You must not believe anything you hear on this show

Sunday, June 16th, 2019

Bill Cooper sounds like quite a character — but that’s just what they’d like you to think:

Reputed instances of Cooper’s prescience are legion. An early roundup of these forecasts can be found in the August 15th, 1990, edition of the newsletter of the Citizens Agency for Joint Intelligence (CAJI), an organization Cooper created, billing it as “the largest private intelligence-gathering agency in the world.” Published on a dot-matrix printer, carrying the tagline “Information, not money, will be the power of the nineties,” Cooper ran an article entitled “Every Prediction Has Come True.” He listed 16 of his most recent prognostications that had come to pass “or will soon be fulfilled.”

These included the disclosure that “the CIA and the military are bringing drugs into the United States to finance their black projects.” Cooper also predicted that “the rape of the Savings and Loans by the CIA is only the tip of the iceberg. At least 600 banks will go under in the next two years.” The current monetary structure, Cooper said, “will be replaced by a cashless system that will allow the government to monitor our every action by computer. If you attempt to stay out of the system you will not be allowed to buy, sell, work, get medical care, or anything else we all take for granted.”

Cooper continued to make predictions in his watershed book, Behold a Pale Horse. Published in 1991 by Light Technology, a small New Age–oriented house then located in Sedona, Arizona, Behold a Pale Horse is something of a publishing miracle. With an initial press run of 3,500 (500 hardcover, 3,000 paperback), by the end of 2017, the book was closing in on 300,000 copies sold.

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Eight years before the Trench Coat Mafia murders at Columbine High School, Cooper wrote: “The sharp increase of prescriptions of psychoactive drugs like Prozac and Ritalin to younger and younger children will inevitably lead to a rash of horrific school shootings.” These incidents, he said, “will be used by elements of the federal government as an excuse to infringe upon the citizenry’s Second Amendment rights.”

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“I am no Prophet, I am no Nostradamus, I have no crystal ball,” Cooper proclaimed. He was “just an ordinary guy.” There was nothing supernatural about his predictions. Anyone could do it. It was all in the methodology, summed up in what he called his “standard admonition,” the one rule every prospective Hour of the Time listener had to obey, “no matter what.”

“You must not believe anything you hear on this show,” Cooper declared. Nor was the listener to believe anything they heard from any other shortwave host, “or Larry King Live, Dan Rather, George Bush, Bill Clinton, or anyone else in this entire world, whether you hear it on radio, on television, or from the lips of someone standing right in front of you.

“Listen to everyone, read everything, believe nothing until you, yourself, can prove it with your own research,” Cooper told the audience. “only free-thinking, intelligent people who are prepared to root through all the crap and get at the truth should be listening to this show. Everyone else should just turn off their radio. We don’t even want you to listen.

“Listen to everyone. Read everything, believe nothing . . . until you can prove to yourself whether it is true or false or lies between the many shades of gray. If you don’t do this, if you cannot do this, or are just plain too lazy to do this, then I can assure you that you will march into the New World Order as a docile slave.”

Then Cooper made the sound of a sheep. “Baaa! Baaa! Baaaing all the way.”

Cooper’s most famous prediction was made during the June 28th, 2001, broadcast of The Hour of the Time. A little past his 58th birthday and drinking heavily, Cooper was doing his program from a studio he’d built in the den of his house at 96 North Clearview Circle, atop a hill in the small White Mountains town of Eagar, Arizona, 15 miles from the New Mexico line.

“Can you believe what you have been seeing on CNN today, ladies and gentlemen?” Cooper asked the Hour of the Time audience that evening.

“Supposedly, a CNN reporter found Osama bin Laden, took a television camera crew with him, and interviewed him and his top leadership, lieutenants, and his colonels, and generals…in their hideout!

“Now don’t you think that’s kind of strange, folks?” Cooper asked with his signature chuckle. “Because the largest intelligence apparatus in the world, with the biggest budget in the history of world, has been looking for Osama bin Laden for years, and years, and years, and can’t find him!

But some doofus jerk-off reporter with his little camera crew waltzes right into his secret hideout and interviews him!”

This meant one of two things, Cooper told the audience. Either “everyone in the intelligence community and all the intelligence agencies of the United States government are blithering idiots and incompetent fools, or they’re lying to us.”

The fact was, Cooper told the audience, no one in the U.S. intelligence services was really looking for Osama bin Laden. They knew where he was. They had since the beginning of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Bin Laden, along with his entire family, was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Central Intelligence Agency.

“They created him. They’re the ones funding him. They supported him to make their new utopian worlds…and he has served them well.” There were rumors floating around the mass media that bin Laden was planning attacks on the United States and Israel, but this was just subterfuge, Cooper said. “If Osama bin Laden is an enemy of Israel, don’t you think the Mossad would have taken care of that a long time ago?” Cooper asked.

Something else was in the wind. There was no other reason for the government to allow the CNN report but to further stamp bin Laden’s bearded, pointy face upon the collective American mind-set. Bogeyman of the moment, the Saudi prince was being readied for his close-up.

“I’m telling you to be prepared for a major attack!” Cooper declared. The target would be a large American city.

“Something terrible is going to happen in this country. And whatever is going to happen they’re going to blame on Osama bin Laden. Don’t you even believe it.”

Two and a half months later, on September 11th, 2001, after two commercial airliners flew into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in a cataclysm that killed 2,996 people, including 343 New York City Fire Department personnel, Cooper’s prediction came to pass.

By the time Cooper got on the air that morning, the towers had already fallen. Several hours passed before the name Osama bin Laden surfaced on the BBC feed Cooper was monitoring. The British station, which Cooper regarded as marginally more reliable than the American networks, was doing an interview with the former Israeli Prime Minister General Ehud Barak and Richard Perle, chairman of George W. Bush’s Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee.

Widely known as the Prince of Darkness, in part for his Reagan-era support of Edward Teller’s $100 billion Strategic Defense Initiative, known as Star Wars, Pperle said teh attacks on New York and Washington were “clearly an act of war.”

“All our Western civilization is under attack,” Barak put in. The interviewer asked Perle if he thought the United States would be justified in firing cruise missiles at Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. Perle, who along with fellow neocons Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld would soon push hard for the reinvasion of Iraq, answered in the affirmative.

The Afghani authorities had “allowed Osama bin Laden to operate in their territory,” Perle said. That alone was reason enough for a military strike. Bin Laden was involved, no doubt about it. Yes, Barak agreed, there was “every reason to believe” bin Laden was behind the attack.

It was then Cooper interrupted the transmission, shouting, “How do they know who did it?

“If the United States government had no warning like they say, if they didn’t know who was going to mount these attacks, and there are no survivors from the people in these planes, how do they know Osama bin Laden is behind it?”

So, yet again, Cooper was right.

[...]

Cooper made another prediction. “Folks, I can assure you that 72 hours from now we will be at war. We will be bombing two or maybe three countries….Because that’s how it works. When governments are attacked, they lash out. Thousands of people who had nothing whatsoever to do with what is happening at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are going to die.

“Nothing will be the same after today,” Cooper said grimly.

“Get ready for it, folks, because that’s what you’re going to be hearing in the next weeks and months on radio and television: Nothing will be the same after today….Because I’ll tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that’s what the people who really did this want you to think, that nothing, nothing, will be the same after today.

“And you know what? They’re right. They’re telling the truth about that. Within weeks the Congress will pass draconian legislation aimed at restricting the rights of American citizens. You’re going to have surveillance cameras on every street corner. You think your phones are being tapped now, just wait.

“No one is going to gain from this except a very small group of people. Everyone else will lose. No one will lose more than the American people.” This would be the most grievous casualty of the 9/11 attacks, Cooper told the audience, the nation itself, the America that could have been.

Freedom, the most elusive of qualities, best distilled in the inspired documents of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, had been dealt a fatal blow: “From now on, freedom will be whatever the law allows you to do.”

[...]

It was soon after that Cooper’s final prediction came true.

“They’re going to kill me, ladies and gentlemen,” he told the audience. “They’re going to come up here in the middle of the night, and shoot me dead, right on my doorstep.”

And, around midnight on November 5th, 2001, less than two months after the 9/11 attacks, that’s exactly what happened.

(Hat tip to Neovictorian.)

Posted in Media, Policy | 10 Comments »

Germans holding judgment upon themselves

Saturday, June 15th, 2019

Upheaval by Jared DiamondJared Diamond recounts (in Upheaval) how German views of the Nazi era changed between 1961 and 1982:

The change in German views of the Nazi era after I lived in Germany was made brutally clear to me by an experience 21 years later, in 1982. In that year my wife Marie and I spent a vacation in Germany. As we were driving along the autobahn and approaching Munich, an autobahn exit sign pointed to a suburb called Dachau, site of a former Nazi concentration camp (German acronym, KZ) that Germans had converted into a museum. Neither of us had previously visited a KZ site. But we didn’t anticipate that a “mere” museum exhibit would affect us, after all that we already knew of KZs through the stories of Marie’s parents (KZ survivors) and the newsreels of my childhood. Least of all did we expect to be affected by how Germans themselves explained (or explained away) their own camps.

