We have endured 30 years of lies, half-truths, and myths. Bruce Biddle and I debunked many of these untruths in our book, The Manufactured Crisis, in 1995. But more falsehoods continue to surface all the time. The most recent nonsense was "U. S. Education Reform and National Security," a report presented to us last year by Joel Klein and Condoleezza Rice.
Church/State sign.
Posted in Creationism, Education, History, Law, Religion
Tagged Creationism, Education, History, Law, Religion
Map from *The Malay Archipelago* by Wallace, showing the physical geography of the Archipelago and his travels. (The thin black lines indicate where Wallace traveled, and the red lines indicate chains of volcanoes.)
On this date, Charles Darwin received a paper from Alfred Russel Wallace, who was still at the Malay Archipelago. The paper was titled: “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type.”
Darwin was shocked! Wallace had come up with a theory of natural selection that was very similar to his own. The paper contained concepts like “the struggle for existence,” and “the transmutation of species.” Upon further examination Darwin saw that Wallace had some ideas about natural selection that he did not agree with. For one thing, Wallace tried to mix social morality with natural selection, proposing an upward evolution of human morals which would eventually lead to a socialist utopia (Darwin’s natural selection had no goal). What’s more, Wallace believed that cooperation in groups aided in the progress of mankind (Darwin saw natural selection as being influenced by competition). Finally, Wallace’s natural selection was guided by a higher spiritual power (there was no divine intervention in Darwin’s version).
Tagged Alfred Russel Wallace, Charles Darwin, Evolution, History
The story began in the 17 June 1864 issue of Le Pays, Journal de l’Empire, one of the most important French newspapers at the time of Emperor Napoléon III, as a letter sent by an unnamed correspondent to a French journalist; its title was “Un habitant de la planète Mars” ["An Inhabitant of the Planet Mars"]. Other letters were then published twice a month in that paper until 06 January 1865. And a book with the same title, by author Henri de Parville, was soon published in Paris, probably in April or May 1865, by Hetzel, who was from 1863 the publisher of Jules Verne; it had apparently both a hardback and a softcover edition. De Parville, whose full name was François Henri Peudefer de Parville (1838-1909), was a popular science writer, a contributor to some newspapers, an author (for instance, in 1883 he wrote a book about electricity and its applications), and a manager of a popular science magazine. He had apparently some importance, for a prize of the Académie des Sciences bears his name.
A Martian mummy, from the French astronomer Camille Flammarion (1881).
The [alleged...] events take place in the “Arrapahys country, several miles from James Peak”; no other precise location is given, but the given route locates them probably somewhere in Colorado. (A quick Google search gives indeed the James Peak in the Arapaho National Forest, at some 60 km WNW of Denver.) Workers of (or for) the wealthy landowner Mr. Paxton are searching for oil in his estate. One day, they discover in a Paleozoic terrain a strange egg-shaped rock which measures some 45 yards [35 m] and the surface of which seems enameled. Mr. Davis, a geologist from Pittsburgh, begins its study. News of the discovery spreads, and interested people are arriving on the spot, despite its isolation and the war [the American Civil War, of course].
A scientific committee decides to dig a hole in the rock, in which they find a cavity, from which is extracted a white metallic jar bearing curious drawings, then several other such containers. Next a grave is discovered behind a metal plate. It contains the calcified mummy of a strange being:
some parts seemed carbonized and the short legs were damaged during the extraction, the head was intact, no hair, instead a smooth, coriaceous skin, a triangular-shaped brain,..[]…instead of a nose a short trunk, a small mouth with some teeth, two orbital cavities with the eyeballs removed in the past, as limestone had formed in there…
There are also some objects, particularly metal rods. The plate bears several drawings: ‘rhinoceros’, ‘palm tree’, “very successful representation of a star similar to the Sun as drawn by children”, other ‘stars’ which are identified as the planets and the biggest of which shows evidently the Martian origin of the being. Money is collected so that the work can be continued, with several meetings of the scientific committee on the site. It consists of specialists from various disciplines and is chaired by the geologist Newbold, and has some journalists as guests, including N. During the first meeting, a vote by the committee decides that the creature is an extraterrestrial.
In order that the whole world shares proofs of the event, Paxton decides to offer the engraved plate to the Royal Society in London and the mummy to the Institut de France in Paris, while the United States keeps the egg-shaped rock and the various artifacts. And N is assigned the mission to bring the mummy to France, he writes in his last letter to his friend P.
However, nothing comes during the following months. Here we must go
back briefly to the preface, where P had written that he had received the letters very mysteriously twice a month: early on the morning, opened on his desk. And we jump again to the postscript: six months later, another letter comes from Richmond, in which N wonders for not having received news from France, and this letter is signed… Henri de Parville! P wonders if de Parville had been his own correspondent, writing by night in some altered state. Last clue: his postscript is dated… 1 April 1865 (April Fool’s Day).
An identical story was published in La Capital, a Rosario, Argentina newspaper on 13 October 1877. This time the discovery, again attributed to Paxton and Davis, occurred near the Carcarana River, near whose banks the egg-shaped object lay half-buried. The body and related artifacts were put on display in a local tavern and later lost.
Many nineteenth-century newspapers routinely published outrageous yarns, often set in some distant place inaccessible to a skeptical reader who might seek verification.
The French “mummified Martian” hoax might have inspired the “Cardiff Giant,” the 10-foot statue planted and uncovered in 1868-1869 in an upstate New York farm as an alleged petrified ancient giant man. The “Cardiff Giant” was the creation of New York tobacconist and outspoken atheist George Hull. He decided to create the giant after an argument with a fundamentalist minister about the passage in Genesis 6:4 that there were giants who once lived on Earth.
References:
Scales of Justice
Background: On January 5, 1954, Paul M. Sweezy was summoned to appear before New Hampshire attorney general Louis C. Wyman for inquiries into Sweezy’s political associations. Under a 1951 New Hampshire statute, the state attorney general was authorized to investigate “subversive activities” and determine whether “subversive persons” were located within the state. Wyman was especially interested in information on members of the Progressive Party, an organization many politicians suspected of nurturing communism in the United States.
Sweezy said he was unaware of any violations of the statute. He further stated that he would not answer any questions impertinent to the inquiry under the legislation, and that he would not answer questions that seemed to infringe on his freedom of speech. Sweezy did answer numerous questions about himself, his views, and his activities, but he refused to answer questions about other people. In a later inquiry by the attorney general, Sweezy refused to comment about an article he had written and about a lecture he had delivered to a humanities class.
When Sweezy persisted in his refusal to talk about others and about his lecture, he was held in contempt of court and sent to the Merrimack County jail. The Supreme Court of New Hampshire affirmed the conviction, and Sweezy appealed.
Decision: The U.S. Supreme Court reversed the conviction. The basis for the reversal was the New Hampshire statute’s improper grant of broad interrogation powers to the attorney general and its failure to afford sufficient criminal protections to an accused. The Court commented strongly upon the threat such a statute posed to academic freedom:
We believe that there unquestionably was an invasion of petitioner’s liberties in the areas of academic freedom and political expression — areas in which government should be extremely reticent to tread.
The essentiality of freedom in the community of American universities is almost self-evident. No one should underestimate the vital role in a democracy that is played by those who guide and train our youth. To impose any strait jacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities would imperil the future of our Nation. No field of education is so thoroughly comprehended by man that new discoveries cannot yet be made. Particularly is that true in the social sciences, where few, if any, principles are accepted as absolutes. Scholarship cannot flourish in an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust. Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise our civilization will stagnate and die.
Posted in Academic Freedom, Education, History
Tagged Academic Freedom, Education, History
Harrison Gray Otis Statue, MacArthur Park, Los Angeles
To Harrison Gray Otis (1837-1917), Democrats weren’t the opposition but “hags, harlots and pollutants.” Members of organized labor were “skunks, pinheads, gas-pipe ruffians, rowdies, anarchists and deadbeats.” Elections weren’t routine political events in a democracy but apocalyptic choices between the forces of good and evil. He saw his growing list of enemies as more ink for his poison pen, resulting in more readers of his newspaper.
