A commentary on pages selected from H. E. Chehabi, IRANIAN POLITICS AND RELILGIOUS MODERNISM (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, n.d.)
Religious modernism is seen by the author as an effort to reestablish harmony between religion and a changing socio-cultural environment. The author interprets this phenomenon as a reactive movement. He is wrong. It is an adjusting movement, to which there is no terminiation. One would better speak of "adaptive permanence" which will continue as long as homo sapiens creates more or less imaginary constructs in an attempt to reduce the complexity of an expanding universe to the dimensions of his small skull.
The author differentiates between modernism, which is secular and Western, and reformism, which is an adaptive tendency within a religious community. In a parallel to intellectual struggles within twentieth century secular Marxism, we may identify "reformism" with "revisionism."
Professor Chehabi asserts that nationalism and "religious modernism" share similar attitudes. That is debatable, but nationalism as a surrogate religion is infinitely malleable, and can coexist equally well with state-sponsored paganism, as with some Nazis in Germany, and state-sponsored secularism, as with Communist Russia, or state-sponsored polytheism, as with the BJP government in Hindu India, or iodolatry of the marketplace, as celebrated in Washington, and first identified by Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) Nationalism, further, is inward-oriented or centripetal within a state structure or linguistic unit, attaining its extreme forms in integral nationalism, as exemplified by Zionism, whereas religion (except for the Hindu caste system) is presumed to supply a universal explanation equally accessible to all adherents regardless of language or race. (To evaluate the Islamic view that the Bahai's are contaminated by Western culture, one may consult statements published by their world headquarters at 100 Linden Street, Wilmette, IL 60091 /www.bahai.us/).
The defensive character of religious modernism is more pronounced in the non-Western world, inhabited by the majority of the planet's population. For technology and ideas about different political systems come to this majority population from outside, as in the case of colonialism, often accompanied by foreign Christian missionaries, or their short-wave radio broadcasts. (as is said to be proverbial in East Asian studies, "First the missionaries, then the merchants, then the Marines.") In later generations the defensive character of the "anti" motivation broadened from individual psychology to a social imperative to resist the invasive sociological entity insofar as it pressed aggressively for a seismic shift in the traditional or dominant social order. Professor Chehabi misses the mark, however, when he glibly speaks of the European acceptance of "modernity" without referring to the French Revolution (1789-99) that gave birth to it, and the Napoleonic Wars that diffused it by military means (1799-1815) until surrounded by commercial-religious nationalism in Anglican England and monarchical-communal nationalism in Orthodox Russia.
SHI'ITE MODERNISM
One characteristic trait of religious modernists is that they are eclectic in their thinking. After the Iranian revolution of 1905-06 (contemporaneous with the first Russian revolution), one faction of the ulema (or community of Islamic scholars) asserted that a secular constitution was incompatible with Islam, whereas a second faction admitted members of the Islamic clergy into the Parliament and thereby asserted that a Parliamentary body was indeed compatible with Islam. Thus the Shi'ite clergy became the most politically active clergy of the early 20th century, according to Dr. Chehabi. They were primarily motivated to establish a "rule of law" in the state rather than to reform or modernise Islam.
To focus on influential Western influences on modern Iranian political thouught, one must advert to the quasi-Fascistic Alexis Carrel (1873-1944), awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1912, and who conducted research at the University of Chicago (funded by John D. Rockefeller) and the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in Newe York City. In 1935 he wrote MAN, THE UNKNOWN (L'homme, cet inconnu) in which he argued that the huyman racd should be governed by a limited intellectual elite, and advocated the useof gas chambers to cull the human herd of inferior stock, e.g., the mentally diseased, the criminal and the defective. Government should be restricted to a hereditary minority composed of the descendents of revolutionary heros, great criminals, or financial magnates. As he wrote, "The conditioning of petty criminals with a whip, or some more scientific procedures, followed by a short stay in hospital, would probably suffice to insure order." ("Alexis Carrel," Wikipedia) Among his aphorisms may be fouond the following: (1) All great men are gifted with intuition. They know without reason or analysis, what they need to know; (2) Everyone makes a greater effort to hurt other people than to help himself; (3) Hard conditions of life are indispensable to bringing out the best in human personality; (4) Life leaps like a geyser for those who drill through the rock of inertia; (5) Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor. After 1939 he enjoyed connections with the government of Marshal Philippe Petain (1856-1951) which chartered his charitable institution, the French Foundation for the Study of Human Problems, in 1941. Among other projects, it developed the first French opinion polls. After Paris was liberated by the Free French army under General Leclerk, Carrel was suspended from his administrative function, and died in November, 1944. Currently he is honored only by Jean-Marie Le Pen of the National Front party.
To explain the appeal of Carrel to Muslim modernizers would try the tolerance of an angel, and certainly exceeds the competence of this writer. In part, Professor Chehabi's view that a disparate variety of sources is requisite to nourish a cultural eclecticism is incontrovertible. On the other hand, his dismissal of Iran as "peripheral" to the market economy of the West manifests an unconscious proclivity to cultural superiority which is incompatable with objective research , sine ira et studio. In Tehran, the social thought of Brussels or New York is equally peripheral to their interests, for there are not many libraries in Europe with volumnous translations from Farsi--not to mention the presence of an unofficial market censorship commonly expressed in the judgment that a volume, musical form or fashion in couture is "not commercial," and where the cultural stagnation of pop music forms of the 1960's and stereotyped Hollywood sit-coms becomes progressively more evident.
Shi'ite modernists in Iran have two guiding principles, according to the author: return to the Koran and a preoccupation with science. In this dual quest they may be contrasted with the revolutionary May 4th movement in late imperial China, which adopted the watchwords "Science and Democracy." While an admiration for empirical science was common to both movements, "democracy" pointed to broad popular participation in political activity, whereas a return to the Koran implied a return to guidance from a narrow council of clerical scholars. In 1883 Ernst Renan (1823-1892) in France attributed Islamic retardation ("backwardness") or persistent traditionalism to features of the Muslim religion, perhaps projecting on the Islamic world elements of his own agonized struggle to reconcile Catholic clericalism with the democracy of the 3rd Republic. The Shi'ite reformer al-Afghani agreed with him.
MEHDI BAZARGAN
Mehdi Bazargan reversed this judgment, observing that in Europe practicing Christians emphasized faith or belief, whereas in Islamic civilization Muslims always emphasized knowledge. In his political thought Bazargan might be clasified as a (waffling) "Islamic liberal." Like others living under the Reza Shah regime, he became influenced by the legends of Persian imperial greatness before the Islamic conquest and gave considerable attention to the controversial question of Iranian national identity. Islamic "underdevelopment," he thought, was initiated prior to European expansion and flowed from Islamists' withdrawal to private affairs to the detriment of state (so-called "public") interests. Muslim scholars thereby became progressively divorced from a practical familiarity with secular or everyday affairs. Notwithstanding this social defect, Bazargan asserted that the Iranian nation (as part of the Aryan race) proved to be uniquely adaptable in its historical development, for the peaceful Aryan base had progressively assimilated successive waves of "progressive and violent" invaders, from the ancient Assyriansto the later Arabs, Mongols and Tatars. (One also encounters the same argument propagated among its Russian neighbors to the north, when the agrarian and democratic Slavic communes and their princes progressively assimilated their foreign conquerers, from the Scandinavians in 862 through the agnostic Mongols, Muslim Tatars and Protestant Germans from the Baltic principalities.) Rural agriculturalists, according to Bazargan, were less inclined to mensuration than uban merchants, and consequently the agrarian Aryan nation, accustomed to domination by Mother Nature, developed a fatalistic outlook and were indifferent to academic accuracy. The result was that classic Persian literature valued exaggeration at the expense of realism (as did the Ukrainian Nikolai Gogol' /1809-1852/), and deployed the same commanding tone against sloth as progressive Russians, including V.I. Lenin (1870-1924), manifested in condemning that privileged scion of aristocracy, Oblomov, lounging in his halat (dressing gown) on his divan, in Goncharov's famous novel of 1859. Indeed, it would appear that Bazargan, born in the Russian-dominated Caucasus in the city of Bazargan in Azerbaijan, and following the same migratory route to Tehran as Ayatollah Khomenei (1900-1989), projected many of the standard formulae of classic Russian literary tradition on the developing Iranian national consciousness.
As a progressive "liberalizing" intellectual, Bazargan supported creating Islamic associations of students, engineers and teachers, and urged Muslim scholars in the ulema to support Iranian nationalists. He asserted that while political considerations should not interfere with religion, Islam should inform all social and political activity in the state. The application of Islamic principles should constitute the legislative agends of parliaments. While Islam should proclaim the general principles by which society should constitute itself, the details of governance are to be worked out by believers according to the immediate situation. (His views in this regard bear comparison with the assertion of a leading Slavophil, Ivan Kireevsky /1806-1856/) that the Russian Orthodox Church should consititute a "community of believing reason.") He repeatedly asserted that there should be no compulsion in religion. Bazargan believed that all believers in the three Abrahamic cults should have equal rights and responsibilites in the Islamic state. Like other modernists he emphasized that Islam was rationalistic (tactfully not mentioning the irrational mystery of a Triune God worshipped in the West). But in criticizing the UN Declaration of Human Rights, Bazargan asserted, with the Prophet, that "the dearest to God were those who were most virtuous," and that, by implication, virtue trumps legality. Unaware of the contradiction, he sides with those early Muslims he formerly criticized for withdrawing from public life to restrict their social activity to virtuous practice in private. He never overcame this contradiction. After resigning as Prime Minister of the new Islamic Republic in 1979 and returning to private life, he wrote that the Republic demanded more of its free citizens than Allah had demanded from the prophets.
But as the Prophet and the Imams were no longer accessible for guidance, Bazargan asserted that the congregation of all believers must participate, in a kind of "community of believing reason," in the choice of their rulers. He also argued that as men are free, they were endowed with the capacity and the right to embrace Islam or to reject it. Freedom of speech should be allowed to opponents in order that the application of reason to problems whould illumine a more enlightened path. In his final book, written in 1983, Bazargan summons the Spanish Inquisition to the minds of Eurasian readers to color his rejection of the methods of his Islamic successors in authority to impose religion. He might have recalled, but did not, that the Thirty Years' War in Europe (1618-1648) was settled at Westphalia through the partisans' acceptance of the formula Cuius regio, eius religio (Religion follows the will of the ruler). In his final years he rejected the market-of-heads political orthodoxy proclaimed in the European political systems: "From an Islamic point of view Western democracy is not government by the people, nor does it benefit the people....It rules over the whole people and deceives them with its false propaganda. The colonial governments that had dragged people through blood and debased them derive from the same democracy." Scholars in comparative political systems might view Bazargan as a kind of proponent of Muslim Iranophilism modelled on Slavophilism. It is incontrovertible that Bazargan's world outlook was comprised in part from incompatible propositions, in that while valuing Islamic virtue over political activity, he recommended broad popular participation in selecting a government while at the same time he rejected the demonstrated course of popular democracy in practice.