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In fact, our visit to Dachau was a shattering experience—at least as powerful as was our subsequent visit to the much larger and more notorious Auschwitz, which is also an exhibit but not a German exhibit, because it lies within Poland.

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Far from shirking German responsibility, the exhibit exemplified Fritz Bauer’s motto “Germans holding judgment upon themselves.”

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Such national facing-up to past crimes isn’t to be taken for granted. In fact, I know of no country that takes that responsibility remotely as seriously as does Germany.

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Revolts and protests, especially by students, spread through much of the free world in the 1960’s. They began in the U.S. with the Civil Rights Movement, protests against the Vietnam War, the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley, and the movement called Students for a Democratic Society.

[...]

But that confrontation of generations achieved a particularly violent form in Germany for two reasons. First, the Nazi involvement of the older generation of Germans meant that the gulf between the younger and the older generation was far deeper there than it was in the U.S. Second, the authoritarian attitudes of traditional German society made older and younger generations there especially scornful of each other.

[...]

All of them had bad things happen to them as children, due to the war. For example, among my six closest German friends born around 1937, one was orphaned when her soldier father was killed; one watched from a distance the district where his father lived being bombed, although his father survived; one was separated from her father from the time that she was one year old until she was 11 years old, because he was a prisoner of war; one lost his two older brothers in the war; one spent the nights of his childhood years sleeping out of doors under a bridge, because his town was bombed every night and it was unsafe to sleep in a house; and one was sent by his mother every day to steal coal from a railroad yard, so that they could stay warm.

[...]

Thus, my German friends of Jahrgang 1937 were old enough to have been traumatized by memories of the war, and by the chaos and poverty that followed it, and by the closure of their schools. But they weren’t old enough to have had Nazi views instilled into them by the Nazi youth organization called the Hitler Jugend.

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Most of them were too young to be drafted into the new West German army established in 1955; Jahrgang 1937 was the last Jahrgang not called up for that draft.

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On the average, the German protestors of 1968 had been born around 1945, just at the end of the war. They were too young to have been raised as Nazis, or to have experienced the war, or to remember the years of chaos and poverty after the war. They grew up mostly after Germany’s economic recovery, in economically comfortable times. They weren’t struggling to survive; they enjoyed enough leisure and security to devote themselves to protest.

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That meant that the parents of Germany’s 1945 generation were viewed by their children as the Germans who had voted for Hitler, had obeyed Hitler, had fought for Hitler, or had been indoctrinated in Nazi beliefs by Hitler Jugend school organizations.

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German 1968-ers equated contemporary capitalist German society with fascism, while conservative older Germans in turn regarded the violent young leftist rebels as “Hitler’s children,” a reincarnation of the violent fanatical Nazi SA and SS organizations.

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Many of the rebels were extreme leftists; some actually moved to East Germany, which in turn funneled money and documents to sympathizers in West Germany.

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Older West Germans responded by telling the rebels, “All right, go to East Germany if you don’t like it here!”

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West German terrorism peaked during the years 1971 to 1977, reaching a climax in 1977 when Andreas Baader and two other RAF leaders committed suicide in prison after the failure of a terrorist attempt to free imprisoned terrorists by hijacking a Lufthansa airplane.

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The German student revolt of 1968 is sometimes described as “a successful failure.”

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Spanking of children was widespread then, not merely permitted but often considered obligatory for parents.

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I worked in a German scientific research institute whose director completely by himself made the decisions controlling the careers of his institute’s 120 scientists. For instance, to obtain a university teaching job in Germany required a degree beyond the PhD, called “Habilitation.” But my director permitted only one of his 120 scientists to be “habilitated” each year, and chose that person himself.

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Wherever one went—on the street, on lawns, in schools, in private and public buildings—there were signs saying what was forbidden (verboten), and instructing how one should and shouldn’t behave.

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One morning, one of my German colleagues arrived at work livid, because the previous evening he had come home to find the grass lawn outside his apartment building, which served as his children’s play area, surrounded by barbed wire (indelibly associated in Germany with concentration camps). When my friend confronted the apartment manager, the latter was unapologetic: “It’s forbidden to walk on the grass (Betreten des Rasens verboten), but those spoiled children (verwöhnte Kinder) were nevertheless walking on the grass, so I felt entitled (ich fühlte mich berechtigt) to prevent them from doing so by putting up barbed wire (Stacheldraht).”

[...]

In retrospect, authoritarian behaviors and attitudes in Germany were already starting to change by and just after the time of my 1961 visit. A famous example was the Spiegel Affair of 1962. When the weekly magazine Der Spiegel, which was often critical of the national government, published an article questioning the strength of the German army (Bundeswehr), Chancellor Adenauer’s defense minister Franz Josef Strauss reacted with authoritarian arrogance by arresting Der Spiegel’s editors and seizing their files on suspicion of treason. The resulting enormous public outcry forced the government to abandon its crackdown and compelled Strauss to resign. But Strauss nevertheless remained powerful, served as premier of the German state of Bavaria from 1978 to 1988, and ran for chancellor of Germany in 1980. (He was defeated.)

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Younger American visitors, born in or after the 1970’s, who didn’t experience the Germany of the 1950’s, instinctively compare Germany today with the U.S. today and say that German society is still authoritarian. Older American visitors like me, who did experience Germany in the (late) 1950’s, instead compare Germany today with Germany of the 1950’s and say that Germany today is much less authoritarian than it used to be. I think that both of those comparisons are accurate.

[...]

On October 3, 1990 East Germany was dissolved, and its districts joined (West) Germany’s as new states (Bundesländer).

Posted in Policy | 13 Comments »

The Western Allies needed West Germany to become strong again

Friday, June 14th, 2019

Upheaval by Jared DiamondJared Diamond explains (in Upheaval) the challenge of rebuilding Germany after the war:

Millions of Germans were searching for missing family members, of whom some miraculously turned up alive years later. But most never turned up, and for many of them the time and place and circumstances of their deaths remain forever unknown. My first German teacher, living in exile in 1954, happened to mention having a son. When I naïvely asked him about his son, my teacher burst out in pain, “They took him away, and we never heard anything about him again!” By the time that I met my teacher, he and his wife had been living with that uncertainty for 10 years. Two of my later German friends were “luckier”: one learned of her father’s probable death “only” a year after the last news from him, and another learned of his brother’s death after three years.

[...]

The term “German Democratic Republic” is remembered as a big lie, like the name “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” that North Korea adopts for itself today. It’s easy now to forget that not just Soviet brute force but also German communist idealism contributed to East Germany’s founding, and that numerous German intellectuals chose to move to East Germany from West Germany or from exile overseas.

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The pre-war public transport system in Berlin (U-Bahn and S-Bahn) included lines that connected West and East Berlin, so that anyone in East Berlin could get into West Berlin just by hopping on a train. When I first visited Berlin in 1960, like other Western tourists I took the U-Bahn to visit East Berlin and to return to West Berlin.

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In 1953 dissatisfaction in East Germany blew up in a strike that turned into a rebellion, crushed by Soviet troops.

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Finally, on the night of August 13, 1961, while I was living in Germany, the East German regime suddenly closed the East Berlin U-Bahn stations and erected a wall between East and West Berlin, patrolled by border guards who shot and killed people trying to cross the wall (Plate 6.3). I recall the disbelief, shock, and rage of my West German friends the morning after the wall’s erection.

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As late as 1961, when I was about to go live in Germany, my (American) father advised me in all seriousness to be ready to flee to a safe refuge in Switzerland at the first signs of danger in Europe.

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The Western Allies needed West Germany to become strong again, as a bulwark against communism. Their other motives for wanting Germany to become strong were to reduce the risk that a weak and frustrated Germany might descend again into political extremism (as had happened after World War One), and to reduce the economic costs to the Allies of having to continue to feed and support an economically weak West Germany.

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By the time that I moved from Britain to West Germany, West Germany felt more prosperous and contented than was Britain.

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Politically, by 1955 West Germany had regained sovereignty, and Allied military occupation ended.

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At the end of World War Two, the Allies prosecuted the 24 top surviving Nazi leaders at Nuremberg for war crimes. Ten were condemned to death, of whom the highest ranking were the foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and the Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring. (The latter succeeded in committing suicide by poison during the night before his scheduled execution.) Seven others were sentenced to long or lifelong prison terms.
LOCATION: 3032

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In Germany the trials became dismissed as “Siegerjustiz”: mere revenge taken by the victors upon the vanquished.

