are two other developments. The Chinese government has significantly shifted its approach in diplomacy with Japan, and while this is still in a period of adjustment, it has already caught the attention of many scholars in China and Japan. Secondly, fewer Chinese believe it worth storming the Japanese embassy every time its Prime Minister decides to pay homage to war criminals, and the crowds have shrunk in size during recent visits. China’s foreign minister lodges a protest, as he did today in response to Koizumi’s pledge to continue his visits to Yasukuni. This is not to say that Chinese people or government have suddenly come to accept Japan’s misbehavior and the continued strength of nationalist right wing narratives of Japan’s last century. Instead, it is an indication that many Chinese believe there are more effective ways to address these issues.

The official responses to the Asia Cup crisis have wrapped up quietly. The Japanese government protested, and the Chinese ambassador responded with an expression of regret that some Chinese fans behaved irresponsibly. As many articles have pointed out, however, there are a number of issues that remain. Unfortunately, I suspect that the dominant trend in the Japanese media will be to continue highlighting Chinese anti-Japanese sentiment and any domestic crime committed by Chinese migrants, even as the Chinese media will continue to suggest that the Japanese government has never apologized for wartime atrocities, that Japanese textbooks all deny the country’s past aggression, and dangerously portray the outlandish historical claims of some Japanese as representative of the opinions of the people in Japan as a whole. Much of the tension in Sino-Japanese relations traces to the question of history, that is, how the past is portrayed. We should also note, however, that the gap in perceptions are not limited to the understanding of a war long past–but also for soccer games still only a hangover away.

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by | 10 August 2004 · 6:00 pm

Down Home: A Landscape of Small Ruins

Regular readers know I’m an avid fan of V.S. Naipaul, from whose book Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples I’ve excerpted many passages on this blog. I thought it only fair to accompany Naipaul as he encounters some of the Christian peoples of a part of the world with which I’m more intimately familiar. So I’ve begun reading A Turn in the South (Vintage, 1989). And it does not disappoint.

The epigraph quotes the first two lines of the following reply by Warwick to his king in Shakespeare’s King Henry IV Part 2:

There is a history in all men’s lives,

Figuring the natures of the times deceased;

The which observed, a man may prophesy,

With a near aim, of the main chance of things

As yet not come to life, who in their seeds

And weak beginning lie intreasured.

That is certainly the goal of most of my reading these days. And the following passage rings true to me, an expatriate son of generations buried in family plots scattered over the landscape of Virginia. Naipaul’s opening chapter is entitled, “Down Home: A Landscape of Small Ruins.”

JIMMY WORKED in New York as a designer and lettering artist. Howard was his assistant. Jimmy, who could become depressed at times, said to Howard one day, “Howard, if I had to give up, and you couldn’t get another job, what would you do?” Howard, who was from the South, said, “I would go home to my mama.”

Jimmy was as struck by this as I was when Jimmy told me: that Howard had something neither Jimmy nor I had, a patch of the earth he thought of as home, absolutely his. And that was where–many months after I had heard this story–I thought I should begin this book about the South: with the home that Howard had….

Later [after arriving in Bowen/Peters, North Carolina], we went out for a drive. Hetty [Howard’s mama] knew the land well; she knew who owned what. It was like a chant from her, as we drove.

“Black people there, black people there, white people there. Black people, black people, white people, black people. All this side black people, all this side white people. White people, white people, black people, white people.”

Sometimes she said, “Black people used to own this land.” She didn’t like that–that black people had lost land because they had been slack or because of family disputes. But blacks and whites appeared here to live quite close to one another, and Hetty herself had no racial complaints. White people had been good to her, she said. But then she said that that might have been only because she liked people.

It was a landscape of small ruins. Houses and farmhouses and tobacco barns had simply been abandoned. The decay of each was individual, and they were all beautiful in the afternoon light. Some farmhouses had very wide eaves, going down low, the corrugated iron that once provided shelter now like a too-heavy weight, the corrugated-iron sheets sagging, fanning out in places.

We went to see the house, now abandoned, where Hetty’s father had lived when he had sharecropped for Mr. Smith. Bush grew right up against the open house. The pecan trees, still almost bare, just a few leaves now, were tall above the house and the tobacco barns. The colors were gray (tree trunks and weathered timber) and red (rusted corrugated iron) and green and the straw-gold of reeds. As we stood there Hetty told us of the death of her father in that house; the event was still vivid to her.

