Category: Noteworthy

Magnets for Militants on the Move

~ Michael A. Innes

A review in The New Republic of Cambridge historian Tim Harper’s Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire. The book looks fascinating. A couple of bits caught my eye.

This one:

The locales that interest him are cosmopolitan ports that were at least partly incorporated into Western empires—cities such as Canton, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Saigon, which were magnets for militants on the move. In these places, exiles from “lost countries”—a term Harper borrows from an activist of the time to refer to colonized lands—could evade arrest by the police by lying low in hard-to-patrol dockland districts.

… and this:

In subdivided cities like Shanghai, which had a British-dominated International Settlement beside a separate French Concession, they had another option: Base themselves in alleyway apartments in the jurisdiction of an empire other than the one they opposed, and take advantage of imperial rivalries that limited cooperation between the law enforcement arms of different powers.

Sounds familiar.

Poetic Nods to an Atomic Indochina

~ Michael A. Innes

Bernard Fall… nuclear strategist? One of the pieces of archival treasure I discovered among Fall’s personal papers is a document that reveals his awareness of and engagement with nuclear issues.

In a general sense, that’s a claim that could be made of just about anyone at the time. At the height of the Cold War, social and political anxieties over the prospect of nuclear war were real and pervasive. This was c. 1960-1961, right around the same time Fall was seeing Street Without Joy: Indochina at War, 1946-1954 – that quintessential artefact of Vietnam-era counterinsurgency – fully realized and published. Apparently he wasn’t busy enough, because meanwhile he was, according to what I found in his papers, also contributing expert input and analysis to a U.S Air Force Command and Staff College exercise.

It was a 24-hour affair a year in the planning, and focused on a hypothetical deployment of forces to Laos, then of much more immediate concern to U.S. policymakers than was Vietnam. In typical Fall style, he submitted a memoranda to exercise planners in which he tore apart the scenario they had developed for being completely “unrealistic” (underlined in the original memo). It was, he wrote, “so divorced from the military, political, terrain and even meteorological realities of war in Laos as to make any attempted solution along its lines unlikely to ever be applicable to Laos or to a similar situation.” He went on to detail exactly why this was the case, one paragraph per faulty scenario reality.

This is pretty standard Fall: when someone got their details wrong, he would basically eat them alive. But this wasn’t even the fun part. In addition to pointing out the flaws in the exercise design, he also offered a few observations about parts of it that could work, and it’s here that his engagement with nuclear practicalities comes through. Exercise participants were meant to include in their planning any and all possible options. The use of nuclear weapons was tabled, and one move that participants suggested was to disrupt cross-border logistics by nuking the mountain passes between Laos and North Vietnam.

Fall thought that while it might work on the ground units and bases in the area, Soviet airlift would limit its effectiveness. Use of battlefield nuclear weapons, on the other hand, could work in another way. “One new favorable factor is the creation by the Communists of a large supply center based on the three airfields of the Xien-Kouang Plateau (XK, Plaine des Jarres, and Phong-Savan). This does offer a valuable target inside Laos which no doubt can be taken out by small nuclear weapons.” It’s a striking comment, not least because it’s so far removed from the kind of subject matter for which Fall is remember these days.

Fall had made the occasional poetic allusion to nuclear anxieties in his military histories, but they were rare and fleeting and not the point of his published writing. The brutally unsympathetic nods to atomic Indochina contained in this exercise paperwork puts a different spin on things. And yes, this is a bit of shameless self-promotion: if you want the details and the source references, you’ll have to buy the book (or at least wait until it comes out, and then use Amazon to look inside and pilfer whatever details you need).

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you

~ Michael A. Innes

Context is everything. As Maya Jasanoff, the Harvard historian, asks, in lyrical terms: “If a writer harbored bias, shall we never speak his name? Or when he wrote with insight, might we read him all the same?” The questions appear in her review in The New Republic, of Christopher Benfey‘s If:  The Untold Story of Kipling’s American Years. Benfey, a literary scholar, has sought to explain Kipling and “If” in the context of his decade-long American sojourn between 1889 and 1899.  Kipling’s famous poem is worth this kind of study because of its contemporary prominence. As Benfey’s back cover blurb frames it, in slightly limp terms:

… in recent decades Kipling’s reputation has suffered a strange eclipse. Though his body of work still looms large, and his monumental poem “If—” is quoted and referenced by politicians, athletes, and ordinary readers alike, his unabashed imperialist views have come under increased scrutiny.

That’s putting it mildly.  Jasanoff’s review caught my eye because I happen to teach (and completed a PhD) at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London – a storied institution with its own colonial roots where today the intellectual activism surrounding Britain’s imperial past is a recurring and prominent (if not necessarily consistent or constant) feature of campus life. I also study the use of history and language in political decisions and processes, especially among foreign policy and national security elites, where the lessons of Munich, Korea and Vietnam are routinely invoked to help shape public discourse.

Jasanoff opens with a description of the University of Manchester’s tin-eared attempt in 2018 to publicly celebrate Kipling’s poem, and the student population’s delightfully creative rebuff of the move. Figures like Kipling, and their works, had their day; their contributions, even presented in context,  are now powerfully symbolic political devices, especially at a time when public discussion of decolonizing academia plays such an important part in debates around the content of higher education and equitable acccess to it.