--Joe Tudeh
Friday, September 26, 2008
Monday, September 22, 2008
OPEN LETTER TO DOGU ERGIL (Ankara University)
Dogu Ergil, "Turkey's Crisis and Future," MIT Center for International Studies. August 2008.
A REBUTTAL
By the thinnest of margins the Constitutional Court permitted the governing Justice and Development party government to proceed with its Muslimizing programme, permitting young women to wear the jihab at universities. You note, moreover, that the party has "lost its enthusiasm" for liberalizing and democratizing Turkey in its quixotic quest for EU membership.
Predictably you condemn the Ergenekon discussants as aspiring to impose "an isolationaist dictatorial regime" upon the secular republic established by the actions of General Kemal Ataturk. The hypothetical popular demands you visualize for "liberalization and globalization" may conceivably echo the programme advocated in Langley, VA, but it is dubious if Anatolian farmers in their mosques and the urbanized Istanbul elite, meeting in coffee shops or Mariott Hotel bars, really desire to be "globalized" under the credit pump of fiat currency underlying the marketization of the Anglo-American economic model. Progressive devaluations undercut the currency of the Ottomans, and loom ever closer for the American dollar. Criticism of the coup mentality is singularly ill-timed in the post-Cold War era, when the actions of Boris Yeltsin to summon 1300 Russian troops to bombard the elected deputies of the Russian Parliament in their skyscraper (the "White House") elicit the applause of his Harvard biographer.
Far from the fraudulent choice posed by Prof. Ergil, that Turkey must choose "Westernization" or ostracism, it would be better advised to cultivate the path of Pan-Turanism advanced by Enver Pasha and re-ignite the cooperation of colonized non-white nationalities as envisaged by Sultan-Galiev after 1918, with this difference--that the newly resurgent national state cooperate with the new Shanghai Cooperation Council, Pakistan, and the dynamic economies of the emerging Asian giants as they recycle petroleum income invested by Muslim states around the Persian Gulf.
The Muslim masses and secularizing elite may well discover a new Silk Road to Eurasian prosperity if they imbibe a colonic to purge themselves of the constipation of Western-style marketization and the Pentagon-Brussels axis of military bureaucracy through which illusory waves of parliamentary approval are suborned or purchased by manipulators of fiat-financed investment vehicles.
--Dr. Diogenes
A REBUTTAL
By the thinnest of margins the Constitutional Court permitted the governing Justice and Development party government to proceed with its Muslimizing programme, permitting young women to wear the jihab at universities. You note, moreover, that the party has "lost its enthusiasm" for liberalizing and democratizing Turkey in its quixotic quest for EU membership.
Predictably you condemn the Ergenekon discussants as aspiring to impose "an isolationaist dictatorial regime" upon the secular republic established by the actions of General Kemal Ataturk. The hypothetical popular demands you visualize for "liberalization and globalization" may conceivably echo the programme advocated in Langley, VA, but it is dubious if Anatolian farmers in their mosques and the urbanized Istanbul elite, meeting in coffee shops or Mariott Hotel bars, really desire to be "globalized" under the credit pump of fiat currency underlying the marketization of the Anglo-American economic model. Progressive devaluations undercut the currency of the Ottomans, and loom ever closer for the American dollar. Criticism of the coup mentality is singularly ill-timed in the post-Cold War era, when the actions of Boris Yeltsin to summon 1300 Russian troops to bombard the elected deputies of the Russian Parliament in their skyscraper (the "White House") elicit the applause of his Harvard biographer.
Far from the fraudulent choice posed by Prof. Ergil, that Turkey must choose "Westernization" or ostracism, it would be better advised to cultivate the path of Pan-Turanism advanced by Enver Pasha and re-ignite the cooperation of colonized non-white nationalities as envisaged by Sultan-Galiev after 1918, with this difference--that the newly resurgent national state cooperate with the new Shanghai Cooperation Council, Pakistan, and the dynamic economies of the emerging Asian giants as they recycle petroleum income invested by Muslim states around the Persian Gulf.
The Muslim masses and secularizing elite may well discover a new Silk Road to Eurasian prosperity if they imbibe a colonic to purge themselves of the constipation of Western-style marketization and the Pentagon-Brussels axis of military bureaucracy through which illusory waves of parliamentary approval are suborned or purchased by manipulators of fiat-financed investment vehicles.
--Dr. Diogenes
Saturday, September 20, 2008
BLACK SEA STUDIES (Take-home Exam. AD 2004)
Many observers have commented that American strategic planners have felt a pang of nostalgia for the former certitudes of the Cold War Era. With that in mind, please draft an aide-memoire interpreting Washington's criticism of the Russian tactics in Chechnya, demands for Russian forces to withdraw from Abkhazia and Moldova, and Secretary Rumsfeld's mission to Georgia as a legitimate and commendable democratic effort to restrain expanding Russian imperial power. (You may wish to include a few well-thouoght-out paragraphs clarifying that a strategic thrust to envelop Kiev in the arms of NATO is necessary to contain Russian expansionism.)
As the diplomatic service remains woefully inadequate at integrating economic pollicies into a coherent diplomatic strategy, include in your answer a symbolic application of the putative predominance of the American judicial system on a global scale. You might wish to conduct a Weberian "thought-experiment" imagining the collapse of Mubarak's regime in Egypt. Could not a Texas court be dextrously manoeuvered into placing the former president's assets into international escrow, to be awarded later to the victorious successor regime if it provides credible assurances that it will be guided by, say, the Bloomberg Financial Group, Goldman-Sachs, or the Carlyle Group?)
Please tie the economic and military-strategic paragraphs together with a patriotic hortatory injunction informing the reader that "loose nukes" in Russia constitute a global menace, whereas after a Third Democratic Revolution in Russia, a newly purified planet will labor diligently and optimistically for the new dominant congeries of trans-national corporations, troubled only temporarily and evanescently by earthquakes, tsunamis and pandemics in the best of all possible free-market business climates conducive, in the words of the Sage of Crawford, to "a better return on investment?"
5 pages maximum.
As the diplomatic service remains woefully inadequate at integrating economic pollicies into a coherent diplomatic strategy, include in your answer a symbolic application of the putative predominance of the American judicial system on a global scale. You might wish to conduct a Weberian "thought-experiment" imagining the collapse of Mubarak's regime in Egypt. Could not a Texas court be dextrously manoeuvered into placing the former president's assets into international escrow, to be awarded later to the victorious successor regime if it provides credible assurances that it will be guided by, say, the Bloomberg Financial Group, Goldman-Sachs, or the Carlyle Group?)
Please tie the economic and military-strategic paragraphs together with a patriotic hortatory injunction informing the reader that "loose nukes" in Russia constitute a global menace, whereas after a Third Democratic Revolution in Russia, a newly purified planet will labor diligently and optimistically for the new dominant congeries of trans-national corporations, troubled only temporarily and evanescently by earthquakes, tsunamis and pandemics in the best of all possible free-market business climates conducive, in the words of the Sage of Crawford, to "a better return on investment?"
5 pages maximum.
Friday, September 19, 2008
SUSPECTED SOCIOPATH (DIAGNOSIS AND PROGNOSIS)
TO: Health Care Professionals
FROM: Dr. Povanda, Psychological Practicioner
DATE:Feb. 5, 2003
SUBJECT: Suspected Sociopath
1. The subject, George B., currently occupies a responsible executive position in a large conglomorate deriving its income from two main subsidiaries. One is in the oil production and marketing sphere. The other provides armed security guards for managers appointed to supervise foreign subsidiaries under oil cartel control.
2. The subject inherited his position from his father , George H.W., after an eight year interval in which the company was administered by a straw man. Ab initio George B. embarked on a policy of virtually unrestrained deficit spending. In this he was encouraged by his father's former comptroller, crony, and now general factotum. The company's internal script, the "Holler," has steadily fallen against both gold bullion and the new Euro. There are no appreciable signs of reversal, given the prospect of mounting deficits and the continuing prospect of of the company consuming more than it earns. The subject fired the company treasurer who, after a tour of Africa with a sexy rock star, announced his preference for a soundly-backed script (the "strong Holler"). He also took the axe to his private financial adviser, who had warned that taking over oil fields in a hostile takeover from a regional competitor would cost in excess of $200 billion US, for which the company held insufficient funds.
3. Whilst circumspect in public, the subject has frequently stated his firm is under continual threat of attack by fanatical terrorists. Last year he attacked the Afghani gas fields, removed the previous managers, and through manipulated proxies and a controlled stakeholders' assembly (the "Big Tent"), installed his own front man as manager on an ethnic reservation (Chief Hamid the Bold). For the last fifteen months he has manifested the behavior of a typical stalker, pursuing the once formidable but now superannuated manager of a semi-ruined regional oil competitor, either because he fears the old-line owner has weaponized his employees, or entertains malevolent thoughts in secret, or is dodging an international audit, or represents in his abhorrent person the quintessence of human evil. His company has continued to seek and sign secret undertakings to divide the opponent's property among the most slavish of his subsidized adherents ("lynching by the willing").
4. The subject frequently manifests inconsistent ultra-nationalistic and ultra-conservative convictions. He recently visited a sectarian Southern university where Blancos and Negros among the disparate nationalities in his employ were (until his visit) forbidden to date. He has stated orally that he favors diversity in the workplace, yet his company recently filed suit to terminate affirmative actions programs for minority nationalities. He is a stong public proponent of the so-called "right-to-life" ideology. He has forbiden the company clinic to distribute birth control implements or medication. He has refused to pay dues to an international organization on the East Coast because it distributes birth control information which might facilitate abortions in overpopulated China. On M.L. King's memorial weekend, he issued a proclamation fervently reaffirming the "sanctity" of life. Not ten days had passed before he announced an eleemosynary gift to a distant African town, to subsidize the distribution of drugs against AIDS and condoms (perhaps to restrict the reproduction of Negros).
5. He has undertaken the largest company reorganization in 40 years to unify, strengthen and coordinate (Gleichschaltung) the security guard and to restrict access to company property. He has begun interrogating, registering and fingerprinting foreign workers and even visitors to company grounds. He has complained that open parklands on his northern boundary are open to visitors, residents, immigrants, terrorists, and moose alike, and urged that his property line be secured by armed patrols.
6. Each time the possibility of a workers' action arises, he employs legal subterfuge to postpone the action ad infinitum. The leader of the company union has acquiesced, postponed union elections for two years, and disappeared from the public eye. Further to his ostensibly religious ends, the subject has advocated "faith-based employment" and introduced company chaplains (C-in-C's) into his basement command bunker. He has not shrunk from distributing photos that subliminally suggest that he is the Son of God.