Another house, even more beautiful, was where Hetty and her husband had lived for ten years. It was a farmhouse with a big green field, with forest trees bounding the distance on every side.

Home was not for Howard just his mother’s house, the little green house that was now closed up, or the new concrete-block house she had moved to. Home was what we had seen. And we had seen only apart: all about these country roads, within a few miles, were houses and fields connected with various members of Howard’s family. It was a richer and more complicated past than I had imagined; and physically much more beautiful. The houses I was taken to were bigger than the houses many people in Trinidad or England might have lived in.

But, still, in the past there was that point where darkness fell, the historical darkness, even here, which was home….

TWO DAYS later, in New York (and just before I began my true Southern journey), I talked again with Howard, to make sure I had got certain things right. About the presence of Asians and Cubans and Mexicans he said, “I get very pro-American when I think about that.” And that pro-American attitude extended to foreign affairs, which were his special interest. So, starting from the small Southern black community of Bowen, Howard had become a conservative. He said, “I think that when you come out of a Southern Baptist background that is the groundwork of being a conservative.”

UPDATE: The Tanuki Ramble adds more on Naipaul, including the following passage from A Turn in the South, which the Tanuki read about a year ago.

That had been the great discovery so far in my travels so far in the South. In no other part of the world had I found people so driven by the idea of good behavior and the good religious life. And that was true for black and white.

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by | 9 August 2004 · 6:44 pm

Nagasaki, Atomic Radiation, and Godzilla

Today, on the 59th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Japan experienced yet another accident in a nuclear power plant, and I received academic junk mail about an exhibit in Lawrence, Kansas, entitled In Godzilla’s Footsteps: Japanese Pop Culture Icons on the Global Stage.

Here’s an excerpt from an obituary of Godzilla creator Tanaka Tomoyuki (1910-1997).

Wakened from his deep-sea slumber by a series of careless H-bomb tests, Godzilla first took his Tokyo-destroying act to the big screen in an eponymously titled 1954 debut. Curiously, Tanaka’s original aim was not to glorify the wanton squishing of human beings and their abodes, but rather to illuminate the dangers of the atomic age. Godzilla, King of the Monsters was all about getting on a moral high horse and condemning the United States for its silly pummeling of helpless Pacific atolls with multimegaton packages. Funny thing was, audiences didn’t care one whit for the preaching. As we all discovered at around age 4 or 5, mind-numbing cinematic violence is a whole heck of a lot more entertaining than … well, than just about anything else. Tanaka, super genius that he was, picked up on this vibe like a pterodactyl stealing a stegosaurus egg. If the public–especially those American kiddie-matinee patrons eating their Red Vines and digging on the amateur dubbing jobs wanted mass destruction, then by golly! — that’s what they were going to get.

Meanwhile, Godzilla: The Uncut Japanese Original is making its U.S. debut.

You may think you’ve seen “Godzilla,” the monster flick that launched hundreds of campy sequels. But chances are, you saw “Godzilla: King of the Monsters!”

This American bowdlerization of the original 1954 Japanese version included reshot scenes with Raymond Burr, just so the movie could have an American character. It cut out some 40 minutes of material, completely changed the tone of the ending and dubbed the whole thing in English. It even superimposed Burr into existing scenes, so he would seem to interact with the Japanese characters. Reconstituted as a cheese-ball monster flick, it was a far cry from the initial vision: a sobering cautionary tale about the dangers of nuclear proliferation.

To mark the movie’s 50th anniversary, a beautifully restruck print (with the unwieldy title: “Godzilla: The Uncut Japanese Original”) has been released for the first time in the United States. Here’s an opportunity to see the first — and a radically different — film (known as “Gojira” [like Gorilla–get it?]) in all its glory. It’s in Japanese with English subtitles. The images are crisp. The story is restored. And there’s no sign of Raymond Burr….

There are some campy elements left in the original. Some of the acting is ham-handed. Many of the big crowd scenes seem amusingly quaint…. But despite these moments, there’s a surprisingly powerful thrust to this film. And it’s instructive to recall the political era in which the movie was made. The atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still recent memories. And in 1954, the crew of a Japanese fishing trawler had been fatally radiated by the fallout of a nuclear H-bomb test.

