Halfway down the Danube

Around Baalbek

We had the place to ourselves.

It’s the off season, for one thing – tourists don’t usually show up in great numbers until April. Driving over the summit of the Lebanon Mountains, there was still plenty of snow on the ground. (Baalbek itself was fine, though – sunny and pleasant.) More to the point, there’s been some shooting along the border near Baalbek… supposedly the Lebanese Army squaring off against ISIS in Syria, though who knows. Anyway, in two hours of strolling around Baalbek I think we saw maybe three other tourists.

So Baalbek. As I noted in the last post, it’s this huge pile of ruins that used to be a pre-Christian religious site.  It was big in Phoenician and Hellenistic times, and then the Romans made it bigger.  At various times, almost a dozen different Emperors stopped here to sacrifice and take the omens. The scale of the place is impressive. For instance, there were dozens of granite columns that weighed sixty tons each. There’s no granite in Lebanon, so these had to be quarried in Egypt, floated down the Nile and overseas, and then hauled several thousand feet up and over the Lebanon Mountains. Our guide said that this was done by building two parallel “walls” – stone rails, basically – and rolling the columns along. There are also some ridiculous large solid limestone blocks – we’re talking slabs the size of a freight container, weighing hundreds of tons. There are a lot of theories about how they moved those, but apparently it’s still an open question.

(Our guide: it’s not required, but it is strongly encouraged that one takes a guide through Baalbek. Ours was pretty good. His price was reasonable – 35,000 Lebanese pounds or about $25 to guide the three of us for about 90 minutes – and he was knowledgeable and spoke good English. His patter was a bit rehearsed at times, but after the thousandth time that’s probably not surprising.)

Religion in the pagan world involved sacrifice, so the center of the complex was two sacrificial altars, one for large animals like sheep and cows and another for birds and other small stuff. Apparently the mechanics of this were fairly well known: there were basins of holy water for washing the animals in advance, flames in which to throw some of the meat, gutters (still intact) for carrying off the blood, and so forth. It does make one wonder: was the atmosphere like a slaughterhouse, all terrified bellowing and squawking and the thick reek of blood everywhere? Or did they keep it neat?

Mark Twain came through Baalbek in the 1870s, and was suitably impressed. "At eleven o'clock, our eyes fell upon the walls and columns of Baalbec, a noble ruin whose history is a sealed book. It has stood there for thousands of years, the wonder and admiration of travelers; but who built it, or when it was built, are questions that may never be answered. One thing is very sure, though. Such grandeur of design, and such grace of execution, as one sees in the temples of Baalbec, have not been equaled or even approached in any work of men's hands that has been built within twenty centuries past."  Twain could get a little overheated, but Baalbek really is quite something; the intact Temple of Bacchus deserves to stand beside the Acropolis, and the ruins of the main Temple of Jupiter must have been ridiculously spectacular.

It did leave me wondering: was Roman Baalbek a purely top-down construction, a prestige project for various Emperors?  Or was it funded and maintained by a huge stream of pilgrims over hundreds of years?  And if the latter... what a curious thought, to think of large numbers of people in the Roman world traveling for hundreds of miles for religious reasons.  Did the medieval pilgrim routes simply recreate something that had already existed a thousand years earlier?

There were no less than three museums in the grounds -- a Roman/Phoenician one, a Mameluke one, and a big general historical museum up by the front.  The Mameluke one was there because the Mamelukes turned Baalbek into a fortress for a while, so a lot of the Roman ruins have medieval ruins on top of them, with arrow slits and Moorish arches.  The Roman/Phoenician one contained a lot of sarcophagi, including one with a young woman's skeleton still inside.  Scattered at her feet were a number of tiny glass containers.  At first I thought they were candlesticks, but the guide said they were tear vials: mourners would collect their tears, and drop them into the grave.

In the Temple of Bacchus, there's a plaque commemorating Kaiser Wilhelm's visit to the site.  It's in 19th century German on one side, Ottoman Arabic on the other.  Apparently the Kaiser was a patron of the archeological diggings here.  History doesn't have a lot of good to say about Wilhelm, but this was a thing.

I could have killed another hour or two wandering around -- I never did finish touring the third museum -- but then we would have ended up driving down the mountain after dark.  So after about 90 minutes we moved along. There were a few touts hanging around the parking lot trying to sell us stuff, but there were so few tourists that they were pretty half-hearted.  One guy was selling yellow Hezbollah t-shirts: the Hezbollah flag is  bright yellow with a fist clutching an AK-47 on it.  I admit that I briefly considered it. (When you work in development, you're tempted by the occasional conversation starter.).  But, no.

Afterwards we stopped at a local restaurant and had roasted garlic chicken with mezze and arrack. “Mezze” is the term for all the little dishes, hummus and stuffed grape leaves and babaghanoush and such, that are brought as preludes or accompaniments to a meal. Arrack is wine alcohol mixed with aniseed; it is served cold, tastes like licorice and turns cloudy when you mix it with water.

Back in Ottoman times, there was a railroad that ran down the length of the Levant from Turkey, through Syria and Palestine, all the way to Mecca. Then someone – either the Ottomans or the French, I don’t know – built a spur going up over the mountains into the Bekaa Valley. As noted, the Lebanon Mountains are nearly a mile high and steep, so this was no small effort. Presumably the idea was to open up the immense agricultural potential of the Bekaa to export markets. So Lebanon used to have a functioning railroad system, with connections running north to Turkey and south to Egypt. But in 1947, the southern link was cut when Palestine became Israel; and then during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), the whole network got broken up and destroyed. No train has actually run in Lebanon since the 1980s. And none will again for many many years, if ever; the tracks have been torn up in many places, and the rights-of-way have been built over.

I mention all this because it happens that our restaurant was next to an old rail yard. It was pretty big; I’m guessing it was the end-of-the-line yard for the Bekaa Valley branch. And sitting on the rusty tracks were several train cars, including three locomotives. Eating our garlic chicken while sipping our iced arrack, we could look out the window right at them. The locomotives were solid orange with rust, but looked otherwise pretty intact; they looked like coal-burning steam engines, built sometime in the first quarter of the 20th century. A couple of stray dogs picked their way around the old rail yard, but otherwise it was still and quiet, and obviously had been for a long time.

(Did I mention that garlic chicken, or garlic anything, is a rare treat? Claudia is violently allergic to garlic, so I gave it up when we got married. But when I’m on the road… Also, the Lebanese know how to make a good French fry! After years of soggy, greasy, tasteless Eastern European French fries, this is a tiny but real pleasure.)

On the way back to Beirut, we passed a camp of Syrian refugees. There are several hundred thousand Syrians in Lebanon right now, fleeing the civil war there, and it doesn’t look like they’re going home any time soon. The refugee camp looked like someone had put several hundred sheds down in the middle of a farmer’s field.

Going down the mountain, we ran into a a half hour of gridlock traffic -- that happens a lot, in Lebanon, and often for no visible reason -- and then, after we emerged, into a thick bank of fog: we literally could not see more than a single car length ahead.  Somewhere in there our driver Jamil asked us if he could buy us a coffee, which turned out to be Lebanese for "I need to stop and get a coffee".  So we did, at a little general store by the side of the road.  And then we came down out of the mountains and emerged from the clouds, and drove into Beirut by the bright light of the sun setting over the Mediterranean.

A trip to Baalbek

Went to Baalbek today.

I'm in Lebanon for a few weeks, about which more anon. If you're in Lebanon, you really need to visit Baalbek, because it's amazing. It was original a huge Phoenician temple complex devoted to the worshop of Baal -- yeah, the guy from the Old Testament -- and then the Hellenistic rulers reinterpreted it as "we're really worshipping Zeus, Aphrodite, and Dionysus", and then the Romans came along and rebuilt it all into an even more immense and spectacular complex dedicated to Jupiter, Venus, and Bacchus. It's just ridiculously huge -- acres and acres of ruins -- and there's enough left standing to give you some idea of how astonishing it must have been, back in the day. It was a major, major religious site, maybe the closest equivalent to a Mecca that the ancient world had.

