Review — The Little Third Reich on Lake Superior: A History of Canadian Internment Camp R

The Little Third Reich on Lake Superior: A History of Canadian Internment Camp R

by Ernest Zimmerman

  

After a childhood in Cologne under the Nazis and the terror bombing of the war years, Ernest Zimmerman emigrated to Canada in 1953, eventually becoming head of the history department at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario. After some students mentioned to him that at the start of the war there had been a prisoner of war camp in the town of Red Rock, just east of Thunder Bay, Zimmerman gave himself the task of learning all he could learn and documenting the place, known as Camp R. It turned out, surprisingly, not to hold any POWs at all, but only German civilians. The research and writing extended over many years. In 2008 he told several of his students that, if anything happened to him, he’d like them to finish the book, and a few weeks later he suddenly died of a heart attack. The Little Third Reich on Lake Superior is Zimmerman's book, completed by two of his students who are listed as editors.

It is a thorough study, adding to the sizeable body of work already done on Canada’s internment camps. Virtually all aspects of the Camp R are described for its entire 17-month history, from the circumstances leading to the first round-up of prisoners in Britain to the final closure of the camp in the summer of 1941 on the grounds of its inadequate facilities. Even before the camp was opened, we learn of the purchase and preparation of the site, and the voyage of the prisoners across the Atlantic. On one ship swaggering Nazis, intoxicated by German victories in Europe, concocted a foolish plan to rush the machine guns and attempt a takeover of the ship, hoping to steer it to Hamburg, somehow passing through the British blockade. Luckily for them, the were talked down by cooler heads. One ship was torpedoed with the loss of 830 lives. One Camp R was up and running, with all its administration, guards and prisoners in place, there is extensive information on virtually all aspects of its operation, its routines, its personnel, supplies, health, morale, escape attempts, and much more.

What made Camp R special was, in addition to its holding only German civilians, the fact that it mixed committed Nazis with Jews and anti-Nazis who had fled Germany. Such a volatile mix, a microcosm of the Third Reich, inevitably led to constant tension and occasional violence. Internees at other camps in Canada dreaded being transferred to Camp R, which had a reputation as a snake-pit.

For readers with no special interest in Canadian internment camps or Lake Superior regional history, the most compelling part of the book is probably the story of how these three hostile groups came to be thrown together into the same camp. It was the result of shocking bad behaviour on the part of the Churchill government, its panic in the early years of the war, its anti-Semitic and anti-German racism,  and its chicanery in duping Canada into accepting three boatloads of prisoners labeled as “dangerous enemy aliens,” knowing that some were refugees who clamoured to join the battle against Germany.

After the war began in earnest and the German juggernaut overran western Europe, Britain became terrified of a German invasion. Invasion fears spawned rumours of landings by German parachutists and a widespread belief in sleeper cells, a “fifth column” of agents waiting to rise up and assist the invaders. Although no evidence existed of either parachutists or fifth columnists, the myths gripped the nation, and all 75,000 German nationals, including refugees from Hitler’s Germany, who had been welcomed in earlier years, were declared “enemy aliens.” It seems clear that, whether the government believed the rumours of fifth columnists or not, it benefited from the idea because it distracted the public from its own failures, no only its defeats on the continent, but also the loss of Norway, which was an enormous fiasco, the result of Churchill's incompetence. “Intern the lot” became the watchword, taken up by the public and spurred on by the country's leadership, by Churchill, parliament, the military, and the newspapers. Especially outrageous were right-wing periodicals and members of the aristocracy who had previously led the call for appeasement of Hitler. The security services, eerily echoing Nazi racial theories, warned that, even in the case of Germans who had lived in Britain for many decades, “ancestral blood” would triumph over political loyalties. Even German Jews, it declared, were unreliable because of their German blood.

Everyone in Britain holding German citizenship had to appear before a system of one-man tribunals, usually run by retired judges, some of whom were badly out of touch, prejudiced, or both. In the end, most people were judged as Category C enemy aliens, allowed to go free but required to report weekly to the police. However, some judges issued extraordinarily arbitrary judgments. Refugees who had brought money to Britain as they fled Germany could be branded as currency smugglers who had broken the laws of their country, therefore sentenced to internment camp as Category A, “dangerous enemy aliens.” Jews could be condemned because in fleeing Germany they showed “typical disloyalty” to their home country. One man, when asked if he hated Germany, replied no, that he only hated the current regime. The judge ruled that therefore he desired German victory.