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Adenauer’s policy upon becoming chancellor was described as “amnesty and integration,” which was a euphemism for not asking individual Germans about what they had been doing during the Nazi era.

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Instead, the government’s focus was overwhelmingly on the urgent tasks of feeding and housing tens of millions of underfed and homeless Germans, rebuilding Germany’s bombed cities and ruined economy, and re-establishing democratic government after 12 years of Nazi rule.

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As a result, most Germans came to adopt the view that Nazi crimes were the fault of just a tiny clique of evil individual leaders, that the vast majority of Germans were innocent, that ordinary German soldiers who had fought heroically against the Soviets were guiltless, and that (by around the mid-1950’s) there were no further important investigations of Nazi crimes left to be carried out.

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Further contributing to that failure of the West German government to prosecute Nazis was the widespread presence of former Nazis among post-war government prosecutors themselves: for instance, it turned out that 33 out of 47 officials in the West German federal criminal bureau (Bundeskriminalamt), and many members of the West German intelligence service, had been leaders of the Nazi fanatical SS organization.

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Bauer did not succeed in tracking down Mengele, who eventually died in Brazil in 1979, or Bormann, who it later turned out had committed suicide in 1945 around the same time as did Hitler.

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But Bauer did receive information about the location of Eichmann, who had fled to Argentina.

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Instead, he relayed the news of Eichmann’s whereabouts to the Israeli Secret Service, which eventually succeeded in kidnapping Eichmann in Argentina, secretly flying him to Israel in an El Al jet, putting him on public trial, and eventually hanging him after a trial that drew worldwide attention not just to Eichmann but to the whole subject of individual responsibility for Nazi crimes.

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The Nazi defendants being prosecuted by Bauer all tended to offer the same set of excuses: I was merely following orders; I was conforming to the standards and laws of my society at the time; I was not the person who had responsibility for those people getting killed; I merely organized railroad transport of Jews being transported to extermination camps; I was just a pharmacist or a guard at Auschwitz; I didn’t personally kill anyone myself; I was blinded by belief in authority and ideology proclaimed by the Nazi government, and that made me incapable of recognizing that what I was doing was wrong.

Posted in Economics, Policy, War | 5 Comments »

Indonesian killing technology was much simpler than that of the Nazis

Thursday, June 13th, 2019

Upheaval by Jared DiamondControl of Indonesia passed through many hands, Jared Diamond explains (in Upheaval):

At first, Japanese military leaders occupying the Dutch East Indies claimed that Indonesians and Japanese were Asian brothers in a shared struggle for a new anti-colonial order.

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But the Japanese mainly sought to extract raw materials (especially oil and rubber) from the Dutch East Indies for the Japanese war machine, and they became even more repressive than had been the Dutch.

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The Dutch, invoking the ethnic diversity and huge territorial extent of the Indonesian archipelago, and probably driven by their own motive of “divide and rule” to retain control, promoted the idea of a federation for Indonesia.

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In contrast, many Indonesian revolutionaries sought a single unified republican government for all of the former Dutch East Indies.

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The final transfer took place in December 1949—but with two big limitations that infuriated Indonesians and that took them 12 years to overturn. One limitation was that the Dutch did not yield the Dutch half (the western half) of the island of New Guinea. Instead, they retained it under Dutch administration, on the grounds that New Guinea was much less developed politically than was the rest of the Dutch East Indies, that it was not even remotely ready for independence, and that most New Guineans are ethnically as different from most Indonesians as either group is from Europeans. The other limitation was that Dutch companies such as Shell Oil maintained ownership over Indonesian natural resources.

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The military saw itself as the savior of the revolution, the bulwark of national identity, and demanded a guaranteed voting block in parliament. The civilian government, on the other hand, sought to save money by eliminating military units, reducing the size of the officer corps, and pushing soldiers out of the military and off the government payroll.

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Military leaders extorted money from other Indonesians and from businesses for army purposes, raised money by smuggling and by taxing radio ownership and electricity, and increasingly took over regional economies, thereby institutionalizing the corruption that remains today one of Indonesia’s biggest problems.

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Well aware of Indonesia’s weak national identity, he formulated a set of five principles termed Pancasila, which to this day serves as an umbrella ideology to unify Indonesia and was enshrined in the 1945 constitution. The principles are broad ones: belief in one god, Indonesian national unity, humanitarianism, democracy, and social justice for all Indonesians.

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As president, Sukarno blamed Indonesia’s poverty on Dutch imperialism and capitalism, abrogated Indonesia’s inherited debts, nationalized Dutch properties, and turned over the management of most of them to the army.

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Sukarno responded by telling the U.S. to “go to hell with your aid”; then in 1965 he expelled the American Peace Corps and withdrew from the United Nations, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. Inflation soared, and Indonesia’s currency (the rupiah) lost 90% of its value during 1965.

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Fundamental to any functioning democracy are widespread literacy, recognition of the right to oppose government policies, tolerance of different points of view, acceptance of being outvoted, and government protection of those without political power. For understandable reasons, all of those prerequisites were weak in Indonesia.

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In the September 1955 elections an astonishingly high 92% of registered voters went to the polls, but the outcome was a stalemate, because the four leading parties each obtained between 15% and 22% of votes and parliamentary seats.

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Presumably out of fear of Dutch anti-aircraft capabilities during daylight hours, the paratroops were dropped blindly at night over forested terrain, in an incredible act of cruelty. The unfortunate paratroops floated down into a hot, mosquito-infested sago swamp, where those who survived impact on sago trees found themselves hanging from the trees by their parachutes. The even smaller fraction who managed to free themselves from their parachutes dropped or clambered down into standing swamp water. My friend and his Dutch unit surrounded the swamp, waited a week, and then paddled into the swamp with boats to retrieve the few paratroops still alive.

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As a face-saving gesture, the Dutch ceded it not directly to Indonesia but instead to the United Nations, which seven months later transferred administrative control (but not ownership) to Indonesia, subject to a future plebiscite. The Indonesian government then initiated a program of massive transmigration from other Indonesian provinces, in part to ensure a majority of Indonesian non–New Guineans in Indonesian New Guinea.

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This three-way struggle came to a climax around 3:15 A.M. during the night of September 30–October 1, 1965, when two army units with leftist commanders and 2,000 troops revolted and sent squads to capture seven leading generals (including the army’s commander and the minister of defense) in their homes, evidently to bring them alive to President Sukarno and to persuade him to repress the Council of Generals.

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At 7:15 A.M. on October 1 the coup leaders, having also seized the telecom building on one side of the central square in the Indonesian capital city of Jakarta, broadcast an announcement on Indonesia radio declaring themselves to be the 30 September Movement, and stating that their aim was to protect President Sukarno by pre-empting a coup plotted by corrupt generals who were said to be tools of the CIA and the British. By 2:00 P.M. the leaders made three more radio broadcasts, after which they fell silent. Note: despite the account of a communist coup described vividly in the lobby display of my 1979 Indonesian hotel, the revolt was by Indonesian army units, not by a communist mob.

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The squads ended up killing three of the generals in their houses, two by shooting and one by bayonet. A fourth general succeeded in escaping over the back wall of his house compound. The squad accidentally shot his five-year-old daughter as depicted in one of the paintings in my Indonesian hotel, and also killed his staff lieutenant, whom they mistook for the general himself. (For brevity, I’ll still refer to “seven generals.”) The squads succeeded in capturing alive only the remaining three of the generals, whom they nevertheless proceeded to murder instead of carrying out their instructions to bring the generals alive to Sukarno.

[...]

The coup leaders had neither tanks nor walkie-talkies. Because they closed down the Jakarta telephone system at the time that they occupied the telecom building, coup leaders trying to communicate with one another between different parts of Jakarta were reduced to sending messengers through the streets. Incredibly, the coup leaders failed to provide food and water for their troops stationed on the central square, with the result that a battalion of hungry and thirsty soldiers wandered off.

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Did anti-communist generals know of the coup in advance but nevertheless allow it to unfold, in order to provide them with a pretext for previously laid plans to suppress the PKI? The last possibility is strongly suggested by the speed of the military’s reaction. Within three days, military commanders began a propaganda campaign to justify round-ups and killings of Indonesian communists and their sympathizers on a vast scale (Plate 5.4).

[...]