Otis’ first bully pulpit, the Santa Barbara Press, was a financial failure. In 1882, he bought a one-quarter interest in the new Los Angeles Daily Times. In 1883, Otis and entrepreneur H. H. Boyce became co-owners of the Times, now grown to eight pages, and formed the Times Mirror Company. Otis set about transforming the newspaper. As John Weaver writes in Los Angeles: The Enormous Village: “He dropped ‘Daily’ from the Times masthead, ordered up livelier headlines, doubled the telegraphic news coverage, made room for letters to the editor and added a column, ‘Political Points’ which collected editorial barbs aimed at Democrats by other Republican journals.”
“When you worked for the Times in those days,” Louis Sherwin later remembered, “you were not reporting for a newspaper; you were embattled for a Cause.” Otis took pride in his growing reputation as the most aggressive and unyielding foe of organized labor in America. He founded the Merchants and Manufacturers (M&M) Association—a league of local businesses created to keep the unions out. He rallied the M&M membership with his cry: “We say to capital: Here you can invest in safety! Don’t hover between the lines or I will count you as the enemy! Decide!”
As George E. Mowry writes in The California Progressives: “It is possible that no man in all the United States hated organized labor more, and it is certain that few did more to obstruct its advance.” For years, the Page 1 banner of the Times included the phrase, “True Industrial Freedom,” while editorials and news stories reflected Otis’ uncompromising opposition to the union shop. As John Weaver notes, labor leaders called Los Angeles “Otistown” because it was “the country’s most impregnable open shop fortress.” The burgeoning circulation of William Randolph Hearst’s pro-union Los Angeles Examiner reflected the growing anti-Otis constituency and explained in part how Los Angeles could simultaneously be the national headquarters for arch-conservative capitalism and a crucible for socialist politics.
In 1907, the American Federation of Labor levied a penny-a-month assessment on its membership to create a war chest dedicated exclusively to fighting Otis. On the national level, prominent citizens were declaring that Otis was an enemy of democracy and progress. No voice was louder or drew more applause than that of Theodore Roosevelt, when he wrote on 17 June 1911 in The California Outlook magazine:
[Otis is] a consistent enemy of every movement of social and economic betterment – just as he has shown himself the consistent enemy of men in California who have dared resolutely to stand against corruption and in favor of honesty… The attitude of General Otis in his paper affords a curious instance of the anarchy of soul which comes to a man who, in conscienceless fashion, deifies property at the expense of human rights… It may be quite true that the Los Angeles Times has again and again shown itself to be as much an enemy of good citizenship, of honest and decent government, and of every effective effort to secure fair play for working men and women, as any anarchist sheet could show itself to be.
Posted in Economics, History, Human Rights
Tagged Economics, History, Human Rights
Shrewsbury School
Towards the close of my [Shrewsbury] school life, my brother worked hard at chemistry, and made a fair laboratory with proper apparatus in the tool-house in the garden, and I was allowed to aid him as a servant in most of his experiments. He made all the gases and many compounds, and I read with great care several books on chemistry, such as Henry and Parkes’ Chemical Catechism. The subject interested me greatly, and we often used to go on working till rather late at night. This was the best part of my education at school, for it showed me practically the meaning of experimental science. The fact that we worked at chemistry somehow got known at school, and as it was an unprecedented fact, I was nicknamed “Gas.” I was also once publicly rebuked by the head-master, Dr. Butler, for thus wasting my time on such useless subjects; and he called me very unjustly a “poco curante”, and as I did not understand what he meant, it seemed to me a fearful reproach.
As I was doing no good at school, my father wisely took me away at a rather earlier age than usual, and sent me (Oct. 1825) to Edinburgh University with my brother, where I stayed for two years or sessions.
George Gaylord Simpson
On this date, the American evolutionary biologist George Gaylord Simpson was born. Simpson was the most influential paleontologist of the twentieth century and a major participant in the Modern Synthesis, contributing Tempo and Mode in Evolution (1944) and Principles of Classification and a Classification of Mammals (1945). Among other things, he is notable for anticipating such concepts as punctuated equilibrium (in his 1944 work, see quantum evolution), and dispelling the myth that the evolution of the horse was a linear process culminating in the modern Equus caballus.
[My favorite Simpson quotes - Ed.:]
“Any sensitive person must feel a basically religious awe in the face of the mysteries of life and of the universe, but belief in an anthropomorphic god, in a savior, or in a prophet is nonsense” (Autobiographical Notes, 1970, p. 17).
“The fact – not theory – that evolution has occurred and the Darwinian theory as to how it occurred have become so confused in popular opinion that the distinction must be stressed” (This View of Life: The World of an Evolutionist, 1964, p. 10).
Charles Darwin by G Richmond.
On this date, Charles Darwin had records of insects published in Stephen’s Illustrations of British Entomology.
While he was an undergraduate at Cambridge, Darwin had sent records of insects that he had captured to James Francis Stephens, and some of these were published in Illustrations of British Entomology. He refers to the pleasure that he got from seeing his name in print against his records of beetles in his autobiography (Life and Letters, Vol. I, p. 51) although he gets both the title of the work and the method of citation wrong:
But no pursuit at Cambridge was followed with nearly so much eagerness or gave me so much pleasure as collecting beetles. It was the mere passion for collecting, for I did not dissect them and rarely compared their external characters with published descriptions, but got them named anyhow. I will give a proof of my zeal: one day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as well as the third one.
I was very successful in collecting and invented two new methods; I employed a labourer to scrape during the winter, moss off old trees and place [it] in a large bag, and likewise to collect the rubbish at the bottom of the barges in which reeds are brought from the fens, and thus I got some very rare species. No poet ever felt more delight at seeing his first poem published than I did at seeing in Stephen’s Illustrations of British Insects the magic words, “captured by C. Darwin, Esq.”
Stephens’ classic work was published in parts between 1 May 1827 and November 1845, with a supplement in August 1846. The following is a short description of it:
Illustrations of British Entomology; or, a synopsis of indigenous insects etc. 8vo, 245 mm, 11 vols, 80 coloured plates, Baldwin and Cradock for the author, London [1827-]1828-1835[-1845]; supplement, vi + 32 pp, 15 coloured plates, 1846.
Stephens, J. F. 1829-1832. Illustrations of British Entomology, or, a Synopsis of Indigenous Insects.
The main work is divided into four volumes of Haustellata and seven of Mandibulata. The beetles occur in the first five volumes of the latter, and there are about thirty records bearing Darwin’s name, the earliest being in an appendix to Volume II, which is dated June 15, 1829. The localities include Cambridge, North Wales and Shrewsbury. There is one further record which is earlier than this. In Haustellata, Volume II, p. 200, Darwin records the occurrence of the common noctuid moth Graphiphora plecta at ‘Cambridge’, and the date of this part is June 1, 1829. The modern scientific name of this moth is Ochropleura plecta (L.), and its common name the flame shoulder. In most cases these records are given in quotation marks, and therefore represent the earliest genuine publications by Darwin in a book.
A scan of The Magna Carta.
On this date, following a revolt by the English nobility against his rule, King John put his royal seal on The Magna Carta, or “Great Charter.” (Contrary to popular belief, The Magna Carta was not signed by King John; he was illiterate.) His uncontrollable barons had had enough of his high taxation and arbitrary decisions. The document, essentially a peace treaty between John and his barons, guaranteed that the king would respect feudal rights and privileges, uphold the freedom of the church, and maintain the nation’s laws. The Magna Carta contained no new rights or privileges, but only put in writing old laws. The barons needed John to make explicit what was already implicit.
The origin of the barons’ rebellion came about from the moment when John came to the throne in 1199. John had inherited the crown from his brother Richard I, or to be correct, seized it from the legitimate heir, his nephew, Prince Arthur. The French King Philip II supported Arthur’s claim, not only to the throne of England, but to French lands in Normandy and Anjou, which had been held by Richard. King Philip summoned John to appear before him and when John refused, confiscated his French lands and allocated some of them to Arthur and some to himself. John responded by sending an army to defend his lands in Normandy, thus bringing about a minor but costly war.