The British government put all the pressure it could muster on a reluctant and unprepared Canada to accept about 8,000 prisoners, all of whom, it declared, were “a bad lot,” dangerous enemy aliens and POWs—German parachutists, downed Luftwaffe pilots, submarine crews. Yet among the 1,150 prisoners finally sent to Camp R were no POWs, several priests, 78 Jews, including several rabbis, 144 boys under the age of 18, one boy only 15, an old man of 71, and 770 merchant seamen, some of whom had fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil War. About 100 prisoners were genuine Nazis. As Canada slowly began to realize how it had been deceived and sought to sort out the confusion, British authorities held back the documentation that would reveal their own duplicity.

Camp R held one prisoner whose name will go down in history. Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, a cultured, Harvard-educated businessman, was an important member of Hitler’s inner circle before he came to power. Hitler was smitten by Hanfstaengl’s American wife, Helene, and when the Beer Hall Putsch failed, he fled to the Hanfstaengl mansion. Putzi was gone, having fled to Austria. Hitler, injured and in despair, standing before Helen, took out his revolver and made as if to shoot himself. She scolded him, took the revolver out of his hand and buried it in a large flour bin. Thus Hanfstaengl became a name linked with one of the great what-ifs of history.

Review -- This Idea Must Die

In 1948 physicist Max Planck described the progress of science as a battle between newly discovered truths and old ideas championed by senior scientists who fight stubborn, rear-guard actions until they die. It has been summed up in the memorable phrase, “Science advances one funeral at a time.” This Idea Must Die attempts to rectify the process, if not by speeding up the death of old scientists, then at least by killing off some old ideas. In a series of brief essays, most only a few pages in length, 175 leading scientists pack their pet peeves into tumbrels and head them to the guillotine. It makes wonderful reading for those odd moments when you want to engage with something substantial but are short of the time or energy to tackle a major paper or book.

Some topics, not surprisingly, are aimed at specialists. As general readers we probably don’t care much about causal entropic forcing, stationarity, inclusive fitness, the somatic mutation theory, or string theory. And most of us, because our minds are boggled, are insulated from concern about an eleven-dimension theory of the universe. More accessible, if not entirely riveting, are essays which twist the knife into subjects which few people have little deep allegiance to any more, such as IQ, the concept of race, the absolute distinction between nature and nurture, lab mice as valid models for humans, and common sense. Some essays are useful in clarifying issues, such as Richard Dawkins’s piece debunking “essentialism,” that is, the search for “essences,” the unwillingness to accept continuities. This has impeded progress in biology, as anti-evolutionists hoot about “missing link” species, failing to understand that organisms evolve continuously, not jumping from type to type, and that in fact what we call species are simply samples picked out of a continuous stream. Essentialism, the “dead hand of Plato,” as Dawkins calls it, corrupts our thinking on many other fronts, too, falsely splitting continuities into segments, as, for example, when we ask at what point life begins in the development of an embryo, or when a person on life support is truly dead.  

Some essays suggests science may be of two minds about humanity. On the one hand there are defenses of our species against common aspersions. The popular notion in psychology, for example, that we are sheep, easily led to surrender our consciences to authorities, is repudiated as simplistic and a misinterpretion of the data. Sci-fi dreams about robot companions get their comeuppance by an MIT professor who reminds us why machines designed as companions, not mere performers of simple functions but elder-care-bots, nanny-bots, teacher-bots, sex-bots, are poor, empty fictions. As non-living entities, robots are by definition incapable of sharing with us what it means to be alive and human. An artificial intelligence theorist suggests throwing out AI as a title for his field and replacing it more accurately with “the attempt to get computers to do really cool stuff.” Machine intelligence is so fundamentally different from human intelligence, and so much thinner, he says, that no one has even attempted to reproduce real human intelligence yet.

On the other hand, there are thinkers who are much less impressed by humanity. The old philosophical chestnut about determinism is dusted off by a professor who argues that, since everything we think and do is produced by our physical brains, it follows that all our thoughts and actions are locked into the laws of physics, making us, in theory, as predictable as the motions of the planets. There is no free will for us any more than there is free will for a planet, there are no real choices, everything we do is done under inescapable compulsion. Because criminals could not help being what they are, he believes, they should be given the kind of consideration that we now give to the mentally ill. A psychologist agrees there is no free will but goes a step further, arguing there is no such thing as the self, on the grounds that no evidence of it has been found in the lab. And, kicking the corpse, a philosopher discloses that we barely have cognitive agency at all. Only for a small fraction of time are we in charge of our thoughts; most occur independent of us as, for example, spontaneous responses to stimuli, sleeping, daydreaming, zoning out, and Mind Wandering (his capitals), not to speak of mental dysfunctions that involve loss of cognitive control, such as illness, intoxication, and various kinds of obsessive thinking. Even more, he suggests that our sense of identity, the feeling that we are the same person over time, is an illusion, an adaptive form of self-deception designed by the organism to achieve its goals. In reality, we are only cognitive systems, complex processes without an identity. 