Thus, the notion of a sea monster that has been irradiated from atomic tests and is threatening to emerge from the sea is more than a cartoonish cheap thrill. It’s a very real metaphor for doomsday. Which is why, when a character in the restored “Godzilla” almost casually mentions that she’s a survivor of Nagasaki, it’s chilling.

The political messages in Godzilla sequels changed over time.

In the 1950s and ’60s, Japan was still suffering through its post-war comeuppance. In the 1980s and 1990s, Japan had been transformed into a technological and economic powerhouse. The new series of Godzilla movies, released through the 1990s, had to come up with a whole new series of rationales about why Japan deserved to be punished.

In the most overtly political film of the new series [in 1991], “Godzilla vs. King Gidorah,” White Guys from the future come back through time to “help” Japan by getting rid of Godzilla. However, the White Guys have a hidden agenda. You see, in the future, Japan’s economic might has grown so great that all the other nations of the world pale in comparison, and Japan dominates the Earth. The disgruntled White Guys get rid of Godzilla and replace him with King Gidorah (the three-headed dragon) whose purpose is to destroy Japan so that White Guys can take their place as the rightful owners of everything.

Oh, but wait, there’s more! We also learn the secret origin of Godzilla, who was once a surviving dinosaur on a Pacific Island, where he saved a garrison of Japanese soldiers from bloodthirsty American troops during World War II, then was subsequently exposed to the radiation which transformed him into Godzilla proper. So Godzilla is not only pro-Japan, he’s also anti-American.

Thank goodness Godzilla Matsui is now protecting New York–or at least the Bronx, while Little Matsui protects Queens.

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by | 9 August 2004 · 5:58 pm

The New Guinea Schoolboy and the Japanese Straggler

The following story was told to me in 1976 by a man from Morobe Province, New Guinea who was a noted traveler and raconteur whose nickname was “Samarai,” because he had once spent time there. An earlier The following story was told to me in 1976 by a man from Morobe Province, New Guinea who was a noted traveler and raconteur whose nickname was “Samarai,” because he had once spent time there. An earlier episode, The New Guinea Schoolboy and the Japanese Officer, was posted in May.

In this rough translation, I’ve tried to capture the storyteller’s idiom without presuming too much specialized knowledge on the part of my readers. We can be sure the story has “improved” over countless retellings, but it nevertheless conveys a third-party perspective on the Pacific War that is too rarely heard. For more local reactions to the Pacific War in Papua New Guina, consult the Australian-Japan Research Project.

We went and slept until the first crack of dawn when it was my time to sound reveille. So I went and struck the, dakine, slitgong: “Kuing, kuing, kuing, kuing, kuing.” So then the boys woke up and bathed and washed their faces. When they finished, okay, the bell rang.

The bell rang and all the people went to school and were singing. As soon as they finished, I ran right up behind the school and stood atop a rock.

When I looked out, I could see as far as the Huon Gulf and, okay, it was completely dark.

I said, “Hey guys, come look at something. The boys said, “What is it?”

“Come look!” And when they looked, “Guys, let’s scatter!”

Okay, they went and gathered up their things and fled into the forest. Before we left, the guns started sounding, “Bum, bum, bum.” They were firing at the soldiers at Singkau and Kabwum and Lae and Salamaua. You could see fire and smoke all over the place.

Okay, all the Bukawa and Hopoi people went into the forest. I ran to my house and roasted some taro cakes under a tree. I planned to take two to eat in the forest.

I was doing that and our teacher Gidisai and his wife and kids came up. And just then a crazy Japanese man came up. He had no gun, no knife, just walking around empty-handed.

“E, Kapten!”

So I said, “What?”

“E, Kapten, Japan boi hangre, ya.”

“Oh, I don’t have any food.”

“A, banana sabis [= ‘free’], ya? Japan boi hangre, ya.”

The teacher said, “Are you crazy or what? You go fight!”

“O, nogat [= ‘no’], ya. Japan boi sik na hangre, ya.”

“Oh.” I heard that so I stayed and thought, “Oh, if he stays there, the guns will kill our teacher for sure.” So I stood by and didn’t go into the forest.