7. His chief operating officer, one Dick "Torquemada" Cheney, scion of an old Boston family, exercises predominant planning functions and implements executive functions far exceeding his statuatory authority. He once chaired a search committee to select a deputy chairman which astonishingly chose himself. This eminence gris acts as a virtual recluse in an undisclosed location. George B. is a trained broadcaster with cultivated forensic skills. This cultivated ability is displayed, however, only on formal or "set piece" occasions. When forced to improvise, he is remarkably tongue-tied. Consequently he dodges the press at every opportunity, enjoys minimal contact with elected worker representatives, none with Negro organizations, and even shuns unchaperoned contact with his own company specialists. It is conceivable that his immediate entourage, inherited (or self-selected) from his father's administration, understand the limitations of his abilities. They have apparently formed an "iron ring" to insulate their employer of record from unrehearsed public intercourse. Flora, his wife, is further suspected of exercising domestic disciplinary authority over her wealthy but unstable husband. George B. continues to conduct company business with foreign clients at hole-in-corner locations, without competent experts present, at a mesquite-overgrown Texas spread or at a gated reclusive lodge in Maryland's Catatonic Mountains. His press spokesman announces George's unilateral decisions before a compliant press assembly so often that he is often (if mistakenly) assumed to be the Acting Company President. His personal secretary, Sissy Nice, a former California road-house waitress at "The Farm" restaurant not far from sophisticated San Francisco, is more adept at entertaining foreign male executives than in administering, advising, or restraining her employer. (She reserves her dominatrix tendencies for regaling competitors.)
8. In sum, because of his persistent aggressive and violence-prone advocacy ("Keep on killin' 'em! We'll kill 'em all!") , duplicity in pronouncements and policies, excessive secretiveness and extravagant spending habits--the heir to a rich oil dynasty, trained in manners at exclusive Ivy League colleges, he has never acknowledged the requirements of fiscal discipline--George B., a recovering alcoholic, is to be remanded to the Guantanamo facility for involuntary treatment as a "sociopathic personality."
Bazarov-Nosferato Psychological Clinic
Rapallo, Germany
NB--The original clippings from academic studies are no longer accessible. Psychologists in attendance are urged to consult the literature, in which the dividing line between "sociopath" and "entrepeneur" is distinctly blurred.
FROM: Dr. Povanda, Psychological Practicioner
DATE:Feb. 5, 2003
SUBJECT: Suspected Sociopath
1. The subject, George B., currently occupies a responsible executive position in a large conglomorate deriving its income from two main subsidiaries. One is in the oil production and marketing sphere. The other provides armed security guards for managers appointed to supervise foreign subsidiaries under oil cartel control.
2. The subject inherited his position from his father , George H.W., after an eight year interval in which the company was administered by a straw man. Ab initio George B. embarked on a policy of virtually unrestrained deficit spending. In this he was encouraged by his father's former comptroller, crony, and now general factotum. The company's internal script, the "Holler," has steadily fallen against both gold bullion and the new Euro. There are no appreciable signs of reversal, given the prospect of mounting deficits and the continuing prospect of of the company consuming more than it earns. The subject fired the company treasurer who, after a tour of Africa with a sexy rock star, announced his preference for a soundly-backed script (the "strong Holler"). He also took the axe to his private financial adviser, who had warned that taking over oil fields in a hostile takeover from a regional competitor would cost in excess of $200 billion US, for which the company held insufficient funds.
3. Whilst circumspect in public, the subject has frequently stated his firm is under continual threat of attack by fanatical terrorists. Last year he attacked the Afghani gas fields, removed the previous managers, and through manipulated proxies and a controlled stakeholders' assembly (the "Big Tent"), installed his own front man as manager on an ethnic reservation (Chief Hamid the Bold). For the last fifteen months he has manifested the behavior of a typical stalker, pursuing the once formidable but now superannuated manager of a semi-ruined regional oil competitor, either because he fears the old-line owner has weaponized his employees, or entertains malevolent thoughts in secret, or is dodging an international audit, or represents in his abhorrent person the quintessence of human evil. His company has continued to seek and sign secret undertakings to divide the opponent's property among the most slavish of his subsidized adherents ("lynching by the willing").
4. The subject frequently manifests inconsistent ultra-nationalistic and ultra-conservative convictions. He recently visited a sectarian Southern university where Blancos and Negros among the disparate nationalities in his employ were (until his visit) forbidden to date. He has stated orally that he favors diversity in the workplace, yet his company recently filed suit to terminate affirmative actions programs for minority nationalities. He is a stong public proponent of the so-called "right-to-life" ideology. He has forbiden the company clinic to distribute birth control implements or medication. He has refused to pay dues to an international organization on the East Coast because it distributes birth control information which might facilitate abortions in overpopulated China. On M.L. King's memorial weekend, he issued a proclamation fervently reaffirming the "sanctity" of life. Not ten days had passed before he announced an eleemosynary gift to a distant African town, to subsidize the distribution of drugs against AIDS and condoms (perhaps to restrict the reproduction of Negros).
5. He has undertaken the largest company reorganization in 40 years to unify, strengthen and coordinate (Gleichschaltung) the security guard and to restrict access to company property. He has begun interrogating, registering and fingerprinting foreign workers and even visitors to company grounds. He has complained that open parklands on his northern boundary are open to visitors, residents, immigrants, terrorists, and moose alike, and urged that his property line be secured by armed patrols.
6. Each time the possibility of a workers' action arises, he employs legal subterfuge to postpone the action ad infinitum. The leader of the company union has acquiesced, postponed union elections for two years, and disappeared from the public eye. Further to his ostensibly religious ends, the subject has advocated "faith-based employment" and introduced company chaplains (C-in-C's) into his basement command bunker. He has not shrunk from distributing photos that subliminally suggest that he is the Son of God.
7. His chief operating officer, one Dick "Torquemada" Cheney, scion of an old Boston family, exercises predominant planning functions and implements executive functions far exceeding his statuatory authority. He once chaired a search committee to select a deputy chairman which astonishingly chose himself. This eminence gris acts as a virtual recluse in an undisclosed location. George B. is a trained broadcaster with cultivated forensic skills. This cultivated ability is displayed, however, only on formal or "set piece" occasions. When forced to improvise, he is remarkably tongue-tied. Consequently he dodges the press at every opportunity, enjoys minimal contact with elected worker representatives, none with Negro organizations, and even shuns unchaperoned contact with his own company specialists. It is conceivable that his immediate entourage, inherited (or self-selected) from his father's administration, understand the limitations of his abilities. They have apparently formed an "iron ring" to insulate their employer of record from unrehearsed public intercourse. Flora, his wife, is further suspected of exercising domestic disciplinary authority over her wealthy but unstable husband. George B. continues to conduct company business with foreign clients at hole-in-corner locations, without competent experts present, at a mesquite-overgrown Texas spread or at a gated reclusive lodge in Maryland's Catatonic Mountains. His press spokesman announces George's unilateral decisions before a compliant press assembly so often that he is often (if mistakenly) assumed to be the Acting Company President. His personal secretary, Sissy Nice, a former California road-house waitress at "The Farm" restaurant not far from sophisticated San Francisco, is more adept at entertaining foreign male executives than in administering, advising, or restraining her employer. (She reserves her dominatrix tendencies for regaling competitors.)
8. In sum, because of his persistent aggressive and violence-prone advocacy ("Keep on killin' 'em! We'll kill 'em all!") , duplicity in pronouncements and policies, excessive secretiveness and extravagant spending habits--the heir to a rich oil dynasty, trained in manners at exclusive Ivy League colleges, he has never acknowledged the requirements of fiscal discipline--George B., a recovering alcoholic, is to be remanded to the Guantanamo facility for involuntary treatment as a "sociopathic personality."
Bazarov-Nosferato Psychological Clinic
Rapallo, Germany
NB--The original clippings from academic studies are no longer accessible. Psychologists in attendance are urged to consult the literature, in which the dividing line between "sociopath" and "entrepeneur" is distinctly blurred.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
REVIEW. AMERICAN INTERVENTION IN SIBERIA
Robert J. Maddox. THE UNKNOWN WAR WITH RUSSIA: WILSON'S SIBERIAN INTERVENTION. pp. ix, 156. San Rafael, CA: Presidio Press, 1977. $9.95.
This little book is ambitious in attempting to debunk Woodrow Wilson's gilded image in foreign affairs. Professor Maddox has brought new evidence to light, organized his material carefully, and laid out common-sense conclusions (one suspects in a Puritan spirit) in plain language. I think this essay will enjoy greater significance as a milestone in research into the American presidency than as a gravestone over Wilson's reputation. That may well be Maddox's goal and, if he has intervened in the dispute over the Wilson legacy with goals so limited, he may legitimately claim to have scored some points in a fight with no knock-downs.
Granted that Wilson's first reaction to Bol'shevik success was one of antipathy, one must next inquire what policy measures embodied this antipathy. The record, as Professor Maddox presents it, is tantallizingly suggestive. During those halycon days in the transition between two epochs, Wilson and his advisors "...kneew little more than what appeared in the press" before the first sketchy reports from the American embassy arrived. An entire Cabinet meeting on November 9 was devoted to Russia, following which, according to the semi-official New York Times, the Cabined adopted a wait-and-see attitude. No official record of that meeting has seen the light of day. Yet Secretary of State Lansing (1864-1928) speculated on the same day that some "strongman" might emerge who would unify the nation. On November 12, in a public address, the President characterized the new Russian leaders as "idle dreamers." This is at least a shockingly casual comment from a head of government if that government had genuinely adopted a temporizing policy a mere three days before. Recalling that the last period of Wilsonian "watchful waiting" led to the intervention in Mexico, it seems at least arguable that the Washington government (1) had better sources of information than Maddox credits them with; (2) put forward the "wait-and-see" story as a laissez-entendre through the New York Times; and (3) quite possibly resolved in Cabinet on November 9 to do whatever appeared feasible to facilitate the emergence of a government that could preserve democracy and continue the war.
As Maddox notes, "Decisions made behind the scenes strongly suggest that President Wilson opposed the Bol'sheviks from the outset...." The concatenation of events alone is indicative. On November 11, four days after the Bol'shevik coup, two days after a Cabinet meeting withoug surviving notes, and one day before the President's slighting reference to "idle dreamers," the Russian Ambassador announced that he would not recognize the Bol'shevik regime--but would continue to represent "Russia" until a legal successor regime appeared! It would of course be impossible for a diplomat without credentials to occupy and administer an embassy complex without the tacit support of the host country. Maddox characterized this situation as "an item of diplomatic curiosa," but it seems to signal clearly that the Administration was already parti pris in the Russian political struggle.
"Provocative" is the only word to describe the evidence Maddox has selected to illustrate the leverage the Administration exerted on this new fulcrum. The Russian embassy's assets, valued at more that fifty-six million dollars (deposited at Citibank) were expended to arm both Whites and Czechs with the active assistance of United States government representatives. Twice the State Department interceded to induce the bank to defer collecting obligations, previously floated on the money market, which would have severely reduced the embassy's ability to execute contracts. One of the ancillary conclusions Professor Maddox does not draw is that if the Soviet government consented to make a token payment on the imperial bonds repudiated by Lenin (1870-1924), it would be symbolically subsidizing intervention! This is heady stuff indeed.
When Wilson did decide to send troops to Siberia, in uneasy collabortion with the Japanese in July, 1918, N.D. Baker, the Secretary of War who had previously opposed the decision, in effect took himself out of the chain of command by handing General Graves the President's aide-memoire without any specific military instructions. Graves adhered scrupulously to the injunction to avoid siding in Russian internal politics. Thereby he gave offense to every other armed force in Siberia. Further, he acurately predicted Admiral Kolchak's downfall as Supreme Ruler in Omsk. In Maddox's view, the military were the most objective observers of the alien Russian scene, wheres American diplomats' views were colored by their close associations with various representatives of Russian social opinion. Is there a moral here?