Some writers cleverly take exception to the premise of the book, refuting Max Planck with historical examples, insisting that new ideas do not triumph by replacing old ones, urging “Beware of arrogance! Retire nothing!” and “Don’t Discard Wrong Theories, Just Don’t Treat Them as True,” or calling scientific progress an illusion. What other ideas must die? Spacetime, brain plasticity, carbon footprint, left-brain-right-brain, information overload, standard deviation, universal grammar, Moore’s Law, altruism, innateness—the list goes on. Who would have imagined it even possible to doubt, never mind call for the end of, ideas such as cause and effect, geometry, the scientific method, culture, or the universe? We are assured that beauty is not in the eye of the beholder, that humans are not social animals, that bias is not always bad, that sadness is not always bad and happiness is not always good. Glancing over the table of contents, the eyebrow rises again and again—but in a good way, as a sign that the mind is being pried open and that a moment of enlightenment might ensue.

Review: Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America

Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America

by Owen Matthews

Around the year 1800 the west coast of North America seemed ripe for takeover by Russia. Spain held Mexico firmly in its grip, but its hold on California was loose, consisting of only a scattering of small, poorly supported missions north to San Francisco. In 1789, attempting to block Russian expansion, it had sent an expedition north to Nootka on Vancouver Island, claiming it as Spanish territory and in the process seizing several British commercial ships, but when Britain threatened war, Spain was forced to sign a humiliating treaty and retreat back to San Francisco. The question was open: Who would gain final sovereignty over the waters and coastlands of Pacific North America? (The competing powers—Russia, Britain, Spain—were not interested in large new territories of wilderness; the prize was the lucrative Pacific trade, especially in sea otter furs, which brought astronomical prices in China.) Even though ships from Britain and the U.S. were the most active in the area, and British Captains Cook and Vancouver were mapping the coastal waters, Russia seemed to have the advantage. It had already established colonies stretching 1,400 km from the Aleutian islands to Sitka. But in the end, of course, Russia’s colonial ambitions failed. In 1867 the U.S purchased all its possessions in America for two cents per acre in a bargain known at the time as Seward’s Folly.

Glorious Misadventures is the story of Count Nikolai Rezanov, a Russian courtier obsessed with the idea of an empire in America. Taking the British Empire as his model, especially the East India Company, a private company with a royal charter granting it a free hand to exploit and rule, Rezanov lobbied three tsars in succession on the idea, starting with Catherine the Great. Finally, when Tsar Alexander came to believe the British and Americans posed a security threat in the northern Pacific, he allowed the creation of the Russian American Company, granted it a royal charter, and sent out Rezanov as overseer for the government. The RAC’s majority shareholder and chief executive was Grigory Shelikov, the “King of Siberia,” an unstoppable, buccaneering fur tycoon who had established several of the outposts along the Alaskan coast. Rezanov became the ultimate point man for Russia’s American dreams when, at the age of 32, he married Shelikov’s 14-year-old daughter (they turned out to be deeply devoted to each another before Anna died in childbirth several years later).

Although Rezanov’s big dream never did materialize, his life itself had enough colour for books, poems, and even an opera. In order to travel to Russia’s Pacific coast, he was given a fleet and set out on what would be Russia’s first round-the-world voyage, sailing from St Petersburg to Kamchatka by way of Brazil, Hawaii, and Japan. The voyage was marred throughout by fierce and endless quarrels with the captain over who was in charge. Rezanov was fastidious about status and protocol. That insistence on maintaining a show of superiority was disastrous for his mission to open trading relations with Japan. To bow at the waist to the Shogun’s representatives he regarded as degradation. As he wrote in his diary, he did ‘not even bow to God, except in my own mind.’ Negotiations dragged on, the Shogun keeping him waiting in virtual confinement for almost a full year. Rezanov was driven to the brink of insanity—he drank, moped, wandered aimlessly in his dressing gown in the walled compound, and urinated in public. And in the end he sailed away empty-handed and  humiliated. He never got over it. Shortly before his death he ordered Russian ships to attack Japan’s northern islands, waging a war to which the Tsar had not consented.