In order to defray the cost, John instituted a series of taxes, including Forest Law, a set of regulations regarding woodlands, which were difficult to obey in their entirety, easily broken and raised a great deal of money in fines. John also started an Income Tax, which raised him enough to pay for his wars and more besides. Naturally, the barons were unhappy at this state of affairs and a group of them joined together in rebellion. They captured London, forcing John to leave the city, and then rounded on him at Runnymede, where, at the point of a sword, he sealed The Magna Carta.
As might be expected, the text of The Magna Carta bears many traces of haste, and is clearly the product of much bargaining and many hands. Most of its clauses deal with specific, and often long-standing, grievances rather than with general principles of law. Some of the grievances are self-explanatory: others can be understood only in the context of the feudal society in which they arose. Of a few clauses, the precise meaning is still a matter of argument.
Although more a reactionary than a progressive document in its day, The Magna Carta was seen as a cornerstone in the development of democratic England by later generations. Thus, it can also be considered the first British constitution, setting down the relationship between citizens and state. The document was remarkable in that it implied there were laws the king was bound to observe, thus precluding any future claim to absolutism by the English monarch. Of greatest interest to later generations was clause 39, which stated that “no free man shall be arrested or imprisoned or disseised [dispossessed] or outlawed or exiled or in any way victimised…except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.” This clause has been celebrated as an early guarantee of trial by jury and of habeas corpus and inspired England’s Petition of Right (1628) and the Habeas Corpus Act (1679).
The complete text can be read here.
‘Execution’ by Beijing artist Yue Minjun
The train incident occurred June 6 when six protesters were killed as they stood at a barricade on the tracks near the Shanghai train station and a train from Beijing did not stop in time. People in a large crowd set fire to the train and fought with firefighters and police who came to put it out, injuring 21. The three condemned men “frenziedly smashed the railway carriages and set fire to police motorcycles and the carriages” during the attack, the official New China News Agency reported. “They also prevented firefighters from extinguishing the fire and beat them cruelly.” They were given three days to appeal.
An article in the New York Times on 22 June 1989 reported, in part:
The Chinese authorities staged a public execution today of three young men who were accused of taking part in a violent political protest in Shanghai…The three young men in Shanghai were presumably executed in the Chinese way, with a bullet fired in the back of the head at close range…
The three men in Shanghai – Xu Guoming, an employee of a Shanghai brewery; Bian Hanwu, who is unemployed, and Yan Xuerong, a worker at a radio factory – were sentenced to death last Thursday but had appealed.
They were accused of helping to set fire to a train on June 6 and then attacking firefighters who arrived to put out the fire. No one was killed, but some firefighters were beaten up and nine rail cars were burned, forcing the closing of the rail line for two days.
The Government has not mentioned the circumstances in which the crowd attacked the train. The crowd had gathered to block the rail line, in protest of the killings of hundreds of students and workers in Beijing two days earlier by the army. A train rammed its way through the human blockade, killing six people who lay on the track, and only then did the outraged crowd attack the train and set it afire.
It is not known what evidence existed against the three men, who appeared to be in their 20′s or perhaps early 30′s, or even exactly what role each was accused of having played in the incident. Nor have the authorities indicated how they caught the three, who were apparently arrested several days later rather than on the scene…
Soon after, people in Beijing, Shandong, Sichuan, Hebei, and Hubei were sentenced to death. Throughout the country, there were tens of thousands of detentions and arrests. Approximately one thousand people were executed, and many others were investigated and harassed. These people were additional victims of the June 4 Massacre.
References:
Posted in China, History, Human Rights
Tagged China, History, Human Rights, Massacre, Tiananmen
Photo of the 1832 Fragment of a Difference Engine
On 13 July 1823, Babbage received a gold medal from the Astronomical Society for his development of the difference engine. He then met the Chancellor of the Exchequer to seek public funds for the construction of a large difference engine. His initial grant was for £1500 and he began work on a large difference engine which he believed he could complete in three years.
In 1834, work on the difference engine stopped because the government could not decide whether to continue to fund the project; eight years later, in 1842, it finally decided not to proceed.
By 1834 Babbage’s work on the difference engine had led him to a much more sophisticated idea; he had completed the first drawings of the “analytical engine”. The Analytical Engine is much more than a calculator and marks the progression from the mechanized arithmetic of calculation to fully-fledged general-purpose computation – the forerunner of the modern electronic computer. Although the analytic engine never progressed beyond detailed drawings, it is remarkably similar in logical components to a present day computer.
Babbage ultimately failed to build a complete machine despite independent wealth, social position, government funding, a decade of design and development, and the best of British engineering. The reasons are still debated and the cocktail of considerations is a rich one. Babbage was a prickly character, highly principled, easily offended and given to virulent public criticism of those he took to be his enemies. Runaway costs, high precision, a disastrous dispute with his engineer, fitful financing, political instability, accusations of personal vendettas, delays, failing credibility and the cultural divide between pure and applied science, were all factors.
[My favorite Babbage quote - Ed.:]
The whole of the developments and operations of analysis are now capable of being executed by machinery. … As soon as an Analytical Engine exists, it will necessarily guide the future course of the science.
– Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, ch. 8 “Of the Analytical Engine” (London 1864)
A handcuffed man is led by Chinese soldiers on a street in Beijing on 14 June 1989 as the authorities looked to prosecute and punish anyone connected with the demonstrations.
On this date, the Beijing Public Security Bureau issued a list of 21 leaders of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests who were being sought for arrest, as reported by the New York Times on the following day:
The 21 students whose mug shots and biographical details were shown on television included the two most prominent leaders of the democracy movement, Wang Dan and Wuer Kaixi. Others shown on television were Chai Ling, the leader of the students occupying Tiananmen Square, and her husband, Feng Congde, and a 28-year-old graduate student, Liu Gang, who is said to have assisted the students from behind the scenes.
The television showed lengthy film clips of Mr. Wuer, apparently so that viewers could identify him and turn him in. The clips also showed the extent of Government surveillance of the student leaders; it seemed that three different video cameras were used to record one visit by Mr. Wuer on May 29 to a restaurant in a Beijing hotel. One camera was trained on him from above while he ate, another showed him leaving the restaurant, and a third caught him as he left the building.
From NYT’s description above, it is clear that Liu Gang’s significance in the movement was not understood by outsiders. Even most students were surprised seeing his name in the no. 3 slot, behind Wang Dan and Wuer Kaixi but ahead of Chai Ling.
This is the list of the 21 most wanted:
*The 21 Most Wanted*
As Liu Gang would later comment, almost all of the 21 had been, one way or another, involved with the Beijing Students Autonomous Federation he had founded.
Posted in China, History, Human Rights
Tagged China, History, Human Rights, Massacre, Tiananmen
On this date, “Darwin Among the Machines” appeared as the heading of an article published in The Press newspaper in Christchurch, New Zealand. Written by Samuel Butler but signed Cellarius, the article raised the possibility that machines were a kind of “mechanical life” undergoing constant evolution, and that eventually machines might supplant humans as the dominant species:
We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race.
(…)
Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.
The article ended by urging that “war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of the race.” This article, along with later writings by Butler on “machine evolution”, was arguably satirical in intent, although he may have been using these fanciful writings to explore some real philosophical issues like the question of whether biological life and evolution can be explained in purely mechanical terms.
An artificial intelligence with attitude.
Butler was the first to write about the possibility that machines might develop consciousness by a kind of Darwinian selection. Although many dismissed this as a joke, Butler wrote in the preface to the second edition of Erewhon that he had no intention of satirizing Darwin’s evolutionary theory:
I regret that reviewers have in some cases been inclined to treat the chapters on Machines as an attempt to reduce Mr. Darwin’s theory to an absurdity. Nothing could be further from my intention, and few things would be more distasteful to me than any attempt to laugh at Mr. Darwin; but I must own that I have myself to thank for the misconception, for I felt sure that my intention would be missed, but preferred not to weaken the chapters by explanation, and knew very well that Mr. Darwin’s theory would take no harm. The only question in my mind was how far I could afford to be misrepresented as laughing at that for which I have the most profound admiration.
