How can one be silent about Syria with all the mayhem going on in that country? Yet what can one say? I’m sitting here in Turkey with a wrecked back and can’t do much about world problems, but what I can do is send a few messages to a few friends in the hope that they may spread the word. The following are observations of someone who has observed the “Arab Spring” while living in the region since the beginning mainly via television and Internet.
As for the back problem, I’m now lying on a comfortable bed in a decent Istanbul hotel, getting as much bed rest as I can and speaking into the dictation program!
First I have to say that I admire the courage, stamina and craftiness of the Syrian people–qualities that we have seen in other national uprisings—in standing up to one of the most brutal son-of-a-bitches on record–Basher al-Assad. I should also admit my status as an amateur commentator on Middle eastern affairs; I speak no Arabic and get all of my news from the media. I know a few Syrians in Al Ain & at my university in the UAE, but I’ve never had a chance to plumb their feelings or minds in any depth. As for the Syrian people in general, they do get good word of mouth from both professional and casual travelers who go there and report back. I have never been to Syria but would like very much to visit in the near future.
Secondly, it seems to me that the qualities shown by the Syrian people are those we have seen other Arab nationalities exercise effectively. I’ve been extremely impressed by how these popular rebellions have exploited basic Arab & Islamic religious patterns (and social street behavior) to instigate and strengthen their political protest movements; Most amazing to my mind is the way the protesters have used the weekly Friday prayers meeting to launch and relaunch their protests so that their religious day is integrated into (and partly legitimates, one would think) the political movement. Early in the “spring,” the joke went around that one of the dictators would do well to abolish the day Friday altogether. With Ramadan now upon us (Ramazan in Turkey) it will be extremely interesting to see if the Syrian protesters can make good their threat to up the pressure on Basher during this time. The other religious event is the spectacle of street funerals for victims of the repression – a sad but vigorous Arab tradition – that seems to serve both to mourn the dead and rally the living. The other basic cultural trait, I see, that supports the political movement is the willingness of the Arabs to go into the street and coalesce as a crowd – often with tragic results as we’ve seen continually—but overall showing a kind of courage week after week that commands respect (& must dismay the tiny brain behind the closely-set eyes of Basher the Basher).
What can one do? Very little of course but one issue to my mind especially with Americans is the fact that the US government excludes Al Jazeera television; without the direct and indirect input of a major news outlet foreign issues remain vague and cloudy, mere hearsay. So my first suggestion to all those who care about the bloody situation of the Syrians is to request the FTA or the State Department to immediately cease its ban of Al Jazeera TV and let that important conduit of communications into the country. Al Jazeera is covering the Syrian situation better than any other channel, probably because they are one of the few news outlets allowed into that country. Americans are already endangered by their provincialism and remoteness from world events; we need more foreign news in more foreign news channels, not less.
The other point concerns petitioning our representatives and informing them of our views on Syria. I believe we can’t turn our backs on what appears to be a huge pro- democracy movement against a brutal dictatorship that responds to legitimate demands of its population by regular massacres of peaceful civilians. If we were willing to sacrifice American blood to bring democracy to Iraq, we ought to support a movement in favor of the same ideals that is self-generated in a country next door. According to Al Jazeera, the Syrian demonstrators' signs recently read “your silence is killing us”.
[note added later: this was apparently directed to other Syrians in cities such a Damascus -- and other Arab countries, whh recently did respond finally]
Our government has taken some steps in the right direction such as ambassador Ford’s recent visit to the demonstrations in Hama, and Hillary Clinton has made some good statements but our government needs to do much more than this in my opinion. With their great experience and connections in world affairs, they ought to be able to think of something that makes it clear to Basher Al Assad that he’s going to pay a price for his criminal repression of peaceful civilians. Perhaps Basher’s actions should be the basis for the definition of a new kind of crime against humanity—populace repression?–and be classified among those punishable by the Hague War Crimes tribunal. A few years ago an international arrest warrant was issued for the president of Sudan for his ethnic cleansing of the Christian south. In what way are Basher al-Assad’s crimes against his own people any less than those of the Sudanese president?
Colorful cramped Old Delhi
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Blood was. The Hawk was. Pain was.
Yalo. By Elias Khoury
Translated by Humphrey Davies
Maclehose Press/Quercus UK (paperback)
7.99 344 pp.
Reviewed by James Dalglish
A brief summary of Yalo could make it sound like the latest Robert Ludlum thriller. In a war-torn country, a man accused of conspiracy and rape is subjected to shocking tortures in an atmosphere of paranoid politics and international intrigue. The tale is riddled with sex and violence plus a good deal of grotesque, sometimes obscene imagery. But the fact is that Yalo is not a thriller at all despite its lurid contents.
The story goes like this: In post-civil war Lebanon, a young ex-militiaman Yalo (nickname for Daniel) is not readjusting well to peacetime. Working as an armed guard of a rich man's villa, he begins raping and robbing couples who come for surreptitious sex to a nearby lovers Lane. The uneducated thug falls in love with one of the women he rapes, pursues her, trying futilely to win her heart, and though he is rejected in the end by the upper-class woman, he becomes less brutal and a potentially decent human being through his love for her, or so the author implies. In the end, Yalo is absolved of the more sinister conspiracies but sentenced for his common crimes.
These bare bones of the story however don’t convey its disorienting experimental texture. Indeed, one of the most striking qualities about this novel is the way the author subverts the linear nature of narration and turns it into something closer to random access. If you’re looking for one coherent continuous story, you won’t find it here. Rather you will find multiple versions of Yalo’s life and crimes told and retold as he undergoes a set of gruesome tortures that not only damage his body but also fragment his mind. And since the novel is told from Yalo’s point of view, the impressionistic vortex of his mind is our only source of information. The challenge is, this information is often expressed in non literal language, so we have to wade at time through prose saturated with Yalo’s personal myths, images and symbols.
The torture that Yalo undergoes, for example, is brutal but never literal, fleshly but not pornographic. Here he is on “the throne”: “Blood was. The hawk was. Pain was. Then suddenly the body left its owner and went to a place of pains too many to number. He saw it moving away and plunging into a pool of pain.”
The torture imagery turns into a bizarre sexual fantasy in which he becomes a squid making love to Shireen, another squid. The squid imagery naturally leads to ink: “He dove into the depths, stretched out his eight hands and flew through the water... he squirted his ink to mislead them, and the ink came out the colour of blood.”
And of course, ink links to Khoury’s ultimate topic--writing itself. Yalo, you see has been assigned the task of writing his confessions; though these are as confused as his thoughts, the process of self-creation by means of that mystical substance ink helps Yalo reach truths about his life that though irrelevant to the police show the reader Yalo has understood his crimes and matured.
Khoury’s theme is the effect on the human mind of torture, shown through many vivid and excruciating scenes but in which the language illuminates rather than deliver the Ludlum like thrill: here Yalo ironically congratulates his tormentors for the “inventiveness of the forms of torture you employ and on your capacity to extract confessions from the accused as easily as extracting his soul... However violent torture may be, its physical effects wear off quickly and all that remains is the spiritual effect, which makes you feel the soul is about to depart.”
[If Yalo is an allegory of writing, I wondered mischievously at times, what role would the torturers play? Could we identify them with syntax? Spelling? Style?]
Despite the tight focus on Yalo’s torment, the exterior settings and culture of Lebanon and Beirut still come through – especially in Yalo’s reveries of his Assyrian family, dominated by his grandfather, a priest of the sect, who still remembers the ancestral massacre of Ward Ein in Kurdish Turkey and tries to keep the quaint old (Eastern Christian Orthodox) practices going. Khoury’s highly concrete and sensual style not only reflects Yalo’s basic Arab macho personality but also the hedonistic culture of Lebanon that contrasts strikingly with the Puritanism of the Arab Gulf.
Though linguistically I can’t judge the faithfulness of Humphrey Davies’ translation to the original text in Arabic, I can say that what I hear in it is the coherent voice of a clearly defined character – Yalo’s diction can’t be overly ornate or learned yet must be subtle enough to carry a whole novel. It could be no easy task to fashion such a voice but Davies has done so very skillfully. He’s no traditore.
Originally published in Banipal 40 (mag of Modern Arab Lit published in London UK), spring 2011.