During his visits to the settlements in America, he found the conditions shocking. Housing was primitive. None of the accoutrements of civilization, such as schools, were provided. The settlers were mostly ex-convicts, brutes and scoundrels of all sorts. The company exploited them, and they exploited the indigenous peoples even more, who replied with attacks and massacres. Supply ships were often lost at sea, plunging everyone into near starvation. Rezanov had big ideas and he drew up big plans for improvements, but he changed little. In the winter of 1806 the usual state of wretchedness reached a breaking point, with people dying from scurvy and starvation. In utter desperation, Rezanov gathered a band of half-dead compatriots and sailed south, hoping to get food from the Spanish at San Francisco, the people he wanted one day to conquer,.

And it was that brief, six-week visit, not any of his labours, that assured his name would live on. While recovering from scurvy and malnutrition, with the generous aid of the commandante, he kept an eye out for military weaknesses and, most crucially, wooed Conchita, known as the most beautiful, charming girl in California. She was 15 and the daughter of the commandante. For her, who had never left her tiny, isolated Spanish mission, Rezanov was a dashing, glamorous man of the world. When he proposed after two weeks courtship, she accepted and prepared herself for a dazzling new life in the court of the Tsar. However, because of their religious differences, he required approval from the Patriarch and she required approval from the Pope, so they agreed to wait. Then he returned to Sitka. But on his way back to St Petersburg he died of disease in Siberia, and the lovers never saw each other again. Conchita waited 35 years for Rezanov’s return, until an English traveler convinced her he was dead. She became a nun.

The story of Rezanov and Conchita became perfect fodder for poets. They wrote about it as a great romance, the eternal story of a doomed love, a epic love that yearned against all odds to bridge the chasms of age, nationality, culture, and religion, only to be struck down by cruel Fate. In 1981 it opened in Moscow as the very first rock opera in Russia. It was a sensation. It is still playing in Moscow today and has toured far beyond the borders of Russia. The highlight is a ballad whose lyrics sum up the romantic essence of the story: “I will never see you. I will never forget you.” It was not an American empire that made Rezanov famous but a 15-year-old Spanish girl.

Glorious Misadventures is packed with good stories and sheds light on an obscure part of history, but it seems strangely out-of-date in the vague, sketchy way it treats First Nations.

Review -- Everyman Dies Alone by Hans Fallada

At the end of the war, German author Hans Fallada was not well. Throughout his life his mental state had been sketchy—as a youth he and a friend had tried to commit suicide together by staging a duel with pistols—and he had been locked up a number of times in jails and insane asylums for violence, theft, and various addictions. The Nazi years and the war not did not improve his mental health. When a Soviet cultural official found him in 1945, Fallada and his wife had just been released from hospital, he for morphine addiction, she for attempting suicide. Hoping to restore some purpose to Fallada’s life, the official handed him a Gestapo file and suggested it might be turned into a novel. The subjects were a middle-aged couple, the Hampels, simple working people, the kind Fallada usually wrote about. For nearly two years they had conducted an obscure campaign of protest against the Nazis, dropping postcards in various places around Berlin with messages such as “Mother! The Führer has murdered my son! Mother! The Führer will murder your sons, too, he will not stop till he has brought sorrow to every home.” Fallada was not impressed; the Hampels’ protest was so feeble, so ill-conceived, almost ridiculous in its hopelessness. If the White Rose group from the university had not roused the public with their vastly more articulate handbills, and if the elaborately planned coup attempted by von Stauffenberg and other top army officers could not succeed, what hope was there in the Hampels’ little postcards, with their awkward penmanship and bad grammar, left in the stairwells of public buildings in Berlin? Then for some reasaon Fallada had a change of heart, and he began writing at break-neck speed, finishing the entire 500-page novel in 24 days. It was, he told his family, “a truly great novel.”