As Alan Turing (1951) observed, “once the machine thinking method has started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. … At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control, in the way that is mentioned in Samuel Butler’s ‘Erewhon’”. Turing shared Butler’s view that the consequences of such greater-than-human intelligence will be profound, and conceivably dire for humanity as we know it.
References:
Posted in Evolution, History, Human Evolution
Tagged Alan Turing, Charles Darwin, Evolution, History, Human Evolution
When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman? From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men. For if God would have had any bondmen from the beginning, he would have appointed who should be bond, and who free. And therefore I exhort ye to consider that now the time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may (if ye will) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty.
–from John Ball’s sermon at Blackheath, delivered on this date.
.
Under the feudal system that had operated in England since the Norman Conquest, the life of a serf was one of drudgery and oppression. The majority of the population lived in the countryside at the sufferance of landowners to whom they paid rent in the form of unpaid labor and military service. A small amount of their produce was their own, but could only be milled or processed if they made payments to the landowner. Theoretically a serf could buy himself out of his bondage but the opportunities for any sort of paid labor were severely limited. A rigid social structure was enforced by a legal code that stipulated what clothes a serf could wear and what food could be eaten, but most importantly of all, forbade them to leave their villages.
There was no strong centralized authority to enforce this in the modern sense but the feudal state was a three-headed creature: The Church – often a landowner as well – provided ideological legitimacy; the Nobles acted as a form of privatized law enforcement; and the Crown sat in the shadows behind it all. Consequently, while peasant resentment was aimed at the Church and landowners, the king was generally seen as some sort of champion of justice for the common people – an unfortunate illusion which the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 soon exposed.
The Black Death of 1348-9 – the pandemic that killed off a third of the total population – created the cracks in the system that made rebellion possible. Wide-scale depopulation and a resulting chronic labor shortage gave serfs and craftsmen an opportunity to earn higher wages. A nascent urban working class was created by peasants leaving their villages and taking up trades in the towns.
The landowners were alarmed by this threat to the social order. In response, a draconian Statute Of Laborers was enacted in 1351 that stated:
As a result, the next thirty years saw social conflict with peasants, craftsmen, and merchants forced into an alliance by laws that penalized both worker and master who agreed to higher wages than those specified.
Young King Richard II
It was not a popular tax. The unfairness of everyone, rich or poor, paying the same amount bothered some people. Taxpayers were also aggravated by tax collectors grilling them about their personal circumstances. Politically prominent people ignored those complaints; they were mainly bothered by the inefficiency of the tax.
The government needed more money for the war, and allowing the rich to get off cheap seemed foolish. In 1379, a graduated poll tax was introduced. The fact that the rich paid more, or were supposed to, did not stop the grumbling, and the tax still yielded less than Parliament and the king’s council had hoped for.
When the financial crisis deepened the next year, 1380, Parliament went ahead with a third poll tax. Once again, rich and poor were to pay the same and the tax rate was jacked up: In 1381, every lay person above the age of 15 was to pay one shilling, 12 pence, three times the rate of the first poll tax of 1377.
The parliament was not unaware that this was ruinous for the poor, whose family income was often 20 shillings a year or less. A family with two adults would have to pay ten percent of their yearly income. The parliamentarians reassured themselves that the rich would, as a matter of what we might call noblesse oblige, help the poor to pay. Also instructions were given to collect the tax in installments: two-thirds by January of 1381, one-third by the following June.
These minor adjustments did nothing to stem public discontent. People refused to cooperate with the tax collectors, and up to a third of the adult lay population succeeded in avoiding the tax. The London collectors reported to the Exchequer that they couldn’t do their job without stirring up dangerous agitation. The king’s council told collectors to put on the screws and collect the whole tax at once, and now. It was a fatal mistake.
Inspired by hatred of the unfair tax as well as the virtual-regent John of Gaunt who had abused the powers of the Crown, crowds of peasants and townspeople gathered in Essex and Kent led by Wat Tyler, an independent artisan with some military experience, and by John Ball, an itinerant English Lollard preacher. However, Ball was not a revolutionary in any modern sense – he sought recourse for injustices by corrupt nobles and churchmen from the king as God’s appointed judge on Earth.
Ball lived in Kent at the time of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, which was not only the most extreme and widespread insurrection in English history but also the best-documented popular rebellion to have occurred during medieval times. He is said to have gained considerable fame as a roving preacher, especially by his insistence on social equality. Unfortunately, what is recorded of Ball’s adult life comes from hostile sources liable to exaggerate his political and religious radicalism.
Ball’s speeches brought him into conflict with the Archbishop of Canterbury, and he was thrown in prison on three occasions. These measures, however, did not moderate his opinions, nor diminish his popularity. Ball was in the archbishop’s prison at Maidstone, Kent when the uprising began with protests in Dartford; he was quickly released by the Kentish rebels. He preached to them at Blackheath (the insurgents’ gathering place near Greenwich) in an open-air sermon, from which the passage (probably authentic) at the beginning of this essay is taken.
Some sources, unsympathetic to Ball, assert that he urged his audience to kill the principal lords of the kingdom and the lawyers, and that he was later among those who rushed into the Tower of London to seize Simon of Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury. But Ball does not appear in most accounts after his speech at Blackheath.
The rebels stormed into London on 13 June to present the young King Richard II with a set of demands, and for two days their forces were in control of the capital. The king, with limited military forces available and desiring to keep fighting away from London, met with the rebels on 14 June at Mile End. They pledged their allegiance to Richard, and handed him a petition which asked for the abolition of villeinage, for labor services based on free contracts, and for the right to rent land at fourpence an acre. The King said he would grant these demands.
British photographer Red Saunders depicts rebels of Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.
However, this virtual abolition of serfdom was only a cynical attempt to play for time while the king actually gathered his military forces. At a second private meeting on 15 June in Smithfield, Wat Tyler was murdered by the Lord Mayor of London William Walworth. Unaware of this, the rebels agreed to disperse and leave London. When they had done so the king immediately renounced his previous promises. Having now gathered an army, over the next two weeks he defeated the remaining rebel forces in Hertfordshire, Essex, and Kent.
John Ball was taken prisoner at Coventry, given a trial in which, unlike most, he was permitted to speak, and hanged, drawn and quartered in the presence of King Richard II on 15 July 1381. Ball’s head was subsequently stuck on a pike on London Bridge.
The revolt later came to be seen as a sign of the beginning of the end of serfdom in medieval England, although the revolt itself was a failure. It increased awareness in the upper classes of the need for the reform of feudalism in England and the appalling misery felt by the lower classes as a result of their enforced near-slavery. By the start of the 15th century, serfdom had in effect all but been abolished. And John Ball’s rallying cry “When Adam delved and Eve span – Who was then the gentleman?” endured to inspire later radicals of the English Civil Wars and Victorian socialists.
References:
Scales of Justice
On this date, the U.S. Supreme Court decided the landmark case of Loving v Commonwealth of Virginia (388 US 1), in which the Court, by a 9-0 vote, declared Virginia’s anti-miscegenation statute, the “Racial Integrity Act of 1924″, unconstitutional, thereby overturning Pace v State of Alabama (106 US 583 [1883]) and ending all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States.
In Pace v. State of Alabama (1883), the Supreme Court had ruled that the conviction of an Alabama couple for interracial sex, affirmed on appeal by the Alabama Supreme Court, did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment because whites and non-whites were punished in equal measure for the offense of engaging in interracial sex. Interracial extramarital sex was deemed a felony, whereas extramarital sex (“adultery or fornication”) was only a misdemeanor.
Background: In June 1958, two residents of Virginia, Mildred Jeter, an African-American woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, were married in the District of Columbia pursuant to its laws. Shortly after their marriage, the Lovings returned to Virginia and established their marital abode in Caroline County. At the October Term, 1958, of the Circuit Court of Caroline County, a grand jury issued an indictment charging the Lovings with violating Virginia’s ban on interracial marriages. On January 6, 1959, the Lovings pleaded guilty to the charge and were sentenced to one year in jail; however, the trial judge suspended the sentence for a period of 25 years on the condition that the Lovings leave the State and not return to Virginia together for 25 years. He stated in an opinion that:
Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.