To conclude, what is presented as a study in intervention takes on the appearance of a Puritan homily on the sins of the imperial and liberal presidency. This interpretation could be innocently misleading. It suggests a perception of Wilson as a liberal Prometheus whose hisstorical reputation is ravaged by the claws of Professor Maddox. But in ranging hinmself among the opponents of Bol'shevism Wilson would have been lost among a large majority of Russians; far from appearing heroic, he adopted the policy of the average man. The problems he faced in trying to "reconcile the American people to the need for intervention..." flowed from the weakness of his position rather than its strength. This is the opposite of the situation in a truly imperial state in which quod principi placet leges habet virorum. Yet to condemn intervention as a "total failure" appears overly narrow and hence overly harsh.
The prosaic truth is that geography, circumstances, political institutions, and military capacity dealt Wilson a weak hand. The titular head of a second-class power adopted a strategy of no trump--with the usual results. But he eschewed overcommitment and maintained acceptable relations with the first-class powers while Congressional opposition deterred him from an improvident squandering of resources of the kind that destroyed the myth of the later imperial presidency. It could have been worse. Miliary intervention in foreign politics, concealed by domestic subterfuge, is not a practice to be recommended to democratic governments.
(Columbia University) Published in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences.
This little book is ambitious in attempting to debunk Woodrow Wilson's gilded image in foreign affairs. Professor Maddox has brought new evidence to light, organized his material carefully, and laid out common-sense conclusions (one suspects in a Puritan spirit) in plain language. I think this essay will enjoy greater significance as a milestone in research into the American presidency than as a gravestone over Wilson's reputation. That may well be Maddox's goal and, if he has intervened in the dispute over the Wilson legacy with goals so limited, he may legitimately claim to have scored some points in a fight with no knock-downs.
Granted that Wilson's first reaction to Bol'shevik success was one of antipathy, one must next inquire what policy measures embodied this antipathy. The record, as Professor Maddox presents it, is tantallizingly suggestive. During those halycon days in the transition between two epochs, Wilson and his advisors "...kneew little more than what appeared in the press" before the first sketchy reports from the American embassy arrived. An entire Cabinet meeting on November 9 was devoted to Russia, following which, according to the semi-official New York Times, the Cabined adopted a wait-and-see attitude. No official record of that meeting has seen the light of day. Yet Secretary of State Lansing (1864-1928) speculated on the same day that some "strongman" might emerge who would unify the nation. On November 12, in a public address, the President characterized the new Russian leaders as "idle dreamers." This is at least a shockingly casual comment from a head of government if that government had genuinely adopted a temporizing policy a mere three days before. Recalling that the last period of Wilsonian "watchful waiting" led to the intervention in Mexico, it seems at least arguable that the Washington government (1) had better sources of information than Maddox credits them with; (2) put forward the "wait-and-see" story as a laissez-entendre through the New York Times; and (3) quite possibly resolved in Cabinet on November 9 to do whatever appeared feasible to facilitate the emergence of a government that could preserve democracy and continue the war.
As Maddox notes, "Decisions made behind the scenes strongly suggest that President Wilson opposed the Bol'sheviks from the outset...." The concatenation of events alone is indicative. On November 11, four days after the Bol'shevik coup, two days after a Cabinet meeting withoug surviving notes, and one day before the President's slighting reference to "idle dreamers," the Russian Ambassador announced that he would not recognize the Bol'shevik regime--but would continue to represent "Russia" until a legal successor regime appeared! It would of course be impossible for a diplomat without credentials to occupy and administer an embassy complex without the tacit support of the host country. Maddox characterized this situation as "an item of diplomatic curiosa," but it seems to signal clearly that the Administration was already parti pris in the Russian political struggle.
"Provocative" is the only word to describe the evidence Maddox has selected to illustrate the leverage the Administration exerted on this new fulcrum. The Russian embassy's assets, valued at more that fifty-six million dollars (deposited at Citibank) were expended to arm both Whites and Czechs with the active assistance of United States government representatives. Twice the State Department interceded to induce the bank to defer collecting obligations, previously floated on the money market, which would have severely reduced the embassy's ability to execute contracts. One of the ancillary conclusions Professor Maddox does not draw is that if the Soviet government consented to make a token payment on the imperial bonds repudiated by Lenin (1870-1924), it would be symbolically subsidizing intervention! This is heady stuff indeed.
When Wilson did decide to send troops to Siberia, in uneasy collabortion with the Japanese in July, 1918, N.D. Baker, the Secretary of War who had previously opposed the decision, in effect took himself out of the chain of command by handing General Graves the President's aide-memoire without any specific military instructions. Graves adhered scrupulously to the injunction to avoid siding in Russian internal politics. Thereby he gave offense to every other armed force in Siberia. Further, he acurately predicted Admiral Kolchak's downfall as Supreme Ruler in Omsk. In Maddox's view, the military were the most objective observers of the alien Russian scene, wheres American diplomats' views were colored by their close associations with various representatives of Russian social opinion. Is there a moral here?
To conclude, what is presented as a study in intervention takes on the appearance of a Puritan homily on the sins of the imperial and liberal presidency. This interpretation could be innocently misleading. It suggests a perception of Wilson as a liberal Prometheus whose hisstorical reputation is ravaged by the claws of Professor Maddox. But in ranging hinmself among the opponents of Bol'shevism Wilson would have been lost among a large majority of Russians; far from appearing heroic, he adopted the policy of the average man. The problems he faced in trying to "reconcile the American people to the need for intervention..." flowed from the weakness of his position rather than its strength. This is the opposite of the situation in a truly imperial state in which quod principi placet leges habet virorum. Yet to condemn intervention as a "total failure" appears overly narrow and hence overly harsh.
The prosaic truth is that geography, circumstances, political institutions, and military capacity dealt Wilson a weak hand. The titular head of a second-class power adopted a strategy of no trump--with the usual results. But he eschewed overcommitment and maintained acceptable relations with the first-class powers while Congressional opposition deterred him from an improvident squandering of resources of the kind that destroyed the myth of the later imperial presidency. It could have been worse. Miliary intervention in foreign politics, concealed by domestic subterfuge, is not a practice to be recommended to democratic governments.
(Columbia University) Published in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences.
Monday, September 15, 2008
AMERICANS AND EURASIA (Review)
James C. Thomson, Jr. Peter W. Stanley and John Curtis Perry, Sentimental Imperialism: The American Experience in East Asia. New York: Harper & Row, c. 1981. 323 pp.
The genre of this volume is difficult to define. Written in the collaborative mode by three well-connected educators (from Harvard, Carleton College in Minnesota and Tufts, respectively), it lacks bibliography, footnotes and illustrations. The four maps are poorly reproduced and are of marginal utility. The editorial decision to maintain the Wade-Giles system of transliteration is, on the other hand, highly commendable. The prose is consistent in a style recognizable as "formally Washingtonian:" bureaucratic, academic and liberal. The volume is intended, apparently, for readers with little or partial previous knowledge of the area.
The authors have attempted to delineate a contrast among American experiences with China, The Philippines and Japan. Beginning with China, the study is clear as regards China's Canton System of regulating foreign trade, the role of the Opium Wars (1840-42) and the outline of the "treaty system" emerging from the Treaty of Nanking (1842). Fluctuations in regional currencies and the price of silver are noted and the incresed role of the comprador (a Chinese llicensed broker employed by a foreign trading company is outlined. The summary of the American "Open Door" policy (1899) has obviously benefitted from previous scholarly reinteerpretation. The development of the May 4th movement, stemming fronm China's rejection of the Versailles Treaty, is traced from its original emphasis on individual emancipation to an emphasis on strengthening the state. On the other hand, the ideology of the Taiping Rebellion is virtually ignored, Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles of Nationalism, Democracy and Socialism are not satisfactorily amplified, and neither the Japanese Black Dragon Society nor Chiang Kai-shek's relationship to it are mentioned. Also ignored is M.M. Borodin (Gruzenberg), the former Chicago schoolteacher and later Comintern representative, whom Dr. Sun Apotheosized as the "Lafayette of the Chinese revolution."
While Protestant missionary activity was only marginally effective in converting the Chinese, it enjoyed greater success in establishing a network of training institutions in education and medicine. It is curious to read that the Rockefeller Foundation recommended an ambitious new program to exploit China's "plasticity" by undertaking a massive program to raise the living standards of rural China in 1934 (p. 186) while Chiang's New Life movement of the same year, modelled on the YMCA and the protestant churches, was executed ",,,with fascism as its covert sponsor and enforcer.:" (p. 182). Missing in action is the wartime American liason with Mao Tse-tung (code-named "Dixie Mission"); unpersoned and presumably not rehabilitated are President Liu Shao-chi and Mao's once-designated successor, Gen. Lin Pao. While Maoism is not defined, the Great Helmsman is commemorated on only a few pages more than Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R.-WI), whose influence on world events was significantly less. Pursuit of the mythical question "Who lost China?" suggests that the responsible corps of American China specialists is still deeply defensive and has not yet regained a desirable degree of self-confidence and impartiality.
The Philippines offer a case study of forty years of American imperial administration. Conquered by Spain in the 18th century, the peoples of the archipeligo lived in barangay's or extended kinship units, without a national state as such. Following the Spanish defeat by the Vermont-born Commodore Dewey in 1898, Filipinos led by Emilio Aguinaldo (1869-1964) rose in insurrection against both Spain and the United States. Annexation was nearly defeated in the U.S. Senate. Inexplicably, the authors do not refer to the quotable Sen. Albert J. Beveridge, the influlential William Randolph Hearst, the Protestant interest in Christianizing the "little brown brother," or the enlisted man's variant, "Civilize 'em with a Krag!" (referring to the .30/40 repeating rifle, purchased from Norway, US Army standard issue 1894-1903). Despite this inauspicious beginning, the civil administration of William Howard Taft and his "policy of attraction" in The Philippines signified an alliance between American imperial power and native collaborators among the local elites. The "imperialism of suasion" developed into a bulwark protecting class interest. The personalism of social relationships within the barangay was destroyed during the economic "rationalization" of the 1920's and 1930's. The Japanese invaders of 1941 found fewer collaborators (except the independence-minded Aguinaldo), and those were resisted by the Hukbalahap, part of which later developed into a Communist-led anti-landlord uprising until defeated by President Ramon Magsaysay in the 1950's. His successor, Ferdinand Marcos, declared martial law in 1972. In the opinion of the present authors, "...Eight decades of collaboration have been tried and found wanting."