On one level, Every Man Dies Alone is a detective novel, a good one, with the fictional Quangels trying to avoid capture by a Gestapo inspector assigned to catch them. Initially they are motivated only by grief over the loss of their son in the war, but their outrage soon expands until the postcards condemn the regime on bigger issues, including the plight of the Jews. The Quangels may be unsophisticated, but they are exceedingly cautious, so much so that their ability to evade capture does not sit well with the Inspector’s superiors. The most interesting character in the book is the Inspector, patiently and methodically tracing their postcards with pins on a map, confident of finding the culprits eventually and not much concerned with what his superiors think. Far from being a Hollywood stereotype, he is simply a good cop, almost a gentleman, kind-hearted up to a point, with no animus for the Quangels. In his mind he is working as a professional, separate from politics. He doesn’t think much about what goes on in the basement cells in Gestapo headquarters.

Fallada’s novels were usually about the German working class. His Little Man, What Next? (1933), about the struggles of a family during the Depression, had been a bestseller, translated into English, made the Book of the Month in America, turned into a Hollywood movie. So he had the skills to flesh out the Gestapo file with an authentic milieu for the Quangels and interesting, lifelike secondary characters. On a floor above the couple lives an old Jewish woman, nervously awaiting her fate; her neighbours watch, split between those who would protect her and those greedy for a chance to steal her possessions. (“The Jews still have all their property,” thinks one, “They’re just hiding it from the Germans they stole it from in the first place.”) On a floor below is a retired judge pretending, but only pretending, to be an old scholar buried in his books. Also in the building are a gambler and his prostitute wife, and a family of Nazis dominated, because of his superior fanaticism, by the sixteen-year-old son. At the main doorway is a snitch, stationed where he might overhear a word, a rumour, anything he can peddle to the authorities. Especially memorable is the local letter carrier, who imprudently resigns from the Nazi Party after seeing a photo of her son, an SS officer on the Eastern front, holding a baby by the foot, about to smash it against a car.

But it’s neither the characters nor the suspense story that draws us to Every Man Dies Alone. We turn to it to see what life was like for ordinary Germans under the Nazis, and Fallada paints a chilling picture, a nightmare world of spies, denunciations, betrayals, cruelty, an entire nation living in terror of its leaders. Resistance, bravery, humanity are not extinguished, of course, but they flicker briefly in the overwhelming gloom. Fallada knew what it was like to be denounced by the Nazis; in 1935 he was officially declared an "undesirable author," he was excoriated by the Nazi press, and his books were removed from public libraries. But he was no hero and he also knew what it was like to be frightened into silence, when he retreated for a time into writing harmless fairy tales. And, sadly, he knew what it was like to be completely terrified and to submit. When pressure was applied to him to add a pro-Nazi flourish to one of his novels, he complied, because he’d been told of Goebbels’ remark that if Fallada didn’t know what to think of the Nazi Party, then the Nazi Party would know what to think of him. “The guilt of every line I wrote then still weighs on me today,” he later wrote. 

Yet the value of Every Man Dies Alone goes beyond all this. In the midst of the detective story and the social realism is something more impressive, an earnest meditation on the question: When there is no hope of resisting evil, when it opposes you with forces so overwhelming that you have no chance of success, is there any purpose in standing against it? If so, what is that purpose? That’s what excited him about the Gestapo file, and that’s what makes the novel so extraordinary.

Review: Justice in Asia and the Pacific Region, 1945-1952

Justice in Asia and the Pacific Region, 1945-1952

by Yuma Totani

When a war ends and a victor emerges, what then? A general bloodbath? Sometimes the victors indulge in a not very sincere show of fairness before sentencing prisoners to summary execution. But today we pride ourselves on trying to achieve real justice, conducting trials according to international norms, “creating an educational moment,” as the U.S. authorities put it with their trials at the end of World War II in Nuremberg and various locations in Europe and the Pacific region. Those old trials took on renewed meaning in the 1990s when the U. N. set up two ad hoc tribunals to deal with war crimes in Yugoslavia and Rwanda. And their legacy today underlies the International Criminal Court in The Hague and perhaps sheds light on Guantanamo and elsewhere. Some of the profound difficulties in achieving justice for war crimes, particularly when the effort is in the hands of the victors, is vividly illustrated in Justice in Asia and the Pacific Region, 1945-1952, a study of fourteen trials of senior Japanese officers accused of war crimes.

One incidental question raised by the author is why atrocities were so rampant and so egregious among the Japanese forces. Japan had signed the Hague Convention (1907) on the laws and customs of war on land and the Geneva Convention (1929) on prisoners of war. And in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 the Japanese were known to give exemplary treatment to prisoners of war. But the book provides no answer to this question.

