dan maertens's List: Geschiedenis

• As nationalism, rights consciousness, and social mobilization developed in the colonized and semi-colonial world, the costs of direct colonial rule increased while the conditions for indirect rule were enhanced. With the creation of modern institutions in the military dependencies, it became possible to control them more economically by dominating their institutions of resource and social mobilization (such as the Concordia or redemptive societies). Japan, like the later Soviet Union and the United States, sought to bring its client-states into a structure of governance that not only permitted dominance but integrated them into a regional and ultimately, global, game plan.(36)
• Not only were the client-states of the Soviet Union in Europe often more developed, the U. S. S. R. may have been subsidizing their economies by supplying them with cheap oil and raw materials while importing finished products from their economies. This was the price paid by the imperial power to create and maintain dependence upon it and assure its security.(37)
• But just two weeks before, Wilson had sent troops to the Dominican Republic and committed US military forces in Haiti and Mexico as well.(40)
• Little wonder then that the Japanese representative at the League of Nations hearings on Manchukuo repeatedly insisted on the Asiatic Monroe Doctrine as the basis of Japan’s prerogative in Asia.
• But Manchukuo also synthesized and crystallized these ideas into the prototype of the developmental client state within a new imperialist formation that could be found after World War II in Eastern Europe, French Africa, the British sterling zone and the US empire. The US in particular favored the model of modernizing client nation-states centered on royal identity in Asia, witness Japan, Vietnam, Iran, Saudi Arabia and others.
• If some of these projects were driven by the immediate needs of the metropole, others were driven by the logic of a modernizing state.

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• Imperial Preference

•  For one, it assumes a single track of historical progress.
• but rather that the claims this group tended to make were of a different  intellectual tradition than my own.  The “Τιbet always has been,  always will be part of China” crowd are starting from a point of certainty and  proceeding to mine the past to create a narrative in support of that  predetermined certainty. Complexity and nuance need not apply.
• I’m not disputing the assertion “Τιbet is a part of China” or even  “Τιbet was historically a part of China,” just that such assertions are  built on unstable ground.  The problem of Τιbet involves  highly complex questions of sovereignty, authority, national identity,  (de)colonization, and the evolution of empires into nation-states. Even the very  definitions of these ideas, never mind how such ideas were understood in the  past, are subject to discussion and debate.  Thus the above assertion  on Τιbet isn’t “wrong,” but the glassy-eyed certainty with which it is  uttered and the narratives which support it deserve to be unpacked and the  constituent parts looked at carefully and critically.  For me, the counter  to “Τιbet is part of China and history says so” is not “Τιbet is not  part of China and history says so” but rather “How can you be so sure? Did you  look at it this way?”
• A quick glance around my field sees dissertation after dissertation on the  destruction of colonialism, the horrors of the African slave trade and its  legacy, and the brutal genocide of Native Americans.  American graduate  students in history seem never so happy as when they can find an available vein  and let the blood flow.   That said, the history being written today is not  designed to promote patriotism (a point which makes more conservative talk show  hosts and school board members shake their fist and howl at the moon) or to make  people feel good about themselves, it’s about exploring the past, warts and all,  so that we can reach a greater understanding of who we are and who we were.   Research is done, theories posited and proved, always with the  understanding that as new sources and methodologies come to light old  assumptions and conclusions will be overturned and Authority challenged.   That’s a very different intellectual project than history as done in the  PRC.
• (If your whole  position on a particular issue can be summed up in a bumper  sticker then it’s time to worry.)
• Every time I fail to tell the story each side tells itself, I have failed in  its eyes to do my job. That adds up to a lot of failure.
• Similarly, the suggestions that PRC control of the Tibetan plateau was a  strategic necessity, a humanitarian mission of liberation, or a benevolent  paternalism which brought “modernity” in the form of hospitals, schools, and  infrastructure to the benighted locals is fiendishly close to the justifications  used by European and American imperialists in centuries past (and recent years).   
• we are behooved to ask ourselves who said it first, and why

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• It was a very shocking fact for the Japanese that even the   Qin Dynasty of China, which had probably been the strong power in Asia and   considered as the sleeping lion, could do only a little against the British   and their weapons with the latest technologies. Now Japan was the next, the   Japanese leaders thought. China’s defeat actually put the Japanese leaders   in a situation presented with a difficult choice: Should they keep the isolationism   and fight against anyone who would dare to open the door, or should they open   the door by themselves and try to learn about the world? The Japanese leaders   were convinced by the China’s defeat that it was impossible for them   to repel the hand of western imperialists by force; if even China could not   keep the westerns away and stand alone, there was no hope for Japan. Consequently,   Japan abandoned its closed-door policy finally [4].

• after all, if the issue is money, isn’t the average African-American today better-off than the average West African?