We (my colleagues and I) were considering not going to Baalbek, because there'd been some shooting and shelling along the border nearby. Supposedly ISIS is present just across the border into Syria. (Lebanese may disagree with each other on a lot of things, but they almost all agree in despising ISIS.) But we discussed it and decided to go, albeit with care. I have a negative Life List of wonders of the world that I've managed to miss despite spending time nearby -- Angkor Wat, Petra (twice), Victoria Falls -- and I really didn't want to add Baalbek. Odds and ends from the trip:

• Jamil, our driver, was a little terrier of a man, well past retirement age but still an extroardinarily aggressive driver, and still gifted with a thick, glossy head of white hair. (Which he attributed to using only the local soap from his home village, instead of shampoo.) Jamil liked to stop and yell at people for directions. I know that casual interpersonal interactions in the Arab world can seem odd to Westerners, but seriously... Jamil just shouted at people. Everyone was pretty cool, though, and we managed to get everywhere eventually.
• To get to Baalbek, you have to climb up and over the Lebanon Mountains, which are nearly a mile high and really steep. Jamil's radiator immediately began overheating. (I don't know how old Jamil's car was, but it still had a tape deck. With a tape in it.) Jamil kept pulling over and putting water in. It didn't help. When he dropped us off at Baalbek he said he was going off to "get a new radiator". We assumed he meant a radiator hose or something like that but when we met him again a couple of hours later he said, no, he had bought a new radiator and had it installed.
• Baalbek is up at the northern end of the Bekaa Valley, which means it's about as far as you can get from Beirut without leaving the country. (This is not actually very far... maybe 100 km.) The Bekaa is a lush, gorgeous valley, just 20 miles from the sea but three thousand feet above sea level, that lies between the Lebanon Mountains and the imaginatively named Anti-Lebanon Mountains, a parallel range that lies ten miles further east and inland. So the Bekaa is about ten miles wide and it stretches for about a hundred miles, north to south. It's ridiculously fertile and is the reason that little Lebanon is actually a major exporter of agricultural products: wine, olives, dairy, you name it. The Middle East's largest potato chip factory is up there.
• One passes a lot of military checkpoints. Most of these had just a couple of bored-looking soldiers: you slow down, they glance at you and wave you through. I don't know what the purpose of these is. Maybe just to make clear that there's a military presence?
• The area around Baalbek is almost entirely populated by Shi'as. It's pretty easy to tell when you're in a Shi'a town. The women are suddenly wearing headscarves, for starters. (This is not the case in most of Lebanon.) The signs get a lot more Arabic, and English and French become less common. There are still plenty of billboards, but fewer female models and they're usually wearing more clothes. And big posters and cutouts of Shi'a heroes start appearing along the roadsides... pudgy clerics in black with bushy beards and glasses, beefy looking military men in camo garb.
• There's Baalbek the archeological site, and then there's the town of Baalbek -- about 100,000 people, almost all of them Shi'a. And the town of Baalbek also includes a huge Shi'a shrine. It's a shrine to Sayeeda Khalwa, who was a daughter of Imam Hussein. This gets into come complex early Islamic history, but here's the short version: Imam Hussein is a holy martyr to the Shi'a. He was the loser of a power struggle in the generation of Islamic rulers that followed Mohammed's death. You may remember reading or hearing about the big Shi'ite shrine in Karbala, Iraq? That's the shrine to Imam Hussein. So, after the battle, it seems that his family were marched captive back to Arabia. And during the trip, his youngest daughter -- who was just a tiny thing, less than five years old -- died.And she was buried in Baalbek the town, not half a mile down the road from the old temple complex. And so today there is a huge and beautiful mosque and shrine there.  I mean, just gorgeous: all peacock blue and green with a shiny golden dome . And it particularly attracts Shi'ite women from all over the Middle East.

I suppose I should write something about Baalbek itself. But that may take a little while, and I don't want to start another blog post and leave it unfinished -- I've done that more than once over the last little while. So let's get this up, and I'll try to come back to Baalbeck shortly.

Kyrgyzstan

I spent most of the month of April in Kyrgyzstan, a former Soviet Republic in Central Asia.  And now, seven months later, I'm going to blog a little about it!

I liked Kyrgyzstan.   Bishkek, the capital, was very Soviet. Wide streets, huge squares, women sweeping the sidewalks in the gray light of dawn.  It was spring, and I think spring in that part of the world comes on fast -- it was rather chilly when we arrived, four weeks later it was mellow and warm with flowers everywhere. 

Kyrgyzstan is a smallish country that is mostly mountains.  Bishkek sits on the plains some miles north of where the mountains end.  When the air is clear (which, since this is a former Soviet city, it isn't often) you can see the mountains in the distance.  They're the Tien Shan -- a range I'd barely heard of.  But they're huge: five, six thousand meters. Higher than the Alps, steeper than the Rockies. I had no idea.

Kyrgyzstan's economy has three pillars.  One is remittances from Kyrgyz workers who have left the country, mostly for Kazakhstan and Russia.  (That's pretty common across the former Soviet Union -- Moldova was much the same.)  The second is the mining and re-export of gold. While we were there, the gold bubble popped, which caused a certain amount of entirely justified consternation.  The crash in gold prices is going to knock a couple of points off Kyrgystan's GDP this year, and they were pretty poor to begin with.

The third pillar is that Kyrgyzstan  is a major re-export center for Chinese goods. They come across the border on trucks and then get transshipped to Russia and the other Central Asian republics.  At one point in the visit, we went to the "bazaar" outside of town, which combines wholesale and retail.  Whatever image the word "bazaar" conjures up, this didn't much look like it.  It was more like a series of enormous interlinked warehouses covering a couple of hundred hectares.

One section of the bazaar was all Chinese shoes. imagine a metal roof, two or three hundred meters long and maybe 20 meters off the ground. Under it, freight containers in rows two high. The lower containers are mostly retail outlets and/or showcases. The upper row of containers, connected by flimsy catwalks, are wholesale, just filled with shoes.  A million shoes? More? Anyway, enough to hit some critical mass that the whole place had a special smell. glue and leather and plastic and whatever they make soles out of.  You've had a whiff of it in a shoe store but never like this. A Platonic Smell Of Shoe.

Unfortunately, the transshipment business is also not doing so well -- the Chinese are figuring out how to bypass Bishkek, eliminate the middlemen, and sell directly to the Russians and Kazakhs.  So, all in all it's looking like a rocky year or two ahead for the Kyrgyz economy.

What else?  Well, Istopped by the Bishkek train station. It was very Soviet -- reminded me of the one in Chisinau, and also the one in Yerevan.  Apparently the station (along with some 200 km of track) was built by German POWs after WWII. Also, it seems that many of the POWs died in the process, and were dumped in mass graves somewhere in the area. I haven't been able to find any details online, though. There was no monument or memorial, not even a plaque or something, in the train station.  Kyrgyzstan was a back

The Kyrgyz themselves?  I really liked the Kyrgyz.  They're phenotypically very diverse -- Kyrgyz can look like Mongols, like south Chinese, like Turks, or even like South Asians.   But if you speak the language, and self-identify as Kyrgyz, you're Kyrgyz.  (Kyrgyz is a Turkic language.  Everyone is bilingual in Kyrgyz and Russian.)  The folks I met and worked with consistently were friendly, hospitable, and professional.  Kyrgyzstan has all the standard post-Soviet problems, but the people are pleasant and the food is good.  

Last random detail?  The Kyrgyz, like the Mongols, play a game that is basically bocce ball with sheep vertebra. I thought it was a cultural relic that got trotted out for tourists maybe. But no -- walking through a big monument square, there were a bunch of kids and teenagers playing it, and they were obviously deadly serious.