Mildred Loving and her husband, Richard (26 January 1965).
After their convictions, the Lovings took up residence in the District of Columbia. On November 6, 1963, they filed a motion in the state trial court to vacate the judgment and set aside the sentence on the ground that the statutes which they had violated were repugnant to the Fourteenth Amendment. On January 22, 1965, the state trial judge denied the motion to vacate the sentences, and the Lovings perfected an appeal to the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia. The Supreme Court of Appeals upheld the constitutionality of the anti-miscegenation statutes and, after modifying the sentence, affirmed the convictions (206 Va. 924, 147 S.E. 2d 78). The Lovings appealed this decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Decision: In Loving v. Commonwealth of Virginia, the Supreme Court ruled that Virginia’s anti-miscegenation statute violated both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In its unanimous decision, written by Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Court stated:
Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival…. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discrimination. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.
Furthermore, the Supreme Court concluded that anti-miscegenation laws were racist and had been enacted to perpetuate white supremacy:
There is patently no legitimate overriding purpose independent of invidious racial discrimination which justifies this classification. The fact that Virginia prohibits only interracial marriages involving white persons demonstrates that the racial classifications must stand on their own justification, as measures designed to maintain White Supremacy.
Then and now.
Loving v. Virginia established the legal basis for a cultural redefinition of marriage. Over time, marriages between whites and African Americans became both more numerous and more accepted. Same-sex marriages, meanwhile, became more disputed, with equal-rights activists citing Loving as a precedent in their favor. The courts have preferred reading the case strictly in terms of race, although in 2007 the group Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, or GLAD, released a statement that attributed to Mildred Loving support for same-sex marriage. After her death, the Loving family denied that she had held these views. Richard Loving died in 1975, and Mildred Loving died in 2008.
Suggested Reading:
Posted in History, Human Rights, Law
Self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc
At midday on this date, Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức took a ride in a car to the corner of Phan Dinh Phung and Le Van Duyet streets (now Nguyen Dinh Chieu and Cach Mang Thang Tam streets) in central Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City). Đức emerged from the car along with two other monks. One placed a cushion on the road while the second opened the trunk and took out a five-gallon gasoline can. Đức calmly seated himself in the traditional Buddhist meditative lotus position on the cushion. A colleague emptied the contents of the gasoline container over Đức’s head. Đức rotated a mala (string of wooden prayer beads) and recited the words Nam Mô A Di Đà Phật (“homage to Amitabha Buddha”) before striking a match and dropping it on himself. Flames consumed his robes and flesh, and black oily smoke emanated from his burning body.
Đức’s last words before his self-immolation were documented in a letter he had left:
Before closing my eyes and moving towards the vision of the Buddha, I respectfully plead to President Ngô Đình Diệm to take a mind of compassion towards the people of the nation and implement religious equality to maintain the strength of the homeland eternally. I call the venerables, reverends, members of the sangha and the lay Buddhists to organise in solidarity to make sacrifices to protect Buddhism.
The Most Venerable Thích Quảng Đức, whose lay name was Lam Van Tuc, was born in 1897 in a small village in a province in central Viet Nam.
In August Diệm, a Roman Catholic who had been oppressing the Buddhist majority, used regular troops to arrest and imprison more than one thousand Buddhists in Hue and Saigon. Protests spread, and Quảng Đức’s self-immolation was followed by similar acts. Madame Nhu, the president’s sister-in-law, referred to the burnings as “barbecues” and offered to supply matches.
People around the world began to question a regime that would oppress peaceful Buddhists and provoke such shocking sacrifice. Many Americans viewed Thích Quảng Đức’s act as a demonstration that Vietnamese lacked the most cherished of American liberties: freedom of religion. Such was the outrage that officials genuinely feared that it would lead to the end of Diệm’s reign and the American effort to combat communism in Vietnam. The U.S. government found it increasingly difficult to continue its support of the man they had put in power.
The statue of Thich Quang Duc at the corner of Nguyen Dinh Chieu and Cach Mang Thang Tam streets.
For his extraordinary martydom, Thích Quảng Đức was deemed a bodhisattva – an enlightened being who delays entering nirvana to help those in need. And that he did. His heroic act precipitated the end of Diệm’s oppressive reign, and the regimes that followed pledged to accommodate the Buddhists.
Thích Quảng Đức’s heart, which miraculously survived the immolation intact, has become a holy relic.
Posted in History, Human Rights, Politics, Religion
Tagged Buddhism, History, Human Rights, Politics, Religion
The Flag of Gay Pride
On this date, William Jefferson Clinton became the first president to announce June as a national “Gay and Lesbian Pride Month.” Of course, there have always been those who ask why there should be a gay pride month — after all, heterosexuals don’t “celebrate” being straight. There are actually several good, interrelated reasons.
The psychological answer: “To expose heterosexism!” This was explained by psychotherapist Joe Kort:
Why [have LGBT pride month]? The same reason we celebrate St. Patrick’s Day March and Black History month in February — to celebrate one’s identity and acknowledge that we exist.
Currently people still assume that everyone is heterosexual until proven otherwise. They ask males if they have wives and girlfriends and females if they have boyfriends and husbands. Lesbians are assumed heterosexual and asked by doctors if they are using birth control assuming that the woman is sexually active with men.
The next time you see a gay pride event and parade, instead of judging it as overly sexual, over the top flamboyant and/or being in your face about sex, take a moment and remember these people are celebrating their identities. Being gay and lesbian is about a life full of spiritual, emotional, psychological and sexual connection to members of the same gender. Until it is fully acknowledged legally and otherwise and accepted as a legitimate and normal lifestyle for the people who live it, we are going to need gay pride month.
The word pride is used in this case as an antonym for shame, which has been used to control and oppress LGBT persons throughout history. In other words, Gay Pride Parades are necessary to affirm that gay and lesbian people are equal — not inferior or superior — to heterosexuals. This explains why Heterosexual Pride Parades will never be justified, since heterosexuals are viewed, even today, as superior to LGBT people by most of society.
The political answer: “To educate heterosexual people!”
Rustin (center) before a 1964 demonstration. Photo by New York World-Telegram and the Sun staff photographer.
The social butterfly answer: “To connect with each other!”
We are still in the minority which is why we feel the need to get together and enjoy ourselves. If the world were half gay and half straight, then there would be no need for this, but it isn’t. In addition, it also helps for younger gay people to see all of these people and know they’re not alone.
The historical answer: “To celebrate the advances the LGBT movement has accomplished!”
Before Stonewall, the LGBT community was considered as only a sick community that needed to be cured. We were dehumanized. Many of us were sent to insane asylums for electric shock therapy and in some cases, they would cut out the frontal lobe of our brains. In World War ll, the Germans sent any known homosexual to concentration camps and some of us were used for laboratory experiments. After the war was over, most people in the concentration camps were set free. Not the gay men though — they were sent to prison for loving other men.
First Hong Kong Gay Pride Parade (13 December 2008)
Gay pride events around the world celebrate the progress the LGBT movement has achieved since Stonewall. I’m not proud just for being gay, as this in itself is no achievement, but I am proud of what my community and those before me have done so that now things are better than they used to be. We have representatives in politics, entertainment, sports, science, and academics, and we are allowed to get married or have a civil union in dozens of countries and a number of U.S. states. Yet we still have a ways to go before we truly have equality.
Yet as we gained tangible rights, visibility, and even acceptance the gay pride event has come under attack as a distraction, as an over-commercialized event ripe with images that inevitably our foes use against us. But remember, it’s a parade. It’s supposed to be entertaining. Therefore, we see decorated floats, people in costumes, and a few too many guys dressed as Cher. It may or may not be your cup of tea, but it’s more fun than a parade that consists of people in business clothes who look like accountants.
After all, when was the last time that someone complained that people in Mardi Gras parades aren’t an accurate representation of heterosexuality?
Posted in History, Human Rights
Tagged Bayard Rustin, Gay, GLBT, History, Human Rights, LGBT
The Chinese astrophysicist Fang Lizhi at home in Beijing, shortly before taking refuge at the US embassy during and after the Tiananmen Square crackdown, 1989.