“Crimes against peace” was the focus of the Nuremberg trials and the famous Tokyo Trial; the aim was to establish in law that the waging of aggressive war is a crime for which top leaders are responsible. “War crimes” or atrocities took second place and were mostly dealt with in less prominent tribunals. This book examines command responsibility for war crimes.

General Tomoyuki Yamashita, commander of Japanese forces in the Philippines during the final year of the war, was charged in a Manila court with “permitting” his troops to commit atrocities. His trial, a rather hasty affair, found him guilty and sentenced him to death by hanging. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal, but two of the justices wrote an extraordinary dissenting opinion amounting to a withering attack on the fairness of the Manila trial. Not only was Yamashita denied due process, they said, but he was convicted of a crime which did not exist in U.S. law; furthermore, there was no evidence that he ordered, condoned or even knew about the atrocities other than the fact that they were widespread and, according to the prosecution, he ought to have known. But at the time his command was being overwhelmed by advancing American forces and his lines of communication were constantly disrupted, making it very difficult to know what his troops were doing or to exercise control over them. Yamashita was hanged three weeks after the Supreme Court decision. A similar trial followed for General Masaharu Honma. Part of his defence was that, although he might in principle have been in command of all Japanese forces during the invasion of the Philippines, the structure of the Japanese army separated responsibilities for military operations from responsibilities for administration, so that, as commander of operations, the plight of POWs and civilians was not in his purview. His trial, however, was a carbon copy of the Yamashita trial—similar in the presentation of evidence and similar in results: a guilty verdict, death sentence, refusal by the Supreme Court, sharply written dissenting opinion, and execution. When a third Japanese general, Shigenori Kuroda, went on trial in Manila, the U.S. military commission was replaced by Philippine authorities, who turned out to be much more generous in providing fair-trial protections. They did find him guilty but sentenced him to life in prison rather than death. (A few years later the Philippines gave him a presidential pardon, and he returned to Japan a free man.) As reports of these trials reached Japan, the educational moment did not come; the trials were vilified as victor’s justice, and books describing the shortcomings of the trials became bestsellers.

Totani’s careful analysis of the fourteen trials reveals how complex and troubling it can be to blame commanders for war crimes. Did the Americans have the moral authority to try anyone for war crimes after dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Can any trial, no matter how careful its procedures, escape being branded as victor’s justice? To underline that point, the defence in one trial went so far as to argue that the proper role of the Allied war crimes program was to target war criminals among the Allied forces, not military personnel of a defeated nation. Assuming that some kind of judicial reckoning necessary, is it realistic, is it even just, to apply to wartime situations the laws and standards developed for peacetime crimes? Faced with the horrors of war atrocities, can we really accept that it is better to let ten guilty people go free than convict one innocent person? It seems impossible to accept no one being held responsible or perpetrators being let off on a technicality for the Bataan Death March, the  Burma-Siam Death Railway (“The Bridge Over the River Kwai”), the Sook-Ching Massacre in Singapore (over 50,000 Chinese slaughtered on mere suspicion of being anti-Japanese), the often horrific treatment of POWs and civilians throughout the region.

Totani’s book demonstrates that there are no easy answers for how to conduct war crimes trials. It was not easy in the past, and it is not easy now. And however it is done, it will inevitably leave in its wake controversy, unsettling compromises and at best only a shadow of true justice.

Review: Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East

Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East by Gerard Russell

When ISIS swept into Iraq from Syria in the summer of 2014, driving a group of religionists known as the Yazidi onto Mount Sinjar, not only aid workers were sent scrambling. Journalists, too, were caught flatfooted. Who are the Yazidis? Aren’t they Muslims? What do they believe? Why does ISIS call them devil-worshippers? There are answers to these questions and many more like them in Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East by Gerard Russell, a scholar and former diplomat for both the U.K. and the U.N., fluent in Arabic and Farsi. Writing in an easy travelogue style, with descriptions of the land, the people he meets, their beliefs and practices, adorned with abundant historical quotations, he presents a Middle East that is surprisingly variegated not only in ethnicities but in religions as well. Behind the Muslim monolith that we tend to imagine lies a colourful, fascinating welter of minority religions with roots stretching back to Babylonian times and earlier.

