May 18, 1989 (a Thursday)

18 May 1989. Beijing University students during a huge demonstration at Tiananmen Square start an unlimited hunger strike, part of the mass pro-democracy protest against the Chinese government.

On this date, a crowd of protesters, estimated to number more than one million, marched through the streets of Beijing with songs, slogans, and banners calling for greater democracy and the ouster of some hard-line Chinese officials.

CHINA. Beijing. Tiananmen Square. 1989 May 18. Trucks arrive from all over the city as well as from the country.

Also, this morning Li Peng, member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo of the CPC Central Committee and premier of the State Council, and others met with representatives of the students, who had been fasting at Tiananmen Square, at the Great Hall of the People. On the evening of May 18th, Party elders and Politburo members, including Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng, approved the declaration of martial law.

Chinese workers parade through Beijing streets, 18 May, in support of student hunger strikers gathered at Tiananmen Square.

The protests were part of the months-long movement to occupy Tiananmen Square in central Beijing, which culminated in the brutal repression of June 1989. In the wake of the crackdown, the Chinese government condemned the protests as a “counter-revolutionary rebellion”, though it has never publicly accounted for those killed. The massacre caused horror around the world, and China was marginalized by the international community, but as Deng Xiaoping reportedly said: “The West always forgets.“

May 10, 1990 (a Thursday)

Tiananmen Square – June 2, 1989

On this date, the government of the People’s Republic of China announced that it was releasing 211 people arrested during the crackdown on massive protests held in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in June 1989. A brief government statement simply indicated, “Lawbreakers involved in the turmoil and counterrevolutionary rebellion last year have been given lenient treatment and released upon completion of investigations.” The statement also declared that over 400 other “law-breakers” were still being investigated while being held in custody. Most observers viewed the prisoner release as an attempt by the communist government of China to dispel much of the terrible publicity it received for its brutal suppression of the 1989 protests. In fact, in the United States, where the administration of President George Bush was considering the extension of most-favored-nation status to China, the release of the prisoners was hailed as a step in the right direction.

May 9, 1950 (a Tuesday)

Scientology in Hollywood.

On this date, Lafayette Ronald Hubbard (1911-1986) published Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. With this book, Hubbard introduced a branch of self-help psychology called “Dianetics”, which quickly caught fire and, over time, morphed into a belief system boasting millions of subscribers: Scientology.

Hubbard was already a prolific and frequently published writer by the time he penned the book that would change his life. Under several pseudonyms in the 1930s, he had published a great amount of pulp fiction, particularly in the science fiction and fantasy genres. In late 1949, having returned from serving in the Navy in World War II, Hubbard began publishing articles in the pages of Astounding Science Fiction, a magazine that published works by the likes of Isaac Asimov and Jack Williamson. Out of these grew the elephantine text known as Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health.

Though discredited by the medical and scientific establishment, over 100,000 copies of Dianetics were sold in the first two years of publication, and Hubbard soon found himself lecturing across the country. He went on to write six more books in 1951, developing a significant fan base and establishing the Hubbard Dianetics Research Foundation in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

In 1953, L. Ron Hubbard introduced “Scientology”. Scientology expanded on Dianetics by bringing Hubbard’s popular version of psychotherapy into the realm of philosophy, and ultimately, religion. In only a few years, Hubbard found himself at the helm of a movement that captured the popular imagination. As Scientology grew in the 1960s, several national governments became suspicious of Hubbard, accusing him of quackery and brainwashing his followers.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Paul Breckenridge defined Scientology well in June 1984: “In addition to violating and abusing its own members’ civil rights, the organization over the years with its ‘fair game’ doctrine has harassed and abused those persons not in the church whom it perceives as enemies.” In a 1967 policy titled Penalties for Lower Conditions, Hubbard had written that opponents who are “fair game” may be “deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist. May be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed.”

However, on 1 October 1993, the Internal Revenue Service, after an extraordinary campaign of lawsuits and harassment against the IRS and its officials by Scientology, issued letters reclassifying Scientology and every one of its organizations as a religion instead of a business. The American tax man made Scientology fully tax-exempt. By granting Scientology tax exemption, the U.S. government is cooperating with an organization that appears to put citizens from around the world at significant mental health and perhaps medical risk.

Not everything that calls itself a religion is a religion. It could be a multibillion-dollar business, an organization with a mafia-like hold over its followers, or a brainwashing cult. Some ex-members say the so-called Church of Scientology is all three.