Translated by Humphrey Davies
Maclehose Press/Quercus UK (paperback)
7.99 344 pp.
Reviewed by James Dalglish
A brief summary of Yalo could make it sound like the latest Robert Ludlum thriller. In a war-torn country, a man accused of conspiracy and rape is subjected to shocking tortures in an atmosphere of paranoid politics and international intrigue. The tale is riddled with sex and violence plus a good deal of grotesque, sometimes obscene imagery. But the fact is that Yalo is not a thriller at all despite its lurid contents.
The story goes like this: In post-civil war Lebanon, a young ex-militiaman Yalo (nickname for Daniel) is not readjusting well to peacetime. Working as an armed guard of a rich man's villa, he begins raping and robbing couples who come for surreptitious sex to a nearby lovers Lane. The uneducated thug falls in love with one of the women he rapes, pursues her, trying futilely to win her heart, and though he is rejected in the end by the upper-class woman, he becomes less brutal and a potentially decent human being through his love for her, or so the author implies. In the end, Yalo is absolved of the more sinister conspiracies but sentenced for his common crimes.
These bare bones of the story however don’t convey its disorienting experimental texture. Indeed, one of the most striking qualities about this novel is the way the author subverts the linear nature of narration and turns it into something closer to random access. If you’re looking for one coherent continuous story, you won’t find it here. Rather you will find multiple versions of Yalo’s life and crimes told and retold as he undergoes a set of gruesome tortures that not only damage his body but also fragment his mind. And since the novel is told from Yalo’s point of view, the impressionistic vortex of his mind is our only source of information. The challenge is, this information is often expressed in non literal language, so we have to wade at time through prose saturated with Yalo’s personal myths, images and symbols.
The torture that Yalo undergoes, for example, is brutal but never literal, fleshly but not pornographic. Here he is on “the throne”: “Blood was. The hawk was. Pain was. Then suddenly the body left its owner and went to a place of pains too many to number. He saw it moving away and plunging into a pool of pain.”
The torture imagery turns into a bizarre sexual fantasy in which he becomes a squid making love to Shireen, another squid. The squid imagery naturally leads to ink: “He dove into the depths, stretched out his eight hands and flew through the water... he squirted his ink to mislead them, and the ink came out the colour of blood.”
And of course, ink links to Khoury’s ultimate topic--writing itself. Yalo, you see has been assigned the task of writing his confessions; though these are as confused as his thoughts, the process of self-creation by means of that mystical substance ink helps Yalo reach truths about his life that though irrelevant to the police show the reader Yalo has understood his crimes and matured.
Khoury’s theme is the effect on the human mind of torture, shown through many vivid and excruciating scenes but in which the language illuminates rather than deliver the Ludlum like thrill: here Yalo ironically congratulates his tormentors for the “inventiveness of the forms of torture you employ and on your capacity to extract confessions from the accused as easily as extracting his soul... However violent torture may be, its physical effects wear off quickly and all that remains is the spiritual effect, which makes you feel the soul is about to depart.”
[If Yalo is an allegory of writing, I wondered mischievously at times, what role would the torturers play? Could we identify them with syntax? Spelling? Style?]
Despite the tight focus on Yalo’s torment, the exterior settings and culture of Lebanon and Beirut still come through – especially in Yalo’s reveries of his Assyrian family, dominated by his grandfather, a priest of the sect, who still remembers the ancestral massacre of Ward Ein in Kurdish Turkey and tries to keep the quaint old (Eastern Christian Orthodox) practices going. Khoury’s highly concrete and sensual style not only reflects Yalo’s basic Arab macho personality but also the hedonistic culture of Lebanon that contrasts strikingly with the Puritanism of the Arab Gulf.
Though linguistically I can’t judge the faithfulness of Humphrey Davies’ translation to the original text in Arabic, I can say that what I hear in it is the coherent voice of a clearly defined character – Yalo’s diction can’t be overly ornate or learned yet must be subtle enough to carry a whole novel. It could be no easy task to fashion such a voice but Davies has done so very skillfully. He’s no traditore.
Originally published in Banipal 40 (mag of Modern Arab Lit published in London UK), spring 2011.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
My course raised questions about authoritarian gov't
Friends of Harry James: No, I’m not claiming I started the pro-democracy movement in the Middle-East! Only this: that I emphasized -- in a course dedicated to “World Ideas” – those concepts that most strongly supported personal freedom, human rights and rebellion against illegitimate government. In short, I am proud of the fact that before anything was heard publicly about a fall of a tyrant in Tunisia, I was quizzing my students here in the principality on (among other things) Rousseau's famous treatise concerning the basis of legitimate government. This is an excerpt from a final exam I gave January 17 at UAEU in Al Ain, UAE. The students’ interesting answers I reserve for another time.
Part IV. JJ Rousseau & the Enlightenment Period
A. Reading #1 (5)
"It is my wish to inquire whether it be possible, within the civil order, to discover a legitimate and stable basis of government. This I shall do by considering human beings as they are and laws as they might be." –From The Social Contract
Comment & interpretation (5) More of realism or idealism? Why is the word legitimate important?
(space in which to write)
B Reading #2
"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Many a man believes himself to be the master of others who is, no less than they, a slave. How did this change take place? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? To this question I hope to be able to furnish an answer." –From The Social Contract
Vocab/key terms. Give the definition in the context of the passage (2 pts each)
a free__________________________________________ (2)
b slave_________________________________________ (2)
c legitimate (edited) __________________________ (2)
C. Comment & interpretation: (10) What typical ideas or ideals do we find from Enlightenment period in this passage? Find at least two ideas/ideals.
(space in whh to write)
D. In what way does JJR’s style compliment his ideas? (2)
_________________________________________________________________________
Part IV. JJ Rousseau & the Enlightenment Period
A. Reading #1 (5)
"It is my wish to inquire whether it be possible, within the civil order, to discover a legitimate and stable basis of government. This I shall do by considering human beings as they are and laws as they might be." –From The Social Contract
Comment & interpretation (5) More of realism or idealism? Why is the word legitimate important?
(space in which to write)
B Reading #2
"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Many a man believes himself to be the master of others who is, no less than they, a slave. How did this change take place? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? To this question I hope to be able to furnish an answer." –From The Social Contract
Vocab/key terms. Give the definition in the context of the passage (2 pts each)
a free__________________________________________ (2)
b slave_________________________________________ (2)
c legitimate (edited) __________________________ (2)
C. Comment & interpretation: (10) What typical ideas or ideals do we find from Enlightenment period in this passage? Find at least two ideas/ideals.
(space in whh to write)
D. In what way does JJR’s style compliment his ideas? (2)
_________________________________________________________________________
Monday, January 31, 2011
On Egypt: Hillary & Barack are Blatherskates!
Hi folks, I've been watching the situation in Egypt next door evolve and it is truly astounding what the people there have accomplished to throw off the chains of dictatorship. There is nothing that fills me with more enthusiasm than a good rebellion. My sources are few, know a fair of number of Egyptians at work, tho only in the last few days have we talked politics in depth. Went to Egypt last year for a mere week or so and liked the place in spite of its faults...(someday the story of the tough cop thug). My concern is the US position so far.
Hillary Clinton is “a ...national” ... “as whole” .... “all hole” ... that's not what I was trying to say but the dictation prgm wouldn’t let me curse Clinton out as she deserves.
You can tell this clearly from one thing she said in her blathering statements about the situation in Egypt which is obviously in a revolutionary moment.
How can we abandon the Egyptian government, she asked one on TV talk show yesterday. After all we've been friends for nearly 30 years. She meant Mubarak of course. Yes, thirty years of a wonderful friendship -- but for the Egyptians thirty years of a cruel tyranny!!
I'm shocked at her stupidity. This is the clearest sign of the disconnect between Washington DC and Egypt. It's quite clear that she and the whole US side is out of touch with the profoundly changed situation in Egypt.
Hillary urges somebody she calls “President Mubarak" to "open a dialogue" with “his people.” He's had 30 years to do that, has shown little inclination to dialog with anyone and now responds to the rebellion not by offering “dialog” but by police, thugs, jetfighters, and the presence of armored vehicles. It's obvious that the man is incapable of a notion such as "dialogue" “free and fair elections" "freedom of speech" ect. It's good Hillary utters these pious sentiments, yes, but she only makes her self ridiculous by staying in the mindset that has worked in the past but no longer applies.