Kyrgyzstan: I really liked it, and would go back any old time.  (And if I do, I won't take seven months to get around to blogging about it.)

From the State Department Archives

And I'm back in the Democratic Republic of Congo for a week.

So  I was doing a little bit of research on US assistance to the Congo.  There's actually a longish history -- we've been sending various forms of aid here for nearly sixty years now -- so it seemed worth at least checking to see whether anyone else had already attempted what we're trying to do.  I didn't get a firm answer on that, but and I did run across some mildly interesting old documents from the 1970s.

A bit of background for those of you who aren't history nerds: from 1962 to 1997, the Congo -- renamed "Zaire" -- was run by a dictator named Mobutu Sese Seko.  Mobutu ran his country into the ground.  At the end of his term, Congo was poorer than it had been when he took power, 35 years earlier.  16 years after he was chased out of power, the country is still suffering the consequences of his misrule; Congo remains one of the poorest countries in the world. 

But whatever else you can say about Mobutu, he was very, very good at getting money and military assistance from the US.  He was a major aid recipient for three decades, give or take.  Why?  Well, mostly because he was very good at gaming our fear of Communism and its spread in Africa. 

Anyway.  These are from "Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-76, Volume E-6, Documents on Africa, 1973-76.  I think, taken together, they tell a story.  Maybe  not interesting to anyone but a fellow history nerd, but what the hey. 

Guinea

So I'm in Guinea this week.

Guinea is a small French-speaking country in West Africa, and it's not someplace I'd ever really planned on going.  But that's the nature of this business, and (sometimes) its charm.  The work is unexpected, too -- I'm contracting to the US Department of Defense this time, as part of a team that's assessing the needs of the civilian Ministry of Defense.  (Turns out the Ministry of Defense has a lot of needs.)

My impressions of Guinea are pretty light, because this has been one of those assignments where I go from airport to hotel and then back and forth from hotel to Ministry, period.  Well, sometimes that happens.  The Embassy is discouraging Americans from wandering around Conakry alone just now.

Guinea is a poor place even by West African standards.  That seems to be mostly for historical reasons.  Way back in 1958, DeGaulle offered independence to the French colonies of West Africa... but on France's terms: monetary union and continuing French influence on their military and political structures.  Most of the new nations -- Senegal, Mali, and the rest of them -- said yes.  Guinea said "Non!"  De Gaulle promptly withdrew all French assistance and colonial bureaucrats and technicians (who, by all accounts, sabotaged a fair amount of Guinea's infrastructure on the way out).  Guinea was thrown on its own devices.  It became sort of the Albania of West Africa -- Communist, isolationist, and fiercely nationalistic.  Africa nerds may be aware of some of the odd bits of subsequent Guinean history (the Portuguese raid from nearby Guinea-Bissau in 1970, with the goal of killing the Guinean President), but we'll skip over a lot of that.  They had a dictator for 26 years; he died; they got another dictator; the USSR collapsed; after 1991 their economy hit the skids; the second dictator abandoned socialism in the middle 1990s and gradually moved towards a mixed economy.

Then in late 2008 the second dictator died.  A military junta immediately took over.  The junta lasted a couple of years but couldn't stay in power, so they held elections.  A guy who had been in opposition since forever -- like, the Nixon administration -- unexpectedly won.  He's been president for a couple of years now.  Guinea still doesn't have a legislature, but they do seem to be well embarked on a fragile, tentative transition to something like democracy.

So, the poor part: Guinea had all the standard socialist mismanagement problems on top of the usual African stuff.  Like most West African countries, it exports just a couple of things (bauxite ore, corundum, a bit of coffee) and imports almost everything.  It's not a member of WAEMU, the West African monetary union, and the Guinean franc is not exactly one of the world's harder currencies.  Only about 10% of the country has electricity, and much of that irregularly.  (The lights go out in our little hotel several times a day.  There's a generator.)

To make things more complicated, Guinea is in one of the world's nastier geopolitical neighborhoods.  Guinea has six neighbors and they all either have major problems, or have had them in the recent past.  Senegal has a nasty separatist movement in its southern provinces, which border Guinea.  Mali, as you probably know if you watch much TV, is having a civil war right now.  Ivory Coast had a civil war the year before last.  (France intervened in that one, too.)  Sierra Leone and Liberia both saw protracted civil wars and horrifying bloodbaths in the last decade.  And little Portuguese-speaking Guinea Bissau is basically a narco-kleptocracy, a corrupt and violent ministate run by gangsters and drug lords.  So, a rough neighborhood. 

Remarkably, despite all these regional problems, Guinea has remained a relative -- I probably should emphasize this -- relative island of peace and stability.  There have been some unpleasant episodes, most notably in 2009 when the military junta responded to proests with mass shootings, lootings, and rapes.  But compared to the last 20 years in Sierra Leone or Liberia, Guinea has on the whole been pretty pacific.

So what's it like?  Well... tropical and hot.  Conakry seems to be a vast sprawl of city without any perceptible downtown.  (There are some big socialist ministry-looking buildings, but around them it's the same sprawl.)  The people seem friendly enough.  Everyone speaks French.  The coffee at breakfast is pretty good for coffee in Africa.  (Many African countries export the good stuff.)  My hotel room doesn't have a toilet seat but one gets used to that.  The hotel is owned by Lebanese; one of my teammates thinks they're likely Hezbollah folks doing a bit of money laundering.  (My teammates are all former military intelligence guys and don't seem much given to macho fantasizing; this particular guy spent several years in Lebanon.  So, maybe.  He didn't seem too worried about it, so I guess I'm not either.) 

I flew down here via Casablanca.  Was recovering from a really nasty head cold (antibiotics, go), so the first day or so was a little blurry.  Wish I had more chances to walk around, or at least look at a clear night sky -- I miss the tropical stars.  But I have seen a lot of cool-looking lizards, and some no-kidding bald-headed vultures hanging out on the beach waiting for garbage, and those neat little West African weaver birds that make the little hanging ball-shaped nests.

I've been spending a lot of time every day with the Guinean military, who are, under the circumstances, pretty professional.  They're surprisingly cool about the fact that they were running the country a few years ago and no longer are.  (Yes, I understand that they may not be telling the foreigner how they really feel.  But for the most part, they just don't seem that nostalgic for the golden years of junta rule.)  They all shave their heads and speak good French.  Most of them seem pretty sharp.  Certainly they've been very patient with me.

I leave late tomorrow night, so if you have any questions about Guinea, ask now.

 

 

 

Friday links from Bethesda, MD

We're having a friend's daughter over for a sleepover.  Two bedrooms, seven people: one kid on the couch, two on the floor.  I told a monkey story (i.e., something from the Journey to the West, which is full of cool stories).  Much sleepover-type poking and giggling, but they seem to be quieting down now.

So, links.  We flew into Dulles; I used to fly regularly into Washington National, but haven't in years.  This fellow explains why that might be a good thing.  (That blog has all sorts of neat posts -- I'm still browsing.)

This mini-series looks really interesting.  Don't know when I'd ever find time to watch it, though. -- Incidentally, I only just discovered that the Bhagavad-Gita is believed to be a later insertion, added at a time when Hindu elites were anxious about Buddhism, and drafted largely as a response to Buddhism and a critique of it.  When I read that, I actually said "of course it is" out loud.  The B-G is basically Buddhism given a half twist, and in a way that largely defangs its critique of Hinduism.