On October 4 Suharto arrived at an area called Lubang Buaya (“Crocodile Hole” in the Indonesian language), where the coup squads had thrown the bodies of the kidnapped generals down a well. In front of photographers and television cameras, the decomposing bodies were pulled out of the well. On the next day, October 5, the generals’ coffins were driven through Jakarta’s streets, lined by thousands of people. The military’s anti-communist leadership quickly blamed the PKI for the murders, even though the murders had actually been carried out by units of the military itself. A propaganda campaign that could only have been planned in advance was immediately launched to create a hysterical atmosphere, warning non-communist Indonesians that they were in mortal danger from the communists, who were said to be making lists of people to kill, and to be practicing techniques for gouging out eyes.

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Members of the PKI’s women’s auxiliary were claimed to have carried out sadistic sexual torture and mutilation of the kidnapped generals.

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Throughout October and November, when PKI members were summoned to come to army bases and police stations, many came willingly, because they expected just to be questioned and released.

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The highest estimates are about 2 million; the most widely cited figure is the contemporary estimate of half-a-million arrived at by a member of President Sukarno’s own fact-finding commission. Indonesian killing technology was much simpler than that of the Nazis: victims were killed one by one, with machetes and other hand weapons and by strangling, rather than by killing hundreds of people at once in a gas chamber.

[...]

In March 1966 Sukarno was pressured into signing a letter ceding authority to Suharto; in March 1967 Suharto became acting president, and in March 1968 he replaced Sukarno as president. He remained in power for another 30 years.

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In contrast to Sukarno, Suharto did not pursue Third World anti-colonial politics and had no territorial ambitions outside the Indonesian archipelago. He concentrated instead on Indonesian domestic problems.

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Like General Pinochet’s Chicago Boys in Chile, Suharto’s Berkeley mafia instituted economic reforms by balancing the budget, cutting subsidies, adopting a market orientation, and reducing Indonesia’s national debt and inflation.

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In effect, the Indonesian military developed a parallel government with a parallel budget approximately equal to the official government budget.

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Military officers founded businesses and practiced corruption and extortion on a huge scale, in order to fund the military and to line their private pockets.

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Indonesians gave to Suharto’s wife (Ibu Tien = Madam Tien) a nickname meaning “Madam Ten Percent,” because she was said to extract 10% of the value of government contracts.

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After nearly 33 years, just after parliament had acclaimed him as president for a seventh five-year term, his regime collapsed quickly and unexpectedly in May 1998. It had been undermined by a combination of many factors. One was an Asian financial crisis that reduced the value of Indonesia’s currency by 80% and provoked rioting. Another was that Suharto himself, at age 77, had grown out of touch with reality, lost his political skills, and was shaken by the death in 1996 of his wife, who had been his closest partner and anchor.

[...]

In the 1980’s and 1990’s the operations of Indonesian commercial airlines were often careless and dangerous. In addition to being shaken down for bribes and diverted excess baggage charges, I experienced one flight on which large fuel drums were placed unsecured in the passenger cabin, the steward remained standing during take-off, and seatbelts and vomit bags for passengers (including one who was vomiting) were lacking. During another flight on a large passenger jet into the provincial capital of Jayapura, the pilot and co-pilot were so absorbed in chatting with the stewardesses through the open cabin door that they failed to notice that they were approaching the runway at too high an altitude, tried to make up for their neglect by going into a steep dive, had to brake hard on landing, and succeeded in stopping the plane only 20 feet short of the runway perimeter ditch.

[...]

In 2013 a rifle shot from the ground broke the windshield of my chartered helicopter in the air over Indonesian New Guinea; it remained uncertain whether the shot had been fired by New Guinean guerrillas still fighting for independence, or by Indonesian troops themselves feigning guerrilla activity in order to justify a crackdown.

Posted in Policy, War | 15 Comments »

Joe Rogan interviews the Angel Philosopher

Wednesday, June 12th, 2019

Joe Rogan recently interviewed Naval Ravikant (The Angel Philosopher):

Posted in Business, Policy | 1 Comment »

The exhibit made no mention of what followed the deaths of the generals

Tuesday, June 11th, 2019

Upheaval by Jared DiamondJared Diamond explores the recent history of the world’s fourth most populous country, Indonesia (in Upheaval):

My first trip to Indonesia was in 1979, when I began my visit by staying in a hotel whose lobby walls were decorated with paintings telling the story of Indonesian history. In the United States a similar exhibit might display paintings of the American Revolution, the Civil War, the California gold rush, the transcontinental railroads, and other such subjects from 150 to 250 years ago. But in that Indonesian hotel lobby, all of the paintings showed events of just the previous 35 years. The event that was the subject of most paintings was termed the 1965 Communist Revolt. Paintings, and explanatory text below them, vividly depicted how communists tortured and killed seven generals; and how one of the generals that the communists tried to kill managed to escape from his house over a wall, but his five-year-old daughter was shot by accident and died a few days later. The exhibit left the impression that the torture and killing of those generals and the young girl were the most horrible act that had ever happened in Indonesian history.

The exhibit made no mention of what followed the deaths of the generals: the murder of about half-a-million other Indonesians at the instigation of the Indonesian armed forces.

[...]

British control eventually became confined to parts of Borneo, and the only Portuguese colony that survived was in the eastern half of the island of Timor. The most successful colonists were the Dutch, concentrated on the island of Java, which had by far the largest native population (more than half of the population of modern Indonesia).

[...]

But it was only around 1910, more than three centuries after their arrival in the Indonesian archipelago, that the Dutch gained control of the whole far-flung island chain. As an example of how long much of the archipelago remained unexplored by the Dutch, it wasn’t until that year of 1910 that a Dutch governor discovered that the eastern Indonesian island of Flores and the nearby small island of Komodo are home to the world’s largest lizard, the so-called Komodo dragon. Although it’s up to 10 feet long and weighs up to several hundred pounds, it had remained unknown to Europeans for four centuries.

It should be emphasized that the word “Indonesia” didn’t even exist until it was coined by a European around 1850. The Dutch called their colony the “Indies,” the “Netherlands Indies,” or the “Dutch East Indies.” The archipelago’s inhabitants themselves did not share a national identity, nor a national language, nor a sense of unity in opposition to the Dutch. For example, Javanese troops joined Dutch troops to conquer the leading state on the island of Sumatra, a traditional rival of Javanese states.

[...]

But those efforts of Dutch ethical policy produced limited results—partly because the Netherlands itself was too small to put much money into Indonesia; and partly because the efforts of the Dutch, as well as of subsequent independent Indonesia, to improve people’s lives were frustrated by rapid population growth, creating more mouths to feed.

[...]

Indonesians with those beginnings of a wider identity formed many distinct but often overlapping groups: a Javanese group that felt culturally superior, an Islamic movement seeking an Islamic identity for Indonesia, labor unions, a communist party, Indonesian students sent to the Netherlands for education, and others.

Posted in Policy, War | 1 Comment »

The coup was welcomed with relief and broad support

Monday, June 10th, 2019

Upheaval by Jared DiamondChile’s long-expected coup took place on September 11, 1973, after all three branches of the armed forces — army, navy, and air force — had agreed on a plan 10 days previously. Jared Diamond explains (in Upheaval):

The Chilean air force bombed the president’s palace in Santiago, while Chilean army tanks shelled it (Plate 4.3). Recognizing his situation to be hopeless, Allende killed himself with the machine gun presented to him by Fidel Castro. I confess that I had been skeptical about that claim, and had suspected that Allende had actually been killed by coup soldiers. But an investigative commission set up by Chile’s restored democratic government after the end of military government concluded that Allende really did die alone, by suicide. That conclusion was confirmed for me by a Chilean friend who knew a fireman of the fire brigade that went to the burning palace and met Allende’s surviving final companions, including the last person to see Allende alive.

The coup was welcomed with relief and broad support from centrist and rightist Chileans, much of the middle class, and of course the oligarchs.

[...]

One Chilean friend recounted to me the story of a dinner party of 18 people that he had attended in December 1973, just three months after the coup. When the subject of conversation turned to the question how long the guests present expected the junta to remain in power, 17 of the 18 guests predicted just two years. The 18th guest’s prediction of seven years was considered absurd by the other guests; they said that that couldn’t happen in Chile, where all previous military governments had quickly returned power to a civilian government. No one at that dinner party foresaw that the junta would remain in power for almost 17 years. It suspended all political activity, closed Congress, banned left-wing political parties and even the centrist Christian Democrats (to the great surprise of those centrists), took over Chile’s universities, and appointed military commanders as university rectors.

The junta member who became its leader, essentially by accident, had joined it at the last minute and had not led the coup planning: General Augusto Pinochet (Plate 4.4).

[...]

The CIA’s appraisal of Pinochet was: quiet, mild-mannered, honest, harmless, friendly, hard-working, businesslike, religious, modest in lifestyle, a devoted tolerant husband and father, with no known interests outside the military and the Catholic Church and his family—in short, not a person likely to lead a coup. The junta expected itself to be a committee of equals, with rotating leadership. They chose Pinochet as their initial leader mainly because he was its oldest member, because he was chief of staff of the largest branch of the Chilean armed forces (the army itself), and perhaps because they shared the CIA’s view of Pinochet as unthreatening.