I was standing there waiting and, suddenly, “Japan boi, yu mekim wanem [= ‘you do what’]?”

“Boi, hangre, a, imo [= ‘tuber’] sabis, ya? Imo sabis?”

“O, imo planti planti istap faia [= ‘are on the fire’]. Olgeta sabis [= ‘all free’]! Kam kaikai [= ‘come eat’]!

He went and sat down and ate taro and I said to the teacher, “You all go quickly!”

So they ran way over into the forest and hid themselves in the rocks. And then I said, “Japan boi! Yu kaikai. Yu stap. Yu slip haus. Mi go.”

“Mm.”

Okay. I took my things and ran into the forest.

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by | 8 August 2004 · 7:34 pm

Khazaria’s Legacy in Central Asia

IIAS Newsletter 34 in July 2004 contains yet another article of interest, “Assessing Khazaria” (PDF), by Paul Meerts.

The Khazars enter history in the fifth century AD. In the thirteenth, they disappear. Why are these seminomads, who reigned from the Caucasus and the Urals to the Caspian and the Dnieper of interest to students of Eurasian history?

First, because the Khazars, along with the Franks and the Byzantines, served as a dam against the tide of Islam, then threatening Europe from three sides. Second, because the Khazarian Empire had a very particular dual structure of government. Third, the Khazars had an enduring influence on their neighbours, and as allies of the Greeks, contributed to the perpetuation of Eastern Rome. Last but not least, religion draws our attention. Though many Khazars were Muslim or Christian, the leading clans, as well as the royal family, adopted the Mosaic laws.

Independent Khazaria

With the disintegration of the Western Turkish Empire in the seventh century AD, the Khazars were freed from the yoke of their Turkic brethren. Henceforth Khazar external relations were with neighbouring tribes, the Bulgars and Magyars who became their vassals, Byzantines, Arabs, Russians and to a lesser extent, Ostrogoths and Vikings. The Khazars influenced world history through the Bulgars, Seljuks and Magyars. They split the Bulgars into two confederations, one which moved West and conquered present-day Bulgaria, the so-called proto-Bulgarians. Arpad, leading his people to present-day Hungary, was a Khazar-nominated Khan. Seljuk who took his Turks to present-day Turkey, was the son of Timuryalik, an officer in the service of the Khazars….

The beginning of the end

By the tenth century Khazar relations with the Byzantines had soured…. Arab-Khazar relations were more hostile. Although many more Khazars were Muslim than Christian, the history of Khazaria is riddled by wars with Arab invaders. Arab forces made deep incursions into Khazar territory, conquering the Caucasus, destroying the former Khazar capitals of Balanjar and Samandar and threatening the capital Khazaran-Itil (Atil) on the lower stretches of the Volga.

With the rise of the Kievan-Rus state in Ukraine a new enemy arose at the end of the tenth century…. The downfall of the Khazar Empire came in 1016 as a consequence of combined Byzantinian and Kievan actions….

Power dispersed

Khazaria’s political system might provide the key to understanding Khazaria’s downfall. Like other Turkic peoples, the Khazars had a system of tribal and clan rule. Of the many tribes that made-up the empire, one or two were dominant. Within these tribes, leading clans existed, and within the clan were leading families; the royal family came from the leading clan. This did not mean, however, that the royal family held de-facto power in the country. Real power was wielded by the Beg, comparable to the great-vizir, shogun, or hofmeijer….

Economic dependency

Khazaria’s economy, unlike the steppe empires where cattle breeding was the dominant source of income, depended on trade and agriculture. Cattle, rice, fish and wheat were the most important products. The country was situated at a crossroads on the silk-route. The Khazars’ tolerance attracted many traders, among them Greeks, Arabs and Jews. Besides the trade with Byzantium, the Caspian offered numerous possibilities for exchange with Persians and Arabs. This oriental trade was supported by raw materials found in the Caucasus, such as gold and silver. The slave trade was also important. Russians brought slaves from the North to the slave-market in Itil, who where then shipped to the Muslim lands in the South. Russians, Bulgars and Burtas brought in furs and fish. Tributes paid by vassal tribes and the Caliph added to the Khazar treasury, as did transiting merchants who paid ten percent of the value of their goods to tax collectors….