For Benfey and Jasanoff, Kipling’s exposure to crass and brash American ways add a layer of meaning to how Kipling and his imperialism should be understood in their own context.  Benfey’s book, Jasanoff’s review of it, and my comments here, point to context as something that can be eliptically frustrating, a mobius strip of a tautology, endlessly looping back on itself to remind us of  historical details made newly relevant. Benfey, the literary scholar, stalking Kipling. Historian Jasanoff, stalking Benfey. Me, the student of politics, stalking all three.

It’s almost impossible to read any of this, today, without thinking in presentist terms of the unapologetic expressions of bloated (and possibly symbiotic) boorishness that have been emanating from Westminster and Washington.  Benfey’s book includes a listing of Vietnam-era references to “If”. Meanwhile, I’m reminded of the niche interest in Kipling that flared up only a decade ago, as policymakers and soldiers tried to make sense of what they were doing in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2010, for example, one new war veteran framed his memoir of military life and deadly battles in terms of  “the unforgiving minute“, a phrase lifted straight out of “If“. Others talked and wrote about “arithmetic on the frontier” – another Kipling poem – as they tried to come up with “metrics of success” in Afghanistan – another shade of Vietnam. Maybe context isn’t everything. But it is everywhere.

 

 

A signed statement on the failure of language

~ Michael A. Innes

I’ve stayed away from commenting publicly on the new US administration. There’s so much fodder, so much grist, that it could easily overwhelm. It does overwhelm. Daily news feeds are prefaced and filled with coverage of Trump, his family, his appointments, his interests. My instinct is to stay completely away from it, for at least three reasons:

  • First, there is paranoia: we have yet to fully understand and appreciate the consequences of speaking ill or in any way that might be construed negatively. Trump is self-admittedly and famously vindictive, so paranoia in this case is more  a matter of healthy circumspection.
  • Second, there is the usual historian’s caution about offering premature commentary: let’s wait and witness the full unfolding of events, and allow the time needed for all the primary source materials about them to be made available, before crafting an account of events that might help make sense of it all.
  • Third, there are other things going on in the world, which is one of the larger points of the current D.C. diorama – in which it should be apparent to anyone with their peripherals fully engaged and calibrated: every spectacularly dissonant media event  obscures or distracts from an equally disturbing series of events elsewhere in the world.

But today’s meme, which focuses on Donald Trump’s handshake, is full of  the sort of communicative content that will delight symbolic interactionists, frame theorists, specialists in broadcast and rhetorical dominance, and anyone else who thinks about such things. Trump’s physical presence and its role in his political theatre has come up before. One prominent example arose during his campaign debates with Hilary Clinton. There have been others, including Trump’s 19 second long handshake with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his awkward handholding with British Prime Minister Theresa May.

It is precisely Trump’s violent handshake style that has caught the media eye over the last 24 hours, after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, apparely very well prepared  for the event, visibly countered Trump’s grasp. The ensuing commentary has been full of snapshot hilarity. One of the more literary pieces I’ve seen is Vice’s semi-satirical analysis  of the meaning of Trump’s handshake:

This is a handshake buried under the weight of its own meaninglessness, a black hole of metacommentary in a world where sense sloshes chaotically across a flat surface of signifiers unmoored from any attachment to truth or reason or even an orderly presentation of images. Donald Trump’s handshake is a signed statement on the failure of language here at the end of the world.

The Vice piece is worth reading in full.

A brief foray into distraction’s history

~ Michael A. Innes

This looks interesting:

A Crisis of Short Attention Spans, 250 Years Ago

By Natalie M. Phillips | January 01, 2017

When most people think of distraction, they think of flooded inboxes, cellphone beeps, Twitter feeds. An ever-present and unavoidable consequence of our fast-paced contemporary world, distraction is cast as a — if not the — mental state of modernity. Whatever came before — childhood, our parents’ generation, the Enlightenment — must have been, it seems, a more attentive age.

Yet even a brief foray into distraction’s history discourages nostalgia about an idyllic past of easy attention, particularly when we consider the history of reading. Rather than a quiet environment in which audiences were always found absorbed, or “lost in a book,” 18th-century poets and artists describe reading as occurring amid high cacophony: chamber pots sloshing and street hubbub. John Gay’s poem “Trivia” offers us this soundscape of London street life: “Now industry awakes her busy sons, / Full charg’d with news the breathless hawker runs: / Shops open, coaches roll, carts shake the ground, / And all the streets with passing cries resound.” If we complain today of media, and social-media, oversaturation, writers then worried about industrial, vocal, and literary tumult.

Many people both presumed and complained of novels’ unusual ability to capture attention, but fiction competed with a flood of essays, poems, sermons, and histories. The expansion of the book trade inspired a further flourishing of reviews, anthologies, and summaries that were meant to manage this literary surplus but only added to it.

But if inattention was a worry for writers, it also became a literary theme.

Read the rest at the Chronicle of Higher Education, here.