On this day, in the wake of the June 4th crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, China issued a warrant for a leading Chinese dissident who had taken refuge in the U.S. embassy in Beijing. The diplomatic standoff lasted for a year, and the refusal of the United States to hand the dissident over to Chinese officials was further evidence of American disapproval of China’s crackdown on political protesters.
The Chinese government used this brutal crackdown as a pretext for issuing an arrest warrant for Fang Lizhi, an internationally respected astrophysicist and leading Chinese dissident. Although Fang had not participated in the Tiananmen Square protests, he had been a consistent advocate of greater political democracy and a persistent critic of government policies. On June 5, Fang and his wife, Li Shuxian, took refuge in the U.S. embassy.
In the June arrest warrant, Fang and his wife were charged with “committing crimes of counter-revolutionary propaganda and instigation.” Chinese officials demanded that the American government hand over the pair, but the U.S. refused. Fang and his wife remained in the U.S. embassy until June 25, 1990, when they were allowed by Chinese authorities to leave the embassy and board a U.S. Air Force C-135 transport plane to Britain.
During his time in the embassy, Fang wrote an essay entitled “The Chinese Amnesia”, criticizing the Chinese Communist Party’s repression of human rights and the outside world’s turning a blind eye to it. The entire essay (translated by Perry Link) was eventually published in The New York Review of Books on September 27, 1990. The following is a portion of it:
Excerpt from “The Chinese Amnesia” (1989)
By Fang Lizhi
(translated by Perry Link)
There seems to be no accurate count of all the books that have appeared about the Tiananmen events of the spring of 1989. But certainly they have been many. A friend at Columbia University recently wrote me that she and one of her Chinese colleagues, both of whom were eyewitnesses at Tiananmen, had originally planned to write a book about it. But publishers told them that so many Tiananmen books were already available that the market had become “saturated.” The two reluctantly dropped their plan. It seems that a new Tiananmen book, for now, can have only a modest circulation.
In my view, a large but “saturated” market is itself one of the most important consequences to emerge from the events at Tiananmen. It signals the failure of the “Technique of Forgetting History,” which has been an important device of rule by the Chinese Communists. I have lived under the Chinese Communist regime for four decades, and have had many opportunities to observe this technique at work. Its aim is to force the whole of society to forget its history, and especially the true history of the Chinese Communist party itself.
In 1957 Mao Zedong launched an “Anti-Rightist Movement” to purge intellectuals, and 500,000 people were persecuted. Some were killed, some killed themselves, and some were imprisoned or sent for “labor reform.” The lightest punishment was to be labeled a “Rightist.” This was called “wearing a cap” and meant that one had to bear a powerful stigma. I had just graduated from college that year, and also in that year was purged for the first time.
After the 1957 Anti-Rightist purge, what worried me most was not that I had been punished, or that free thought had been curtailed. At that time, I was still a believer, or semibeliever, in Marxism, and felt that the criticism of free thought, including my own free thought, was not entirely unreasonable. But what worried me, what I just couldn’t figure out, was why the Communist party in China would want to use such cruel methods against intellectuals who showed just a tiny bit (and some not even that) of independent thought. I had always assumed that the relationship between the Communist party and intellectuals, including intellectuals who had some independent views, was one of friendship–or at least not one of enmity.
Later I discovered that this worry of mine seemed ridiculous to teachers and friends who were ten or twenty years older than I. They laughed at my ignorance of history. They told me how, as early as 1942, before the Party had wrested control of the whole country, the same cruel methods against intellectuals were already being used at the Communist base in Yan’an. In college I had taken courses in Communist party history, and of course knew that in 1942 at Yan’an there had been a “rectification” movement aimed at “liberalism,” “individualism,” and other non-Marxist thought. But it was indeed true that I had had no idea that the methods of that “rectification” included “criticism and struggle”–which meant in practice forcing people to commit suicide, and even execution by beheading. People who had experienced the Yan’an “rectification” paled at the very mention of it. But fifteen years later my generation was completely ignorant of it. We deserved the ridicule we received.
After another thirteen years, in 1970, it became our turn to laugh at a younger generation. This was in the middle stage of the Cultural Revolution that took place between 1966 and 1976. In the early stage of the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong had used university students, many of whom supported him fanatically, to bring down his political opponents. But in the early 1970s these same students became the targets of attack. In 1970 all the students and teachers in the physics department of the Chinese University of Science and Technology were sent to a coal mine in Huainan, Anhui Province, for “re-education.” I was a lecturer in physics at the time. The movement to “criticize and struggle” against the students’ “counterrevolutionary words and deeds” reached its most intense point during the summer. Some students were “struggled”; others were locked up “for investigation”; a good number could not endure the torment of the vile political atmosphere and fell ill. One of my assignments was to pull a plank-cart (like a horse cart, but pulled by a human being) to transport the ill students. Of the group of forty-some students working in the same mine as I did, two were driven to suicide–one by jumping off a building, the other by lying in front of a train.
Most of these students, as innocent as I had been in 1957, never imagined that the Communist government could be so cruel in its treatment of students who had followed them so loyally. Later one of the students, who became my co-worker in astrophysical research (and who is now in the US), confided to me that he had had no knowledge whatever of the true history of the Anti-Rightist Movement. It was not until he was himself detained and interrogated that he slowly began to appreciate why some of the older people he knew lived in such fear of the phrase Anti-Rightist. The whole story of the main actors and issues had, for this generation, become a huge blank.
Fang’s assessment of the world’s indifference to the oppression of human rights in China was accurate, at least in the United States; the American media had rarely mentioned human rights violations in China since the Democracy Wall movement was crushed in 1979 and its leaders were thrown in jail. As reported in an article entitled “China News Blackout” (Summer, 1989), written by Martin A. Lee and published by FAIR, the national media watch group:
“Look at Wei Jingshen,” Deng Xiaoping said of a prominent Democracy Wall dissident (Progressive, 3/87). “We put him behind bars and the democracy movement died. We haven’t released him, but that did not raise much of an international uproar.”
Shortly after the suppression of the Democracy Wall movement, Deng introduced economic and legal reforms. “A wave of euphoria swept through U.S. government and press circles,” recalled Roberta Cohen, who served as deputy assistant secretary of state for human rights under Carter. “The enthusiasm for free-market initiatives and other reforms became the new rationale for turning a blind eye to the continuing repression in China.”
According to the State Department’s 1987 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, between 2 million and 5 million people languished in Chinese labor camps and prisons. New York Times correspondent Fox Butterfield reported on the existence of Chinese gulags when he was based in China in the early 1980s, but there wasn’t much follow-up in the U.S. press.
U.S. media remained tight-lipped when President Ronald Reagan approved sales of police equipment to China’s internal security force, expanded military ties and encouraged loans and investment despite serious human rights abuses by the Chinese government. The brutalization of Tibet and the relentless suppression of dissent in China were off the press agenda until late in Reagan’s second term. Meanwhile, according to Amnesty International, thousands of Chinese prisoners were being tortured, while others faced illegal arrests, unwarranted search and seizure, and other forms of harassment.
Journalists were outraged when Deng and company imposed harsh press restrictions during the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989, but U.S. reporters appear to have practiced a form of self-censorship with respect to Chinese human rights violations for nearly a decade. “American administrations yawned at reports of repression of basic freedoms in China…. So, much too often, did American journalism,” A.M. Rosenthal wrote in the New York Times (6/13/89) shortly after the massacre at Tiananmen Square.
Rosenthal’s complaint rings hollow, for it was during his tenure as New York Times executive editor that reporting on Chinese abuses virtually ceased. No news stories on China and human rights are listed in the Times index from 1984 through 1986. Ditto for Time magazine, which selected Deng Xiaoping as “Man of the Year” in 1985. Newsweek managed only one story on the subject for these three years.
The media silence was all the more deafening in light of what transpired in China during this period. Vice President George Bush visited the People’s Republic in 1985, but this provoked none of the concern for political prisoners that journalists displayed when U.S. officials met with Soviet leaders. And another round of student protests was put down in December 1986 by Deng Xiaoping, who stated at the time (Progressive, 3/87):”When necessary one must deal severely with those who defy orders. We can afford to shed some blood.” This is the man Bush hailed as a “forward-looking” leader.