The odd man out

The third factor undermining the power of Khazaria was its religion. The Khazar Khagan Bulan accepted the Jewish faith in the second half of the ninth century; his successor Obadiah established synagogues and Judaic schools. The reason for the conversion to Judaism might well have been political. Conversion to Islam would have brought Khazaria under its archenemy, the Caliph. Conversion to Christianity would have made the country too dependent on Constantinople, which, though Khazaria’s main ally, could never be fully trusted.

Judaism was an elegant third way out. But this choice also meant isolation and the danger of being crushed between two powerful monotheist faiths, one from the South and one from the West. And so it happened. There was no brother power to call to in the end….

Khazaria was an enigma in world history. The Khazar Empire governed a crucial region on the Eurasian crossroads for over three hundred years, with social and state structures not readily found elsewhere. The conversion to Judaism of their leaders and tribes might not be unique in history, but remains a fascinating event that has stirred the imaginations of many.

Like many other horse riders, their state withered away, leaving traces that can be seen today. Without the Khazar Empire, present-day Bulgaria and Hungary might not exist in their present forms; this may be true for Turkey and Ukraine as well. Even after a millennium we find words pointing to Khazaria, such as the name of the largest inland sea on earth (Khazar Sea in Farsi, Turkish and Arabic).

There’s more at www.khazaria.com.

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by | 8 August 2004 · 4:19 pm

Pacific War U.S. Soldier’s Photo Album

The Library of Congress collection Experiencing War: Stories from the Veterans History Project includes a photo album by Denton W. Crocker, a “bug-chaser” medic in a malaria survey unit who trained at Camp Pickett, Virginia, and New Orleans, Louisiana, and was then deployed in 1944-45 to Milne Bay in Papua, Hollandia in Dutch New Guinea, Morotai off Halmahera, Mindoro Island outside Manila Bay, Cape Zampa in Okinawa, and finally Takarazuka near Osaka, Japan. It contains 81 photos.

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by | 7 August 2004 · 2:03 pm

Political Clans in Central Asia (and the U.S.)

The Argus, which anyone interested in Central Asia should read regularly, has a post on the Clan system in Central Asia: threat or opportunity?

I think it is impossible to build civil and democratic societies in Central Asia without taking into account this informal, but decisive paradigm of central Asian politics. My idea is that the existing clans are the only forces capable to create opposition, which is the basis for any further democratic change.

However, this political confrontation between clans should remain peaceful and constructive, or else, it can lead to catastrophic results, like the civil war in Tajikistan, which was, basically, the result of competition between Leninabad-Kulyab alliance against Pamiri-Garm group.

In any case, what I am absolutely sure of is that any political change in central Asia in the foreseeable future will be fashioned and led by the dynamics between and within the clans.

Noting that many Americans in Central Asia tend to regard the role of clans as detrimental, a commenter reminds us of the role of political clans in the U.S.: the Kennedy clan from Massachusetts, the Bush clan from Connecticut and Texas, and the Daley clan in Chicago. And what about the Roosevelts of New York and the Rockefellers of Pennsylvania, New York, West Virginia, and Arkansas?

Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Emeritus Stephen Hess wrote on this topic before the 1978 election, and things haven’t got any better since then.

In Minnesota, the son of Hubert H. Humphrey is opposing the son of Orville Freeman for a Democratic congressional nomination. In Virginia, the son-in-law of Lyndon B. Johnson has just been sworn in as lieutenant governor. Last fall in New York City a third-generation Robert F. Wagner was on the ballot….

We seem to be surrounded by the scions of great political families. A second Edmund G. Brown is governor of California. There is a third Rockefeller governor, this time in West Virginia. The acting governor of Maryland, Blair Lee, is the 21st member of his family to have held elective office in America since a Lee entered the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1647.

The U.S. Senate has a Stevenson of Illinois, a Long of Louisiana, a Kennedy of Massachusetts, a Byrd of Virginia, a Talmadge of Georgia.

The membership of the U.S. House of Representatives includes another Hamilton Fish of New York, another Albert Gore of Tennessee, another Clarence Brown of Ohio, another John Dingell of Michigan, another Paul Rogers of Florida. There is also a Kentucky Breckinridge, a Virginia Satterfield, a Dodd from Connecticut, and, of course, a Long of Louisiana.