[...]

Within the first 10 days, thousands of Chilean leftists were taken to two sports stadiums in Santiago, interrogated, tortured, and killed.

[...]

Hundreds of Chileans were tracked down and killed in other South American countries, Europe, and even one in the U.S. The U.S. case occurred in 1976, in Washington, DC, only 14 blocks from the White House, when a car bomb killed the former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier (minister of defense under Allende), plus an American colleague.

[...]

By 1976, Pinochet’s government had arrested 130,000 Chileans, or 1% of Chile’s population. While the majority of them were eventually released, DINA and other junta agents killed or “disappeared” thousands of Chileans (most of them under the age of 35), plus four American citizens and various citizens of other countries.

[...]

South American military governments usually prefer an economy that they control themselves for their own benefit, rather than a free-market economy that they don’t control. Hence the junta’s adoption of the Chicago Boys’ policies was unexpected, and it remains uncertain why it happened.

[...]

The adoption is sometimes attributed to the 1975 Chilean visit of Milton Friedman himself, who met with Pinochet for 45 minutes and followed up the meeting by sending Pinochet a long letter full of recommendations. But Friedman came away from the meeting with a low opinion of Pinochet, who asked Friedman only one question during their conversation. In fact, the Chicago Boys’ program differed significantly from Friedman’s recommendations and drew on detailed plans that Chilean economists had already laid out in a document nicknamed “the brick” (because it was so lengthy and heavy).

[...]

Whatever the motives, the resulting free-market policies included the re-privatization of hundreds of state-owned businesses nationalized under Allende (but not of the copper companies); the slashing of the government deficit by across-the-board cuts of every government department’s budget by 15% to 25%; the slashing of average import duties from 120% to 10%; and the opening of Chile’s economy to international competition.

[...]

That caused the Chicago Boys’ program to be opposed by Chile’s oligarchy of industrialists and traditional powerful families, whose inefficient businesses had previously been shielded from international competition by high duties and were now forced to compete and innovate.

[...]

But the results were that the rate of inflation declined from its level of 600% per year under Allende to just 9% per year, the Chilean economy grew at almost 10% per year, foreign investments soared, Chilean consumer spending rose, and Chilean exports eventually diversified and increased.

[...]

In a democracy it would have been difficult to inflict such widespread suffering on poor Chileans, as well as to impose government policies opposed by rich business oligarchs.

[...]

Thus, Chile after Pinochet reverted to being a functioning democracy still anomalous for Latin America, but with a huge selective change: a willingness to tolerate, compromise, and share and alternate power.

[...]

The new governments continued most of Pinochet’s free-market economic policies, because those policies were seen to have been largely beneficial in the long run. In fact, Concertación governments carried those policies even further, by reducing import tariffs so that they came to average only 3% by 2007, the lowest in the world.

[...]

Average incomes in Chile were only 19% of U.S. averages in 1975; that proportion had risen to 44% by the year 2000, while average incomes in the rest of Latin America were dropping over that same time. Inflation rates in Chile are low, the rule of law is strong, private property rights are well protected, and the pervasive corruption with which I had to deal during my 1967 visit has decreased.

[...]

But even Chilean rightists were shocked by a U.S. Senate subcommittee’s revelation that Pinochet had stashed $30 million in 125 secret U.S. bank accounts. While rightists had been prepared to tolerate torturing and killing, they were disillusioned to learn that Pinochet, whom they had considered different from and better than other dishonest Latin American dictators, stole and hid money.

Posted in Economics, Policy, War | 4 Comments »

Chile had a long history of democratic government

Sunday, June 9th, 2019

Upheaval by Jared DiamondIn 1967 Jared Diamond spent a sabbatical in Chile, at a time when everything there seemed peaceful, as he explains in Upheaval:

My Chilean hosts emphasized to me that Chile was very different from other Latin American countries. Chile had a long history of democratic government, they explained, punctuated by only a few relatively bloodless military coups. Chile didn’t have frequent military governments, as did Peru and Argentina and other South and Central American countries. It rated as the most politically stable country in all of Latin America.

[...]

“We Chileans know how to govern ourselves.”

[...]

In the course of a military coup on September 11, Chile’s democratically elected president committed suicide in the presidential palace. Not only did the Chilean junta kill Chileans in large numbers, torture them in larger numbers, devise vile new techniques of psychological and physical torture, and drive still more Chileans into exile.

[...]

It also directed terrorist political killings outside Chile, including what was, until the World Trade Towers attack of September 11 of 2001 (coincidentally on the anniversary of Chile’s coup), the only terrorist political killing of an American citizen on American soil (in Washington, DC, in 1976).

[...]

When you look at a map you’ll be struck by the fact that Chile is the longest and thinnest country in the world.

[...]

Geographically, Chile is isolated from other countries by the high chain of the Andes in the east separating it from Argentina, and by the world’s most barren desert in the north separating it from Bolivia and Peru.

[...]

Those advantages are the higher average agricultural productivity and the lower average disease burden of temperate-zone areas compared to the tropics.

[...]

As for Chile’s history and people, before European arrival the area that is now Chile supported only a sparse Native American population, lacking the cultural and political achievements of the rich, populous, powerful Inca Empire to the north in what is now Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador.

[...]

Already in his student days he became a declared Marxist, and a founder of Chile’s Socialist Party, which was more extreme left-wing than Chile’s Communist Party. But Allende rated as moderate by Chilean socialist standards, because his aim was to bring Marxist government to Chile by democratic means, not by armed revolution.

[...]

In the 1970 elections Allende received the largest share of the popular vote (36%), but only barely, because the much larger percentage (64%) of the electorate opposed to him was split between a right-wing coalition (35%, only 1.4% lower than Allende’s share!) and a center coalition (28%). Since Allende had obtained only a plurality rather than a majority of votes, his election required confirmation by Congress, which did confirm him in return for a series of constitutional amendments guaranteeing freedom of the press and other freedoms.

[...]

Under President Frei, Chile had already expropriated (and paid for) a 51% interest in the companies; the U.S. feared (correctly, as it turned out) that Allende might expropriate the remaining 49% without paying.

[...]

Even though he knew that his candidacy had been supported by only 36% of Chilean voters and had been opposed by the Chilean armed forces and the U.S. government, he rejected moderation, caution, and compromise, and instead pursued policies guaranteed to be anathema to those opposing forces. His first measure, with the unanimous support of Chile’s Congress, was to nationalize the U.S.-owned copper companies without paying compensation; that’s a recipe for making powerful international enemies.

[...]

He nationalized other big international businesses. He horrified the Chilean armed forces by bringing large numbers of Cubans into Chile, by carrying a personal machine gun given to him by Fidel Castro, and by inviting Castro to Chile for a visit that stretched out to five weeks. He froze prices (even of small consumer items like shoe-laces), replaced free-market elements of Chile’s economy with socialist-style state planning, granted big wage increases, greatly increased government spending, and printed paper money to cover the resulting government deficits. He extended President Frei’s agrarian reform by expropriating large estates and turning them over to peasant cooperatives. While that agrarian reform and others of Allende’s goals were well-intentioned, they were carried out incompetently. For instance, one Chilean friend of mine, at that time still a 19-year-old not-yet-graduated student economist, was given major responsibility for setting Chilean prices of consumer goods.

[...]

The outcome of all those developments was the 1973 coup that many of my Chilean friends characterize as inevitable, even though the form that the coup took was not inevitable.

[...]

“Allende fell because his economic policies depended on populist measures that had failed again and again in other countries. They produced short-term benefits, at the cost of mortgaging Chile’s future and creating runaway inflation.”

[...]

I keep asking myself: why on earth did Allende, an experienced politician and a moderate, pursue extremist policies that he knew were unacceptable to most Chileans, as well as to Chile’s armed forces?

Posted in Economics, Policy | 5 Comments »

Meiji leaders had spent their formative years in a weak Japan at risk of attack by strong potential enemies

Saturday, June 8th, 2019

Upheaval by Jared DiamondThe Meiji Restoration created modern Japan — and the conditions for its demise, Jared Diamond explains (in Upheaval):

The need for a unifying Meiji ideology was expressed in a widely circulated 1891 commentary on the emperor’s 1890 Rescript on Education: “Japan… is a small country. Since there are now those that swallow countries with impunity, we must consider the whole world our enemy… thus any true Japanese must have a sense of public duty, by which he values his life lightly as dust, advances spiritedly, and is ready to sacrifice himself for the sake of the nation.… The purpose of the Rescript is to strengthen the basis of the nation by cultivating the virtues of filiality and fraternal love, loyalty and sincerity, and to prepare for any emergency by nurturing the spirit of collective patriotism.… If we do not unite the people, fortifications and warships will not suffice. If we do unite them, then even a million formidable foes will be unable to harm us.”

[...]

By the resulting peace treaty, Japan annexed the southern half of Sakhalin Island and gained control of the South Manchurian Railroad. Japan established a protectorate over Korea in 1905 and annexed it in 1910. In 1914 Japan conquered Germany’s Chinese sphere of influence and Micronesian island colonies in the Pacific Ocean (Plate 3.9). Finally, in 1915 Japan presented China with the so-called Twenty-One Demands that would have converted China virtually into a vassal state; China gave in to some but not all of the demands.

[...]

The only occasion on which Meiji Japan overestimated its strength was in 1895, at the end of its war against China. The concessions that Japan had extracted from China then included China’s ceding to Japan the Liaotung Peninsula, which controls the sea and land routes between China and Korea. But France, Russia, and Germany reacted by joining together to force Japan to abandon the peninsula, which Russia proceeded to lease from China three years later. That humiliating setback made Japan aware of its weakness, standing alone, vis-à-vis European powers. Hence in 1902 Japan made an alliance with Britain, for protection and insurance, before attacking Russia in 1904.

[...]

In short, Japan’s military expansion in the Meiji Era was consistently successful, because it was guided at every step by honest, realistic, cautious, informed self-appraisal of the relative strengths of Japan and its targets, and by a correct assessment of what was realistically possible for Japan.

[...]

Now, compare that successful Meiji Era expansion with Japan’s situation as of August 14, 1945. On that date Japan was at war simultaneously with China, the U.S., Britain, Russia, Australia, and New Zealand (as well as with many other countries that had declared war against Japan but were not actively fighting).

[...]

In 1937 Japan launched a full-scale war against China. It fought two brief but bloody border wars with Russia in 1938 and 1939. In 1941 Japan simultaneously and suddenly attacked the U.S. and Britain and the Netherlands, even while Japan was still susceptible to resumption of fighting with Russia. Japan’s attack on Britain automatically resulted in declarations of war by Britain’s Pacific dominions Australia and New Zealand; Japan proceeded to bomb Australia. In 1945 Russia did attack Japan.

[...]

Why did Japan from 1937 onwards blunder stepwise into such an unrealistic and ultimately unsuccessful military expansion, when Meiji Japan from 1868 onwards had carried out stepwise such a realistic and successful military expansion?

[...]

There are numerous reasons: the successful war against Russia, disillusionment with the Treaty of Versailles, the collapse of Japan’s export-led economic growth in 1929, and others. But one additional reason is especially relevant to this book: a difference between Meiji-Era Japan and the Japan of the 1930’s and 1940’s, in knowledge and capacity for honest self-appraisal on the part of Japanese leaders.

[...]

In the Meiji Era many Japanese, including leaders of Japan’s armed forces, had made visits abroad. They thereby obtained detailed first-hand knowledge of China, the U.S., Germany, and Russia and their armies and navies. They could make an honest appraisal of Japan’s strength compared to the strengths of those other countries. Then, Japan attacked only when it could be confident of success. In contrast, in the 1930’s the Japanese army on the Asian mainland was commanded by young hothead officers who didn’t have experience abroad (unless in Nazi Germany), and who didn’t obey orders from experienced Japanese leaders in Tokyo. Those young hotheads didn’t know first-hand the industrial and military strength of the U.S. and of Japan’s other prospective opponents. They didn’t understand American psychology, and they considered the U.S. a nation of shopkeepers who wouldn’t fight.

[...]

Quite a few older leaders of the Japanese government and armed forces (especially of the navy) in the 1930’s did know the strength of the U.S. and Europe first-hand. The most poignant moment of my first visit to Japan, in 1998, came when my dinner table partner one evening turned out to be a retired Japanese steel executive, at that time in his 90’s, who recalled for me his visits to American steel factories in the 1930’s. He told me that he had been stunned to discover that the U.S.’s manufacturing capacity for high-quality steel was 50 times Japan’s, and that that fact alone had convinced him that it would be insane for Japan to go to war with the U.S.

[...]

Meiji leaders had spent their formative years in a weak Japan at risk of attack by strong potential enemies. But to Japan’s leaders of the 1930’s, war instead meant the intoxicating success of the Russo-Japanese War, the destruction of Russia’s Pacific fleet in Port Arthur harbor by a surprise attack that served as the model for Japan’s surprise attack against the American fleet at Pearl Harbor (Plate 3.7), and the spectacular destruction of Russia’s Baltic fleet by the Japanese navy in the Battle of Tsushima Strait (Plate 3.8).

Posted in Policy, War | 4 Comments »

Meiji Japan’s borrowing from the West was massive, conscious, and planned

Friday, June 7th, 2019

Upheaval by Jared DiamondDifferent foreign countries ended up as models in different spheres, as Japan tried to modernize, Jared Diamond explains (in Upheaval):

For instance, the new Japanese navy and army became modeled on the British navy and the German army, respectively.

[...]

Meiji Japan’s borrowing from the West was massive, conscious, and planned. Some of the borrowing involved bringing Westerners to Japan: for instance, importing Western schoolteachers to teach or to advise on education, and bringing two German scholars to help write a Japanese constitution drawing heavily on Germany’s constitution. But more of the borrowing involved Japanese traveling as observers to Europe and the U.S.

[...]

A crucial step, undertaken just two years after the Meiji government had consolidated its power, was the Iwakura Mission of 1871–1873 (Plate 3.3). Consisting of 50 government representatives, it toured the U.S. and a dozen European countries, visited factories and government offices, met U.S. President Grant and European government leaders, and published a five-volume report providing Japan with detailed accounts of a wide range of Western practices. The mission announced its purpose as being “to select from the various institutions prevailing among enlightened nations such as are best suited to our present condition.”

[...]

This reframing of innovations as supposedly retained traditions—the phenomenon of “invented traditions” often invoked by innovators in other countries besides Japan—contributed to the success of Meiji leaders in carrying out drastic changes.

[...]

The most urgent changes, effected or launched within the first few years of the Meiji Era, were to create a modern national army, to abolish feudalism, to found a national system of education, and to secure income for the government by tax reform.

[...]

Military reform began with purchasing modern Western equipment, enlisting French and German officers to train the army, and (later) experimenting with French and British models to develop a modern Japanese navy.

[...]

A national conscription law, adopted in 1873 and based on European models, provided for a national army of men armed with guns and serving for three years. Formerly, each feudal domain had had its own private militia of samurai swordsmen, useless in modern war but still a threat to the Japanese national government (Plate 3.4). Hence the samurai were first forbidden to carry swords or to administer private punishment, then hereditary occupations (including that of being a samurai) were abolished, then the ex-samurai were paid off in government stipends, and finally those stipends were converted to interest-bearing government bonds.

[...]

Hence in March 1868 four daimyo, including those of Satsuma and Choshu who had instigated the Meiji Restoration, were persuaded to offer their lands and people to the emperor by an ambiguously worded document. When the emperor accepted that offer in July, the other daimyo were commanded to make the same offer, and as a sop they were then appointed as “governors” of their former feudal domains. Finally, in August 1871 the daimyo were told that their domains (and governorships) would now be swept away and replaced with centrally administered prefectures. But the daimyo were allowed to keep 10% of their former domains’ assessed incomes, while being relieved of the burden of all the expenses that they had formerly borne. Thus, within three-and-a-half years, centuries of Japanese feudalism were dismantled.

[...]

In his 45 years of rule, the emperor made 102 trips outside of Tokyo and around Japan, compared with a total of just three trips by all emperors combined during the 265 years of the Tokugawa Era (1603–1868).

[...]

Compulsory elementary schools were established in 1872, followed by the founding of Japan’s first university in 1877, middle schools in 1881, and high schools in 1886.

[...]

The end result of that educational reform is that Japan today ties for having the world’s highest percentage of literate citizens (99%), despite also having the world’s most complicated and hard-to-learn writing system.

[...]

In the 1880’s, recruitment for the central government bureaucracy became based on an exam testing Western knowledge, rather than testing knowledge of Confucian philosophy.

[...]

It achieved that aim in a Western manner, by imposing a national 3% land tax.

[...]

Japanese farmers periodically complained and rioted, because they had to pay cash every year regardless of the size of the harvest. But they might have considered themselves lucky if they could have foreseen modern Western tax rates. For example, here in my state of California we pay a state 1% property tax, plus a state income tax of up to 12%, plus a national income tax of currently up to 44%.

[...]

The year 1872 saw the founding of a national post system, and the building of Japan’s first railroad and its first telegraph line, followed by establishment of a national bank in 1873. Gas street lighting was installed in Tokyo.

Posted in Policy | 11 Comments »

They considered themselves morally superior to older politicians

Thursday, June 6th, 2019

Upheaval by Jared DiamondWhen the shogun’s government, the bakufu, opened up Japan, it did not go smoothly, as Jared Diamond explains in Upheaval:

The bakufu developed an Institute for the Study of Barbarian (i.e., foreign) Books, translated Western books, and sponsored the production of English-language grammars and an English pocket dictionary.

[...]

The bakufu and domains became heavily indebted to foreign creditors as a result of expenses such as weapons purchases and sending students overseas. Consumer prices and the cost of living rose.

[...]

The sharpest conflict within Japan arose over Japan’s basic strategy dilemma: whether to try to resist and expel the foreigners now, or instead to wait until Japan could become stronger.

[...]

Already around 1859, resentful, hotheaded, naïve young sword-wielding samurai began to pursue a goal of expelling foreigners by a campaign of assassination. They became known as “shishi,” meaning “men of high purpose.” Appealing to what they believed were traditional Japanese values, they considered themselves morally superior to older politicians.

[...]

The following statement of shishi principles, issued in 1861, conveys the flavor of their anger: “It is a source of deepest grief to our Emperor that our magnificent and divine country has been humiliated by the barbarians, and that the Spirit of Japan, which was transmitted from antiquity, is on the point of being extinguished.… It is said that, when one’s lord is humiliated, his retainers must choose death. Must we not set even greater emphasis on the present situation, in which the Imperial Country is about to know disgrace?… We swear by our deities that, if the Imperial Flag is once raised, we will go through fire and water to ease the Emperor’s mind, to carry out the will of our former lord, and to purge this evil from our people. Should any, in this cause, seek to put forward personal considerations, he shall incur the punishment of the angered gods, and be summoned before his fellows to commit hara-kiri.”

[...]

Shishi terrorism was directed against foreigners, and even more often against Japanese working for or compromising with foreigners.

[...]

On January 3, 1868 the conspirators seized the gates of the Imperial Palace in the city of Kyoto, convened a council stripping the shogun of his lands and of his position on the council, and ended the shogunate.

[...]

The council proclaimed the fiction of “restoring” the responsibility for governing Japan to the emperor, although that responsibility had previously actually been the shogun’s. That event is known as the Meiji Restoration, and it marks the beginning of what is termed the Meiji Era: the period of rule of the new emperor.

[...]

Only when the last opposition forces on Japan’s northern main island of Hokkaido had been defeated in June 1869 did foreign powers recognize the imperial government as the government of Japan.

Posted in Policy | 2 Comments »

Japan and Britain look roughly similar

Wednesday, June 5th, 2019

Upheaval by Jared DiamondMeiji-Era Japan is perhaps the modern world’s outstanding example of selective national change, and of using other nations as models. In Upheaval Jared Diamond gives some background, including a bit of geography:

Japan was the first modern non-European country to match European societies and overseas neo-European societies (the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) in standard of living, industrialization, and technology.

[...]

Japan and Britain look roughly similar in area, and both lie near the Eurasian continent, so one would expect similar histories of involvement with the continent.

[...]

While Japan and Britain look at a glance similar in area and isolation, Japan is actually five times farther from the continent (110 versus 22 miles), and 50% larger in area and much more fertile.

[...]

When the first Portuguese adventurers reaching Japan in 1542 shot ducks with their primitive guns, Japanese observers were so impressed that they avidly developed their own firearms, with the result that by 1600 Japan had more and better guns than any other country in the world.

[...]

The first Christian missionaries arrived in 1549, and by 1600 Japan had 300,000 Christians.

[...]

Visits by foreigners to Japan were banned except for Chinese traders confined to one area of the port city of Nagasaki, and Dutch traders confined to Deshima Island in Nagasaki harbor. (Because those Dutch were Protestants, they were considered non-Christian by Japan.)

[...]

The reason why, among Western powers, the U.S. was the one that became motivated to act first against Japan was the U.S.’s conquest of California from Mexico in 1848, accompanied by the discovery there of gold, which caused an explosion of American ship traffic to the Pacific coast. Sailings of American whaling and trading ships around the Pacific also increased. Inevitably, some of those American ships got wrecked, some of those wrecks occurred in ocean waters near Japan, and some of their sailors ended up in Japan, where they were killed or arrested according to Tokugawa Japan’s isolationist policy. But the U.S. wanted those sailors instead to receive protection and help, and it wanted American ships to be able to buy coal in Japan.

Posted in Policy | 3 Comments »

Finlandization is not for export

Tuesday, June 4th, 2019

Upheaval by Jared DiamondAfter fighting the Soviets in the Second World War, Finland had to deal with an awkward situation, as Jared Diamond explains in Upheaval:

If Finland hadn’t prosecuted its own government leaders, the Soviets would have done so and imposed harsh sentences, probably death sentences.

[...]

After those leaders had served out their sentences in comfortable special Finnish prisons, most of them were voted or appointed back into high public positions.

[...]

Paradoxically, though, those reparations proved to be an economic stimulus, by forcing Finland to develop heavy industries such as building ships and factories-for-export.

[...]

Finland imported especially oil. That proved to be a big advantage for Finland, because it didn’t share the dependence of the rest of the West on Middle Eastern oil supplies.

[...]

Paradoxically for a democratic country that had been fighting for its survival against the communist Soviet Union, Finland’s Communist Party and its allies won a quarter of the seats in the March 1945 free elections for Finland’s parliament, and they tried to take over the police force.

[...]

The Soviet Union had already occupied East Germany, was in the process of engineering communist take-overs of four Eastern European countries (Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania), engineered a successful coup in Czechoslovakia, and supported an unsuccessful guerrilla war in Greece.

[...]

The Paasikivi-Kekkonen line reversed Finland’s disastrous 1930’s policy of ignoring Russia. Paasikivi and Kekkonen learned from those mistakes. To them, the essential painful realities were that Finland was a small and weak country; it could expect no help from Western allies; it had to understand and constantly keep in mind the Soviet Union’s point of view; it had to talk frequently with Russian government officials at every level, from the top down; and it had to win and maintain the Soviet Union’s trust, by proving to the Soviet Union that Finland would keep its word and fulfill its agreements.

[...]

Paasikivi, and then Kekkonen, were so successful in developing a trusting relationship with Stalin, and then with Khrushchev and with Brezhnev, that, when Stalin was once asked why he had not tried to maneuver the Communist Party into power in Finland as he had in every other Eastern European country, he answered, “When I have Paasikivi, why would I need the Finnish Communist Party?”

[...]

For the Soviet Union, Finland was its major source of Western technology and its major window onto the West. The result was that the Soviets no longer had any motivation to take over Finland, because Finland was so much more valuable to the Soviet Union independent and allied with the West than it would have been if conquered or reduced to a communist satellite.

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Because Soviet leaders trusted Presidents Paasikivi and Kekkonen, Finland chose not to turn over its presidents as in a normal democracy but maintained those two in office for a total of 35 years.

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Finland’s government and press avoided criticizing the Soviet Union and practiced voluntary self-censorship not normally associated with democracies.

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“Finlandization is not for export.”

Posted in Policy | 1 Comment »

The Finnish language is distinctive, beautiful, and spoken by no one other than Finns

Monday, June 3rd, 2019

Upheaval by Jared DiamondOne of Finland’s strengths, Jared Diamond notes in Upheaval, is that it has a strong sense of unity:

Finland identifies with Scandinavia and is considered part of Scandinavia. Many Finns are blue-eyed blonds, like Swedes and Norwegians. Genetically, Finns are in effect 75% Scandinavian like Swedes and Norwegians, and only 25% invaders from the east. But geography, language, and culture make Finns different from other Scandinavians, and they are proud of those differences.

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Out of the nearly 100 native languages of Europe, all are related members of the Indo-European language family except for the isolated Basque language and four others. Those four are Finnish, the closely related Estonian language, and the distantly related Hungarian and Lapp (Saami) languages, all of which belong to the Finno-Ugric language family.

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Finland’s national epic poem, the Kalevala, holds an even bigger place in Finland’s national consciousness than do the plays of Shakespeare for English-speakers.

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The letter k is very common in Finnish: of the 200 pages of my Finnish-to-English dictionary, 31 pages are for words beginning with k.

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I have nothing against k’s—but, alas, Finnish, unlike English, has double consonants (like kk) pronounced differently from single consonants (like k). That was the feature of Finnish pronunciation that made it hardest for my tolerant Finnish hosts to understand me on the few occasions when I gave short speeches in Finnish. The consequences of failing to pronounce single and double consonants distinctly can be serious. For instance, the Finnish verb meaning “to meet” is “tapaa” with a single p, while the verb “to kill” is “tappaa” with a double p. Hence if you ask a Finn to meet you but you mistakenly double the p, you may end up dead.