• Unlike in finance, where things can be speedily re-arranged, the real economy takes time to adjust. Producers must build new factories, and invest in new technologies. Workers must acquire new skills and find new jobs. When big adjustments are needed, temporary protectionism helps to create the breathing space for companies and workers to reinvent themselves.
• Such protection, known as “infant industry protection,” was practised by virtually all of today’s rich countries—starting with 18th-century Britain, through 19th-century US, Germany and Sweden, to 20th-century Japan, Korea, Taiwan—as I show in my books, Kicking Away the Ladder and Bad Samaritans.
• Despite their own history, over the past quarter century rich countries have done their best to make it increasingly difficult for developing countries to use infant industry protection measures. They have pressed for trade liberalisation as a condition for the aid they give, and for the loans from the international financial organisations that they control. They have pushed for greater restrictions on tariffs, subsidies, regulations on foreign investment and other measures that developing countries need in order to promote their infant industries. This practice has to stop—and, ideally, be reversed.

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• • DIT is RELEVANT!!!
    
• Although all trade surpluses are contracting, the fact that China’s trade surplus is rising indicates that other surplus countries are bearing more than 100% of their share of the global contraction. I don’t think this is sustainable and ultimately, perhaps even already, China’s trade surplus will decline. By the way the fact that China has been able to force at least part of its own adjustment onto trade competitors will likely lead to increasing anger with China, as it already seems to be doing especially on the part of Asian competitors, and will power a further rise in international trade tensions.
• but let me suggest that if you know beyond any doubt the direction of causality here, then you probably do not understand the problem.
• It may seem odd to take the position that Japan was lucky during the period from 1990-2007, but weren’t they? What if the jump in U.S. savings began after the 1991 recession?
• From about 1910 until 1930, U.S. was producing more than it consumed. The adjustment period that followed was not one of increased consumption.
• Try to include China’s trade deficits with Korea, Japan, and Taiwan when discussing overall exports to the US. The deficits with those three countries have historically been equal to the surplus with the US. Since China usually adds value to the technology from these countries, those net deficits matter in context of the US.
• Paul, I definitely agree that it is incredible to think that policies which have resulted in the largest trade surplus and the largest reserve accumulation in history were not in some way responsible for the global imbalance.
• On that last point, I think the Chinese could be glad that the US didn’t pursue certain stimulus policies which would have further damaged the value of the dollar investments.
• But this was not a radical shift in policy. America had been the most protectionist country in the world for the previous century, while Smoot-Hawley only raised average industrial tariffs from about 37 per cent to about 48 per cent, well within the historical range of US tariffs until then. Tariffs in other countries did rise after 1930, but only moderately, and economic historians have shown that trade shrinkage after the depression had more to do with shrinking demand and the drying-up of trade credits.”
• To see the manifest advantages of protection over free trade compare the performance of the American economy from 1869 to 1900 under tariff protection with the period 100 years latter 1969 to 2000 under free trade. From 1869-1900 tariffs were above 40 per cent while from 1969-2000 they were below 10 per cent. From 1869 to 1900 GNP quadrupled while real wages increased 50 percent, and retail prices dropped significantly. Under free trade a century later real wages declined. Real wages of most Americans peaked in 1973 and are down since.

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• I didn't know that Laos, for instance, is the country on which more bombs were dropped per capita than on any other in history.
• The argument deployed by all nations that have used the shock and awe of aerial bombardment is that it weakens the resolve of enemy civilians on the ground. They are so demoralized that they beg their government to sue for peace.
• As "Bombing Civilians" shows in every chapter, this has never been the case. If anything, civilians are brought together by terror bombing, their resolve reinforced.
• or, to his own men, "Butcher") Harris masterminded the air attacks on civilians in Iraq in 1924,
• Curtis LeMay, father of U.S. carpet bombing in Japan, exhibits all the elements of a war criminal, save for the critical one: He was on the winning side.
• Hasegawa goes on to explain persuasively that even the use of two atomic bombs was not responsible for ending World War II, rather it was Japan's fear of a Soviet invasion of Hokkaido that forced its militarists to lay down the sword.

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• Had I been a citizen of the Soviet Union in Stalin’s time the chances are, given my own dissident tendencies, I would have ended up in the gulag.

• In 2005 the New York Times published a damning investigation of the Grasberg mine. It exposed a network of corrupt relationships with local military and government officials in violation of US law, noting that for many years Freeport, presumably with Rio’s knowledge and blessing, assiduously courted Suharto and his cronies, including paying for their children’s education and cutting them in on lucrative deals.
• Company lawyers had advised that intercepting other people’s emails was not illegal “outside the United States”.
• Rio Tinto is one of the handful of big companies behind the self-described greenhouse mafia of industry lobbyists that has been so effective first at blocking and then at watering down all attempts to limit Australia’s carbon emissions. They have used every dirty trick this side of the law.
• Having opened China to capitalism, the Communist Party government is discovering just how powerful are the corporations that control the world’s resources, and it does not like what it has found.
• Perhaps the members of the Central Committee should take a refresher course in Marxism. They might recall the following lines from Marx and Engels on the power of capital:

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• FDR through an executive order -- i.e., acting as a lone tyrant -- froze all Japanese assets in the United States six months before Pearl Harbor, sending Japan, our third-largest trading partner at that time, into the throes of extreme desperation and financial ruin. (The U.S. seems to be the Japan of yesteryear.)

• The US refuses to rule out the first use of nuclear weapons in a conflict. Its latest Nuclear Posture Review envisages the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear “rogue states” and it is developing a new generation of ‘battlefield” nuclear weapons.