Extra Credits
Published on 22 Sep 2018After Raden Vijaya passed away, the crown passed on to his son Jayanagara — along with his reputation to create scandal and vice. Gajah Mada, whose name literally meant “elephant general” stepped up to make sure that the kingdom would run smoothly — maybe a little too smoothly.
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September 25, 2018
Kingdom of Majapahit – Master of Intrigue – Extra History – #3
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China’s anti-Japanese attitudes
From the time that Japan broke out of its self-imposed isolation in the late 19th century, China has been one of its main targets, first for military action and more recently for economic expansion and competition. Japan’s reputation in China would have been bad enough even without the Japanese Imperial presence in large portions of China from 1937 through 1945, but the wounds from the Second Sino-Japanese War have never healed.
Last week, Nick Taber reported on some surprisingly intense anti-Japanese sentiments he encountered in China:
In 2017 in a rust-belt city in Northeast China I hopped in a taxi and began chatting with my driver who, when the conversation turned to politics, nonchalantly told me that he wished that the Chinese Government would kill every single Japanese person on the planet. I found this extreme to say the least, so I double-checked just in case my Chinese was failing me, “You mean kill every single Japanese man, woman, and child?”
“Yes, exactly,” he said.
Guessing by his apparent age I wrote my driver off as a fringe extremist whose possibly restricted worldview was likely shaped during the throes of the Cultural Revolution. I presumed that the vast majority of Chinese people today would decisively denounce this kind of violent sentiment of genocide. This presumption was wrong.
Chinese genocidal hatred against the Japanese simply cannot be dismissed as the bigotry of a nationalist fringe movement. Anti-Japanese sentiment is in fact so engrained in Chinese culture that it has become not only a political utility and form of patriotism but even a solid go-to branding opportunity.
The CEO of a major company in Hebei province sets his username on Weibo (China’s Twitter) to “killer of Japanese devils” and likewise a news anchor of a regional TV station sets his Weibo username to “destroy Japanese devils.” Weibo also has hundreds of users with the phrase “bomb Japan” in their username, and after a devastating 6.1 magnitude earthquake struck Osaka in June, the natural disaster began trending on Weibo with a large number of Chinese netizens lamenting that more Japanese people had not been killed. As one user put it, “The whole nation of Japan should perish as soon as possible. It’s an evil race that has infuriated god.”
Certainly not all Chinese hold such genocidal or hateful views. There is a sizeable minority that even frown upon these views and a growing number of more internationally-minded Chinese who have Japanese friends or study in Japan so are at the very least suspicious of this hate. Some Chinese even see this sentiment, in part, as a product of government propaganda and brainwashing. As The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) manages uncertainty over the future of its leadership, it exploits nationalism to boost its popularity and the painful memories of WWII anti-Japanese sentiment provides a relatively low-cost, high-yield opportunity for this purpose.
Chinese citizens who do openly support Japan in any way, shape, or form also risk being seen as traitors. Another user commenting on the Osaka tragedy remarked, “Any Chinese people in Osaka right now travelling or shopping? They should be buried together with the Japanese”.
In 2017, the China Badminton Super League told their own Lin Dan, the number one badminton champion in the world, that he would be forbidden from competing in the playoffs because he had a sponsorship contract with the Japanese sports brand Yonex. In 2012, the Chinese actress Li Bingbing refused to travel to Japan to promote her film, Resident Evil 5, saying that she “personally cannot handle it emotionally”.
The origin of China’s anti-Japanese sentiment lies in the Chinese theater of World War II when the Imperial Japanese Army committed scores of harrowing war crimes on Chinese soil including the mass killing of civilians, sexual slavery, human experimentation, and cannibalism that resulted in the deaths of 10 to 20 million Chinese people.
Bodies of victims along Qinhuai River out of Nanjing’s west gate during Nanjing Massacre.
Detail of original photo by Moriyasu Murase, 村瀬守保 via Wikimedia Commons.
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September 23, 2018
The Russians are Coming! – WW2 004 September 22 1939
World War Two
Published on 22 Sep 2018When the USSR crushes the plans of the Allies for Poland and the Japanese plans in China in the same week, it is Germany that benefits.
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Or join The TimeGhost Army directly at: https://timeghost.tvBetween 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Written and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Produced and Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Spartacus Olsson
Colorized Pictures by Olga Shirnina and Norman StewartOlga’s pictures: https://klimbim2014.wordpress.com
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH
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How to use the stock market as a scorecard during a trade war
At the Continental Telegraph, Tim Worstall explains how even the financial journalists at Fortune are misunderstanding what the changes in stock market values mean during Trump’s ongoing trade disputes with China:
… how stock markets react is not a good guide to the positive effects of tariffs. Quite the opposite in fact. It’s a much better guide to how we’re all getting screwed by tariffs. That is, the better the US stock market does the more evidence we’ve got of the bad effects of tariffs and a trade war.
Think on it. Why is Trump imposing tariffs? To protect American business from competition by those dastardly foreigners. Who loses in the absence of competition from the Yellow Peril? Those American consumers who would have bought those better/cheaper Chinese goods if they were able to. Who gains from tariffs? American businesses who can now gouge the American consumer a little more in the absence of those items imported from East Asia.