Anyway.  So I was reading a while back about the Millikan oil drop experiments, which established the magnitude of the charge on a single electron back in 1910.  They're pretty awesome: Millikan stared at a bunch of individual microscopic oil droplets through a microscope, tracking them for 60 days, waiting for them to suddenly change their speed or direction.  Millikan later got recruited to help found Cal Tech by a guy named George Ellerby Hale, who is now pretty much entirely forgotten, but who was one of the pivotal figures of early 20th century American science.  (In part because he helped create Cal Tech.  A fair number of the scientists who'd build the atom bomb studied in the house that Hale built.)  One biographer calls him "the patron saint of big science (and corporatized science) in America."  Hale was a brilliant man who unfortunately also suffered from some form of mental illness, possibly manic-depression; in between steering American science towards greatness and managing the first generation of great US astronomers, he heard voices, had endless sleepless nights, and grappled with multiple nervous breakdowns and collapses.  (No, there's no moral to this story.  The poor son-of-a-gun seems to have been just bipolar, and horribly overworked.)

Speaking of astronomy, I only recently became aware of the existence of the South Atlantic Anomaly.  It's no joke -- there are satellites that can't pass through that volume, because it's too dangerous.  No effect at the surface of the Earth, but still: interesting.  Also speaking of astronomy, this is one of the better anti-Shuttle rants.  (Except it's hardly even a rant.  Yes, the Shuttle really was that bad.)

What else... I also only recently became aware of the randomized response trick, though apparently it's been around for a while.  Yes, the dice-rolling aspect appeals to my inner gamer nerd.

Pine nut mouth.

Okay, this was kind of a nerdy collection.  I'll try to do better next time.

 

Tangle, Part 2

Palestine's legal system is a fine mess.

On the West Bank, the laws are a mixture of Jordanian, British, and a few statutes going all the way back to Ottoman times.  Over in Gaza, it's similar, but some of the laws are different (because Gaza was never under Jordanian administration).

There are huge holes in the legal system.  To give one example, Palestine completely lacks a bankruptcy law.  A company goes bankrupt: who gets its assets?  Owners, managers, employees?  The bank it owes money to?  Creditors?  The tax authorities?  Nobody knows. And this is no small thing; banks, for instance, hate lending money when they suspect the owner might be able to repudiate the debt through bankruptcy, even if the bank has taken the precaution of securing a mortgage or other collateral.

Then there are laws that combine with other laws to give ludicrous results.  There's a provision in the labor code that gives severance pay: one month for every year you've worked for that employer.  But then there's another law that defines "severance" so broadly that it even includes firing for incompetence or theft.  Caught your accountant stealing?  You can fire him, but you still have to give him that severance pay.  (Employers get around this by hiring people for eleven months, firing them, and then hiring them again.)

There's all sorts of stuff like this.  It doesn't contribute to an attractive investment environment.

Palestine had exactly one decade to sort this out: from 1996, when the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) first convened, to 2006, when the PLC shattered under the Hamas-Fatah conflict.  Unfortunately, fixing the legal system was not a high priority.  They did get some stuff done -- passed a decent company law, amended the civil code -- but they were just coming to grips with the problem in the early years of this decade.  Then they had elections and, boom.

-- The election thing deserves a little expansion.  See, in 2006 there hadn't been legislative elections for years, and they were overdue.  By this time Hamas -- the Islamist party that's more hardline against Israel -- had become pretty powerful, especially over in Gaza.  Fatah -- the very corrupt ruling party that had dominated Palestinian politics since forever -- had put off holding elections because it was afraid Hamas would do well, but by 2006 the pressure was becoming irresistable, not only from inside Palestine but from without.  The United States, in particular, was still dreaming of an "Arab Spring" in which democracy would sweep across the Middle East.  So the Bush administration was pushing pretty hard for elections.

Shortly before the elections -- N.B., I am simplifying the hell out of a complicated story; bear with me -- shortly before the elections, Israel announced that it wouldn't allow voting in East Jerusalem, because it considered Hamas a terrorist organization and didn't accept its legitimacy.  Fatah seized on this as an excuse for cancelling the whole election.  In a beautiful moment of perfect harmony, Israel and the Palestinian government (still run by Fatah) mutually agreed that, alas, there could be no elections just now...

...and the Bush administration stepped in and insisted, no, there had to be elections.  The Palestinians needed a legitimate government to negotiate peace with Israel!  So the US twisted arms, and the elections went forward...

...and Hamas won, with a clear plurality of votes and a thumping majority in the Palestinian Legislative Council.

Oops.

The Line of Rail

I'm back from Zambia.

Got back the day before Thanksgiving.  I've almost entirely lost the knack of sleeping on airplanes, so long flights -- and Johannesburg-Frankfurt is over ten hours -- now turn into all-nighters.  The plane wasn't full, but there was a very annoying young woman who refused to move to a nearby seat ("But I like this seat") so I was blocked from stretching out.  So, finished a book on the barbarian migrations of late antiquity and the early medieval period; fifty pages of Gardner on Chaucer; a nature documentary; a few minutes of "Life on Mars" (the American version; didn't impress); and the first "Best of the Who" album. 

-- The barbarian book was interesting.  It was Peter Heather's Empires and Barbarians, and I have a number of bones to pick with it that are beyond the scope of a blog post.  (Fewer pots, more genes and pollen counts, and cut 75% of the academic wrangling.)  But it made the intriguing and plausible point that a lot of ethnogenesis in late classical Europe took place against a background of intense violence.  We think of Huns and Goths and Franks and whatnot as solid masses, neat black arrows moving across Europe's landscape to pierce the frontiers of Rome.  But in fact most of these were probably groups-of-groups, accumulated from smaller warbands hammered together under the stress of invasion and war.  Smaller groups that didn't agglomerate were at a military disadvantage; they disappeared, or are remembered only by specialist historians.

A Fireman in Africa

I'm back from a couple of days in the north of the country, about which more anon. 

First I want to talk about a literary form I've just recently discovered: the naive autobiography of the former white colonist in Zambia.  ("Naive" here just means an autobiography by someone who's not a professional writer.)  I posted last week that there's not a lot of literature about the colonial experience in Zambia.  And that's true -- while there are plenty of novels about white colonists in Kenya, Rhodesia or South Africa, I haven't found a single one yet about Zambia.  But there are a fair number of first-hand accounts, and some of them are pretty good.

The most interesting so far is a book called "WIth Sword and Chain", by the last white Mayor of Lusaka.  (The title is a pun, and less alarming than it sounds.)  That deserves another post, if time allows.

A very close second is an unpublished book, written as a series of articles online, called "A Fireman in Africa".  It's the story of the guy who used to be the fireman at Lusaka Airport.  And it's really interesting.

Raymond Critchell, born 1927, went into the British Navy just in time for the end of World War Two.  Got  out a couple of years later, and answere an advertisement to work in Rhodesia.  He came to then-Northern-Rhodesia in the early 1950s; he'd live there through independence, not leaving until 1974.

You cannot have  -- I did not know this! -- an airport that receives regular international commercial flights, without having an airport fire service.  Mr. Critchell expands:

A modern history of Zambia

There doesn't seem to be one. 

There are some older books from the 1970s and '80s, and a "Political History of Zambia" published this decade.  But that's about it.  A general history of the country since independence, published in the last 20 years?  Doesn't seem to exist.

So there's a niche for some aspiring young academic.  Meanwhile, digging around at the local bookstore and the museum and online has turned up some interesting nuggets.

-- Zambia was central to a dispute between Britain and Portugal in 1890.  The Portuguese wanted to claim it to connect their colonies in Angola and Mozambique.  AFAICT, they had a decent claim.  But the British completely curb-stomped them, threatening to take away Mozambique if Portugal didn't retreat and withdraw their claim.  Which they did, albeit with considerable and lingering resentment.

-- That said, Zambia remained a complete and utter backwater until the 1920s, when copper was discovered.  It was the distant northern frontier of the British Empire in South Africa.  There was one rail line, a handful of white farms, and absolutely nothing of interest.  All of that changed when the copper -- some of the world's richest deposits -- was found.  By WWII Zambia ("Northern Rhodesia") had 30,000 white settlers and the region's economy had been reconfigured around providing cheap labor for the mines.