Rejecting not only alliances but commercial intercourse (save with the Dutch and Chinese),, Tokugawa Japan enforced social tranquillity through a policy of "centralized feudalism /sic/." The less populous but more industrialized United States compelled the insular Japanese into a "treaty system" in 1858, following the naval mission of Commodore Mathew Perry in 1853. The Emperor Meiji was restored to full autority over the Tokugawa and other clans in 1868 in Japan's response to the perceived Western threat. Subsequent Westernization of the "military-industrial complex" was capitalized domestically. Influenced by Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, among others, the modernizing Meiji leadership returned in force to Korea by 1876, defeated the reformed Chinese military in 1894-5, and contributed nearly half the forces sent to rebuff the Boxer uprising in 1899. Japan next defeated Russia in 1904-05, agreeing to a relatively modest settlement at the Treaty of Portsmouth (NH) for which President Theodore Roosevelt received the Nobel Peace Prize. Following Secretary Hay's Open Door notes, the United States attempted to act as balance-maker between Japan and China in the expectancy that Japan would pursue its expansionist aims in northeastern Asia rather than among the Pacific islands. Basic American military strategy (Plan Orange) of 1907 and after envisaged a defensive posture in the Pacific. During the Wilson era the realism of Theodore Roosevelt and Secrtary Elihu Root was replaced by a "...new sense of the universal applicability of American values." While the value of Japanese exports fell 50% during 1929-31, expansion into Manchuria (1931) and China's Yangtse Valley (1937) under various Pan Asian slogans significantly underestimated Chinese nationalism. Associating itself with the Anticomintern Pact (1936) and the Tripartite Alliance (1940), Japan became loosely associated in American public opinion with European Fascism. President Franklin Roosevelt and Secretary Cordell Hull believed in "collective security" (pace Maxim Liltvinov) and directed stiffening American resistence to Japan in her role of German ally. No mention is made of the Japanese and Allied interventions in Siberia (1917-22), which included the Americans, or the forces urging Japan into war against the Soviet Union in 1939. The authors' opinion that the Soviets were "...still too weak to challenge the Japanese" may disturb the spirit in Valhalla of Lieutenant-General Georgii Zhukov, whose tank-led army exacted some 50,000 Japanese casualties at the battle of Khalkin Gol' on the Mongolian frontier in August, 1939.
Political and social reforms were undertaken during the American occupation of Japan (1945-52, while ambitious economic reforms were projected but subsequently curtailed. Since 1945, the authors conclude, the United States has enjoyed better relations with its former enemy, Japan, than with its former ally, China., or former colony, The Philippines. The Japanese Wirtschaftwunder is remarked on and while the aulhors comment on the Japanese "vulnerability complex" and its nearly total dependence on imported oil, they do not associate these phenomena with political friability in Japan, Inc. where "...the same conservative party always wins a plurality." The contrast in conclusions relative to American coopertion with the Japanese and Philippine elites is not explained. Someday, somewhere, an independent institute or journal to foster integrated studies of modern Eurasia might be welcomed.
Publhed in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science in Philadelphia in the Spring of 1983. Insignificant rhetorical modifications have been introduced in this version.
The genre of this volume is difficult to define. Written in the collaborative mode by three well-connected educators (from Harvard, Carleton College in Minnesota and Tufts, respectively), it lacks bibliography, footnotes and illustrations. The four maps are poorly reproduced and are of marginal utility. The editorial decision to maintain the Wade-Giles system of transliteration is, on the other hand, highly commendable. The prose is consistent in a style recognizable as "formally Washingtonian:" bureaucratic, academic and liberal. The volume is intended, apparently, for readers with little or partial previous knowledge of the area.
The authors have attempted to delineate a contrast among American experiences with China, The Philippines and Japan. Beginning with China, the study is clear as regards China's Canton System of regulating foreign trade, the role of the Opium Wars (1840-42) and the outline of the "treaty system" emerging from the Treaty of Nanking (1842). Fluctuations in regional currencies and the price of silver are noted and the incresed role of the comprador (a Chinese llicensed broker employed by a foreign trading company is outlined. The summary of the American "Open Door" policy (1899) has obviously benefitted from previous scholarly reinteerpretation. The development of the May 4th movement, stemming fronm China's rejection of the Versailles Treaty, is traced from its original emphasis on individual emancipation to an emphasis on strengthening the state. On the other hand, the ideology of the Taiping Rebellion is virtually ignored, Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles of Nationalism, Democracy and Socialism are not satisfactorily amplified, and neither the Japanese Black Dragon Society nor Chiang Kai-shek's relationship to it are mentioned. Also ignored is M.M. Borodin (Gruzenberg), the former Chicago schoolteacher and later Comintern representative, whom Dr. Sun Apotheosized as the "Lafayette of the Chinese revolution."
While Protestant missionary activity was only marginally effective in converting the Chinese, it enjoyed greater success in establishing a network of training institutions in education and medicine. It is curious to read that the Rockefeller Foundation recommended an ambitious new program to exploit China's "plasticity" by undertaking a massive program to raise the living standards of rural China in 1934 (p. 186) while Chiang's New Life movement of the same year, modelled on the YMCA and the protestant churches, was executed ",,,with fascism as its covert sponsor and enforcer.:" (p. 182). Missing in action is the wartime American liason with Mao Tse-tung (code-named "Dixie Mission"); unpersoned and presumably not rehabilitated are President Liu Shao-chi and Mao's once-designated successor, Gen. Lin Pao. While Maoism is not defined, the Great Helmsman is commemorated on only a few pages more than Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R.-WI), whose influence on world events was significantly less. Pursuit of the mythical question "Who lost China?" suggests that the responsible corps of American China specialists is still deeply defensive and has not yet regained a desirable degree of self-confidence and impartiality.
The Philippines offer a case study of forty years of American imperial administration. Conquered by Spain in the 18th century, the peoples of the archipeligo lived in barangay's or extended kinship units, without a national state as such. Following the Spanish defeat by the Vermont-born Commodore Dewey in 1898, Filipinos led by Emilio Aguinaldo (1869-1964) rose in insurrection against both Spain and the United States. Annexation was nearly defeated in the U.S. Senate. Inexplicably, the authors do not refer to the quotable Sen. Albert J. Beveridge, the influlential William Randolph Hearst, the Protestant interest in Christianizing the "little brown brother," or the enlisted man's variant, "Civilize 'em with a Krag!" (referring to the .30/40 repeating rifle, purchased from Norway, US Army standard issue 1894-1903). Despite this inauspicious beginning, the civil administration of William Howard Taft and his "policy of attraction" in The Philippines signified an alliance between American imperial power and native collaborators among the local elites. The "imperialism of suasion" developed into a bulwark protecting class interest. The personalism of social relationships within the barangay was destroyed during the economic "rationalization" of the 1920's and 1930's. The Japanese invaders of 1941 found fewer collaborators (except the independence-minded Aguinaldo), and those were resisted by the Hukbalahap, part of which later developed into a Communist-led anti-landlord uprising until defeated by President Ramon Magsaysay in the 1950's. His successor, Ferdinand Marcos, declared martial law in 1972. In the opinion of the present authors, "...Eight decades of collaboration have been tried and found wanting."
Rejecting not only alliances but commercial intercourse (save with the Dutch and Chinese),, Tokugawa Japan enforced social tranquillity through a policy of "centralized feudalism /sic/." The less populous but more industrialized United States compelled the insular Japanese into a "treaty system" in 1858, following the naval mission of Commodore Mathew Perry in 1853. The Emperor Meiji was restored to full autority over the Tokugawa and other clans in 1868 in Japan's response to the perceived Western threat. Subsequent Westernization of the "military-industrial complex" was capitalized domestically. Influenced by Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, among others, the modernizing Meiji leadership returned in force to Korea by 1876, defeated the reformed Chinese military in 1894-5, and contributed nearly half the forces sent to rebuff the Boxer uprising in 1899. Japan next defeated Russia in 1904-05, agreeing to a relatively modest settlement at the Treaty of Portsmouth (NH) for which President Theodore Roosevelt received the Nobel Peace Prize. Following Secretary Hay's Open Door notes, the United States attempted to act as balance-maker between Japan and China in the expectancy that Japan would pursue its expansionist aims in northeastern Asia rather than among the Pacific islands. Basic American military strategy (Plan Orange) of 1907 and after envisaged a defensive posture in the Pacific. During the Wilson era the realism of Theodore Roosevelt and Secrtary Elihu Root was replaced by a "...new sense of the universal applicability of American values." While the value of Japanese exports fell 50% during 1929-31, expansion into Manchuria (1931) and China's Yangtse Valley (1937) under various Pan Asian slogans significantly underestimated Chinese nationalism. Associating itself with the Anticomintern Pact (1936) and the Tripartite Alliance (1940), Japan became loosely associated in American public opinion with European Fascism. President Franklin Roosevelt and Secretary Cordell Hull believed in "collective security" (pace Maxim Liltvinov) and directed stiffening American resistence to Japan in her role of German ally. No mention is made of the Japanese and Allied interventions in Siberia (1917-22), which included the Americans, or the forces urging Japan into war against the Soviet Union in 1939. The authors' opinion that the Soviets were "...still too weak to challenge the Japanese" may disturb the spirit in Valhalla of Lieutenant-General Georgii Zhukov, whose tank-led army exacted some 50,000 Japanese casualties at the battle of Khalkin Gol' on the Mongolian frontier in August, 1939.
Political and social reforms were undertaken during the American occupation of Japan (1945-52, while ambitious economic reforms were projected but subsequently curtailed. Since 1945, the authors conclude, the United States has enjoyed better relations with its former enemy, Japan, than with its former ally, China., or former colony, The Philippines. The Japanese Wirtschaftwunder is remarked on and while the aulhors comment on the Japanese "vulnerability complex" and its nearly total dependence on imported oil, they do not associate these phenomena with political friability in Japan, Inc. where "...the same conservative party always wins a plurality." The contrast in conclusions relative to American coopertion with the Japanese and Philippine elites is not explained. Someday, somewhere, an independent institute or journal to foster integrated studies of modern Eurasia might be welcomed.
Publhed in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science in Philadelphia in the Spring of 1983. Insignificant rhetorical modifications have been introduced in this version.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
REVIEW, JEANNE KIRKPATRICK, THE REAGAN PHENOMENON
Jeanne J. Kirkpatrick. THE REAGAN PHENOMENON, AND OTHER SPEECHES ON FOREIGN POLICY. Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, c. 1983. xv +230 pp.
In late mediaeval times a unique form of "how to do it" literature known as the "mirror of princes" literature arose in Europe. Holding up examples of virtue and vice, pious clerks hoped to inspire the virtuous prince to rule justly and in a Christian spirit in order to attain good fortune on earth and fitting disposition after death. One of the later practicioners was Niccolo Machievelli, secretary to the Florentine Republic in Italy, whose splendidly condensed job-seeking tract THE PRINCE redirected a formerly pietistic genre into realistic or amoral politics with a strong undercurrent of nationalism. Guided, as it were, by the Italian precedent, Jeanne J. Kirkpatrick, the present US ambassador to the United Nations, has published some selected addresses on the present Administration's UN policies and the significence of the Reagan victory of 1980 as her contribution to a "mirror for reps" literature.