So, a rise in the US stock market is a guide to how much more profit American business can screw out of the American public. It’s a measure, a reasonably good and precise one too, of how much we the people are losing from the trade war and tariffs. More exactly, it’s the capitalised value of the ongoing losses we’re suffering from this restriction of our choices, the competition those who supply us face.
That is, the better the stock market performance the higher those costs and the more we’re losing the trade war. That is, as long as you accept that it is consumers, not producers, that matter, but then that’s the standard economic assumption ever since Adam Smith even if it gets lost in Washington DC often enough.
The US stock market rising in response to US tariffs is evidence of the losses from tariffs, not the gains.
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September 18, 2018
Kingdom of Majapahit – Wrath of the Khan – Extra History – #2
Extra Credits
Published on 15 Sep 2018The Mongols came to the island of Java — the King of Singhasari had defied them for too long. But by the time they got there, the king had died, and instead someone claiming to be his stepson, Raden Vijaya, promised to be their vassal. The Mongol forces were in for quite a surprise.
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September 15, 2018
Battle of Saipan – Suicide Island – Extra History – #2
Extra Credits
Published on 13 Sep 2018This series is brought to you by World of Tanks PC. Check out the game at the link below and use the invite code FORAGER for extra goodies. https://redir.wargaming.net/r06pve1j/…
As the ruthless clash of the Saipan invasion drags on into the second week, a unique and unlikely hero emerges. Marine scout Guy Gabaldon can speak Japanese. He deserts his post, not once but twice, to reach out to the enemy soldiers and civilians.
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September 12, 2018
QotD: Origins of India’s caste system
In India, the notion of Hindu culture as a giant conspiracy by Aryan invaders to enshrine their descendants at the top of the social order for the rest of eternity perhaps struck a little too close to home.
But Reich’s laboratory has found that the old Robert E. Howard version is actually pretty much what happened. Conan the Barbarian-like warriors with their horse-drawn wagons came charging off the Eurasian steppe and overran much of Europe and India. Reich laments:
The genetic data have provided what might seem like uncomfortable support for some of these ideas — suggesting that a single, genetically coherent group was responsible for spreading many Indo-European languages.
Much more acceptable to Indian intellectuals than the idea that ancient conquerors from the Russian or Kazakhstani steppe took over the upper reaches of Indian culture has been the theory of Nicholas B. Dirks, the Franz Boas Professor of History and Anthropology at Columbia, that the British malignantly transformed diverse local Indian customs into the suffocating system of caste that we know today.
Now, though, Reich’s genetic evidence shows that caste has controlled who married whom in India for thousands of years:
Rather than inventions of colonialism as Dirks suggested, long-term endogamy as embodied in India today in the institution of caste has been overwhelmingly important for millennia.
This is in harmony with economic historian Gregory Clark’s recent discovery in his book of surname analysis, The Son Also Rises (Clark loves Hemingway puns), that economic mobility across the generations is not only lower than expected in most of the world, but it is virtually nonexistent in India.
Steve Sailer, “Reich’s Laboratory”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-03-28.
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September 8, 2018
Battle of Saipan – Steel and Coral – Extra History – #1
Extra Credits
Published on 6 Sep 2018The battle of Saipan would decide the fate of the Pacific War. On a tiny island, just five miles wide, thousands died under advanced artillery and amphibious tanks. This series is brought to you by World of Tanks PC. Check out the game at the link below and use the invite code FORAGER for extra goodies. https://redir.wargaming.net/r06pve1j/…
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September 6, 2018
Feature History – Chinese Civil War
Feature History
Published on 25 Jul 2017Hello and welcome to Feature History, featuring a civil war that done happened in China.
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I do the research, writing, narration, art, and animation. Yes, it is very lonely
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September 3, 2018
WW2 – September 1 1939 – The Polish German War
World War Two
Published on 1 Sep 2018When Germany invades Poland on September 1 1939, the world is already at the brink of a new world war…
Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Written and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Produced and Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Spartacus OlssonJoin us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Or join The TimeGhost Army directly at: https://timeghost.tvA TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH
Apologies for this going out a day later than usual … I was out of town on the weekend with very limited internet connectivity. Future TimeGhost/Between2Wars episodes will appear closer to their release days (usually the next day).
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August 31, 2018
How did Britain Conquer India? | Animated History
The Armchair Historian
Published on 10 Aug 2018Check out History With Hilbert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs1sw…
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Sources:
https://dailyhistory.org/Why_was_Brit…
1857 Indian War of Independence: 1857 Indian Sepoys’ Mutiny, Shahid Hussain Raja
The East India Company, Brian Gardner
The Corporation that Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational, Nick Robins
A History of India, Peter Robb
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August 29, 2018
Out of Context: How to Make Bad History Worse | World War 2
Knowing Better
Published on 5 Mar 2018Churchill was a genocidal maniac. The Japanese were rounded up into concentration camps. FDR let Pearl Harbor happen. When you take history out of context, you can make it say whatever you want – including making bad things worse.