Journalists found little to say about Yazidis because Yazidis themselves know little about their faith. Theirs is a mystery religion whose truths are revealed only to the clergy in secret meetings and ceremonies, while the laity is allowed to know only some customs and rituals. Why are Yazidi forbidden to eat lettuce? No one knows. Why are they forbidden to wear blue? It’s a mystery. The Yazidi may be an offshoot of the most famous of all ancient mystery cults, the cult of Mithras, wildly popular in the Roman army. It was near Yazidi territory that Roman soldiers first discovered the cult of Mithras while fighting the Persians, adopting it so passionately that in the western parts of the empire Mithraism resisted Christianity for several centuries. There are similarities between the Yazidi religion and the cult of Mithras: both pray three times a day with a girdle around the waist, both show a special reverence for the sun, and both include a key ceremony involving the sacrifice of bulls. And, what’s been passed down even to us today, is the custom of greeting someone with a handshake, a practice that  the Yazidis appear to have copied from the cult of Mithras.

ISIS is almost correct in accusing the Yazidi of devil worship. They do revere Azazael, one of the “emanations” of the supreme being, the greatest of all the angels who rebelled against God and was cast out of heaven, known to others as Satan (the Yazidi have a horror of pronouncing the name Satan). However, in Yazidi stories, Azazael repented, extinguished Hell with his tears and was restored to his preeminent place among the angels, turning their worship of “Satan” into the worship of the redeemed chief angel, a figure of goodness, not of evil. ISIS fails to appreciate this distinction. Azazael is represented in Yazidi iconography by the figure of the Peacock Angel. Why a peacock? That’s another mystery.

Russell devotes a chapter to each of six other religions. The Druze are the Mormons of Islam in that they accept a revelation different from that of mainstream Muslims. Like the Yazidi, they restrict knowledge of their religion to a priestly caste who devote themselves to lives of contemplation and poverty. The laity are known as “the ignorant ones.” The group nearest to extinction is the Samaritans with only 750 adherents. Calling themselves the true descendants of the ancient Israelites, more faithful and more pure than the most orthodox of Jews, they accept only the Pentateuch (or Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament), rejecting all scriptures, teachings and practices that came after 597 B.C. when the Jews were exiled to Babylon. Austerity is the watchword of Copts or Egyptian Christians, who fast 210 days of the year. Their religion has echoes of the Egypt of the pharaohs: even in their church in London they pray for the “rising of the water of the rivers,” follow a pharaonic calendar, and maintain that the psalms of David were written by the pharoah Akhenaten, father of Tutankhamun. Zoroastrians are well known,  in name if nothing else, because Zarathustra, their founder, is memorialized in the title of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra and Richard Strauss’s tone poem, used in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Their branch in India, known as the Parsees, were often written about by the British in colonial times, who thought very highly of them. Founded about 1000 B.C. with a dualistic outlook that sees the world as a constant battleground between the forces of good and evil, Zoroastrianism appears to have influenced several later world religions. It teaches that the souls of those who choose to do good in life are rewarded with an eternal life in heaven, with hell awaiting the others. And their sacred book, the Avesta, prophesies a Messiah or redeemer who will lead the armies of good in their final battle, which will conclude with the end of the world and the resurrection of the dead. The Kalasha, the “last pagans of Pakistan,” all four thousand of whom live in three remote valleys in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, are given a chapter, as are the Mandaeans, who believe that their religion was passed down to them from the Garden of Eden as secret teachings whispered into the ear of Seth by his father, Adam. And there are digressions on other groups, such as Manichees, Alawites, Babis (later to become Baha’is), Kam, and Harranians.

All these minority religions of the Middle East have survived through many centuries largely by retreating to remote areas, such as mountain valleys or the vast marshlands of southern Iraq, where earlier governments had difficulty reaching them. Today, with better transportation  and communications and with the rise of extremist forms of Islam, they are under threat. It is quite possible that some, despite having maintained a continuous, living connection with the earliest periods of recorded history, will disappear within a few decades.

Review: Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World

Lee Kuan Yew: 

The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World

Graham Allison and Robert Blackwill

When Lee Kuan Yew died on March 21 of this year, accolades poured in from around the world and  focused mainly on his greatest achievement, the spectacular growth of Singapore. As Prime Minister from 1965 to 1990 he utterly transformed a tiny, poverty-stricken, Third World island nation of less than 2 million people, devoid of natural resources, lacking even a water supply, reeling from a series of economic shocks, its only major asset being a port for entrepôt trade. In 25 years he catapulted it into the front ranks of the First World. Today the IMF lists Singapore as third richest country in the world in terms of per capita GDP, after only Qatar and Luxembourg (Canada is no. 20). It has the tenth largest foreign reserves of $251B (Canada has $75B, holding down 27^th place, just behind the Philippines).