In six subdivisions of addresses to variegated bodies, the virtues and vices of Mrs. Kirkpatrick and the current Administration's foreign policy are luminously mirrored. Some sixty pages in Parts 3 and 4 are selected from speeches treating Israel's Drang nach Osten and the not-so-splendid isolation America enjoys within the UN. Some fifty pages in Part 5 are titled, with questionable understatement, "Some Troublesome Problems of Foreign Policy" such as most of Asia, Africa and Central America. These proportions are instructive and may suggest inter alia that a mote in the State Department's eye may prevent it from seeing the (falling) beams all around it.
Perhaps, too, an element of Machiavellian realism may have intertwined with other motives in issuing this collection. But not too much, for the Ambassador formally abjures rationalism in foreign policy and advocates "taking the cure" of history, which at her hands teaches that the liberties we are privileged to enjoy as putative victors in the Revolution and as descendents of Englishmen are sufficiently protected in the wise arrangement of offices provided in the Constitution and "...not by the Bill or Rights." (p. 44) O tempora! O Watergate!
It is not surprising that her address to the Natinal Urban League on "Goals in Africa" appears not to have touched the normal concerns of that body. The term "supply-side" is not in her vocabulary, but she finds "The case of Sri Lanka is particularly interesting..." (p. 24) The line separating neo-realism from neo-Phiilstinism is a thin one and at times Mrs. Kirkpatrick's formulations seem too close to that line for comfort. But her problems with a human rights formula stem largely from the Administration's commitment to throw out former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski while keeping the bath water, i.e., a tepid human rights pollicy that is less zealous and more manageable. Driving in the fast lane with one or two wheels skittering off the track, Jeanne the K nevertheless zooms to the finish line under the yellow-and white checkered flag of Christendom with a proposal to encourage the Brezhnev regime to withdraw from Afghanistan, factual rebuttals to the Sandinista spokesmen for Nicaragua and a heartfelt repudiation of Kampuchea's former leader, Pol Pot. And the Bill of Rights is suddenly (without being identified as such) fundamental once more (p.62).
It is bodacious to assert that the election of Ronald Reagan marked a watershed in American political life. (When has a recent Presidential election NOT been so characterized?) An excess of reductionism may be seen in her condensation of the twenty years from Truman's Point Four to the Tet offensive (1948-68) as the Cold War era. The decade from 1968 to about 1980, seen through these Reaganite goggles, is characterized as the interlude of detente, opening with the turgid rise of the New Left and detumescing during the flaccid presidency of Jimmy Carter. The Third Period, like the Third Rome, promises to a true believer's eyes to stand forever--"a fourth there shall not be"--but this is holding up a mirror to prince to show them in court regalia rather than as they actually, warts and wattles, are.
In the realistic spirit of Machiavelli, Mrs. Kirkpatrick decries the illusion that possession of armaments is eo ipso an incitement to violence. Indeed, she could point at MiG-23's in Cuba which can deliver nuclear devices, the airframe toggles that could carry them, and a Soviet brigade that guards them, but forbears for some reason to do so. Her conviction that peace and liberal democracy rests on American power is firmly expressed (p. 14).
Poised midway between Kissinger and Brzezinski, Mrs. Kirkpatrick may be characterized in Continental erms as a Liberal-Conservative. She is a better rhetorical driver than a mechanic of ideas: it has been a painstaking and sometimes painful exercise for her to tune her philosophcal engine to run without embarassing ideological backfires. As a political scientist, she demonstrates her forte to be analysis and presentation. Her addresses may be commended for their lucidity. It is liberalism in the traditional sense that underlies her most atttractive prose. This is seen at its best in her reflections on"The Reagan Phenomenon an the Liberal Tradition" in Rome. (How much more persuasive she could be staging "Hamlet" without Reagan as the Prince!) her tribute to the Italian political tradition from Marsilius of Padua in the 14th century (too radical, perhaps, for John Paul II) to Gaetano Mosca in the 20th century (but why not Vilfredo Pareto?) is intelligent and informed. A liberal commitment shines through her persistence in reminding audiences that words make a difference--as they do, if we are to communicate rationally, and if Humanidad is to be a criterion of civilized life. Any speaker who can deliver a readable commencement address deserves to be heard in policy council as well as in public advocacy. (Where ARE those speeches on Argentina?)
If the CIA should incur an expedient vacancy before the Orwellian year of 1984, Mrs. Kirkpatrick might approach the Great Communicator with the words of Portia in The Merchant of Venice:
Happy in this, she is not yet so old
But that she may learn: happier than this,
She is not bred so dull but she can learn;
Happiest of all, is that her gentle spirit
Commits itself to yours to be directed.
Tempered, qualified and humane CIA directors are precious few, and Mrs. Kirkpatrick is one of the few intellectuals in the Reagan Cabinet who, despite her understandable confusion in domestic politics, is apparently capable of looking into the mirror of princes and taking a long view.
Review commissioned by the Baltimore Sun, which declined to publish it. The Sun sent a $15.00 kill fee.
In late mediaeval times a unique form of "how to do it" literature known as the "mirror of princes" literature arose in Europe. Holding up examples of virtue and vice, pious clerks hoped to inspire the virtuous prince to rule justly and in a Christian spirit in order to attain good fortune on earth and fitting disposition after death. One of the later practicioners was Niccolo Machievelli, secretary to the Florentine Republic in Italy, whose splendidly condensed job-seeking tract THE PRINCE redirected a formerly pietistic genre into realistic or amoral politics with a strong undercurrent of nationalism. Guided, as it were, by the Italian precedent, Jeanne J. Kirkpatrick, the present US ambassador to the United Nations, has published some selected addresses on the present Administration's UN policies and the significence of the Reagan victory of 1980 as her contribution to a "mirror for reps" literature.
In six subdivisions of addresses to variegated bodies, the virtues and vices of Mrs. Kirkpatrick and the current Administration's foreign policy are luminously mirrored. Some sixty pages in Parts 3 and 4 are selected from speeches treating Israel's Drang nach Osten and the not-so-splendid isolation America enjoys within the UN. Some fifty pages in Part 5 are titled, with questionable understatement, "Some Troublesome Problems of Foreign Policy" such as most of Asia, Africa and Central America. These proportions are instructive and may suggest inter alia that a mote in the State Department's eye may prevent it from seeing the (falling) beams all around it.
Perhaps, too, an element of Machiavellian realism may have intertwined with other motives in issuing this collection. But not too much, for the Ambassador formally abjures rationalism in foreign policy and advocates "taking the cure" of history, which at her hands teaches that the liberties we are privileged to enjoy as putative victors in the Revolution and as descendents of Englishmen are sufficiently protected in the wise arrangement of offices provided in the Constitution and "...not by the Bill or Rights." (p. 44) O tempora! O Watergate!
It is not surprising that her address to the Natinal Urban League on "Goals in Africa" appears not to have touched the normal concerns of that body. The term "supply-side" is not in her vocabulary, but she finds "The case of Sri Lanka is particularly interesting..." (p. 24) The line separating neo-realism from neo-Phiilstinism is a thin one and at times Mrs. Kirkpatrick's formulations seem too close to that line for comfort. But her problems with a human rights formula stem largely from the Administration's commitment to throw out former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski while keeping the bath water, i.e., a tepid human rights pollicy that is less zealous and more manageable. Driving in the fast lane with one or two wheels skittering off the track, Jeanne the K nevertheless zooms to the finish line under the yellow-and white checkered flag of Christendom with a proposal to encourage the Brezhnev regime to withdraw from Afghanistan, factual rebuttals to the Sandinista spokesmen for Nicaragua and a heartfelt repudiation of Kampuchea's former leader, Pol Pot. And the Bill of Rights is suddenly (without being identified as such) fundamental once more (p.62).
It is bodacious to assert that the election of Ronald Reagan marked a watershed in American political life. (When has a recent Presidential election NOT been so characterized?) An excess of reductionism may be seen in her condensation of the twenty years from Truman's Point Four to the Tet offensive (1948-68) as the Cold War era. The decade from 1968 to about 1980, seen through these Reaganite goggles, is characterized as the interlude of detente, opening with the turgid rise of the New Left and detumescing during the flaccid presidency of Jimmy Carter. The Third Period, like the Third Rome, promises to a true believer's eyes to stand forever--"a fourth there shall not be"--but this is holding up a mirror to prince to show them in court regalia rather than as they actually, warts and wattles, are.
In the realistic spirit of Machiavelli, Mrs. Kirkpatrick decries the illusion that possession of armaments is eo ipso an incitement to violence. Indeed, she could point at MiG-23's in Cuba which can deliver nuclear devices, the airframe toggles that could carry them, and a Soviet brigade that guards them, but forbears for some reason to do so. Her conviction that peace and liberal democracy rests on American power is firmly expressed (p. 14).
Poised midway between Kissinger and Brzezinski, Mrs. Kirkpatrick may be characterized in Continental erms as a Liberal-Conservative. She is a better rhetorical driver than a mechanic of ideas: it has been a painstaking and sometimes painful exercise for her to tune her philosophcal engine to run without embarassing ideological backfires. As a political scientist, she demonstrates her forte to be analysis and presentation. Her addresses may be commended for their lucidity. It is liberalism in the traditional sense that underlies her most atttractive prose. This is seen at its best in her reflections on"The Reagan Phenomenon an the Liberal Tradition" in Rome. (How much more persuasive she could be staging "Hamlet" without Reagan as the Prince!) her tribute to the Italian political tradition from Marsilius of Padua in the 14th century (too radical, perhaps, for John Paul II) to Gaetano Mosca in the 20th century (but why not Vilfredo Pareto?) is intelligent and informed. A liberal commitment shines through her persistence in reminding audiences that words make a difference--as they do, if we are to communicate rationally, and if Humanidad is to be a criterion of civilized life. Any speaker who can deliver a readable commencement address deserves to be heard in policy council as well as in public advocacy. (Where ARE those speeches on Argentina?)
If the CIA should incur an expedient vacancy before the Orwellian year of 1984, Mrs. Kirkpatrick might approach the Great Communicator with the words of Portia in The Merchant of Venice:
Happy in this, she is not yet so old
But that she may learn: happier than this,
She is not bred so dull but she can learn;
Happiest of all, is that her gentle spirit
Commits itself to yours to be directed.
Tempered, qualified and humane CIA directors are precious few, and Mrs. Kirkpatrick is one of the few intellectuals in the Reagan Cabinet who, despite her understandable confusion in domestic politics, is apparently capable of looking into the mirror of princes and taking a long view.
Review commissioned by the Baltimore Sun, which declined to publish it. The Sun sent a $15.00 kill fee.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
REVIEW, T. NAKAMURA, THE POSTWAR JAPANESE ECONOMY (1981)
Takafusa Nakamura. The Postwar Japanese Economy: Its Development and Structure. Translated by Jacquelinle Kaminski. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, c. 1981.
Professor Takafusa Nakamura's newly-translated interpretation of the Japanese economy gives an insider's viewpoint that no available Western interpretations can rival. Academics may label the profusely documented study as revisionist. Lay readers who are prudent enough to skip over the infrequent algebraic formulas and who do not have the time to invest in analyzing 128 statistical tables will find the text more than sufficient to provide a solidly-grounded framework for interpreting the postwar Japanese economic phenomenon.