-- For a decade, 1953-63, Zambia was part of the short-lived Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, a state now completely forgotten except by historians and a dwindling handful of cranky white ex-settlers.  (I'm still at a loss as to what the point of this entity was, but maybe more reading will make it clear.)

-- Zambia pretty quickly developed a postwar nationalist / independence movement, which seems to have split early on between "independence for Zambia" and "independence for all white-dominated South Africa" factions -- basically UNIP (which would eventually rule Zambia) and the more well-known African National Congress. 

The independence struggle was, in the cold light of history, rather less violent and bloody than it could have been. The death toll seems to have been in the hundreds rather than the thousands, which was fairly light compared to some of Zambia's neighbors (Mozambique, Angola, Rhodesia / Zimbabwe). 

That said, there were some gruesome incidents.   In the Lusaka museum, I came across a fading photograph of Mrs. Lillian Burton.  She and her two small daughters were pulled out of a car and horribly killed in 1960.  The museum article made it sound like a wrong-place-wrong-time kind of a thing, but this interview suggests that it was deliberate murder on the part of UNIP  ("Our final decision was to kill someone who was well-known in the streets of London and there could not have been any better figure than Ms Lillian Burton who was very popular in Zambia.")

-- The independence movement got nicknamed the "chachacha", after the dance -- "we'll do the steps, and force the imperialists to follow".  The late colonial years are still sometimes called the chachacha period, and there's a Chachacha Road here in Lusaka.

The chachacha period is familiar, and kind of depressing.  It wasn't Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, but the center did not hold, and in the end the country was handed over to a bunch of guys who didn't really know what they were doing.  A common enough story, but still.

Reading the history, many of the black nationalists and most of the white leadership come across as pretty despicable.  That said, they could have done considerably worse than Kaunda (universally remembered as "KK").  He trashed the economy and allowed himself to be surrounded by cronies and flatterers, but he wasn't mad or genocidal, he didn't impose a brutal police state, and (with prodding from Jimmy Carter) he did eventually step down.  The bar for post-independence African leaders is not that high, but Kaunda clears it with a little space.

-- At independence, there was one of those crazy religious movements.  It was anti authority -- all authority, colonial and post-colonial alike.  Led by a female seer, Alice Lenshina.  Melded Christian and animist elements, immunity to bullets, the works.  Ended badly.

-- After independence, Zambia embarked on a policy of supporting black independence movements all across southern Africa.  This did not meet with approval from its white-dominated neighbors.  The Rhodesians staged a number of border incursions, and the South Africans initiated "Operation Plathond" to create and support a fairly insane and pointlessly destructive guerrilla movement in the country's northwest. 

-- Kaunda wanted the Bomb, which is why Zambia was one of a handful of countries to vote against the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in the UN back in the late 60s.  Why?  Because he knew South Africa had it.  (How?  Not clear, but my guess would be he made the various independence movements he hosted pay their rent with, among other things, intel.)  It's not clear if he seriously thought the South Africans would nuke Lusaka, but presumably he thought a nuclear deterrent would make them think twice about it.

-- And finally, Zambia may hold a record of some sort: four serious coup attempts (1980, '88, '90 and '97) without a single success.

 

White Zambia

So Zambia was originally supposed to be a white settler colony.

That didn't work out.  Zambia -- northern Rhodesia, as it was then -- was too far away from the Imperial centers of expansion, too backwards, too remote.  There just weren't enough white settlers.  By independence, in a country of around 3 million, there were maybe 75,000 whites: simply not enough to rule.  So Southern Rhodesia (modern Zimbabwe) cut the north free and embarked upon its own strange 15-year experiment in minority government. 

Over the next 45 years, the white population steadily declined.  Today there are maybe 10,000 or 15,000 (it's quite hard to get good numbers). 

But they still punch above their weight. 

Zambia was a mining colony, and most of the whites were involved with the mining industry. So it didn't have as many big white-owned farms, ranches and plantations as Rhodesia / Zimbabwe to the south.  We're talking 1% of the population owning 10% or 15% of the land, as opposed to 3% of the population owning half the land.  Ironically, this meant that the big white farms that did exist, were able to survive much better.  Because they didn't utterly dominate the landscape, there wasn't an overwhelming need to break them up or give them back to black ownership.  So, while big white-owned farms have almost disappeared from Zimbabwe, there are still a bunch of them here in Zambia.  A lot -- maybe a majority; I'm not sure yet -- of the big commercial farms here are still in the hands of White Zambians.  They're second, third, fourth generation, the children and grandchildren of the farmers who hung on after independence nearly 50 years ago. 

-- One oddity: while there's plenty of lore and literature about the white settlers in Rhodesia and Kenya, white Zambia seems to have kept a very, very low profile.  Okay, there aren't a lot of them, and Zambia's fairly obscure.  But it's an English-speaking country.  And it's not like there are a lot of African countries where the descendants of white settlers are still playing an important role in the economy.  (South Africa, Kenya, Zimbabwe, umm, maybe Namibia?)  So you'd think they'd be discussed more.  Nope.  They seem to keep to themselves, and as far as I can tell nobody has written any best-selling novels about them.

Banks and bankers tomorrow.

 

 

The short-lived empires

I'm getting interested in these as a category.

Examples: the Japanese in Micronesia (1915-1945); the Germans in Africa (1880s -- WWI); the Italians in Libya (1912-1942).

Disqualified: various occupations during and around the World Wars that were never generally recognized.  So, for instance, Japan was running Manchuria 1931-45, and Germany had Poland 1939-44, but those were extralegal occupations so I'm leaving them out.

Also disqualified: when one sort of colonial empire segues into another one under the same colonial master.  So, the Belgian Free State (1884-1908) just turned into the Belgian Congo, and various African colonies went from being League of Nations Mandates to United Nations Trust Territories without much change.

So why are these interesting?

The Tanzania-Uganda War of 1979

Africa has had a lot of wars. 

But not too many classic, old-fashioned inter-state wars.  In fifty years since independence, I can only think of five or six. So you'd think the T-U war would have attracted some interest.  Nope.  Minor news at the time, almost completely forgotten today.

Except here in Tanzania, of course.  There are statues and monuments, people of a certain age remember it vividly, and even young people know that "he got rid of Idi Amin" is to be put on the credit side of Julius Nyerere's account balance.

Wikipedia has a pretty good summary of the war. Some more details can be found starting here.  Article for those with JSTOR access here.  I'd add a few things:

Nyerere

So, Julius Nyerere.

He's been out of power since the late 1980s and dead for over a decade, but he's still very much present.  His face is on the currency, coins and bills.  There are pictures of him all over the place -- in government offices, private businesses, shops.  I wouldn't call it a cult of personality -- quite -- but he's still a regular topic of conversation, and everybody has an opinion about him.

I'm just starting to come to grips with the Nyerere thing.  My very tentative take is that the closest comparison is to Ataturk in Turkey.  He's the Father Of The Country, the greatest Tanzanian ever, a potent symbol of national unity and pride.  And he's going to dominate political discourse in Tanzania for a long time to come.

Some very preliminary thoughts on his legacy:

Miscellaneous Belgian Congo stuff

Odds and ends.

There needs to be a verb for noodling around on some particular topic online.  Rambling from link to link, and such?  "Googling" is just part of it.

Anyway.  I knew that, during WWII, the Belgian Congo stayed loyal to the Allies.  (This in contrast to the French African colonies, which split between Vichy and DeGaulle.)  What I did not know was that in 1941 the Congo mobilized a force of several thousand men -- native troops, native "bearers", and a handful of white officers -- marched north into the Sudan, and then marched east to invade Ethiopia. 