She says she doesn't want to over influence or micro manage the situation -- yes of course that's understandable, but by implying Mubarek is still the legitimate leader of Egypt, she's damaging the slim chances of those totally undefended free forces that we see each revolutionary day—who are admirably evolving into a more and more coherent phenomenon. Bravo El Baradei!
I'm particularly disappointed because I've always rejected Egyptian accusations about US perfidy and complaints alleging that the US wouldn't support the Egyptian people in any case, hanging on to the dictator as they do. I replied (tentatively) to these people who were my colleagues and co workers that I felt sure the US would support a genuine people's rebellion, if they ever got one going. Privately I felt annoyed at what I thought was one more dishonest blame game -- in which it's always safe for Arabs to blame the US but never the tyrants in their own countries.
Now we have a clear case study in front of us, a clearly revolutionary moment in which the people themselves have revolted by their own lights and I have to say: the charge made by Egyptians is beginning to look plausible. Here is a liberal State Dept Secretary serving under a Democrat president--and what do we get from them? Nothing but the most mealy-mouthed platitudes in which you get the feeling that the possible escape of an entire people from 30 years of tyranny and an absolutely unprecedented revolt in this region of the world is taking place – is just a detail hardly worth mentioning.
How could our petty “security concerns” compare to the fate of 80 million?
For shame!
I hope for two things-- that the new Egypt will emerge more or less peacefully in spite of Mubarek’s stupid intransigence and lukewarm US support for what is clearly a democratic (and as I write) peaceful revolution. Secondly that the US will improve its understanding and the tone and substance of its statements as the situation evolves. Clearly Mubarek needs to be prodded or better kicked out of the place.
The Egyptians have stated very clearly that they will refuse to go back to the status quo ante, so we better get with it.
(I wish I were there, but had to stay here during the break – due to some extra jobs I had to vanquish).
The news photos that portray the man once known as “resident Mubarek” seem to show a stony faced Pharoah who still has all of his powers within the sphere he normally controls, so none of those toadies are going to speak up. Our government has got to step in and take responsibility: otherwise the new revolutionary Egypt is going to very p**sed off.
And oh yes, what I was trying to say but the voice-text program either censored (because it’s coded to not allow criticism of high officials) or didn’t understand:
And if you didn’t get my initial message--Hillary is an A S * H O L E !!
Hillary Clinton is “a ...national” ... “as whole” .... “all hole” ... that's not what I was trying to say but the dictation prgm wouldn’t let me curse Clinton out as she deserves.
You can tell this clearly from one thing she said in her blathering statements about the situation in Egypt which is obviously in a revolutionary moment.
How can we abandon the Egyptian government, she asked one on TV talk show yesterday. After all we've been friends for nearly 30 years. She meant Mubarak of course. Yes, thirty years of a wonderful friendship -- but for the Egyptians thirty years of a cruel tyranny!!
I'm shocked at her stupidity. This is the clearest sign of the disconnect between Washington DC and Egypt. It's quite clear that she and the whole US side is out of touch with the profoundly changed situation in Egypt.
Hillary urges somebody she calls “President Mubarak" to "open a dialogue" with “his people.” He's had 30 years to do that, has shown little inclination to dialog with anyone and now responds to the rebellion not by offering “dialog” but by police, thugs, jetfighters, and the presence of armored vehicles. It's obvious that the man is incapable of a notion such as "dialogue" “free and fair elections" "freedom of speech" ect. It's good Hillary utters these pious sentiments, yes, but she only makes her self ridiculous by staying in the mindset that has worked in the past but no longer applies.
She says she doesn't want to over influence or micro manage the situation -- yes of course that's understandable, but by implying Mubarek is still the legitimate leader of Egypt, she's damaging the slim chances of those totally undefended free forces that we see each revolutionary day—who are admirably evolving into a more and more coherent phenomenon. Bravo El Baradei!
I'm particularly disappointed because I've always rejected Egyptian accusations about US perfidy and complaints alleging that the US wouldn't support the Egyptian people in any case, hanging on to the dictator as they do. I replied (tentatively) to these people who were my colleagues and co workers that I felt sure the US would support a genuine people's rebellion, if they ever got one going. Privately I felt annoyed at what I thought was one more dishonest blame game -- in which it's always safe for Arabs to blame the US but never the tyrants in their own countries.
Now we have a clear case study in front of us, a clearly revolutionary moment in which the people themselves have revolted by their own lights and I have to say: the charge made by Egyptians is beginning to look plausible. Here is a liberal State Dept Secretary serving under a Democrat president--and what do we get from them? Nothing but the most mealy-mouthed platitudes in which you get the feeling that the possible escape of an entire people from 30 years of tyranny and an absolutely unprecedented revolt in this region of the world is taking place – is just a detail hardly worth mentioning.
How could our petty “security concerns” compare to the fate of 80 million?
For shame!
I hope for two things-- that the new Egypt will emerge more or less peacefully in spite of Mubarek’s stupid intransigence and lukewarm US support for what is clearly a democratic (and as I write) peaceful revolution. Secondly that the US will improve its understanding and the tone and substance of its statements as the situation evolves. Clearly Mubarek needs to be prodded or better kicked out of the place.
The Egyptians have stated very clearly that they will refuse to go back to the status quo ante, so we better get with it.
(I wish I were there, but had to stay here during the break – due to some extra jobs I had to vanquish).
The news photos that portray the man once known as “resident Mubarek” seem to show a stony faced Pharoah who still has all of his powers within the sphere he normally controls, so none of those toadies are going to speak up. Our government has got to step in and take responsibility: otherwise the new revolutionary Egypt is going to very p**sed off.
And oh yes, what I was trying to say but the voice-text program either censored (because it’s coded to not allow criticism of high officials) or didn’t understand:
And if you didn’t get my initial message--Hillary is an A S * H O L E !!
Monday, October 11, 2010
Liu Xiaobo wins Nobel Peace Prize
A Chinese friend writes about Liu Xiaobo and his response to receiving the Nobel Peace Prize:
He was sentenced to 11 years on Dec 23, 2009 for drafting Charter 08 (which was published on Dec 10, 2008, 60th anniversary of Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and several other major anniversaries).
His wife is a banner of human rights movements too, who advised him not to write Charter 08 (after Havel's Charter 1977). She did not mind him signing the original charter 08 drafted by others. However, Liu felt obligated to improve the wording, and in the end the entire Charter.
So, this is his major piece, which Voice of America has the full English text:
http://www.voanews.com/chinese/news/Charter-08-63188827.html
I compared with Chinese, it's not verbatim, but enhanced slightly by Perry Link, Professor of Chinese Literature at the University of California, Riverside.
He was a visiting scholar in the US during June 4, 1989 movement, and went back to Tiananmen Square in Beijing. He was the four intellectuals who participated the movement. He tried to reach reconciliation between students and the government.
Here's a wiki entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Xiaobo
After his receiving the harsh prison term, US embassy site in China posted a major link at its main Chinese web page a yellow ribbon. Hillary made speeches. And the White House and DoD approved a major arms sale to Taiwan in Jan 2010 (the other major trigger for this arms sale was Chinese Premier Wen's arrogance toward Obama and Hillary in global environment summit in Copenhagen Nov 2009).
(updated)
The source who prefers to be anonymous added today:
The twitter thing is all in Chinese. Liu Xiaobo's wife Liu Xia -- her last name happens to be Liu as well -- has this twitter address: http://twitter.com/liuxia64
Latest update:
刘霞：见了一个小时。在监狱。9号监狱告诉了他。他见我时说，奖是给全体亡灵的，他们用生命践行了和平民主自由和非暴力的精神，说起亡灵，晓波哭了
Liu Xia: [We] met for 1 hour, in Jinzhou Prison. The prison [authorities] told him on [Oct] 9th. He said when meeting me: "The prize is for all those who died. They practiced the spirit of peace, democracy, freedom and non-violence with their lives." He burst into tears when mentioning "those who died."
He was sentenced to 11 years on Dec 23, 2009 for drafting Charter 08 (which was published on Dec 10, 2008, 60th anniversary of Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and several other major anniversaries).