Formerly director of research at Japan's Economic Planning Agency, the author has divided his subject, like Caesar's Gaul, in partes tres. The first part treats the 1930's and 1940's. The second part analyzes the mechanisms of rapid growth prevailing from the Korean War (1950-53) to the Arab-Israeli War of 1973 and the ensuing oil crisis. Professor Nakamura describes in his third section the challenge of maintaining stable growth and furthering social consolidation for the immediate future.
One of the author's most striking arguments, not often discussed in English, is that the mechanisms responsible for Japan's current economic success were improvised during the 1930's in order to manage the China Incident and to prepare for what the Army thought would be an attack on the Soviet Union. By 1939-40, full-scale price, wage and profit controls were erected over the entire economy, as well as resource allocation mechanisms (rationing) for scarce commodities such as rice and steel. Control associations were established in designated key industries by 1941. In 1944 the Bank of Japan was directed to provide unimpeded funding to the munitions industry. The role of the present-day Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) can be traced back to the wartime controls of the Commerce and Munitions Ministries. Under the subsequent American Occupation, wartime "patriotic associations" were miraculoously reborn as vertically-organized company unions offering lifetime employment ant total job security. The contrast between wartime controls and the more classical, free-market enterprise economy from the Meji Restoration to the 1920's is hinted at, but not explained in detail.
During the Occupation, 14 of the great cartels (zaibatsu), which in toto disposed of 40% of all Japanese stocks, were formally dissolved. Land reform reduced tenant farming from 46% to 11% of the available arable land. Organized unions rose from zero to 60% of the labor force of big companies in 1948, accompanied by mass dismissal of employees implicated in strikes orchestrated by the left wing of the Socialist party. Occupation authorities also vigorously championed the conversion of industrial fuel from native coal to imported oil.
While the Five Year Plan adopted in 1948 aimed at restoring living standards to the level of 1934, the yen, under American pressure, underwent a forced deflation to a 360:1 exchange rate. But official expectation of a long and painful recovery period were made obsolete by the Korean War, when US special procurements and military expenditures were treated, for bookkeeping ppurposes, as an "export." Guided by a continuum of bureaucrats trained in applying wartime controls, buoyed up by an undervalued currency, fueled by cheap Arab oil and protectd domestically by patriotic company unions, the Japanese economy took off like a Zero.
But on closer examination today, Japanese commercial practices leave the companies exceptionally vulnerable to fluctuations in the export market. A third of Japanese trade is now with the United States, making Japanese companies dependent on the American business cycle. The consequences of this dependence are magnified by the extraordinarily low equity rationm now estimated at 25% or less. Stratospheric indebtedness in an era affected by US bubble-level interest rates further increases Japanese sensitivity to the external economic environment. Export to the United States is a key variable; access to secure Middle Eastern oil at stable prices is another.
The Japanese national economy is so sharply stratified between the great combines and smaller businesses, labor and agriculture, that the term "dual structure" is commonly employed. (This phenomenon is treated in terms of the US economy by Professor Robert Averitt of Smith College, whose 1968 book The Dual Economy was recently hailed in Boston as an "underground classic.") More than 95% of the part-time labor force are women who serve as a disposable marginal economic reserve. Smaller businesses hire and lay off the bulk of the labor force and depend on the great combines through subcontracting arrangements (again, a practice developed in wartime). As the Japanese economy has prospered, the subcontracting practice has expanded overseas to South Korea and Taiwan.
Once the panic attendant on the oil crisis of 1973 subsided and the lesser economic shock of an upward revaluation of the yen was absorbed, Japan entered a period of readjustment in the 1970's which Nakamura hopes will be an era of "stable growth." But the current international payments deficit and declining export opportunities coupled with a volatile oil procurement situation suggest that the economic weather may be clouded. US policy planners would be well advised to exercise restraint in addressing their own self-induced fiscal and oil pricing problems, without seeking a short-term melioration by diverting public attention to the Japanese economy as a convenient scapegoat.
Business strategists who can appreciate a penetrating, honest and surprisingly frank study of a unique economic mechanism will find no better model than The Postwar Japanese Economy. It is a world-class performance.
Submitted to The Asia Mail in Alexandria, VA, in November, 1982. The journal terminated its publication before the review could be printed. No kill fee was offered.
Professor Takafusa Nakamura's newly-translated interpretation of the Japanese economy gives an insider's viewpoint that no available Western interpretations can rival. Academics may label the profusely documented study as revisionist. Lay readers who are prudent enough to skip over the infrequent algebraic formulas and who do not have the time to invest in analyzing 128 statistical tables will find the text more than sufficient to provide a solidly-grounded framework for interpreting the postwar Japanese economic phenomenon.
Formerly director of research at Japan's Economic Planning Agency, the author has divided his subject, like Caesar's Gaul, in partes tres. The first part treats the 1930's and 1940's. The second part analyzes the mechanisms of rapid growth prevailing from the Korean War (1950-53) to the Arab-Israeli War of 1973 and the ensuing oil crisis. Professor Nakamura describes in his third section the challenge of maintaining stable growth and furthering social consolidation for the immediate future.
One of the author's most striking arguments, not often discussed in English, is that the mechanisms responsible for Japan's current economic success were improvised during the 1930's in order to manage the China Incident and to prepare for what the Army thought would be an attack on the Soviet Union. By 1939-40, full-scale price, wage and profit controls were erected over the entire economy, as well as resource allocation mechanisms (rationing) for scarce commodities such as rice and steel. Control associations were established in designated key industries by 1941. In 1944 the Bank of Japan was directed to provide unimpeded funding to the munitions industry. The role of the present-day Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) can be traced back to the wartime controls of the Commerce and Munitions Ministries. Under the subsequent American Occupation, wartime "patriotic associations" were miraculoously reborn as vertically-organized company unions offering lifetime employment ant total job security. The contrast between wartime controls and the more classical, free-market enterprise economy from the Meji Restoration to the 1920's is hinted at, but not explained in detail.
During the Occupation, 14 of the great cartels (zaibatsu), which in toto disposed of 40% of all Japanese stocks, were formally dissolved. Land reform reduced tenant farming from 46% to 11% of the available arable land. Organized unions rose from zero to 60% of the labor force of big companies in 1948, accompanied by mass dismissal of employees implicated in strikes orchestrated by the left wing of the Socialist party. Occupation authorities also vigorously championed the conversion of industrial fuel from native coal to imported oil.
While the Five Year Plan adopted in 1948 aimed at restoring living standards to the level of 1934, the yen, under American pressure, underwent a forced deflation to a 360:1 exchange rate. But official expectation of a long and painful recovery period were made obsolete by the Korean War, when US special procurements and military expenditures were treated, for bookkeeping ppurposes, as an "export." Guided by a continuum of bureaucrats trained in applying wartime controls, buoyed up by an undervalued currency, fueled by cheap Arab oil and protectd domestically by patriotic company unions, the Japanese economy took off like a Zero.
But on closer examination today, Japanese commercial practices leave the companies exceptionally vulnerable to fluctuations in the export market. A third of Japanese trade is now with the United States, making Japanese companies dependent on the American business cycle. The consequences of this dependence are magnified by the extraordinarily low equity rationm now estimated at 25% or less. Stratospheric indebtedness in an era affected by US bubble-level interest rates further increases Japanese sensitivity to the external economic environment. Export to the United States is a key variable; access to secure Middle Eastern oil at stable prices is another.
The Japanese national economy is so sharply stratified between the great combines and smaller businesses, labor and agriculture, that the term "dual structure" is commonly employed. (This phenomenon is treated in terms of the US economy by Professor Robert Averitt of Smith College, whose 1968 book The Dual Economy was recently hailed in Boston as an "underground classic.") More than 95% of the part-time labor force are women who serve as a disposable marginal economic reserve. Smaller businesses hire and lay off the bulk of the labor force and depend on the great combines through subcontracting arrangements (again, a practice developed in wartime). As the Japanese economy has prospered, the subcontracting practice has expanded overseas to South Korea and Taiwan.
Once the panic attendant on the oil crisis of 1973 subsided and the lesser economic shock of an upward revaluation of the yen was absorbed, Japan entered a period of readjustment in the 1970's which Nakamura hopes will be an era of "stable growth." But the current international payments deficit and declining export opportunities coupled with a volatile oil procurement situation suggest that the economic weather may be clouded. US policy planners would be well advised to exercise restraint in addressing their own self-induced fiscal and oil pricing problems, without seeking a short-term melioration by diverting public attention to the Japanese economy as a convenient scapegoat.
Business strategists who can appreciate a penetrating, honest and surprisingly frank study of a unique economic mechanism will find no better model than The Postwar Japanese Economy. It is a world-class performance.
Submitted to The Asia Mail in Alexandria, VA, in November, 1982. The journal terminated its publication before the review could be printed. No kill fee was offered.
Saturday, September 6, 2008
THE BUSH FAMILY AND NAZI GERMANY
The Bush family played a central role in the financing and arming of Adolf Hitler before he assumed power in Germany. It helped to build up the armaments factories of the Nazi war machine. In the first years of the war the Bush family profited from slave labor in the mineral mines of Auschwitz. It helped develop the theory of "racial superiority." It united the Bush family with Nazi Germany. --by Peter Mertens, 3 October, 2003
Part I. How Steel Baron Thyssen and Bush's Grandfather made Hitler Great
At the end of the First World War, August Thyssen, the greatest millionaire entrepeneur in Germany, saw his steel empire in danger. In the "neutral" Netherlands he opened the Bank of Shipping and Trading in Rotterdam. Thus he could channel his war booty from the August Thyssen Bank in Berliln in timely fashion despite the claims for damage /i.e., reparations/ of the Versailles Treaty. Old August gave 100 million dollars and his industrial empire in the Ruhr region to his son Fritz. They scored in 1923 with the ban on Adolf Hitler, the man who could rescue German industry from the insurgent worker class. The steel baron met Adolf Hitler and General Erich Ludendorff and channelled 100,000 gold marks as a contribution to the early NSDAP.
But Hitler's party found far more funding necessary to defeat the Communist movement. The war profits in Rotterdam were insufficient. And thus Thyssen wanted to establish an American bank as well. In 1922 he met Averell Harriman, the head of the investment firm W.A. Harriman and Co., in Berlin. Harriman and Thyssen agreed to establish a bank for Thyssen in New York. Business friends of Harriman would act as the directors, together with Thyssen's agent H.J. Kouvenhoven who moved to the United States, according to an official investigation report in 1942.
German Armament Manufacturers Appeal to the Bush Family
So after Berlin and Rotterdam, Thyssen achieved a foothold in the United States. In early 1924 Kouvenhoven, Director of the Bank of Shipping and Trading, travelled to New York where he, together with Averell Harriman and George "Bert" Walker of the Union Banking Corporation (UBC), agreed to establish on Broadway the same bank at the very same address as Harriman and Co. Behind the scenery the Union Banking Corporation was the property of the Rotterdamse Bank, which was in its turn the property of Fritz Thyssen. On January 10, 1925, the August Thyssen firms won a loan of 12 million dollars from another American bank, Dillon, Read and Co. Dillon was an old friend of Sam Bush, the great-grandfather of the current American president. His bank was used by Standard Oil, Ford, General Electric, DuPont and IIT to finance Hitler. The German steel industry, led by Fritz Thyssen and Friedrich Flick, combined to form the United Steel Works with American dollars. "There was a division of labor: Thyssen's own intimate knowledge of politics and related matters was led by the Walker-Bush organization; the United Steel Works, on the contrary, carried on its bank functions through Dillon Read."