Ethiopia, of course, had been conquered by Mussolini a few years earlier -- poison gas and machine guns, and such -- and so was an Axis property, full of Italians.  Still, it was a pretty damn bold move on the part of the Belgians: a 2,000+ kilometer march through jungle, savannah and mountains, with an assault against a numerically superior and well entrenched foe at the end. 

There's not much about this online, but here's a .pdf of a 1942 pamphlet about it, or here's the same information as a web page.

Home for Christmas, and some thoughts on Congolese history

I was starting to wonder, there.

There were absolutely no flights to Frankfurt.  So in the end I caught one to Hanover, a few hundred km further north.  Caught the last southbound train and arrived in Fulda just before midnight, in time to stand shivering in the falling snow, a long way from the equator.  I didn't much care, honestly.  I was neither in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, nor Charles DeGaulle Airport either.

Speaking of which, I have a tentative idea on why the Congo got so very screwed up.  These are from a conversation with Carlos, who is very good at helping me clarify my own thoughts.

Africa's 50th

June 30, 2010 will mark the 50th anniversary of Congolese independence.

Congo won't be alone.  So far, only two sub-Saharan African countries have had 50th anniversaries -- Ghana and Guinea, which got their independence in 1958 and 1959.  But 1960 was the great boom year for decolonization.  So over the next 12 months there will be 50th independence ceremonies in Cameroon, Togo, Mali, Senegal, Madagascar, both Congos, Somalia, Benin, Niger, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Chad, Central African Republic, Gabon, Chad and Mauretania.  That's seventeen countries with almost half a billion people.

If I were writing for the Economist, or some such, I'd spend a couple of paragraphs on a beard-stroking retrospective about the high hopes of independence, and how they've been dashed by misgovernment and corruption and war, and how today a few glimmers of hope light the horizon, and blah blah like that.  But just thinking about that is boring, no?  So here's a thing: these celebrations look to be a really huge deal.  Here in the Congo, people are already talking about it.  In addition to being an immense national party, the government also views June 30 as a deadline by which it wants to accomplish various things.

Well, national anniversaries don't generally accomplish much except to leave behind a quickly dated monument or two.  Still, a continent-wide series of massive celebrations stretching over a year is a pretty cool thing by itself, no?

The mouth of the Congo

The geography of the Congo is kinda strange.

Okay, the geography of most African countries is strange.  As someone or other said, Europe divided the region in a manner both completely self-serving and unbelievably haphazard, like monkeys at a salad bar.  But Congo -- as usual -- is an extreme case.  It might make sense to have a country that consisted of the Congo River basin.  But Congo consists of about 3/4 of the Congo basin, plus a bunch of other odds and ends tacked on around the edges.  Much of the north bank of the river is owned by Congo-Brazzaville (which is another country entirely).  The northern and eastern fringes of the country aren't part of the Congo Basin --- they're the Great Lakes region, part of east rather than central Africa.  And there's that weird long bulge into Zambia, which deserves a post of its own.

One of the obvious odd bits is at the mouth of the river.  If you look closely at a map of the Congo, you'll notice that although it's immense -- "as big as the United States east of the Mississippi" is the example that's always used -- it just barely kisses the Atlantic Ocean: Congo has only only about 25 miles (40 km) of coastline.

Look even more closely, and you'll notice that the Congo coastline snips off a piece of Angola.  Angola is a large country, and most of it is to the south of the Congo, but a little piece about the size of Rhode Island (or, if you're European, Montenegro) is north of the Congo's Atlantic coast.  The reason for this is complicated, and involves a little history.

The fallen Falcons

Sixty-five years ago last week, an American bomber crashed just down the road from here.

The bomber was a Boeing B-17G Flying Fortress based out of England.  It had a crew of nine, all of whom survived the crash.  It hit between the villages of Heufurt (which is about 2km from here) and Nordheim (which is about 5 km further down the Streu).

In the last post, I noted that the valley of the Streu had very little military significance.  This was a good thing for the crew, because -- other than sending their sons away, and rationing and the like -- the war had not much touched this region.  No bombs had fallen on Nordheim or Heufurt or Fladungen.  So the bomber crew were not killed on the spot by enraged civilians with clubs and pitchforks -- which was a thing that happened, some places, when a bomber went down too close to the people it had been bombing.

We are living on Planet Onion

I mean...

"U.S. President wins Nobel Peace Prize for not being George Bush; Grateful world thanks Obama for relative intelligence and sanity."

We're on page 9 of Our Dumb Century, volume 2.

Was raking

when the bells struck eleven.

Claudia called to me that I should run down to the city hall for the ceremony.  Fladungen's city hall is just a stroll around the corner -- most of Fladungen is a stroll around the corner -- so I did.

Nothing.  Some towns do a thing, some don't.  Ostheim (Claude's home town) makes a big deal of November 11, but apparently Fladungen doesn't.  I went into the city hall to get the yellow bags for recycling plastic, and then I stopped at the bakery for some bread and some apple tarts, and then I went home and went back to raking the yard.

Here's a thing: November 11 is also "Faschingsbeginn" -- the start of the long winter carnival season.  And Germans celebrate this by dressing up in silly costumes and building floats and all that.  But it's also a day of mourning, the day World War One ended.  It doesn't seem to have the emotional resonance that Veterans Day does in the US, or Armistice Day in Britain, but it's recognized.  I'm not sure how the Germans deal with having these two completely different things on one day.  Solemn ceremonies in the morning, wacky costumes after lunch?

The good old days, the downside

So I was looking for that Garry Wills book on John Wayne. (Long story.) I didn't find it. I found this instead:

Oh yes. A Garry Wills book about the impending RACE WAR. Written in 1967, when he was 33. You have to see the back cover:

Best dollar I ever spent

  I'm getting the full 8 1/2" by 15 1/2" version framed.

Reading off the text in my best Hochstetter while walking with a friend through Park Slope: one of life's simple pleasures. You WILL be entertained by a BAND CONCERT.

(More information about the Yorkville Casino here.)

Leyendo los archivos en la madre patria

I’ll try to keep up the slack while Doug’s in Germany this holiday season.  This one goes out to Carlos’s paternal grandparents. 

The Republic of the Philippines is unique in Asia in how well it’s assimilated it’s Chinese population.   Chinese-Filipinos have served their country in every position from private to President of the Republic, and nobody seriously questions their Filipino-ness.  As a result, for all their communal solidarity Chinese-Filipinos consider themselves Filipino first, Chinese-Filipino a rather distant second, and Chinese-Chinese not at all.  (I have a sneaking suspiscion that future Chinese governments will find themselves unpleasantly surprised by that fact.)  This didn’t happen in Burma or Thailand or Vietnam or Malaysia or Indonesia. 

So why did it happen in the Philippines, and what does any of this have to do with the madre patria? 

Amma and I were in Sevilla because I was looking for tax and budget data on the Spanish Philippines.  The first place to look for that is the Archivo de Indias.  You can see the main building behind the beautiful woman in the above photo.  The reading room is across the street behind the main building:  look for the sand-colored edifice to the right of this group of typical Sevillano pedestrians.

In 1864, Madrid decided to modernize the Philippines’ tax system.  Since specific taxes laid on Chinese generated about 7 percent of the islands’ revenue, the Crown commissioned some fascinating reports before deciding on the specifics of the reform.  Extracts below the fold:

Nostalgia, or lack thereof, Part 3

So I'm here reading the Congressional debates about the annexation of the Philippines.  Man, Senator Hoar really ripped Senator Beveridge a new one.  "Have you read the Declaration of Independence, sir?  Allow me to remind you."  And Carlos will be proud that his people's representative, Senator John Spooner, proceeded to call Beveridge's economic justifications of American rule "base and sordid." 

But that's not why I'm here.  I'm here to ask a question that I've asked before, but who's answer I've forgotten:

WTF happened to baseball in the Philippines?  It's gone, disappeared, nada, se fué, totally driven out by ... basketball.  How and why did that happen???