His wife is a banner of human rights movements too, who advised him not to write Charter 08 (after Havel's Charter 1977). She did not mind him signing the original charter 08 drafted by others. However, Liu felt obligated to improve the wording, and in the end the entire Charter.
So, this is his major piece, which Voice of America has the full English text:
http://www.voanews.com/chinese/news/Charter-08-63188827.html
I compared with Chinese, it's not verbatim, but enhanced slightly by Perry Link, Professor of Chinese Literature at the University of California, Riverside.
He was a visiting scholar in the US during June 4, 1989 movement, and went back to Tiananmen Square in Beijing. He was the four intellectuals who participated the movement. He tried to reach reconciliation between students and the government.
Here's a wiki entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Xiaobo
After his receiving the harsh prison term, US embassy site in China posted a major link at its main Chinese web page a yellow ribbon. Hillary made speeches. And the White House and DoD approved a major arms sale to Taiwan in Jan 2010 (the other major trigger for this arms sale was Chinese Premier Wen's arrogance toward Obama and Hillary in global environment summit in Copenhagen Nov 2009).
(updated)
The source who prefers to be anonymous added today:
The twitter thing is all in Chinese. Liu Xiaobo's wife Liu Xia -- her last name happens to be Liu as well -- has this twitter address: http://twitter.com/liuxia64
Latest update:
刘霞：见了一个小时。在监狱。9号监狱告诉了他。他见我时说，奖是给全体亡灵的，他们用生命践行了和平民主自由和非暴力的精神，说起亡灵，晓波哭了
Liu Xia: [We] met for 1 hour, in Jinzhou Prison. The prison [authorities] told him on [Oct] 9th. He said when meeting me: "The prize is for all those who died. They practiced the spirit of peace, democracy, freedom and non-violence with their lives." He burst into tears when mentioning "those who died."
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Best Books on 9/11? Help me out!
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Best books on 9/11
In order to prepare intelligently for the 10th anniversary of 9/11 next year I've tried to assemble a list of good or at least moderately interesting books on the subject, not necessarily literary and some with only indirect connections. Please help me out with your suggestions, comments or criticisms.
Overall, I've little on the topic due to lack of time and sources. I’d appreciate you the reader’s help in assembling a more complete and useful list.
The 'Age of Vanished Normalcy...'
Probably the single most essential title, at least IMO, is Martin Amis's sharply satirical and flagrantly biased The Second Plane (from whom the above amusing subtitle is taken). I’m surprised at how few Americans know about it. Short and acerbic, it is full of understated outrage at the most famous Islamist atrocity. If you're looking for wishy washy guilt-stricken introspection along the lines of "God, whatever did we do to those poor people that they hate us like this?" this book is not for you. And, as you find in Amis’ best work, there is here a kind of rich sarcasm that covers its object of dislike with trenchant ridicule worthy of a Swift.
Amis's satire and irony is acceptable because under it -- as in the case of all good satirists (Lord Rochester, Kurt Vonnegut and the aforementioned Dean) -- lies a great deal of moral indignation.
Amis however is not a perfect critic of Islamism since his strong pro-Israel anti-Palestinian biases are linked to and weaken his arguments. It's unfortunate that Amis takes the single most legitimate Arab cause and blackens it by associating it with an issue which is completely disconnected (Hamas and Al Queda are not the same organization). This is guilt by association and Amis should know better.
Yet his book is one of the few by a public intellectual writing in commonsense prose for everyone that doesn't shirk 9/11; this is itself is admirable. I salute Amis's willingness to take on the tough dirty topics that kinder, more polite, more politically diplomatic (read: correct) critics avoid... Odd too that some of these statements -- which IMO may be some of the most powerful statements on that disaster -- are written by a Brit. Why don't we have an Amis or two in our ranks? Well, we do -- Christopher Hitchens, but he's British too! Why can't we native born American do more when it comes to expressing in prose indignation (or better shock physical and metaphysical) at the attack on our basic rights and intellectual traditions?
The other point about Amis is that he doesn't just shoot off his mouth and indulge his political paranoia but fully lends his literary imagination to the event. And this is a considerable literary imagination at work. "The Last of Days of Mohammed Atta" is a creepy masterpiece, taking us into the revolting, intransigent, sick and sickening mind of Atta up until his final moments of jet-fuel barbecued consciousness.
Falling Man based on the famous photo
Falling Man by Don DeLillo is much better than the NY Times critic, at least, allowed. Those finding fault with Delillo's fragmentation of reality and distantly cool attitude toward his characters ought to consider: what other serious writer or even semi serious writer has attempted to deal directly with the incident? Shown us full bodied characters moving through all that trauma, and tried to make sense of it in basic human terms? I just wish his main character had done something more significant than drop out of life to play world poker as a symbol of his post 9/11 alienation.
The Quran just picked up in Penguin Paperback edition the Dawood translation. I'd like to decide for myself if the Koran advocates violence or not.
Terror And Liberalism by Paul Berman mentioned in Amis's book, this essay is famous as a statement by a self-described liberal attempting to bring a philosophical perspective to the analysis of terrorism. Obviously I haven't read it.
An emancipated Somali woman encounters distrust
Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Impressive, informative memoir/autobiography by a brilliant Somali women who successfully excavated herself from a repressive and (yes) Muslim upbringing, and had the audacity to leave her religion. This has intriguingly brought down on her the condemnation of orthodox Muslims and outraged multiculturalists (Buruma, TG Ash etc) who seem to want all tribal people to remain quaintly tribal so they can be condescended to (i guess). Hirsi's undeniable personal achievment of extricating herself from ferocious Somali tribal life and its traditional repression of women (aided by Islamic tradition going in the same direction) -- and by her own efforts becoming a modern European in mind and spirit – including election to the Dutch Parliament -- makes a great story and one full of resonance in the context of the rise of Islamic militancy and the increasing presence of Somalia in the news.
Having read Infidel, I can say that it is an impressive work indeed from many angles and deserves to be read for its intrinsic value as an autobiography in depth of a brilliant and fascinating woman-- and for its searching portrayal of what it's like growing up in an African patriarchal Muslim context.
Buruma’s unsatisfactory analysis of an Islam inspired atrocity
Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance. Ian Buruma. This title can be paired with Infidel since they touch on a common person (Hirsi), theme (Islam in the modern world), and a shocking homicide. It's perhaps not directly relevant to 9/11 but then again perhaps not totally irrelevant either. For those who like myself, were shocked and puzzled by the event (and didn't know the background on the principals, especially Van Gogh), the book is strangely dissatisfying.
You get the feeling that Buruma is doing everything in his power to make the brutal murder of Van Gogh by the Muslim fanatic Mohammed Bouyeri a very Dutch act, which it is obviously not. As for the subtitle with its monitory phrase "limits of tolerance," one finds no strong defense of the society and its open values that this non intellectual Islamist knifer could not understand and tried to destroy. Quite the contrary, Buruma seems to hint everywhere at Dutch complicity in violence (however buried in history) and oppression of its own citizens and others, from drunken football fans (wwh we know is short for fanatics) to the Hals and Rembrandt paintings of Dutch masters (these ultra respectable looking patriarchs were of course guilty of many hidden crimes).
Buruma uses the example of superficially similar political murder committed around the same time of the gay politician Pim Fortuyn by an animal rights activist to indicate that both murders were "principled" and hence equivalent, somehow related to excessive Dutch moral rigor. Ridiculous? Yes, obviously, but Buruma goes on and on in this vein.
In his effort to naturalize the horrible butchery (gunshots, machete, and dagger all used on Van Gogh on a main thoroughfare of Amsterdam), Buruma even gives Bouyeri literary cachet by reciting the long genealogy of Western terrorists and terrorism in the fictions of Dostoevsky and Conrad though there is no evidence Van Gogh’s killer was a reader except of sectarian tracts. He gives us a synopsis of Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent and suggests that the most sordid character The Professor is an prototype for Bouyeri. Rhetorically he asks, “How is it that characters out of Conrad came to Holland?” The fact is Bouyeri is not at all a character "out of Conrad." First of all he didn’t read Conrad, and wasn’t influenced by any high literary artifacts at all as Buruma implies. If he had, he would be more interesting, but he didn’t it seems. He was just one more brainwashed clone spouting the familiar Islamist cliches. So why does Buruma make this preposterous statement? A much better imaginary comparison would be Charles Manson. Like Manson, Bouyeri was obsessed with bloodletting -- one can imagine the two murderers enjoying watching beheading videos together in prison. But reading the cerebral Conrad? Give me a break. No, better, give Conrad a break! He doesn't deserve to be associated with this sordid, uncerebral murderer.