In February 1989, more than one hundred Chinese security personnel had forcibly prevented Fang Lizhi from attending a banquet with President George Bush (the First), even though he had received a highly publicized invitation. And yet, Bush subsequently failed to raise the human rights issue with Chinese officials. The best he could muster was a statement of regret channeled though his spokesperson Marlin Fitzwater. In a case of too little, too late, editorials in major dailies chided Bush for not taking a tougher stand in Beijing (Miami Herald, 2/28/89; New York Times, 3/1/89).
Nevertheless, the Fang Lizhi incident indicated that feelings about what had occurred in Tiananmen Square ran high, both in the United States and China; it seemed America had finally taken notice.
Posted in China, History, Human Rights
Tagged China, Fang Lizhi, History, Human Rights, Massacre, Tiananmen, Tibet
On this date, in Salem Village in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Bridget Bishop, the first colonist to be tried in the Salem witch trials, was hanged after being found guilty of the practice of witchcraft two days earlier.
Examination of a Witch (1853) by T. H. Matteson, inspired by the Salem trials.
discovered a preternathurall Excresence of flesh between the pudendum and Anus much like to Tetts & not usuall in women
She professed her innocence:
I am innocent I know nothing of it I am no witch I know not what a witch is.
[Both of the above excerpts can be found in the proceedings against Bishop — and other witchcraft defendants — here.]
Nevertheless, Bishop was found guilty and executed by hanging on June 10. Thirteen more women and five men from all stations of life followed her to the gallows, and one man, Giles Corey, was executed by crushing. Most of those tried were condemned on the basis of the witnesses’ behavior during the actual proceedings, characterized by fits and hallucinations that were argued to have been caused by the defendants on trial.
The United States has blamed us for suppressing the students. But didn’t the U.S. itself call out police and troops to deal with student strikes and disturbances, and didn’t that lead to arrests and bloodshed? It suppressed the students and the people, while we put down a counter-revolutionary rebellion. What right has it to criticize us?
— Deng Xiaoping, June 9, 1989, comment to officers of troops enforcing martial law in Beijing after the Tiananmen events on 4 June.
Tiananmen. Nothing happened, according to the Chinese Communist Party.
On this date, less than a week after the Tiananmen Square protests were crushed on 4 June, Deng Xiaoping, chairman of the Central Military Commission and China’s foremost leader, delivered an address in Beijing to military commanders. The address, which was first reported in Chinese newspapers in Hong Kong and the United States, emerged as a key document setting out the party line in the crackdown on the pro-democracy movement. He stated that the government had suppressed a “counterrevolutionary rebellion . . . determined by the international and domestic climate” where the “dregs of society” had sought to “establish a bourgeois republic entirely dependent on the West.”
Chinese senior leader Deng Xiaoping, left, shakes hands with officers of the People's Liberation Army in Beijing June 9, 1987 while former President Li Xiannian, left, looks on.
An official publication issued by the Chinese authorities in 1990 about the “riots,” The Truth About the Beijing Turmoil, claimed that 6,000 troops had been injured and “scores” had been killed. The book said that 3,000 civilians were wounded, and over 200, including 36 university students, had died. These casualties occurred when troops “counter-attacked,” it states, and “some rioters were killed, some onlookers were hit by stray bullets and some wounded or killed by armed ruffians.” How this could have happened when soldiers only “fired into the air” as it claims was left unexplained.
More recent commentators have made much of the fact that the party leadership generally now refers to the events of that year as a “political incident” rather than the more harsh-sounding “counterrevolutionary rebellion.” But the denial of extensive loss of life among ordinary people in the official version, dubbed “the big lie” by many observers, has not been revised, even to a small extent. The attempt to impose collective amnesia is encouraged by a deafening silence on the matter in the Chinese media.
Posted in China, History, Human Rights
Tagged China, History, Human Rights, Massacre, Tiananmen
Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of a naked 9-year-old Phan Thị Kim Phúc running down a road after being burned by napalm.
On this date, an iconic Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph of the Vietnam War was taken by AP photographer Huyng Cong Nick Ut. The photo shows Phan Thị Kim Phúc at about nine years of age running naked on a road in the village of Trang Bang, screaming from burns to her skin.
Trang Bang had just come under attack by South Vietnamese planes, which mistakenly dropped napalm on a Buddhist pagoda in an area where the North Vietnamese were infiltrating. While running for safety with other children, Kim was severely burned by the napalm. Kim suffered many years of painful burn therapy, but she always longed to reach out and help other children who were victimized by war.
Kim Phuc today.
In the 1980s, Kim got a chance to study medicine in Cuba, where she met her future husband, Bui Huy Toan. In 1992, the couple asked for political asylum in Canada during their honeymoon trip.
Half a century later, she lives in Ajax, Ontario, with her husband and two children. She established The Kim Foundation International, with the aim of providing medical and psychological assistance to child victims of war.
Kim Phuc – Toronto, Canada, as heard on NPR’s “All Things Considered”, 30 June 2008:
On June 8, 1972, I ran out from Cao Dai temple in my village, Trang Bang, South Vietnam, I saw an airplane getting lower and then four bombs falling down. I saw fire everywhere around me. Then I saw the fire over my body, especially on my left arm. My clothes had been burned off by fire.
I was nine years old but I still remember my thoughts at that moment: I would be ugly and people would treat me in a different way. My picture was taken in that moment on Road number 1 from Saigon to Phnom Penh. After a soldier gave me some drink and poured water over my body, I lost my consciousness.
Several days after, I realized that I was in the hospital, where I spent fourteen months and had seventeen operations. It was a very difficult time for me when I went home from the hospital. Our house was destroyed, we lost everything, and we just survived day-by-day.
Although I suffered from pain, itching, and headaches all the time, the long hospital stay made me dream to become a doctor. But my studies were cut short by the local government. They wanted me as a symbol of the state. I could not go to school any more.
The anger inside me was like a hatred as high as a mountain. I hated my life. I hated all people who were normal because I was not normal. I really wanted to die many times.
I spent my daytime in the library to read a lot of religious books to find a purpose for my life. One of the books that I read was the Holy Bible. On Christmas 1982, I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior. It was an amazing turning point in my life. God helped me to learn to forgive — the most difficult of all lessons. It didn’t happen in a day and it wasn’t easy. But I finally got it.
Forgiveness made me free from hatred. I still have many scars on my body and severe pain most days, but my heart is cleansed.
Napalm is very powerful but faith, forgiveness, and love are much more powerful. We would not have war at all if everyone could learn how to live with true love, hope, and forgiveness. If that little girl in the picture can do it, ask yourself: Can you?
Phan Thị Kim Phúc is the living symbol of the suffering of innocent war victims. Her image of being burned by napalm during the Vietnam War raised worldwide awareness of the horrors of the War, and indeed of all wars, and made her the bearer of the message of forgiveness, reconciliation, and tolerance.
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An Evening with Kim Phuc
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Posted in History, Human Rights
Tagged History, Human Rights, The Kim Foundation International
Mohandas Gandhi (right) with his brother Laxmidas in 1886.
On this date, Mohandas K. Gandhi, a young Indian lawyer working in South Africa, refused to comply with racial segregation rules on a South African train and was forcibly ejected at Pietermaritzburg.
Gandhi was born in Porbandar in the present state of Gujarat on October 2, 1869, and educated in law at University College, London. In 1891, after having been admitted to the British bar, Gandhi returned to India and attempted to establish a law practice in Bombay, with little success. Two years later an Indian firm with interests in South Africa retained him as legal adviser under a one-year contract in its office in Durban, SA. Here he was subjected to racism and South African laws that restricted the rights of Indian laborers.
Gandhi later recalled one such incident as his moment of truth. While traveling by train to Pretoria, a white man objected to Gandhi’s presence in a first-class carriage. Despite having a first-class ticket, Gandhi was asked to move to the van compartment at the end of the train. He refused and was thrown off the train at Pietermaritzburg station. There he spent the night in the waiting room and it is there he decided he would stay in South Africa to fight against racial discrimination. It was Gandhi’s first act of civil disobedience. From thereon, he decided to fight injustice and defend his rights as an Indian and a man.