Nostalgia, Part 2

By pure coincidence, I just discovered that Dan Drezner had something to say on the subject of baseball nostalgia.

First, it seems as though my comportment, trained in the bleachers of Yankee Stadium, has very long roots in baseball.  I never realized that I was such a traditionalist. 

Second, Conan.

Nostalgia

As a fan of the New England Patriots and the Green Bay Packers, I have to say that this is shaping up to be a most exciting football season.  I've been a New England fan ever since I wrote the job talk that got me my current employment while watching them win the Superbowl.  And I've been a Green Bay fan since becoming friends with Carlos. 

But my football loyalties are shallow.  I'm a baseball man, a fan of the once and future dreaded (but always hated) New York Yankees.

I follow them around.  That's me at Fenway.  I had doffed my hat at the moment that photo was taken, but look at the two guys standing below my right arm.  Yankees hats.  And look at the fellow seated in front of them.  A Derek Jeter jersey.  We are there, in the bleachers of Fenway.  The opposite would not occur in Yankee Stadium, not unless the Red Sox fan in question wanted humiliation.  Or possibly violence.

The Bleacher Creatures of the Bronx are the fellows who learned to chant obscene comments about the sexuality of Dice-K's mother in Japanese.  Two senior professors once took me to a Red Sox game against Toronto.  They weren't surprised, exactly, at my comportment. 

In some ways, Boston and New York are inverses.  In NYC, nobody could care less if you wear Red Sox paraphenalia.  In fact, Manny Ramírez managed to blow a shot at turning most of Washington Heights and a big chunk of the Bronx into part of Red Sox Nation.  (Guess how he blew it.  Right.)  In Boston, though, people feel free to yell at me in the street for wearing a Yankees hat. (And so I mostly don't, except around Harvard Square.)  On the other hand, Yankees fans do fine inside Fenway, even in the bleachers ... and the reverse ain't true in the Bronx.  (I wouldn't risk it on the D-train after a game neither, to be honest.)    

So why am I a baseball fan?  Three reasons.  (1) I actually played it back in the day.  Sure, now I have trouble throwing a ball ninety feet, but I played the real thing, unlike football.  I think I played tackle football maybe, like, twice in my life, and even then it was way way watered-down because we used neither pads nor helmets and I am still here to talk about it.  (2) I understand baseball.  People who don't understand baseball won't admit this, but the game is actually simpler than football.  And (3) ... history.  Baseball's just got hella more history than football. 

Which brings me to nostalgia.  I rarely give Brink Lindsay props.  After all, he has no idea what really caused the Great Compression, mistakenly believes that the Democratic Party lost white male votes outside the South during the 1960s and 1970s, and claims that the Great Society contributed to "an explosion of crime, urban riots, family breakdown, and welfare dependency."  But he did say one very very clever thing about nostalgia for the 1950s, when baseball ruled supreme, and today's political debates:

"Republicans want to go home to the United States of the 1950s, while Democrats want to work there."

True or false?

The Sumner Welles anecdote

There's nothing like an old scandal. From the prologue of Benjamin Welles's biography of his father, Sumner Welles: FDR's Global Strategist:

On a sweltering September afternoon in 1940, Sumner Welles, Franklin D. Roosevelt's Under Secretary of State and lifelong friend, boarded the presidential train at Washington's Union Station. Tall, imposing and immaculately dressed, Welles was then at the peak of a brilliant career. A veteran diplomat and linguist, he had conceived and carried out for FDR, among other responsibilities, the Good Neighbor policy—arguably the high-water mark of U.S.-Latin American relations since the founding of the republic.

Age forty-eight—ten years younger than FDR—he, too, had attended Groton and Harvard. The Welles and Roosevelt families had long been close, and, as a twelve-year-old, Welles had served as a page at Franklin's wedding to Eleanor. Later FDR had sponsored his entry into the diplomatic service, had followed his career closely and, after taking office in 1932, had named Welles Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America. Ever since, FDR had come to rely on Welles's quick mind, tireless energy and compendious knowledge of foreign affairs. In 1940 many thought Welles the likely successor to Cordell Hull, FDR's elderly and chronically ill Secretary of State.

Few, however—and least of all Welles—would have suspected that the next thirty-six hours would start unraveling his career and generate a scandal that Roosevelt would struggle to suppress for the next three years.

A Brief History of the First Armenian Republic (2)

Part 1 can be found here.

We were up to the summer of 1919, but let's backtrack a little and look at how the Republic evolved.

First off, it wasn't very big.  According to the Treaty of Batum, forced on Armenia by the Turks in May 1918, Armenia was a tiny state consisting basically of Yerevan, the holy city of Echmiadzin, and some rocky land around Lake Sevan.  It was about 2/3 the size of modern Armenia (which isn't that big anyhow).  The Turks took everything west of the Araxes River -- including Mount Ararat, which had been Armenian since forever, and the fertile plain around Kars -- snipped off the rail line that ran north towards Russia, and claimed Armenia's only industrial region (around Alexandropol, modern Gyumri).

Second, it was in a hell of a mess.  In very round numbers, Armenia in 1918 had about 700,000 people... 300,000 native Armenians, 100,000 non-Armenians (Azeris, Kurds, some Russians and Greeks), and 300,000 refugees from the genocide.  Starving, penniless refugees were everywhere.  Since Armenia had no large towns except Yerevan, the countryside was full of beggars.

And corpses.  The Spanish influenza swept through in 1918, as it did everywhere else.  Then a major typhus epidemic followed it... typhus, spread by lice, moved with particular ease among the ragged, ill-clothed refugees. Meanwhile the winter of 1918-19 was one of the coldest on record.  The Turks closed the borders so no trade went out (not that there was anything to trade) and no outside aid got in. 

So in the first year of the Republic's existence, between 120,000 and 150,000 of its people -- roughly 20% of the population -- died.

Third, there were still a lot of Armenians outside the Republic's borders.  Putting aside the distant populations of the Diaspora, there were plenty of Armenians in the southern districts of Nakhichevan, Zangezur, and Karabakh; tens of thousands in Tblisi and Baku (even after the pogrom); and some number still hanging on in the debatable lands across the Araxes, in what's now Turkey.  This complicated the Republic's foreign policy considerably.

A Brief History of the First Armenian Republic (1)

History is complicated.  But history in the Caucasus?  Master class time.

Armenian history is so goddamn complicated that only now, after almost two years in the country, am I starting to get a handle on it.  This is partly because there aren't a lot of good sources in English; partly because a lot of what there is, is a chapter in someone else's history book; partly because the few Armenian histories in English tend to be very, um, Armenian; but mostly because it's just complicated.

Here's a short history of the First Armenian Republic (1918-1921).  I am not making any of this up.

Tragedy, farce, enemy action... and every tenth one has super powers.

From David Gilmour's The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj:

In 1870 [Indian Civil Service] salaries were slightly lower than they had been forty years earlier although the cost of living had risen over the same period. More serious for Civilians, however, was the subsequent depreciation of the currency. In The Importance of Being Earnest Miss Prism instructs her pupil Cecily Cardew not to read a chapter on the fall of the rupee because the subject is too sensational and melodramatic for a young girl. It was certainly an undesirable sensation for men who earned a salary in rupees but spent much of it in sterling.

Day 6: Just do it.

A Soviet poster a day. Madison Avenue didn't catch up until the 1980s. Peculiar.

Day 3: The Kräusening

Jonathan Meades on Stalinist architecture. (H/t to the New York City Math Teacher.)

Crusaders

So after Jerash we went to Ajloun.

Ajloun is a Crusader castle, except not built by Crusaders. It was built by Saladin as a counter to the Crusaders. It let him control the upper Jordan valley and keep an overland route from Egypt up to Damascus.