Less well known is the reputation of Lee Kuan Yew as one of the most brilliant strategic thinkers of our times, admired in the top echelons of government, academia and business. Margaret Thatcher expressed this elite view with characteristic force: “In office, I read and analyzed every speech of Lee’s. He had a way of penetrating the fog of propaganda and expressing with unique clarity the issues of our times and the way to tackle them. He was never wrong.”

Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World is an attempt to offer to U.S. decision makers a compact version of Lee’s analyses on the future of various subjects—China and India on the rise, the position of the U.S. in the 21^st century, Islamic extremism, national economic growth, geopolitics, globalization, and democracy. Consisting of brief extracts from Lee’s writings, speeches, and interviews, the book was compiled by two senior U.S. foreign policy academics who regularly serve in top government posts. It is published by MIT Press under the auspices of the Harvard Kennedy School. Anyone interested in public affairs will find it valuable. Lee’s comments on leadership are alone worth the price of the book.

Lee’s views on the future of China are especially prized, not only because of his acumen but also because he was in close and constant communication with Chinese leaders since the 1970s. In fact, China’s opening up and conversion to capitalism is often traced to Deng Xiaoping’s eye-opening first visit to Singapore in 1978. For Lee the rise of China is absolutely inevitable but also completely unprecedented, for while the world has seen new actors appear on the international stage before, it has never experienced a new player of China’s gargantuan size. He reminds us that memories of its former greatness are fundamental to its current resurgence and that it will insist on being accepted on its own terms, not as some  honorary member of the West. Its leaders calculate that three, four, maybe five decades will be required for its GDP to surpass that of the U.S; in the meantime it will avoid confrontations with the U.S. and be content to assert its power in the economic sphere rather than the military. By 2050, even with the world’s largest GNP, China will still remain behind the U.S. technologically and thus militarily, so it sees the 21^st century as a time of sharing power with America. Its day in the sun will come in the 22^nd century. While Lee is clear about the significant problems China must overcome, he judges that its chances of success are about four in five.

The U.S. presence in the Pacific is welcomed by Lee as a force to counterbalance China, so that all of East Asia is not absorbed wholesale into the Chinese economic behemoth. Unlike “declinists” who are pessimistic about the future of the U.S., he sees American innovation as so fundamental to its DNA that it can overcome major challenges by reinventing itself. In the area of the Indian Ocean he once hoped that India, “a nation of unfulfilled greatness,” would also moderate the influence of China, but when Nehru and Indira Gandhi failed to make the necessary changes to kickstart their economy, he decided India had taken a slower path to development. Infrastructure is poor, progress is forever impeded by bureaucracy, corruption, and a complex constitution, and meritocracy, a cardinal principle for Lee, is stymied by the feudal caste system. Nevertheless, India’s political system is more flexible than China’s, its private sector is stronger, and its population is more youthful—an asset, provided that the young are all well educated. India’s future importance is undeniable, he says, but present projections limit its potential to 60-70% of that of China.

The range of topics in the book is wide, and one always senses a powerful intellect at work, free from ideology or preconceptions, drilling down whenever possible to first principles. (It is impressive to watch that formidable mind in action, even in old age, in his speeches and interviews on YouTube.) If he reaches surprising conclusions, so be it. He once told a Chinese leader that China should make English its first language and Mandarin its second. It was hardly a practical suggestion, but it underscored his point that Chinese language and culture are barriers to the nation’s progress, first, by limiting its ability to attract foreign talent and, second, because the four thousand years of epigrams embedded in the language stifle creativity, suggesting that everything worth saying has been said before, and said better. In the West, he believes the welfare state has proven a failure, both economically, as evidenced by the enormous debts and deficits, and morally, by degrading the virtues of self-reliance and family responsibility. He questions the principle of one man, one vote, preferring to give two votes to people who are over forty with children on the grounds that their thinking is more long-term. He would give just one vote to people over sixty. On a trip to Australia, he warned that if the country did not open up and join the Asian renaissance, it would become “the white trash of Asia;” that bit of plain speaking sparked a national debate and resulted in an overhaul of government policy.

By focusing almost exclusively the fact that the Singapore miracle came at the cost of restrictions on personal freedoms, the Western media have disseminated a caricature of one of the most remarkable men of our time. Even if there were no Singapore, the ideas of Lee Kuan Yew would be well worth the time spent studying them. This is not a thick book, but it is dense with thought.