Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking has a justifiably terrible reputation. It's not as if you have to make up shit to make the Japanese look bad there, you know?
Equally, quoting Mao: the Unknown Story without *substantial* back-up or qualifications is not a great idea.
Much as I love them, you probably couldn't get away with citing Norwich's Byzantium trilogy in any serious conversation, I suspect, though I know very little about the field there.
Then there's the books which a serious student should have read, but which will fuck-up anyone who reads them as their first or only source. I'm thinking of Taylor's typically gadflyish and remarkably wrong Origins of the Second World War here, f'instance.
I wonder if he drew the idea from Frantz Fanon? You know, the healing violence of the oppressed, and so on. There seemed to be a great need, post 9/11, to recast America as international victim.Didn't work out terribly well in Algeria, mind.
Actually, Rumsfeld seems to have run the whole thing rather like a second-rate management consultant coming into a new firm; get rid of as many staff as you can, think only in the short-term, and ignore what the people there before you advise.
Wasn't it a 'million Mogadishus'?
What strikes me as particularly odd/criminally incompetent on Rumsfelds' part is that as someone who always claimed to be on the cutting edge of strategic thinking, he paid absolutely no attention to the massive literature concerning insurgencies, asymmetrical warfare, etc, etc written in the 90s + earlier. Since the smart officers in Iraq were reading about Algeria, Malaya, and so on - at least according to George Packer - why wasn't he?
One of the recurring statements by Bushites in George Packer's THE ASSASSIN'S GATE is 'I/we could never imagine ...' normally followed by something that a ten year old could have foreseen.
Well, when it comes to war crimes, let's not forget that after My Lai, only one of the twenty-six soldiers who took part was prosecuted, Lt. Calley - and he received the terrible sentence, in the end, of three and a half years of house arrest.
The Irish Civil War in the early 20s (post-independence, between the anti-treaty and pro-treaty forces) is a good model of how a civil war need not involve standing armies. Only about three thousand people were killed, but it scarred the nation for years. It was a matter of guerrilla bands and assassinations - much like Iraq today.
Darn it, Geoffrey Hill's SHILOH isn't online anywhere, and I can only remember the first four lines, or a rough version thereof.
Oh marching ground of the shod word! So hard
On the heels of the damned red man we came
Geneva's tribe, outlandish and abhorred
Bland visage milky with Jehovah's calm ...
There's a couple of great lines later - 'In deserts dropped the odd white turds of bone' - but I can't remember the rest.
I had an interesting discussion with a friend on these issues recently. He's worked in aid in Tanzania for seven years, is engaged to a Tanzanian woman, and is just completing
He had two main complaints about NGOs in Africa. The first - which I've witnessed in Asia myself - was that aid organisations, a lot of the time, became more concerned with institutional funding and power than actual aid. Along with that - a criticism that Theroux makes, and I think fairly - is that a lot of aid workers in Africa do live neo-colonial lifestyles, complete with big houses, servants, etc. The jeep is a big power symbol in the NGO world.
The second was a more subtle point; he said that development work had become very concentrated on *subjects* - water provision, AIDS preventation, etc - and that people were training in one subject and then being moved from place to place. He believed that really good development work was only possible by local knowledge, and that what was effective in one area or country often failed in another.
Personally, I had some problems with Live8 and the like; the image of all those well-scrubbed young white people REACHING OUT AND SAVING Africa. Because, y'know, Africans can't do anything by themselves.
It's a bit of a bind. Aid can do wonderful things, but a lot of the time it does end up in the hands of dictators, corrupt bureaucrats, etc. (We had an interesting chat, too, about the role of strong belief in magic in keeping 'big men' in power in Africa, and how it wasn't discussed in the West for some time because of understandable fears of racism.) There are deep-rooted problems with the development of business law, bribery, and so forth that throwing money at only worsens. Most of Geldof's original LiveAid fundraising ended up feeding the Ethiopean Army, after all.
Faber & Faber just published an excellent book on the Red Army called IVAN'S WAR, by Catherine Merridale, which concentrates on the experience of the Russian soldier. (Declaration of interest; she and I have the same editor.)
War apologism is certainly big in Japan, though more common than 'we were pushed into it by the evil Americans!' is 'War is a terrible thing!' - which is an admirable sentiment, but also a way of avoiding thinking about your national sins. One of my absolute favourite books, John Dower's EMBRACING DEFEAT, is very good on this.
National memory is an important thing, especially when it goes wrong. I spend a lot of time in Beijing, and the obsession of Chinese youth with the Japanese invasion is disturbing. These are middle-class, pampered kids, and they can spill gallons of bile about the Japanese dwarfs. It's partially, I think, because the even worse events of the 1950s and 1960s still aren't that easily discussed, meaning that a wealth of national trauma is pushed back onto the Japanese. It's also worrying that these kids largely have a pre-1914 sense of what war is - all guts and glory and heroic Chinese throwing themselves on Japanese tanks - which is why they're so keen to call for it.
I had a Korean friend whose mother *confiscated* her life savings - painfully earnt over seven years of independent work - because 'she wouldn't spend them properly.'
Then her mother brought a car for herself with her daughter's money.
J.
There's an old Chaosium game called CREDO, which features squabbling between various factions in the early Church. CRUSADER KINGS, a Paradox game, also features Papal shenaningans; controlling the Pope lets you determine the targets of Crusades, not to mention excommunicating fellow rulers and seizing their titles cheaply.
I used to live in Manchester, a city with, in places, a catastrophically high rate of teenage pregnancy, and the sight of a nineteen-year old girl *screaming* at a crying two year old that he or she was 'a stupid little fucking brat' was a depressingly common one. I've always found that making contact with the parent does very little good, except maybe to draw off some of the anger onto yourself, and so tried instead to make sympathetic eye contact, smiles, etc with the child. On the other hand, I've heard it argued that intervention in such extreme circumstances demonstrates to the child that their parent's behavior isn't acceptable, which is a very good thing in the long run.
On mother drive-bys, though, Korea and China, where I live now, probably rank first in the world. The Chinese delight in children, but any woman past 40 also takes any opportunity to lecture. Korea has probably the most spectacularly messed-up family dynamics in SE Asia, which is saying something, and the dominance of the mother-in-law figure there is almost unbelievable; I've seen young women reduced to tears in public by the criticism of strangers. (The Koreans take age respect to extremes, though I have to admit that seeing three traffic policemen, all 18-19 year old conscripts, being literally slapped around by a middle-aged taxi driver for having the effontery to give him a ticket was pretty funny.)
The Orthodox, on the other hand, have a habit of very rapidly ordaining and promoting competent laypersons in order to fill an episcopal gap. There was a Byzantine who went from layman to Patriarch in a week. Still happens nowadays; my friend Metropolitan John of Pergamon was an unordained professor of Theology who went from layman to bishop in a few days.
As for the Catholics, rumour has been for a long time that the next pope was going to be from a developing country - which unfortunately probably also means a hardline conservative.
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