If you walk around the castle, you can sort of see that it's an Arab copy of a standard medieval European castle. Oh, it's got all the standard castle stuff -- moat, gatehouse, arrowslits, murder holes for pouring boiling oil. But the proportions are subtly off. The stonework doesn't seem quite as fine. It's a knockoff.

Crusaders

So after Jerash we went to Ajloun. Ajloun is a Crusader castle, except not built by Crusaders. It was built by Saladin as a counter to the Crusaders. It let him control the upper Jordan valley and keep an overland route from Egypt up to Damascus. If you walk around the castle, you can sort of see that it's an Arab copy of a standard medieval European castle. Oh, it's got all the standard castle stuff -- moat, gatehouse, arrowslits, murder holes for pouring boiling oil. But the proportions are subtly off. The stonework doesn't seem quite as fine. It's a knockoff.

Jerash

Did the tourist thing a little this weekend: went to Jerash.

Jerash was once Gerasa, a minor Roman city. It survived into Byzantine and early Ummayad times, then gradually dwindled away. By the 1800s there was not even a village there.

Most Roman ruins got destroyed by people coming to find cheap stone already cut. That didn't happen to Gerasa. Part of the reason is that stone is cheap around here -- it's a whole plateau of soft limestone. Another seems to be that the region around Gerasa got largely depopulated... not sure why.

But anyway, the result was that the ruins of a good-sized Roman town survived into modern times. Gerasa isn't as well preserved as Pompeii, but it's bigger -- around 100 hectares. You could walk around it all day.

(Except that you'd die from heat stroke, of course. I scrambled over rocks and peered at columns for an hour, and I got pretty toasted.)

Some random notes.

Jerash

Did the tourist thing a little this weekend: went to Jerash. Jerash was once Gerasa, a minor Roman city. It survived into Byzantine and early Ummayad times, then gradually dwindled away. By the 1800s there was not even a village there. Most Roman ruins got destroyed by people coming to find cheap stone already cut. That didn't happen to Gerasa. Part of the reason is that stone is cheap around here -- it's a whole plateau of soft limestone. Another seems to be that the region around Gerasa got largely depopulated... not sure why. But anyway, the result was that the ruins of a good-sized Roman town survived into modern times. Gerasa isn't as well preserved as Pompeii, but it's bigger -- around 100 hectares. You could walk around it all day. (Except that you'd die from heat stroke, of course. I scrambled over rocks and peered at columns for an hour, and I got pretty toasted.) Some random notes.

From Isfahan to Moscow, part Five

Continuing the story of the first great embassy from Persia to the West.

During the two months following we now travelled in our galleys up the Volga, but every ten days we disembarked and went ashore to some village, for all along the river bank there are small settlements with houses that are built of wood. At each stopping place we changed some of our rowers, taking on fresh men...

The hills which the Volga has on either side of its banks are very high, and are populated by settlements. We saw on these hills numerous bears, lions, and tigers, also martens of many species.

That sentence stopped me cold. Lions and tigers?

From Isfahan to Moscow, part Five

Continuing the story of the first great embassy from Persia to the West.

During the two months following we now travelled in our galleys up the Volga, but every ten days we disembarked and went ashore to some village, for all along the river bank there are small settlements with houses that are built of wood. At each stopping place we changed some of our rowers, taking on fresh men... The hills which the Volga has on either side of its banks are very high, and are populated by settlements. We saw on these hills numerous bears, lions, and tigers, also martens of many species.

That sentence stopped me cold. Lions and tigers?

From Isfahan to Moscow, part Four

Continuing the story of Persia's first great embassy to the West.

The embassy has crossed the Caspian Sea and arrived at the mouths of the Volga. To the north lies the city of Astrakhan, once the capital of a Muslim Khanate, now a frontier city of the expanding power of Russia.

From Isfahan to Moscow, part Four

Continuing the story of Persia's first great embassy to the West. The embassy has crossed the Caspian Sea and arrived at the mouths of the Volga. To the north lies the city of Astrakhan, once the capital of a Muslim Khanate, now a frontier city of the expanding power of Russia.

From Isfahan to Moscow, Part 3

Continuing the story of Persia's first great embassy to the West.

As fine weather had set in we again put to sea, in two days retraced the way already gone, and in another day, proceeding forward, reached a port where there were indeed no houses, but a settlement of folk of divers tribes. These men were all living, as is the fashion we see among the nomad Moors of Morocco, in the midst of their flocks and camels; they are of the Tartar nation, and the country goes by the name of the Land of the Great Tamerlane of Tartary; though, in fact, it is subject to the King of Persia.

From Isfahan to Moscow, Part 3

Continuing the story of Persia's first great embassy to the West.

As fine weather had set in we again put to sea, in two days retraced the way already gone, and in another day, proceeding forward, reached a port where there were indeed no houses, but a settlement of folk of divers tribes. These men were all living, as is the fashion we see among the nomad Moors of Morocco, in the midst of their flocks and camels; they are of the Tartar nation, and the country goes by the name of the Land of the Great Tamerlane of Tartary; though, in fact, it is subject to the King of Persia.

China's dream of EMPIRE! -- part Deux

Completing the story of the mysterious map of China.

Joseph Eros, friend of this blog and occasional houseguest, is now a law student at a large state university in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This gives him access to libraries! So, Joe did some research. All on his own time, bless him, because he cares.

So is the map real or not?

China's dream of EMPIRE! -- part Deux

Completing the story of the mysterious map of China. Joseph Eros, friend of this blog and occasional houseguest, is now a law student at a large state university in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This gives him access to libraries! So, Joe did some research. All on his own time, bless him, because he cares. So is the map real or not?

From Isfahan to Moscow, Part 2

Continuing the story of the Great Persian Embassy to the West.

So far, the charismatic English adventurer John Shirley has convinced the Shah to send an embassy to Christian Europe. They plan to visit eight western monarchs: the Pope, the Holy Roman Emperor, the Seignory of Venice, and the kings of Poland, England, France, Scotland and Spain. But first they have to go north, into Russia...

From Isfahan to Moscow, Part 2

Continuing the story of the Great Persian Embassy to the West. So far, the charismatic English adventurer John Shirley has convinced the Shah to send an embassy to Christian Europe. They plan to visit eight western monarchs: the Pope, the Holy Roman Emperor, the Seignory of Venice, and the kings of Poland, England, France, Scotland and Spain. But first they have to go north, into Russia...

The Hospital Ship Armenia

The worst maritime disaster of all time?

Armenia.

Well, maybe. First, a shout-out to the new Armenia Blog , which is just full of interesting tidbits, and from which this story comes.

Next, the disaster. The Armenia was a Soviet passenger ship. It was built in 1928, and had a capacity of 4,700 tons. In August 1941, the Soviet Navy converted it to a hospital ship.

The Hospital Ship Armenia

The worst maritime disaster of all time? Armenia. Well, maybe. First, a shout-out to the new Armenia Blog , which is just full of interesting tidbits, and from which this story comes. Next, the disaster. The Armenia was a Soviet passenger ship. It was built in 1928, and had a capacity of 4,700 tons. In August 1941, the Soviet Navy converted it to a hospital ship.

Balikbayan interlude 1

While Doug and Claudia prepare for their move from the sunny glades of Bucharest to the snowy slopes of Yerevan, I thought I might distract and appall HDTD's regular readership with stories of someplace completely different. Like Romania, the Philippines is a Latin country. Over twenty-seven hundred years ago, a pair of twins living in a shack on top of a hill in peninsular central Europe had a vision of the future: Marcello Mastroianni walking down the street badly hungover, every hair on his head perfect. That works! they said. And the rest, as they say, was history. But all such dreams have their dark side. Twenty-six hundred years and three or four waves of Latin expansion and contraction later, the following horrible events occurred, which I recount for the edification of Brett Bellmore: