Author: Josh Philip Ross

I just wanted to point out a couple of good articles I’ve read recently. Unfortunately, neither is free, but in case you happen to subscribe to one of these magazines, or know someone who does, or feel like spending a few bucks for an article is worth your while, I wanted to mention them.

John Brown

In The New York Review of Books, James McPherson reviews several books about John Brown (there’s also a review in last week’s New Yorker), the militant abolitionist whose botched assault on Harper’s Ferry in 1859 and subsequent trial and hanging — some would say martyrdom — helped bring about the Civil War. His story raises difficult questions about our contemporary struggle with terrorism.

Here was a man driven by religious conviction to commit acts that fit the modern definition of terrorism: killing for the purpose of spreading terror and causing political change — in this case, ending slavery. Immediately after the Harper’s Ferry attack, the northern abolitionist response was essentially unanimous in condemning Brown. The Transcendentalists were the first to turn the tide, celebrating Brown as a man of conscience and action. Brown himself managed to win admiration through his dignified demeanor throughout his trial and especially in the period between his sentencing and execution. By the end, northerners were saying that John Brown’s actions were wrong, but that he himself was a good man. Understandably, southerners were horrified and failed to appreciate the subtlety of this argument. (Imagine being told by a Muslim that Osama bin Laden’s policies may be wrong, but that he himself is a good man whose motives are pure and just.)

John Brown is difficult because he was a terrorist fighting for a cause that we now see as unequivocally good and right: ending slavery. He raises the troubling question of when, if ever, it becomes legitimate for individuals to take up arms against evident evil. If never, then what do we say about the partisans in World War II, or the Iraqi rebels we supported (half-heartedly) after the Gulf War? But if we admit that yes, sometimes extralegal violence is legitimate, then how do we decide when? John Brown was a hero not just to the Union Army, whose Battle Hymn was an adaptation of a song about Brown, but to Timothy McVeigh and to the bombers of abortion clinics.

The second article is a piece in Foreign Affairs by Niall Ferguson that discusses the weaknesses of the current process of globalization, drawing parallels between our own time and the period that led up to World War I. Then, as now, new communication technology had drawn the world into a complex web of interdependent trade. The major empires were overstretched fiscally and militarily, there was an unstable balance of powers, and there was the constant threat of terrorism from rogue states (Serbia) and extragovernmental groups. One can go too far with these sorts of exercises — one key factor that Ferguson doesn’t discuss is how much difference it makes that this time around, we know how horrific a Great Powers war really is — but the observations are striking. Among other things, Ferguson points out that after World War I, the period of globalization and free trade came to an end, followed by a period of nationalism, economic protectionism, and Soviet Communism, not to mention the Great Depression.

How an event is remembered by history is often completely different from how it looked when it was happening.

As an example, consider Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry’s forcible opening of Japan to American trade in 1853. This took place just five years after the United States annexed California — by sailing into San Francisco Bay and claiming the place.

In hindsight, it seems obvious that the American approach to Japan was not going to resemble its approach to California, which was part of the continent Americans saw it as their manifest destiny to subdue, and whose vast territory was occupied at the time by about 4,000 Mexicans. But I wonder whether the Japanese of 1853 would have been so sanguine. They were already worried about the Russians nosing about Hokkaido (at that time sparsely populated with Ainu), and the Russians had even gone as far as crossing the Pacific to establish forts in California (thus the town of Sebastopol in Sonoma County). The distance between Washington, D.C. and Tokyo isn’t much greater than that between Saint Petersburg and San Francisco, and it’s less than that between London and Calcutta.

Neither the Japanese nor the Americans could have known in 1853 that America would collapse into civil war within a decade, while Japan would embark on an ambitious, unprecedented campaign of modernization. At the time, Perry’s landing may well have looked like the beginning of a process that would end with total annexation and even statehood.

On Wednesday, six elephants escaped from an amusement park and went on the rampage in downtown Seoul (see BBC News and Digital Chosun). Now the JoongAng Daily reports that the elephants were probably suffering from the stress of too much work.

This is a complaint that most Koreans can relate to. South Koreans work among the longest hours of anyone anywhere. It was only in 2003 that the National Assembly approved legislation to roll back the six-day work week to five days. In 2001, bus drivers went on strike, complaining that they were forced to work 11-hour shifts six days a week. When Jenny and I were in Korea, school teachers were agitating to get their Saturday mornings off.

The elephant escapees, having just been moved to their new home (they had previously resided in Incheon), were putting on as many as seven performances a day, every day. (That’s the JoongAng Daily’s number; Digital Chosun says five.) Anyone who has taught English in Korea knows how exhausting it is to put on seven entertaining dumb-shows a day, and those who decided to make extra money by taking on private classes during their weekends tended to lose their minds. The couple we replaced at the ECC Anyang kindergarten were something like those elephants: overworked, stressed out and anxiously eyeing the exits. (They left the country two months after we arrived.) So I feel for those elephants, and I hope they have the good sense to renegotiate their contracts.

Bonus: The Korean word for elephant is kokkiri.

Like hell.

Last night Jenny and I went to see former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright speak at the 92nd Street Y. The evening’s format was an interview, conducted by the editor of Foreign Affairs, James F. Hoge, Jr.

Overall, there was little that was particularly surprising in the discussion. Hoge described the Middle East as being at, if not a tipping point toward democracy, then in a “tipping zone,” a phrase Albright picked up and amplified. She pointed to the recent revolutions in former Soviet states — her region of greatest expertise — as having had an influence in the Arab world. On the other hand, she put in a phrase of her own, “managed opposition,” to describe what Mubarak seems to be trying to create in Egypt with his proposal for contested elections, and she made it clear that she didn’t think managed opposition constituted real democracy. She later defined democracy as more than elections, pointing out that you have elections in dictatorships too. To Albright, democracy requires not just one election but the guarantee of future elections, with a realistic opposition party that has the possibility of assuming power. It also depends on some degree of rule of law.

When asked which was the greater threat, Iran or North Korea, Albright did not hesitate to say North Korea. She explained that Iran hasn’t yet got nuclear weapon capabilities like North Korea (note that she didn’t just say “weapons”), and that Iran is more amenable to outside pressures than North Korea. She described the Non-Proliferation Treaty as troubled, and she suggested that Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace speech of 1953, in which he outlined the principle of giving peaceful nuclear technologies to countries that promised not to acquire nuclear weapons, was misguided, as it overlooked the ease with which peaceful nuclear technologies can be weaponized. On North Korea, she carefully worded a suggestion that the six-party talks are not the best venue for solving the current problems.

The most surprising thing Albright said all evening was that she has no idea what’s really happening in Iraq. This is a startling admission and an implicit accusation against the Bush administration, but fits with what I’ve read elsewhere. Journalists are severely limited in their ability to travel and conduct interviews, so the main source of information is the U.S. military, which is obviously a biased source. Albright’s point was that without better information, it’s hard to know what might happen in Iraq.

What got my attention most strongly, though, came not from Albright but from Hoge. On the subject of Security Council reform, Hoge said something about China having shot down Japan’s bid for permanent membership — I can’t remember the exact wording, but it was unequivocal. To date, of course, China has not made any official statement declaring their absolute opposition, and in a later question Hoge toned down his wording on China. Still, it seemed clear that Hoge considered China’s opposition to Japan’s bid to be a done deal, at least for the upcoming Millenium Plus Five summit later this year. He also repeatedly described the recent anti-Japan protests in China as “ginned up” by the government, and he suggested that when a government starts ginning up nationalism, as China’s is doing with its managed anti-Japanese outbursts and its anti-secession law on Taiwan, it’s often to cover up serious problems at home. Albright said that America has paid too little attention to what’s going on in East Asia and needs to gain a deeper understanding of the current tensions.

The talk ended with a discussion of John Bolton, the nominee for U.S. ambassador to the UN. Albright didn’t mask her dislike. She said that she had worked with him just once, when taking over from the outgoing administration. As under-secretary for international organizations, Bolton briefed the incoming Albright during the transition period, and she described his attitude as utter contempt for the United Nations and multilateralism. In her more charitable moments, Albright said, she sees the Bush administration’s nomination of Bolton as an attempt to shake things up seriously at the UN in the cause of reform; when she’s feeling less kindly, she thinks it’s just an “in your face” from the administration.

On a more personal level, I remember reading once the notion that some people decide to run for president when they meet the current president, shake his hand, and are struck by the fact that he’s an ordinary human being. “What has he got that I haven’t got?” they ask themselves, and if they’re someone like Bill Clinton, the answer may be “Nothing.”

Jenny and I were impressed by Albright’s charm, intelligence and wit, and she remains a compelling role model for both of us. But we also came away feeling like there’s nothing Albright or Hoge have that we couldn’t acquire with the 30 or 40 years of additional experience they have. Albright’s star power and charisma, not to mention a squeaky-clean enough background to become Secretary of State, may be out of reach, but we came away reassured that our dreams of careers in the State Department are realistic, and we could imagine ourselves in relatively influential positions down the road.

In my reading of East Asian historical source materials, I ran across this marvelous Japanese poem, written in the linked-verse style, which means that the first two lines were written by one person, and the final three lines were then “linked” afterward:

Bitter, bitter it was
And yet somehow funny.

Even when
My father lay dying
I went on farting.

And let me tell you, after spending a couple of weeks slogging through Japanese neo-Confucian and post-neo-Confucian philosophy (“Soil comes into being only from fire. Fire is mind and in mind dwells the god. This is not discussed in ordinary instruction, and it is only because of my desire to make you understand it thoroughly that I am revealing it to you”), fart jokes are a welcome relief.

I have to admit that I’m totally baffled by Japan’s spate of hard-line actions toward China and South Korea in the last couple of weeks. First came the dispute over Takeshima/Dokdo, those uninhabited islands in what Japan calls the Sea of Japan and South Korea calls the East Sea, during which Japan’s Shimane Prefecture went so far as to declare an official “Takeshima Day.” Then came the Japanese government’s approval of controversial textbooks that according to China and South Korea downplay Japanese atrocities during World War II. And now Japan has granted gas drilling rights in territory that China believes it owns.

Taken together, these moves are symptomatic of a rightward shift in Japanese politics. They are of a piece with Japanese moves to remilitarize and become more assertive as a major world power. And there is some justification to the Japanese view that after decades of good global citizenship, they should be allowed to move on once and for all from the nastiness of 60 years ago. Nor are the Japanese entirely wrong in feeling that South Korea and China need to meet Japan halfway, overcoming their own racism and accepting that the past is past.

What I can’t work out, though, is why Japan is stirring all of this up right now. As part of Japan’s growing assertiveness, they’ve made a bid for permanent membership on the Security Council. There is some chance that Japan might succeed, but to do so, it will need the votes (or at least abstentions) of all five existing Permanent Members of the Security Council — including China. Furthermore, South Korea has emerged as one of the most vigorous opponents of Japan’s aspirations. For Japan, stirring up anti-Japanese feeling in East Asia seems counterproductive, to say the least: conflict with China could completely kill Japan’s Security Council bid, while news videos of violent anti-Japanese protests across East Asia don’t exactly paint Japan as a respected regional leader.

So what on earth is Japan doing?