If you're waiting for the powerful condemnation of the revolting murder of an annoying but decent man (Van Gogh’s painted as a free spirited joker and deliberate provocateur as well as a loudmouth TV and film personality) and the free speech for which that man died -- well, it's not going to come: instead, at the end of the book you have the vague impression that all of Holland (but especially the Red Light District) murdered Van Gogh -- and thus the actual killer's crime diminished, almost excused. What is especially disgusting and reprehensible in the crime (read the book for more details) is precisely its Muslim element.
Buruma's comments on the above mentioned Hirsi Ali, who wrote the film script, which Van Gogh produced,(for which he was murdered and she threatened with death) are similarly unsatisfactory -- he blames her for her part in the tragedy because -- are you ready for this? -- Hirsi left her religion! Instead of applauding her for her guts in deserting a religion she found hostile to her ideals (and which often makes apostates pay with their lives), he implies that this prevented her from becoming a force for moderation in the Muslim community. Is it not just a little bit arrogant, and a tad hypocritical for a white male secularist to force Hirsi back into her religious cage -- ex-Muslim Somali Hirsi Ali, whose great achievement in life -- her personal emancipation -- required precisely that: freedom from religion?
This brings me to the final point: the book’s indebtedness to the all pervasive doctrine and set of ideological reflexes called PC. This can be seen most obviously in Buruma’s multicultural faith. He never suggests, for example, that fanatical Islamists (fanatic is a word he never applies to Muslim extremists) have no place in Dutch society – nor that Van Gogh’s killer is an evil butcher who got more and better than he deserved from Dutch society (he’s still alive serving a life sentence). Curiously, in the one case where PC principles are fitting—in that of Hirsi Ali, Buruma misses an opportunity. What could more appeal to a true liberal’s sense of justice and fitness than the career of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an oppressed woman of color who overcame the obstacles of a ferociously patriarchal culture and strict Islamic upbringing to bravely say no to the said authorities and declare herself a free, self-determining individual? What could be a more inspiring story for a multiculturalist than the story of a woman who rose of poverty and violence to become a Dutch citizen and member of parliament? But no, for Buruma, none of these accomplishments are impressive – why? Because, as noted above, Hirsi lost her chance to reform other moderate Muslims by giving up her religion! Secondly, and this is speculative on my part perhaps the real reason for the subtle condemnation of Hirsi is that in Buruma’s view she has violated the canon of PC orthodoxy which is that European countries are responsible for the chaos of former colonies – of which Somalia, Hirsi’s native land, is one. He and the rest of the PC crowd can’t forgive her for making a powerful case for the opposite view – that at least in the case of her native Somalia which she knows – the problems of that country have been self-created.
There is something holier than thou in this work of Buruma’s that ultimately reeks to high heavens.
And this from a man who dealt brilliantly (I thought) with Japan's and Germany's war guilt in The Wages of Guilt, and with many other sensitive international issues in Japan, China and Southeast Asia -- with unusual insight and with what seemed to me unshakable integrity. Why so? Any theories out there? Let’s take a multi-cultural view of Buruma himself and see if we can’t find some Dutch excuse for him -- he is Dutch after all.
Occidentalism: A Short History of Anti-Westernism. Ian Buruma & Avishai Margalit. Buruma again! Picking up and scanning the contents of this small book, and noting the many references to 9/11 and Osama Bin Laden, I now remember that it was written largely as a response to 9/11 though it is theoretical and scholarly rather than a journalistic polemic. Overall preferable to Murder in Amsterdam. In fact read this title, and Buruma redeems himself!
Best books on 9/11
In order to prepare intelligently for the 10th anniversary of 9/11 next year I've tried to assemble a list of good or at least moderately interesting books on the subject, not necessarily literary and some with only indirect connections. Please help me out with your suggestions, comments or criticisms.
Overall, I've little on the topic due to lack of time and sources. I’d appreciate you the reader’s help in assembling a more complete and useful list.
The 'Age of Vanished Normalcy...'
Probably the single most essential title, at least IMO, is Martin Amis's sharply satirical and flagrantly biased The Second Plane (from whom the above amusing subtitle is taken). I’m surprised at how few Americans know about it. Short and acerbic, it is full of understated outrage at the most famous Islamist atrocity. If you're looking for wishy washy guilt-stricken introspection along the lines of "God, whatever did we do to those poor people that they hate us like this?" this book is not for you. And, as you find in Amis’ best work, there is here a kind of rich sarcasm that covers its object of dislike with trenchant ridicule worthy of a Swift.
Amis's satire and irony is acceptable because under it -- as in the case of all good satirists (Lord Rochester, Kurt Vonnegut and the aforementioned Dean) -- lies a great deal of moral indignation.
Amis however is not a perfect critic of Islamism since his strong pro-Israel anti-Palestinian biases are linked to and weaken his arguments. It's unfortunate that Amis takes the single most legitimate Arab cause and blackens it by associating it with an issue which is completely disconnected (Hamas and Al Queda are not the same organization). This is guilt by association and Amis should know better.
Yet his book is one of the few by a public intellectual writing in commonsense prose for everyone that doesn't shirk 9/11; this is itself is admirable. I salute Amis's willingness to take on the tough dirty topics that kinder, more polite, more politically diplomatic (read: correct) critics avoid... Odd too that some of these statements -- which IMO may be some of the most powerful statements on that disaster -- are written by a Brit. Why don't we have an Amis or two in our ranks? Well, we do -- Christopher Hitchens, but he's British too! Why can't we native born American do more when it comes to expressing in prose indignation (or better shock physical and metaphysical) at the attack on our basic rights and intellectual traditions?
The other point about Amis is that he doesn't just shoot off his mouth and indulge his political paranoia but fully lends his literary imagination to the event. And this is a considerable literary imagination at work. "The Last of Days of Mohammed Atta" is a creepy masterpiece, taking us into the revolting, intransigent, sick and sickening mind of Atta up until his final moments of jet-fuel barbecued consciousness.
Falling Man based on the famous photo
Falling Man by Don DeLillo is much better than the NY Times critic, at least, allowed. Those finding fault with Delillo's fragmentation of reality and distantly cool attitude toward his characters ought to consider: what other serious writer or even semi serious writer has attempted to deal directly with the incident? Shown us full bodied characters moving through all that trauma, and tried to make sense of it in basic human terms? I just wish his main character had done something more significant than drop out of life to play world poker as a symbol of his post 9/11 alienation.
The Quran just picked up in Penguin Paperback edition the Dawood translation. I'd like to decide for myself if the Koran advocates violence or not.
Terror And Liberalism by Paul Berman mentioned in Amis's book, this essay is famous as a statement by a self-described liberal attempting to bring a philosophical perspective to the analysis of terrorism. Obviously I haven't read it.
An emancipated Somali woman encounters distrust
Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Impressive, informative memoir/autobiography by a brilliant Somali women who successfully excavated herself from a repressive and (yes) Muslim upbringing, and had the audacity to leave her religion. This has intriguingly brought down on her the condemnation of orthodox Muslims and outraged multiculturalists (Buruma, TG Ash etc) who seem to want all tribal people to remain quaintly tribal so they can be condescended to (i guess). Hirsi's undeniable personal achievment of extricating herself from ferocious Somali tribal life and its traditional repression of women (aided by Islamic tradition going in the same direction) -- and by her own efforts becoming a modern European in mind and spirit – including election to the Dutch Parliament -- makes a great story and one full of resonance in the context of the rise of Islamic militancy and the increasing presence of Somalia in the news.
Having read Infidel, I can say that it is an impressive work indeed from many angles and deserves to be read for its intrinsic value as an autobiography in depth of a brilliant and fascinating woman-- and for its searching portrayal of what it's like growing up in an African patriarchal Muslim context.
Buruma’s unsatisfactory analysis of an Islam inspired atrocity
Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance. Ian Buruma. This title can be paired with Infidel since they touch on a common person (Hirsi), theme (Islam in the modern world), and a shocking homicide. It's perhaps not directly relevant to 9/11 but then again perhaps not totally irrelevant either. For those who like myself, were shocked and puzzled by the event (and didn't know the background on the principals, especially Van Gogh), the book is strangely dissatisfying.