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by | 7 August 2004 · 10:04 am

Legacy and Legality in Central Asia

IIAS Newsletter 34 in July 2004 contains three short articles presenting historical overviews of Central Asian law. Longer versions will appear in a Journal of Asian Legal History monograph entitled Central Asian Law: An Historical Overview (October 2004). Here are substantial excerpts from the article by Irina Morozova on “Legal systems and political regimes in post-socialist Central Asia” (in PDF format). It is all I can do to resist quoting the whole thing. It does a good job of sketching fundamental contradictions facing newly independent Central Asian nations today.

Traditional systems of law informing current practice include customary law (adat) and religious law (Sharia except in Christian Georgia and Armenia and Buddhist Mongolia). Adat has proven remarkably stable while Sharia has survived the centuries; they are closely linked and often identified as one. Customary law, functioning in the form of strong communal relationships and the awarding of social status according to age and kinship hierarchies, is strong in rural areas and exists in modified form in the cities. Religious systems of law in post-Soviet societies are weaker; seventy years of secular education have left their mark. While the new independent states all proclaim themselves to be secular republics, ideas of Muslim law are still alive. Sharia, however, is no longer in serious use. [A little optimistic, perhaps?]

Of the social institutions informing customary law, the social class of agsakals has been especially durable. At the top of the social pyramid resides the agsakal, an old man seen as experienced and wise; his decisions are to be followed by family and community. The institution of the agsakal is legally recognized in Turkmenistan where it is called The Council of Agsakals. In Mongolia, often called the most open and democratic country in Asia, respect for agsakals still persists, albeit in weaker form. The social group also survives in the Eastern and Southern regions of the Russian Federation – Buryatia, Tuva, Kalmykiya, Tatarstan, and especially in the Northern Caucasus.

Customary law is also reflected in the system of clans, very much alive in the contemporary politics of Central Asia and the Southern Caucasus. In the beginning of the 1990s the struggle between clans in Tajikistan became so acute that it led to civil war. One of the threats to the rule of the President of Turkmenistan S. Niyazov is consolidation of an oppositional clan. The Uzbek President I. Karimov regularly purges members of the Samarkand, Tashkent and Bukhara clans from his administration. In Kazakhstan, strategic industries and the most profitable sectors of the economy belong to, or are controlled by, members of the presidential family and their relatives. The principle of social-economic redistribution among members of the clan is one of the main obstacles to the development of Western-style legal institutions. Clan identity ill fits individually based democratic conceptions of law; the effective application of the latter is routinely sacrificed to the pursuit of clan interests.

The Soviet legal system imposed on the Central Asian and Caucasian peoples had a certain modernizing effect on traditional societies. While Soviet legal institutions appeared Western, they did not work in practice the way they were supposed to on paper. While social systems based on clan patronage and kinship were criticized during the Soviet period, they did not disappear – they adjusted themselves to Communist state-party hierarchies. By the 1960s, the reform of administrative systems was complete; clan relationships and the social cult of the agsakal had mutated into the structures of national nomenclatura….

The Soviet legacy

To date, debate on the state of law has focused on overturning the Soviet legacy. Concepts of legitimacy and law are now expressed in terms of democracy, civil society, human rights and the market economy. These concepts serve as antonyms to another range of terms: Soviet one-party system, totalitarian state, communist ideology and planned economy. Post-Soviet politicians, journalists and populists, perhaps believing that the new terms reflect acquired sovereignty, juggle them for career purposes. The active use of the democratic lexicon, however, has yet to further the understanding, much less the application, of democratically based law….

The past legitimizes

Central Asian intellectual elites play a significant role in developing legal concepts. During the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods, university professors and scholars in academies of science aspired to political influence; sociologists, historians and philologists now advise politicians. Academics are charged with developing discourses of nationhood and national development, and to emphasize their democratic and legal nature. [A formula for self-delusion?]

Concurrently governments appeal to the legacy of ancient and medieval Central Eurasian empires and khanates. There are simply too few regional analysts able and allowed to write on the essential contradictions between the political culture of the medieval khanates, the successors to which the present states pretend to be, and the democratic civil societies that they claim to be building…. Here we may be witnessing a modification of customary law: the more ancient the history of the nation, the longer the genealogy of the ruler, the more lawful the regime.

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