Known as Mahatma, or “the great soul,” during his lifetime, Gandhi’s persuasive methods of civil disobedience influenced leaders of civil rights movements around the world, especially Martin Luther King, Jr., in the United States.
[My favorite Gandhi quote - Ed.:]
A time is coming when those, who are in the mad rush today of multiplying their wants, vainly thinking that they add to the real substance, real knowledge of the world, will retrace their steps and say: ‘What have we done?’
Civilizations have come and gone, and in spite of all our vaunted progress, I am tempted to ask again and again, ‘To what purpose?’ Wallace, a contemporary of Darwin, has said the same thing. Fifty years of brilliant inventions and discoveries, he has said, have not added one inch to the moral height of mankind. So said a dreamer and visionary if you will–Tolstoy. So said Jesus, and the Buddha, and Mahomed, whose religion is being denied and falsified in my own country today.
[Source: Mahatma (D.G. Tendulkar) Vol. 2; 2nd edn.(1960), Publications Division; p. 29.]
Posted in History, Human Rights, Law, Politics
Tagged Alfred Russel Wallace, Charles Darwin, Gandhi, History, Human Rights, Law, Politics, Racism
Alexis St. Martin with his wife in his later years.
On this date, Alexis St. Martin was working at a fur-trading post in Mackinac Island in Lake Huron when he was accidentally shot with a gun at close range. The charge of the gunshot blew a fist-sized hole through his side and into his stomach. The following account from Gurdon S. Hubbard is the only eyewitness description of the incident.
This St. Martin was at the time one of the American Fur Company’s engages, who, with quite a number of others, was in the store. One of the party was holding a shotgun (not a musket) which was accidentally discharged, the whole charge entered St. Martins body. The muzzle was not over three feet from him — I think not over two. The wadding entered, was well as pieces of his clothing; his shirt took fire; he fell, as we supposed, dead.
William Beaumont, a US Army surgeon stationed at a nearby army post, treated the wound. Although St. Martin was a healthy 28-year-old [1], he was not expected to recover due to the severity of his wound. Nevertheless, he did so under Beaumont’s care, and when the wound healed itself, the edge of the hole in the stomach had attached itself to the edge of the hole in the skin, creating a permanent gastric fistula. The strong stomach acid essentially disinfected the wound from the inside out, making it safe to not sew it up.
The trading post where St. Martin was shot still stands today in Michigan.
Beaumont recognized the wonderful opportunity he had in St. Martin to investigate the mysterious process of digestion. For centuries, the stomach was thought to produce heat that somehow cooked foods. Alternatively, the stomach was imagined to be like a mill, a fermenting vat, or a stew pan. Beaumont performed two kinds of experiments on the digestive processes from 1825 to 1833. First, he observed the fluids discharged by the stomach when different foods were eaten (in vivo). Second, he extracted samples of the stomach’s content and put them into glass tubes to determine the time required for “external” digestion (in vitro).
Expressing his dislike for his role, St. Martin periodically disappeared. In 1832, to secure his experimental subject, Beaumont signed St. Martin to a 1-year contract. Per the contract, St. Martin was to “obey, suffer and comply with all reasonable and proper orders or experiments” for $150 and room, board, and clothing. In 1833, St. Martin went home to Canada, never to return to Beaumont’s care. The difference in social status and wealth makes Beaumont’s use of St. Martin ethically questionable.
Beaumont published the first results of his experiments on St. Martin in the Philadelphia Medical Recorder for January 1825, and full details in 1838 as Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice, and the Physiology of Digestion. He ended his treatise with a list of fifty-one inferences based on his 238 separate experiments. Although working away from the centers of medicine, Beaumont used findings from Spallanzini, Carminiti, Viridet, Vauquelin, Tiedemann and Gmelin, Leuret and Lassaigne, Montegre, and Prout. Even with their information, he still obeyed the scientific method, basing all his inferences on direct experimentation.
Beaumont proved once and for all that digestion in the stomach was chemical — a product (mostly) of the gastric juice itself which Beaumont surmised, correctly, was composed largely of hydrochloric acid. Beaumont’s important experiments quickly reached an international audience. In the United States, Dunglison’s 1844 second edition of Human Health included a 3-page appendix of Beaumont’s “…time required for the stomachal digestion of different alimentary substances,” and Cutter’s popular Anatomy and Physiology Designed for Academies and Families (1848) included Beaumont’s results for the mean times for digesting foods. In France, Claude Bernard cited Beaumont’s work in his 1865 Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine.
Beaumont’s accomplishment is even more remarkable because the United States, unlike England, France, and Germany, provided no research facilities for experimental medicine. Beaumont, a “backwoods physiologist,” inspired future studies of gastric emptying, intestinal absorption, electrolyte balance, rehydration, and nutritional supplementation with so-called sports drinks.
[1] For some reason, St. Martin’s age at the time was given by Beaumont as 18 years, and the error was not corrected until the Canadian Physiological Society marked his grave in 1962. Often referring to his patient as a “lad,” the doctor was actually just nine years his senior. It is possible that Alexis for some reason falsified his age throughout his dealings with Beaumont, or even that someone else stated the age and the wounded man was never actually asked. On the other hand, others think that it was not an error. “I doubt that Beaumont, who showed himself to be a notoriously accurate observer, would not have noticed the difference between a youth of 18 and a grown man of 28,” said Sylvio Leblond, MD. “I do not believe that Alexis had any reason to state that he was ten years younger than his correct age, and I feel certain that the thought would never have occurred to him…It is reasonable to conclude, then, that he was…18 or 19 in 1822.”
References:
Posted in History, Human Physiology, Medicine, Scientific Method
Tagged Scientific Method, Human Physiology, Medicine, History
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
- George Orwell, first line of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
On this date, George Orwell’s novel of a dystopian future, Nineteen Eighty-Four, was published. The novel’s all-seeing leader, known as “Big Brother,” has become a universal symbol for intrusive government and oppressive bureaucracy.
Orwell
George Orwell was the nom de plume of Eric Blair, who was born in India. The son of a British civil servant, Orwell attended school in London and won a scholarship to the elite prep school Eton, where most students came from wealthy upper-class backgrounds, unlike Orwell. Having no prospect of gaining a university scholarship and his family’s means being insufficient to pay his tuition, Orwell joined the Indian Imperial Police and went to work in Burma in 1922. He resigned and returned to England in 1928 having grown to hate imperialism (as shown by his first novel Burmese Days, published in 1934, and by such essays as “A Hanging” and “Shooting an Elephant”).
Orwell adopted his pen name in 1933, while writing for the New Adelphi. He chose a pen name that stressed his deep, lifelong affection for the English tradition and countryside: George is the patron saint of England (and George V was monarch at the time), while the River Orwell in Suffolk was one of his most beloved English sites.
Choosing to immerse himself in the experiences of the urban poor, Orwell went to Paris, where he worked menial jobs, and later spent time in England as a tramp. He wrote Down and Out in Paris and London in 1933, based on his observation of the poorer classes, and in 1937 his Road to Wigan Pier documented the life of the unemployed in northern England.
Orwell became increasingly left wing in his views, although he never committed himself to any specific political party. He went to Spain during the Spanish Civil War to fight with the Republicans, but later fled as communism gained an upper hand in the struggle on the left. His barnyard fable, Animal Farm (1945), shows how the noble ideals of egalitarian economies can easily be distorted. The book brought him his first taste of critical and financial success. Orwell’s last novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, brought him lasting fame with its grim vision of a future where all citizens are watched constantly and language is twisted to aid in oppression.
Orwell died in 1950 at the age of 46 from tuberculosis, which he had probably contracted during the period described in Down and Out in Paris and London. He was in and out of hospitals for the last three years of his life. Having requested burial in accordance with the Anglican rite, he was interred in All Saints’ Churchyard, Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire with the simple epitaph: Here lies Eric Arthur Blair, born June 25th 1903, died January 21st 1950.
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