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Finnish also has what are called short vowels and long vowels.

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If you find yourself confused by the four cases of the German language or the six cases of the Latin language, you’ll be horrified to know that the Finnish language has 15 cases, many of which replace prepositions in English.

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But in Finnish, whenever you use a direct object, you have to decide whether your verb is doing something to the whole object (requiring the accusative case) or to only a part of the object (requiring the partitive case).

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One of my Finnish hosts in 1959 was a Swedish Finn whose home language was Swedish but who was fluent in Finnish. Nevertheless, he couldn’t get a job from any government agency in Finland, because all Finnish government jobs require passing exams in both the Finnish and the Swedish languages. My friend told me that if, in the 1950’s, you made only a single mistake in choosing between the accusative case and the partitive case, you flunked the exam and couldn’t get a government job.

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All of those features contribute to making the Finnish language distinctive, beautiful, a source of national pride, and spoken by almost no one other than Finns themselves.

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Other central pieces of Finland’s national identity are its music composers, its architects and designers, and its long-distance runners.

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The Finnish musician Jean Sibelius is considered one of the greatest composers of the 20th century.

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Finnish architects and interior designers are renowned worldwide. (American readers will think of the St. Louis Arch, Dulles Airport outside Washington, and the TWA terminal at New York’s Kennedy Airport, all of them designed by the Finnish-born architect Eero Saarinen.)

Posted in Linguistics, Policy | 13 Comments »

What was the big deal about Viipuri?

Sunday, June 2nd, 2019

Upheaval by Jared DiamondThe first nation in crisis that Jared Diamond examines in Upheaval is Finland, which found itself invaded by the Soviet Union. Finnish graveyards record many, many deaths that took place in or near Viipuri:

That will make you wonder: what was the big deal about Viipuri, and why did so many Finns get killed there within such short time spans?

[...]

The explanation is that Viipuri used to be the second-largest city of Finland until it was ceded to the Soviet Union, along with one-tenth of the total area of Finland, after a ferocious war in the winter of 1939–1940, plus a second war from 1941 to 1944.

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Finland’s death toll in its war against the Soviet Union was nearly 100,000, mostly men.

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But it represented 2½% of Finland’s then-total population of 3,700,000, and 5% of its males. That proportion is the same as if 9,000,000 Americans were to be killed in a war today: almost 10 times the total number of American deaths in all the wars of our 240-year history.

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Even though the last death commemorated in Hietaniemi’s military section had occurred more than 70 years previously (in 1944), I saw fresh flowers on many graves, and families walking among the graves.

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But after Nicholas II became tsar in 1894 and appointed as governor a nasty man called Bobrikov (assassinated by a Finn in 1904), Russian rule became oppressive. Hence towards the end of World War One, when the Bolshevik Revolution broke out in Russia in late 1917, Finland declared its independence.

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When the Whites consolidated their victory in May 1918, they shot about 8,000 Reds, and a further 20,000 Reds died of starvation and disease while rounded up in concentration camps. As measured by percentage of a national population killed per month, the Finnish Civil War remained the world’s most deadly civil conflict until the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

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The Finns were willing to make some concessions, but not nearly as many as the Soviets wanted, even though Finland’s General Mannerheim urged the Finnish government to make more concessions because he knew the weakness of the Finnish army and (as a former lieutenant general in tsarist Russia’s army) understood the geographic reasons for the Soviet demands from the Soviet point of view.

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One reason for Finns’ unanimity was their fear that Stalin’s real goal was to take over all of Finland. They were afraid that giving in to supposedly modest Soviet demands today would make it impossible for Finland to resist bigger Soviet demands in the future. Finland’s giving up its land defenses on the Karelian Isthmus would make it easy for the Soviet Union to invade Finland overland, while a Soviet naval base near Helsinki would allow the Soviet Union to bombard Finland’s capital by land and by sea.

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The Finns had drawn a lesson from the fate of Czechoslovakia, which had been pressured in 1938 into ceding to Germany its Sudeten borderland with its strongest defense line, leaving Czechoslovakia defenseless against total occupation by Germany in March 1939.

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Stalin could not imagine that a tiny country would be so crazy as to fight against a country with a population almost 50 times larger. Soviet war plans expected to capture Helsinki within less than two weeks.

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The Finnish civilian casualties in that first night of bombing accounted for 10% of Finland’s total civilian war casualties during the entire five years of World War Two.

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The Soviet Union had a population of 170 million, compared to Finland’s population of 3,700,000. The Soviet Union attacked Finland with “only” four of its armies, totaling 500,000 men, and keeping many other armies in reserve or for other military purposes. Finland defended itself with its entire army, consisting of nine divisions totaling only 120,000 men.

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The world had already seen how quickly Poland, with a population 10 times that of Finland and far more modern military equipment, had been defeated within a few weeks by German armies half the size of the Soviet Union’s armies.

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Against Soviet tanks attacking the Mannerheim Line, the Finns compensated for their deficiencies in anti-tank guns by inventing so-called “Molotov cocktails,” which were bottles filled with an explosive mixture of gasoline and other chemicals, sufficient to cripple a Soviet tank.

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Other Finnish soldiers waited in a foxhole for a tank to come by, then jammed a log into the tank’s tracks to bring it to a stop.

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Daredevil individual Finnish soldiers then ran up to the crippled tanks, pointed their rifles into the cannon barrels and observation slits, and shot Soviet soldiers inside the tanks.

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Naturally, the casualty rate among Finland’s anti-tank crews was up to 70%.

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Small groups of Finnish soldiers mounted on skis, wearing white uniforms for camouflage against the snow, moved through the roadless forest, cut the Soviet columns into segments, and then annihilated one segment after another (Plate 2.5).

Finnish Soldiers on Skis

They then climbed nearby trees while carrying their rifles, waited until they could identify the Soviet officers in the light of the bonfire, shot and killed the officers, and then skied off, leaving the Soviets frightened, demoralized, and leaderless.

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Rather than remain in their homes under Soviet occupation, the entire population of Karelia, amounting to 10% of Finland’s population, chose to evacuate Karelia and withdrew into the rest of Finland.

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There, they were squeezed into rooms in apartments and houses of other Finns, until almost all of them could be provided with their own homes by 1945. Uniquely among the many European countries with large internally displaced populations, Finland never housed its displaced citizens in refugee camps.

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The poor performance of the huge Soviet army against the tiny Finnish army had been a big embarrassment to the Soviet Union: about eight Soviet soldiers killed for every Finn killed.

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The longer a war with Finland went on, the higher was the risk of British and French intervention, which would drag the Soviet Union into war with those countries and invite a British/French attack on Soviet oil fields in the Caucasus.

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But Russian archives opened in the 1990’s confirmed Finns’ wartime suspicion: the Soviet Union would have taken advantage of those milder territorial gains and the resulting breaching of the Finnish defense line in October 1939 in order to achieve its intent of taking over all of Finland, just as it did to the three Baltic Republics in 1940.

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The poor performance of the Soviet army in the Winter War had convinced all observers—not only in Finland but also in Germany, Britain, and the U.S.—that a war between Germany and the Soviet Union would end with a German victory.

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This second war against the Soviet Union, following the first Winter War, is called the Continuation War. This time, Finland mobilized one-sixth of its entire population to serve in or work directly for the army: the largest percentage of any country during World War Two.

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But Finland’s war aims remained strictly limited, and the Finns described themselves not as “allies” but just as “co-belligerents” with Nazi Germany.

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In particular, Finland adamantly refused German pleas to do two things: to round up Finland’s Jews (although Finland did turn over a small group of non-Finnish Jews to the Gestapo); and to attack Leningrad from the north while Germans were attacking it from the south. That latter refusal of the Finns saved Leningrad, enabled it to survive the long German siege, and contributed to Stalin’s later decision that it was unnecessary to invade Finland beyond Karelia (see below).

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As a result, Finland became the sole continental European country fighting in World War Two to avoid enemy occupation.

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Finland did have to agree to drive out the 200,000 German troops stationed in northern Finland, in order to avoid having to admit Soviet troops into Finland to do that. It took Finland many months, in the course of which the retreating Germans destroyed virtually everything of value in the whole Finnish province of Lapland.

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The Soviet Union’s much heavier combat losses against Finland were estimated at about half-a-million dead and a quarter-of-a-million wounded. That Soviet death toll includes the 5,000 Soviet soldiers taken prisoner by the Finns and repatriated after the armistice to the Soviet Union, where they were immediately shot for having surrendered.

Posted in Policy, War | 9 Comments »

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