You get the feeling that Buruma is doing everything in his power to make the brutal murder of Van Gogh by the Muslim fanatic Mohammed Bouyeri a very Dutch act, which it is obviously not. As for the subtitle with its monitory phrase "limits of tolerance," one finds no strong defense of the society and its open values that this non intellectual Islamist knifer could not understand and tried to destroy. Quite the contrary, Buruma seems to hint everywhere at Dutch complicity in violence (however buried in history) and oppression of its own citizens and others, from drunken football fans (wwh we know is short for fanatics) to the Hals and Rembrandt paintings of Dutch masters (these ultra respectable looking patriarchs were of course guilty of many hidden crimes).
Buruma uses the example of superficially similar political murder committed around the same time of the gay politician Pim Fortuyn by an animal rights activist to indicate that both murders were "principled" and hence equivalent, somehow related to excessive Dutch moral rigor. Ridiculous? Yes, obviously, but Buruma goes on and on in this vein.
In his effort to naturalize the horrible butchery (gunshots, machete, and dagger all used on Van Gogh on a main thoroughfare of Amsterdam), Buruma even gives Bouyeri literary cachet by reciting the long genealogy of Western terrorists and terrorism in the fictions of Dostoevsky and Conrad though there is no evidence Van Gogh’s killer was a reader except of sectarian tracts. He gives us a synopsis of Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent and suggests that the most sordid character The Professor is an prototype for Bouyeri. Rhetorically he asks, “How is it that characters out of Conrad came to Holland?” The fact is Bouyeri is not at all a character "out of Conrad." First of all he didn’t read Conrad, and wasn’t influenced by any high literary artifacts at all as Buruma implies. If he had, he would be more interesting, but he didn’t it seems. He was just one more brainwashed clone spouting the familiar Islamist cliches. So why does Buruma make this preposterous statement? A much better imaginary comparison would be Charles Manson. Like Manson, Bouyeri was obsessed with bloodletting -- one can imagine the two murderers enjoying watching beheading videos together in prison. But reading the cerebral Conrad? Give me a break. No, better, give Conrad a break! He doesn't deserve to be associated with this sordid, uncerebral murderer.
If you're waiting for the powerful condemnation of the revolting murder of an annoying but decent man (Van Gogh’s painted as a free spirited joker and deliberate provocateur as well as a loudmouth TV and film personality) and the free speech for which that man died -- well, it's not going to come: instead, at the end of the book you have the vague impression that all of Holland (but especially the Red Light District) murdered Van Gogh -- and thus the actual killer's crime diminished, almost excused. What is especially disgusting and reprehensible in the crime (read the book for more details) is precisely its Muslim element.
Buruma's comments on the above mentioned Hirsi Ali, who wrote the film script, which Van Gogh produced,(for which he was murdered and she threatened with death) are similarly unsatisfactory -- he blames her for her part in the tragedy because -- are you ready for this? -- Hirsi left her religion! Instead of applauding her for her guts in deserting a religion she found hostile to her ideals (and which often makes apostates pay with their lives), he implies that this prevented her from becoming a force for moderation in the Muslim community. Is it not just a little bit arrogant, and a tad hypocritical for a white male secularist to force Hirsi back into her religious cage -- ex-Muslim Somali Hirsi Ali, whose great achievement in life -- her personal emancipation -- required precisely that: freedom from religion?
This brings me to the final point: the book’s indebtedness to the all pervasive doctrine and set of ideological reflexes called PC. This can be seen most obviously in Buruma’s multicultural faith. He never suggests, for example, that fanatical Islamists (fanatic is a word he never applies to Muslim extremists) have no place in Dutch society – nor that Van Gogh’s killer is an evil butcher who got more and better than he deserved from Dutch society (he’s still alive serving a life sentence). Curiously, in the one case where PC principles are fitting—in that of Hirsi Ali, Buruma misses an opportunity. What could more appeal to a true liberal’s sense of justice and fitness than the career of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an oppressed woman of color who overcame the obstacles of a ferociously patriarchal culture and strict Islamic upbringing to bravely say no to the said authorities and declare herself a free, self-determining individual? What could be a more inspiring story for a multiculturalist than the story of a woman who rose of poverty and violence to become a Dutch citizen and member of parliament? But no, for Buruma, none of these accomplishments are impressive – why? Because, as noted above, Hirsi lost her chance to reform other moderate Muslims by giving up her religion! Secondly, and this is speculative on my part perhaps the real reason for the subtle condemnation of Hirsi is that in Buruma’s view she has violated the canon of PC orthodoxy which is that European countries are responsible for the chaos of former colonies – of which Somalia, Hirsi’s native land, is one. He and the rest of the PC crowd can’t forgive her for making a powerful case for the opposite view – that at least in the case of her native Somalia which she knows – the problems of that country have been self-created.
There is something holier than thou in this work of Buruma’s that ultimately reeks to high heavens.
And this from a man who dealt brilliantly (I thought) with Japan's and Germany's war guilt in The Wages of Guilt, and with many other sensitive international issues in Japan, China and Southeast Asia -- with unusual insight and with what seemed to me unshakable integrity. Why so? Any theories out there? Let’s take a multi-cultural view of Buruma himself and see if we can’t find some Dutch excuse for him -- he is Dutch after all.
Occidentalism: A Short History of Anti-Westernism. Ian Buruma & Avishai Margalit. Buruma again! Picking up and scanning the contents of this small book, and noting the many references to 9/11 and Osama Bin Laden, I now remember that it was written largely as a response to 9/11 though it is theoretical and scholarly rather than a journalistic polemic. Overall preferable to Murder in Amsterdam. In fact read this title, and Buruma redeems himself!
Friday, August 13, 2010
Matthew Perry & Japan: Sticking to His Guns
Breaking Open Japan: Commodore Perry, Lord Abe and American Imperialism in 1853.
By George Feifer.
Collins Smithsonian Books.
389 pp. $25.95.
Reviewed by James Dalglish
( is a freelance writer and university lecturer living in New York State and the Middle East)
“The bay of Uraga lies beside a town of the same name that controlled the entrance to far larger Edo--now Tokyo--Bay... five thousand warriors waited on the smaller bay's shore at dawn of that day July 14. All were riveted by the source of their dread, now clearly discernible in the advancing morning light: four giant war-ships of America's East Asia Squadron." (page 4)
Such is the breathless cinematic debut of George Feifer’s Breaking Open Japan, a new and comprehensive study of the crucial events in which an American naval commander, in the mid-nineteenth century, unlocked the heretofore secluded nation of Japan to relations with America and the rest of the world -- famously, without “firing a shot.”
The author puts you believably into the scene, then switches to a series of key background topics, social, historic and economic, that illuminate and explain the coming conflict between the two nations, as well as filling in the basics about the book's principal actor Commodore Matthew Perry, sent by President Fillmore with a powerful squadron of warships to establish relations with Japan.
Then back to the story:
“Dashing up the Uraga waterway, the ships ignored a large sign in French on a native boat: ‘Depart immediately and dare not anchor!’ Anchor is what they proceeded to do, obeying their commander’s flag signal to form a line of battle outside the town and to conduct no communication whatever with the shore.”
I quote these lines because the sense of suspense, bolstered by existential detail, is necessary to get us hooked on the strange, faraway story, and Feifer succeeds brilliantly on this level. Though there is little or overt violence, there is plenty of menace and drama in the tale of Perry’s critical two visits, enough to spread the story through some seventeen chapters.
Anti-imperialists and doves may be embarrassed by the arrogance of Perry’s tactics and his “keep the natives down” mentality, but no question: his strategy succeeded in spades. He meant to frighten the Japanese by the sight and sound of naval guns and ships larger and more menacing than anything they had seen before; the steamer-sail hybrids (the “black ships”) were novelties to the Japanese whose country had been for centuries deliberately cut off from technical and mechanical progress. The ships could maneuver with frightening speed, a quality that Perry exploited repeatedly to rattle Japanese nerves. His psychological warfare consisted in refusing to compromise on the tiniest detail and creating a personal mystique of inscrutable authority, not even coming out of his cabin to talk to low-ranking Japanese emissaries.