On 1 May 1926 George Walker decided to give the vice-presidency of Harriman and Co. to his son-in-law, Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. Bush, Jr. In 1931 Harriman and Co. merged with a British investment company, Brown Brothers . Harriman and Co. acquired a significent portion of a Polish mining company, the Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation. Two-thirds of the corporation became the property of Friedrich Flick, a member of Heinrich Himmler's circle of friends. He used a part of his profits to finance the terrorist Schutzstaffel (SS).
Prescott Bush assumed the responsibility of supervising the United Steelworks of Thyssen and Flick, which continued to finance Hitler until he came to power. In 1932 Thyssen organized a gathering with Hitler in the Park Hotel in Duesseldorf, where he persuated the great industrial big-shots from the Ruhr region to support the Hitler's line. The steel magnates represented the pulsing heart of German war industry: United Steel Works produced 50.8% of the iron, 41.4% of steel plates, 35% of explosives and 22.1% of the steel wire of all Nazi Germany.
Great-grandfather and grandfather Bush had a great ride. They invested in Nazi Germany through Brown Brothers and Harriman, and transferred the armaments profits back into the United States through the UBC bank of Thyssen. In 1934, the profits attained hundreds of millions which also were transmitted to New York through Rotterdam. In the meantime Prescott Bush became managing director of UBC. "The Bush family know very well that Brown Brothers was a gold canal to Nazi Germany and that Union Bank was a secret pipeline to bring Nazi funds through The Netherlands to America again," wrote John Loftus, former prosecutor of the US Department for Nazi War Crimes.
Part II. Slave Labor in the Polish Mines for Prescott Bush
Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation was established in the Polish city of Oswiecim, one of the richest mineral regions in Poland. In 1934 the Polish government accused the company of Flick and Bush of fraud, fictitious accouonting and tax evasion. Great-grandfather Bush concluded a compromise that year with the Polish government. But Consolidated Steel continued to ship the minerals out of Poland with which the Panzers, aircraft and explosives were prepared which were dropped on the same Poles five years later.
It was precisely in Oswiecim that Hitler erected the concentration camp in 1939 that would become known by the German name for the little town, Auschwitz. After the end of 1941 the concentration camp was also supplied with slave labor under Himmler's SS. The "healthy" prisoners worked as slaves in the mines and factories of I.G. Farben and Consolidated Steel. During the war, Thyssen and Flick sold Consolidated Steel completely to UBC. The company was rechristened as the Silesian American Corporation and came under the total control of Harriman and manager Prescott Bush. Grandfather Bush and Harriman pocketed the blood-money from thousands of slaves that worked in the mines of Auschwitz.
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 the American government enacted the Trading with the Enemy Act, the law that prohibited trafficking with the foe. On Oct. 20, 1942, all the components of the Union Banking Corporation were seized, including those of Harriman and Prescott Bush. The government asserted that Bush's bank "...was holding the profits of the Thyssen family and property of the members of a certain enemy nation." Harriman and Bush were indicted as collaborators. A month later, the American government also took over the Silesian American corporation. But the corporation continued to operate and Prescott Bush exercised his functions until 1943, thanks to the protective hand of the lawyer Allen Dulles, the man who later directed the CIA. On the death of Fritz Thyssen in 1951, the shareholders in Brown Brothers Harriman got their blood money back. Prescott Bush received 1.3 million dollars for his portion of UBC and in the same year he helped his son, George Herbert Walker Bush, to invest in the petroleum sector also. With this money George Bush senior directed the Bush-Overby Development Company, active in the oil business and oil patents. And two years later he created the Zapata Offshore Oil Company, the firm that drilled the first oil wells off the coast of Kuwait, and later, as the Pennzoil Company, owned undertakings in Qatar and Egypt. With the blood-money from the Nazis, the Bush family entered the petroleum sector, the royal palace in Kuwait, and the first Gulf War against Iraq.
--The Truth
Popular Edition for The Netherlands
Monday, 6 June 2005.
A lengthier treatment of the same subject may be found in Ben Aris and Duncan Campbell, "How Bush's Grandfather helped Hitler's Rise to Power," in The Guardian for Saturday, 25 September 2004. (8 pages)
The Zapata Corporation is the subject of an 8-page entry in Wikipedia.
Part I. How Steel Baron Thyssen and Bush's Grandfather made Hitler Great
At the end of the First World War, August Thyssen, the greatest millionaire entrepeneur in Germany, saw his steel empire in danger. In the "neutral" Netherlands he opened the Bank of Shipping and Trading in Rotterdam. Thus he could channel his war booty from the August Thyssen Bank in Berliln in timely fashion despite the claims for damage /i.e., reparations/ of the Versailles Treaty. Old August gave 100 million dollars and his industrial empire in the Ruhr region to his son Fritz. They scored in 1923 with the ban on Adolf Hitler, the man who could rescue German industry from the insurgent worker class. The steel baron met Adolf Hitler and General Erich Ludendorff and channelled 100,000 gold marks as a contribution to the early NSDAP.
But Hitler's party found far more funding necessary to defeat the Communist movement. The war profits in Rotterdam were insufficient. And thus Thyssen wanted to establish an American bank as well. In 1922 he met Averell Harriman, the head of the investment firm W.A. Harriman and Co., in Berlin. Harriman and Thyssen agreed to establish a bank for Thyssen in New York. Business friends of Harriman would act as the directors, together with Thyssen's agent H.J. Kouvenhoven who moved to the United States, according to an official investigation report in 1942.
German Armament Manufacturers Appeal to the Bush Family
So after Berlin and Rotterdam, Thyssen achieved a foothold in the United States. In early 1924 Kouvenhoven, Director of the Bank of Shipping and Trading, travelled to New York where he, together with Averell Harriman and George "Bert" Walker of the Union Banking Corporation (UBC), agreed to establish on Broadway the same bank at the very same address as Harriman and Co. Behind the scenery the Union Banking Corporation was the property of the Rotterdamse Bank, which was in its turn the property of Fritz Thyssen. On January 10, 1925, the August Thyssen firms won a loan of 12 million dollars from another American bank, Dillon, Read and Co. Dillon was an old friend of Sam Bush, the great-grandfather of the current American president. His bank was used by Standard Oil, Ford, General Electric, DuPont and IIT to finance Hitler. The German steel industry, led by Fritz Thyssen and Friedrich Flick, combined to form the United Steel Works with American dollars. "There was a division of labor: Thyssen's own intimate knowledge of politics and related matters was led by the Walker-Bush organization; the United Steel Works, on the contrary, carried on its bank functions through Dillon Read."
On 1 May 1926 George Walker decided to give the vice-presidency of Harriman and Co. to his son-in-law, Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. Bush, Jr. In 1931 Harriman and Co. merged with a British investment company, Brown Brothers . Harriman and Co. acquired a significent portion of a Polish mining company, the Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation. Two-thirds of the corporation became the property of Friedrich Flick, a member of Heinrich Himmler's circle of friends. He used a part of his profits to finance the terrorist Schutzstaffel (SS).
Prescott Bush assumed the responsibility of supervising the United Steelworks of Thyssen and Flick, which continued to finance Hitler until he came to power. In 1932 Thyssen organized a gathering with Hitler in the Park Hotel in Duesseldorf, where he persuated the great industrial big-shots from the Ruhr region to support the Hitler's line. The steel magnates represented the pulsing heart of German war industry: United Steel Works produced 50.8% of the iron, 41.4% of steel plates, 35% of explosives and 22.1% of the steel wire of all Nazi Germany.
Great-grandfather and grandfather Bush had a great ride. They invested in Nazi Germany through Brown Brothers and Harriman, and transferred the armaments profits back into the United States through the UBC bank of Thyssen. In 1934, the profits attained hundreds of millions which also were transmitted to New York through Rotterdam. In the meantime Prescott Bush became managing director of UBC. "The Bush family know very well that Brown Brothers was a gold canal to Nazi Germany and that Union Bank was a secret pipeline to bring Nazi funds through The Netherlands to America again," wrote John Loftus, former prosecutor of the US Department for Nazi War Crimes.
Part II. Slave Labor in the Polish Mines for Prescott Bush
Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation was established in the Polish city of Oswiecim, one of the richest mineral regions in Poland. In 1934 the Polish government accused the company of Flick and Bush of fraud, fictitious accouonting and tax evasion. Great-grandfather Bush concluded a compromise that year with the Polish government. But Consolidated Steel continued to ship the minerals out of Poland with which the Panzers, aircraft and explosives were prepared which were dropped on the same Poles five years later.
It was precisely in Oswiecim that Hitler erected the concentration camp in 1939 that would become known by the German name for the little town, Auschwitz. After the end of 1941 the concentration camp was also supplied with slave labor under Himmler's SS. The "healthy" prisoners worked as slaves in the mines and factories of I.G. Farben and Consolidated Steel. During the war, Thyssen and Flick sold Consolidated Steel completely to UBC. The company was rechristened as the Silesian American Corporation and came under the total control of Harriman and manager Prescott Bush. Grandfather Bush and Harriman pocketed the blood-money from thousands of slaves that worked in the mines of Auschwitz.
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 the American government enacted the Trading with the Enemy Act, the law that prohibited trafficking with the foe. On Oct. 20, 1942, all the components of the Union Banking Corporation were seized, including those of Harriman and Prescott Bush. The government asserted that Bush's bank "...was holding the profits of the Thyssen family and property of the members of a certain enemy nation." Harriman and Bush were indicted as collaborators. A month later, the American government also took over the Silesian American corporation. But the corporation continued to operate and Prescott Bush exercised his functions until 1943, thanks to the protective hand of the lawyer Allen Dulles, the man who later directed the CIA. On the death of Fritz Thyssen in 1951, the shareholders in Brown Brothers Harriman got their blood money back. Prescott Bush received 1.3 million dollars for his portion of UBC and in the same year he helped his son, George Herbert Walker Bush, to invest in the petroleum sector also. With this money George Bush senior directed the Bush-Overby Development Company, active in the oil business and oil patents. And two years later he created the Zapata Offshore Oil Company, the firm that drilled the first oil wells off the coast of Kuwait, and later, as the Pennzoil Company, owned undertakings in Qatar and Egypt. With the blood-money from the Nazis, the Bush family entered the petroleum sector, the royal palace in Kuwait, and the first Gulf War against Iraq.
--The Truth
Popular Edition for The Netherlands
Monday, 6 June 2005.
A lengthier treatment of the same subject may be found in Ben Aris and Duncan Campbell, "How Bush's Grandfather helped Hitler's Rise to Power," in The Guardian for Saturday, 25 September 2004. (8 pages)
The Zapata Corporation is the subject of an 8-page entry in Wikipedia.
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