A long list of links to sources is included, but I’m too lazy to re-link ’em all, just go to YouTube to see them. Back in 2009, I did a short fisking of Pat Buchanan’s hit-piece on Churchill’s “reponsibility” for the outbreak of WW2.
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August 27, 2018
Kingdom of Majapahit – An Empire of Water – Extra History – #1
Extra Credits
Published on 25 Aug 2018In this series we will explore the history of a short-lived kingdom that united the diverse, 13,000+ islands of Indonesia: Majapahit. Before Majapahit came along, however, the Kingdom of Srivijaya and the Kingdom of Mataram laid the stepping stones.
Please note: The next episode of Majapahit will be published on September 15 and will continue every Saturday thereafter. The EC team is taking a well-deserved short upload break for a few weeks!
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August 25, 2018
QotD: India’s caste system
… Gandhi, born the son of the Prime Minister of a tiny Indian principality and received as an attorney at the bar of the Middle Temple in London, [began] his climb to greatness as a member of the small Indian community in, precisely, South Africa. Natal, then a separate colony, wanted to limit Indian immigration and, as part of the government program, ordered Indians to carry identity papers (an action not without similarities to measures under consideration in the U.S. today to control illegal immigration). The film’s lengthy opening sequences are devoted to Gandhi’s leadership in the fight against Indians carrying their identity papers (burning their registration cards), with for good measure Gandhi being expelled from the first-class section of a railway train, and Gandhi being asked by whites to step off the sidewalk. This inspired young Indian leader calls, in the film, for interracial harmony, for people to “live together.”
Now the time is 1893, and Gandhi is a “caste” Hindu, and from one of the higher castes. Although, later, he was to call for improving the lot of India’s Untouchables [Dalits], he was not to have any serious misgivings about the fundamentals of the caste system for about another thirty years, and even then his doubts, to my way of thinking, were rather minor. In the India in which Gandhi grew up, and had only recently left, some castes could enter the courtyards of certain Hindu temples, while others could not. Some castes were forbidden to use the village well. Others were compelled to live outside the village, still others to leave the road at the approach of a person of higher caste and perpetually to call out, giving warning, so that no one would be polluted by their proximity. The endless intricacies of Hindu caste by-laws varied somewhat region by region, but in Madras, where most South African Indians were from, while a Nayar could pollute a man of higher caste only by touching him, Kammalans polluted at a distance of 24 feet, toddy drawers at 36 feet, Pulayans and Cherumans at 48 feet, and beef-eating Paraiyans at 64 feet. All castes and the thousands of sub-castes were forbidden, needless to say, to marry, eat, or engage in social activity with any but members of their own group. In Gandhi’s native Gujarat a caste Hindu who had been polluted by touch had to perform extensive ritual ablutions or purify himself by drinking a holy beverage composed of milk, whey, and (what else?) cow dung.
Low-caste Hindus, in short, suffered humiliations in their native India compared to which the carrying of identity cards in South Africa was almost trivial. In fact, Gandhi, to his credit, was to campaign strenuously in his later life for the reduction of caste barriers in India — a campaign almost invisible in the movie, of course, conveyed in only two glancing references, leaving the audience with the officially sponsored if historically astonishing notion that racism was introduced into India by the British. To present the Gandhi of 1893, a conventional caste Hindu, fresh from caste-ridden India where a Paraiyan could pollute at 64 feet, as the champion of interracial equalitariansim is one of the most brazen hypocrisies I have ever encountered in a serious movie.
Richard Grenier, “The Gandhi Nobody Knows”, Commentary, 1983-03-01.
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August 23, 2018
It’s quite possible to spend too much on infrastructure
Tim Worstall on the recent cancellation of two large Chinese infrastructure projects in Malaysia:
A working mantra of our times is that we should all be building much, much, more infrastructure. And that it should be government telling us where and what should be built, even going and building it. All of which rather runs into that brick wall of what is happening with China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Yes, it’s entirely true that the old Silk Road was a useful and enriching trade route. It’s equally obvious that other trade routes have had the same effect, enriching. That is not though the same as the statement that building a trade link enriches. A trade route which is used does, one that is built still has to be used to enrich anyone other than the constructors who make off with their pay. The measure of whether the Belt and Road Initiative enriches is whether it is used, not whether it is built.
This being something that the planners in China have forgotten. Just as our own home grown ones fail to note our own past problems. The Humber Bridge never even paid back the cost of building it, let alone the interest upon it. Infrastructure doesn’t, necessarily, pay for itself. It is that upon which grand plans fail.
[…]
That it’s too expensive means that it’s not going to make money, not even meet its construction costs. And therefore it shouldn’t be built anyway, should it? Why spend more to build a railway than the benefit to be gained by having a railway? That’s just a waste of resources.
All of which is useful for our own infrastructure fetishists. It’s only if the new stuff is used that it can be worth building it. So, only build that which will be used, not whatever crosses those pretty little synapses of yours. Why, we might even insist that private economic actors put their own money at risk in order to concentrate minds on that very issue, of whether what is to be built will get used. Leave government planning out of it that is, in order to see what is worth building.
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