Perry’s view was that as the president’s plenipotentiary he was entitled to the respect due a sovereign; personally offended by the disrespectful treatment meted out by the Japanese to a U. S. commodore sent six years earlier, he insisted on absolute compliance with his demands which he saw as reasonable: "To demand as a right and not to solicit as a favor those acts of courtesy which are due from one civilized nation to another; to allow none of those petty annoyances which have been unsparingly visited upon those who have preceded him." (67) Paradoxically, he also offered “friendship.”
There is high drama and low farce in Feifer’s portrayal of the main episodes of this painful, ambivalent tale: besides the opener already quoted are the intricate negotiations before the first landing, the initial tense violation of Japanese soil by Perry, his troops and a 40 piece orchestra (at which time Perry handed over President Fillmore’s personal letter to the Emperor, offering the same dubious “friend-ship”), Perry’s notorious visits to Okinawa (marked by “pomp” and “insults”), and the final signing of the treaty in which the Japanese abjectly caved in to every demand.
Feifer’s intention however runs deeper than simply retelling the story. He also aims at providing deep cultural and historical contexts for the American intrusion and claims to be the first to have included the Japanese point of view of this event by means of extensive on site research.
Breaking Open Japan indeed provides an impressive picture of the social, economic and historic precedents of Perry’s nonviolent aggression. Some of the topics dealt with are: Japan’s principal encounters with the outside world, starting with the failed invasion by Kublai Khan in the 13th century, Japan’s curious and self-defeating policy of sakoku (seclusion), based on fear and distrust of Christianity (the Japanese believed the religion presaged western conquest), the evolution of the Tokugawa shogunate and Japanese society up to this point, as shaped by sakoku, and the character of Perry’s main adversary, the acting head of the shogunate Abe Masahiro.
Though seemingly forgotten by Japanese today, Lord Abe, as he was known, is built into a major figure in the narrative. The acting shogun being ill and the em-peror old and feeble, the top administrator’s role was magnified in the course of the unprecedented disaster that had beset his nation. Abe knew and worried about Perry’s plans which he had heard about from Dutch informants but accomplished little in the way of preparing defenses against the enemy, his efforts trammeled by warring factions in the feudal power structure. Still, Abe is an appealingly flexible figure, cultured, magnanimous and scholarly, in contrast to the single-minded commodore. Feifer gives him more credit than he does Perry for the nonviolent outcome of the showdown.
Abe’s inaction makes him less dynamic than Perry, but his dilemma in trying to ward off Japanese defeat was perhaps more challenging: “...the threat that colonial domination would follow such defeat -- just look at China cut up by the British [during the Opium Wars] --doubled the foolhardiness of attempting military salva-tion with so inferior a force, which would be worse than betraying Japan’s sacred seclusion.” (135)
Feifer is also good on the “heart of the matter, “ America’s powerful expansionist impulse during this period (of which Perry was perhaps the most singular but not only expression). As the author shows, there was plenty of rationale for “breaking open” Japan : “Americans' individual mixtures of religious. commercial, and patriotic priorities...” [that] “...usually included humanistic ones too: most who thought about it were genuinely convinced Japan would benefit from being lifted into the family of trading nations." (187)
The temper of the times in which these motives developed is well portrayed: the young democracy, fresh from the “conquest of the West” (i. e. California), setting out to compete with European imperialism -- which at that time was greedily dividing up the world (“the conquest of the East”) -- while showing its moral superiority in contemning the excesses of colonialism (as seen in England’s brutal “carving up” of China in the Opium Wars). America’s version of this triumphalism, Manifest Destiny, had just been fashioned, and a burgeoning economy urged expansion to the East; Japan lay precisely on the main route to China, perhaps the main reason for Perry’s mission, as he freely admitted.
A lot of cultural baggage also entered in: vulgar Darwinian racism (that proclaimed the “superiority of the White race”), religious cant (the Japanese were supposed to become aware of their “Christian obligation to join the family of Christendom”!), and an almost messianic belief in the rightness of America’s mission to civilize, enlighten and proselytize the world (echoes of which we sense in certain events going on today in Iraq) and, well, the “breaking open” of Japan became inevitable.
The issue of castaways, shipwrecked sailors whom Japan had treated mercilessly at times, locking them up in cages, also loomed large in American eyes, though Feifer implies that it was trumped up to justify the aggression and name-calling. The corresponding issue of Japanese refugees, refused by the mother country, also was used to exacerbate the situation, though one, the plucky Manjiro, became a key translator in the negotiations.
The essential passion however was not conquest but an optimistic belief in pro-gress, an ideology profoundly alien to late Tokugawa social and political stasis, but which we find still impinges problematically on US foreign policy over a century later.
(note: the order of the last two paras was switched)
The morality of the situation is by no means easy to judge. On the one hand we have the distasteful image of stronger society defeating a weaker, preindustrial one by means of superior mechanical force. The bigger guns won period. On the other, Japan was fortunate to be rid the self-defeating policy of sakoku without too much bloodshed. Had the U. S. abstained, a less scrupulous European powers might well have stepped in. In any case, Perry’s bullying ended Japan’s state of denial con-cerning the rest of the world, and she quickly turned course, instituting the Meiji reforms and becoming a major world naval power in just a few decades.
So perhaps Perry’s visit was of direct, short-term benefit to the Japanese in that it goaded them into quickly becoming a major power, yet the long-term consequences of that militarization could hardly have been desired by the original aggressor.
Hence, in his Afterword, Feifer questions the standard American appraisal of Perry. “Years of asking Americans about Perry,” he writes, “confirmed for me that the vast majority more or less agreed with an admirer who called him ‘the surgeon who operated ... on the suppurating sore of Japanese isolationism.’”(329) Asking Japanese about their opinions, however, (as he did with Japanese historians) produced a different image of Perry. Though the commodore is honored with a statue in Shimoda, some Japanese still resent him (the nonfiring of guns was a form of violence), and point to the some 100 years of unhappy relations between the two countries after the incident to argue against the style and substance of Perry’s intervention. Feifer cites the militaristic Prussian form of government adopted by the Meiji reformers shortly after Perry’s bullying visits as evidence that Perry triggered a basic shift in Japanese society that led to militarism on land and sea and eventually to Pearl Harbor and the War in the Pacific.
In view of this, how smug should Americans feel about Perry’s triumph? It is an important point and one that deserves our attention when our country finds itself involved in several new military adventures in the Middle East that flaunt the same kind of rationale: American cultural and political supremacy.
Feifer concludes that “casting off the destructive myth of the Commodore’s wise and benevolent mission would be a blessing.” (334) This may be difficult for readers who vicariously enjoyed the picture of Japanese pushed around by Perry (I was one of these on the first reading, I must admit), but for other readers with more open minds, Feifer’s points may be more than just wishful thinking.
The author ultimately doesn’t square the circle of these difficult historical and political issues but that’s a minor flaw in a work admirable for its syncretic sympathies, narrative verve and creative history writing. In an age of new imperial out-reach, this book should be required reading for thoughtful Americans who wish to explore a key episode in the history of their nation’s foreign relations with the “Far East.”
By George Feifer.
Collins Smithsonian Books.
389 pp. $25.95.
Reviewed by James Dalglish
( is a freelance writer and university lecturer living in New York State and the Middle East)
“The bay of Uraga lies beside a town of the same name that controlled the entrance to far larger Edo--now Tokyo--Bay... five thousand warriors waited on the smaller bay's shore at dawn of that day July 14. All were riveted by the source of their dread, now clearly discernible in the advancing morning light: four giant war-ships of America's East Asia Squadron." (page 4)
Such is the breathless cinematic debut of George Feifer’s Breaking Open Japan, a new and comprehensive study of the crucial events in which an American naval commander, in the mid-nineteenth century, unlocked the heretofore secluded nation of Japan to relations with America and the rest of the world -- famously, without “firing a shot.”
The author puts you believably into the scene, then switches to a series of key background topics, social, historic and economic, that illuminate and explain the coming conflict between the two nations, as well as filling in the basics about the book's principal actor Commodore Matthew Perry, sent by President Fillmore with a powerful squadron of warships to establish relations with Japan.
Then back to the story:
“Dashing up the Uraga waterway, the ships ignored a large sign in French on a native boat: ‘Depart immediately and dare not anchor!’ Anchor is what they proceeded to do, obeying their commander’s flag signal to form a line of battle outside the town and to conduct no communication whatever with the shore.”
I quote these lines because the sense of suspense, bolstered by existential detail, is necessary to get us hooked on the strange, faraway story, and Feifer succeeds brilliantly on this level. Though there is little or overt violence, there is plenty of menace and drama in the tale of Perry’s critical two visits, enough to spread the story through some seventeen chapters.
Anti-imperialists and doves may be embarrassed by the arrogance of Perry’s tactics and his “keep the natives down” mentality, but no question: his strategy succeeded in spades. He meant to frighten the Japanese by the sight and sound of naval guns and ships larger and more menacing than anything they had seen before; the steamer-sail hybrids (the “black ships”) were novelties to the Japanese whose country had been for centuries deliberately cut off from technical and mechanical progress. The ships could maneuver with frightening speed, a quality that Perry exploited repeatedly to rattle Japanese nerves. His psychological warfare consisted in refusing to compromise on the tiniest detail and creating a personal mystique of inscrutable authority, not even coming out of his cabin to talk to low-ranking Japanese emissaries.
Perry’s view was that as the president’s plenipotentiary he was entitled to the respect due a sovereign; personally offended by the disrespectful treatment meted out by the Japanese to a U. S. commodore sent six years earlier, he insisted on absolute compliance with his demands which he saw as reasonable: "To demand as a right and not to solicit as a favor those acts of courtesy which are due from one civilized nation to another; to allow none of those petty annoyances which have been unsparingly visited upon those who have preceded him." (67) Paradoxically, he also offered “friendship.”
There is high drama and low farce in Feifer’s portrayal of the main episodes of this painful, ambivalent tale: besides the opener already quoted are the intricate negotiations before the first landing, the initial tense violation of Japanese soil by Perry, his troops and a 40 piece orchestra (at which time Perry handed over President Fillmore’s personal letter to the Emperor, offering the same dubious “friend-ship”), Perry’s notorious visits to Okinawa (marked by “pomp” and “insults”), and the final signing of the treaty in which the Japanese abjectly caved in to every demand.
Feifer’s intention however runs deeper than simply retelling the story. He also aims at providing deep cultural and historical contexts for the American intrusion and claims to be the first to have included the Japanese point of view of this event by means of extensive on site research.
Breaking Open Japan indeed provides an impressive picture of the social, economic and historic precedents of Perry’s nonviolent aggression. Some of the topics dealt with are: Japan’s principal encounters with the outside world, starting with the failed invasion by Kublai Khan in the 13th century, Japan’s curious and self-defeating policy of sakoku (seclusion), based on fear and distrust of Christianity (the Japanese believed the religion presaged western conquest), the evolution of the Tokugawa shogunate and Japanese society up to this point, as shaped by sakoku, and the character of Perry’s main adversary, the acting head of the shogunate Abe Masahiro.
Though seemingly forgotten by Japanese today, Lord Abe, as he was known, is built into a major figure in the narrative. The acting shogun being ill and the em-peror old and feeble, the top administrator’s role was magnified in the course of the unprecedented disaster that had beset his nation. Abe knew and worried about Perry’s plans which he had heard about from Dutch informants but accomplished little in the way of preparing defenses against the enemy, his efforts trammeled by warring factions in the feudal power structure. Still, Abe is an appealingly flexible figure, cultured, magnanimous and scholarly, in contrast to the single-minded commodore. Feifer gives him more credit than he does Perry for the nonviolent outcome of the showdown.
Abe’s inaction makes him less dynamic than Perry, but his dilemma in trying to ward off Japanese defeat was perhaps more challenging: “...the threat that colonial domination would follow such defeat -- just look at China cut up by the British [during the Opium Wars] --doubled the foolhardiness of attempting military salva-tion with so inferior a force, which would be worse than betraying Japan’s sacred seclusion.” (135)
Feifer is also good on the “heart of the matter, “ America’s powerful expansionist impulse during this period (of which Perry was perhaps the most singular but not only expression). As the author shows, there was plenty of rationale for “breaking open” Japan : “Americans' individual mixtures of religious. commercial, and patriotic priorities...” [that] “...usually included humanistic ones too: most who thought about it were genuinely convinced Japan would benefit from being lifted into the family of trading nations." (187)
The temper of the times in which these motives developed is well portrayed: the young democracy, fresh from the “conquest of the West” (i. e. California), setting out to compete with European imperialism -- which at that time was greedily dividing up the world (“the conquest of the East”) -- while showing its moral superiority in contemning the excesses of colonialism (as seen in England’s brutal “carving up” of China in the Opium Wars). America’s version of this triumphalism, Manifest Destiny, had just been fashioned, and a burgeoning economy urged expansion to the East; Japan lay precisely on the main route to China, perhaps the main reason for Perry’s mission, as he freely admitted.
A lot of cultural baggage also entered in: vulgar Darwinian racism (that proclaimed the “superiority of the White race”), religious cant (the Japanese were supposed to become aware of their “Christian obligation to join the family of Christendom”!), and an almost messianic belief in the rightness of America’s mission to civilize, enlighten and proselytize the world (echoes of which we sense in certain events going on today in Iraq) and, well, the “breaking open” of Japan became inevitable.
The issue of castaways, shipwrecked sailors whom Japan had treated mercilessly at times, locking them up in cages, also loomed large in American eyes, though Feifer implies that it was trumped up to justify the aggression and name-calling. The corresponding issue of Japanese refugees, refused by the mother country, also was used to exacerbate the situation, though one, the plucky Manjiro, became a key translator in the negotiations.
The essential passion however was not conquest but an optimistic belief in pro-gress, an ideology profoundly alien to late Tokugawa social and political stasis, but which we find still impinges problematically on US foreign policy over a century later.
(note: the order of the last two paras was switched)
The morality of the situation is by no means easy to judge. On the one hand we have the distasteful image of stronger society defeating a weaker, preindustrial one by means of superior mechanical force. The bigger guns won period. On the other, Japan was fortunate to be rid the self-defeating policy of sakoku without too much bloodshed. Had the U. S. abstained, a less scrupulous European powers might well have stepped in. In any case, Perry’s bullying ended Japan’s state of denial con-cerning the rest of the world, and she quickly turned course, instituting the Meiji reforms and becoming a major world naval power in just a few decades.
So perhaps Perry’s visit was of direct, short-term benefit to the Japanese in that it goaded them into quickly becoming a major power, yet the long-term consequences of that militarization could hardly have been desired by the original aggressor.
Hence, in his Afterword, Feifer questions the standard American appraisal of Perry. “Years of asking Americans about Perry,” he writes, “confirmed for me that the vast majority more or less agreed with an admirer who called him ‘the surgeon who operated ... on the suppurating sore of Japanese isolationism.’”(329) Asking Japanese about their opinions, however, (as he did with Japanese historians) produced a different image of Perry. Though the commodore is honored with a statue in Shimoda, some Japanese still resent him (the nonfiring of guns was a form of violence), and point to the some 100 years of unhappy relations between the two countries after the incident to argue against the style and substance of Perry’s intervention. Feifer cites the militaristic Prussian form of government adopted by the Meiji reformers shortly after Perry’s bullying visits as evidence that Perry triggered a basic shift in Japanese society that led to militarism on land and sea and eventually to Pearl Harbor and the War in the Pacific.
In view of this, how smug should Americans feel about Perry’s triumph? It is an important point and one that deserves our attention when our country finds itself involved in several new military adventures in the Middle East that flaunt the same kind of rationale: American cultural and political supremacy.
Feifer concludes that “casting off the destructive myth of the Commodore’s wise and benevolent mission would be a blessing.” (334) This may be difficult for readers who vicariously enjoyed the picture of Japanese pushed around by Perry (I was one of these on the first reading, I must admit), but for other readers with more open minds, Feifer’s points may be more than just wishful thinking.
The author ultimately doesn’t square the circle of these difficult historical and political issues but that’s a minor flaw in a work admirable for its syncretic sympathies, narrative verve and creative history writing. In an age of new imperial out-reach, this book should be required reading for thoughtful Americans who wish to explore a key episode in the history of their nation’s foreign relations with the “Far East.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)