In Britain, as far as the Charity Commissioners are concerned, for the purposes of English charity law: “Scientology is not a religion.“

The underlying logic of the British test is that a religion must be open to all and open about itself. Go into a Christian church and they will tell you about Jesus. You will see images of him, everywhere, dating back almost 2,000 years. Go into a Hindu temple and you will see images of Ganesh, the multi-armed elephant God, everywhere, images that go back millennia. Go into a Church of Scientology and you will see no image of Xenu. No member of the Church of Scientology will admit to Xenu’s existence, but ex-Scientologists say he is at the heart of its cosmology. Scientology fails the British test of what is or is not a religion because it is not open about what it believes in. A belief system that tells lies about its core belief does not have the automatic right to be treated as a religion.

Since 1995, the Church of Scientology has not enjoyed the legal protections accorded to religions in Germany, after a judge ruled that it was not a religion but a group “masquerading as a religion in order to make a profit.”

Suggested reading:

• Jon Atack. A Piece of Blue Sky: Scientology, Dianetics and L. Ron Hubbard Exposed (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1990).
• Richard Behar. The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power, Time Magazine, 6 May 1991, p. 50. Accessed on 9 May 2013 at http://www.rickross.com/reference/scientology/scien413.html.
• Lindsay Beyerstein. Holy Mess, Columbia Journalism Review, (Mar/April 2013) vol. 51, no. 6, p. 58. Accessed on 9 May 2013 at http://www.cjr.org/critical_eye/holy_mess.php?page=all.
• Jenna Miscavige Hill. Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape (William Morrow, 2013).
• John Sweeney. The Church of Fear: Inside the Weird World of Scientology (Silvertail Books, 2013).
• Lawrence Wright. Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (Knopf, 2013).
• ———————-, The Apostate: Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology, The New Yorker, 14 February 2011, p. 84. Accessed on 9 May 2013 at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/14/110214fa_fact_wright?currentPage=all.

April 27, 1819 (a Tuesday)

Scales of Justice

On this date, one Jesse Boorn of Manchester, Vermont was arrested and brought before the Justice of the Peace for examination. The examination lasted from Tuesday until Saturday. Thus began America’s first known wrongful murder conviction case.

When Russel Colvin had disappeared in 1812, suspicion of foul play had fallen on his brothers-in-law, Jesse and Stephen Boorn, who held Colvin in disdain. Seven years later, an uncle of the suspects, Amos Boorn, had a dream in which Colvin appeared to him and said that he had been slain. Colvin did not identify his killers in the dream but said that his remains had been put in a cellar hole on the Boorn farm. Uncle Amos said the dream was repeated three times. The cellar hole was excavated but no remains were found. Shortly afterward, a dog unearthed some large bones from beneath a nearby stump. Three local physicians examined the bones and summarily declared them human.  The patience of the community snapped and action was demanded.

Artist's depiction of the alleged murder of Russel Colvin.

This is when officials took Jesse Boorn into custody. They would have arrested Stephen Boorn as well, but he had moved to New York. While in custody, Jesse’s cellmate, forger Silas Merill, told authorities that Jesse had confessed to him. In return for agreeing to testify against Jesse, Merrill was released from jail. Faced with mounting evidence against him, Jesse admitted to the murder, but placed principal blame on Stephen, who legally was beyond the reach of the local authorities. However, a Vermont constable met up with Stephen, and Stephen agreed to return to Vermont with him to clear his name. After his return to Vermont, Stephen confessed as well, although he claimed to have acted in self-defense.

The local physicians then changed their minds that the found bones were human, and declared them animal. Nevertheless, the prosecution pressed ahead with its case and both of the Boorn brothers were convicted and sentenced to death. The Vermont legislature commuted Jesse’s sentence to life in prison, but denied relief to Stephen. Shortly before Stephen was to be hanged on January 28, 1820, Colvin was found living in New Jersey. On Colvin’s return to Vermont, both brothers were released.

References:

• Edwin M. Borchard, Convicting the Innocent: Errors of Criminal Justice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1932), chapter 3.

April 26, 1989 (a Wednesday)

The April 27th march was a protest to the April 26th editorial.

On this date, Deng Xiaoping, the powerful leader of the Communist Party Elders of China, denounced the student demonstrations in Beijing in an editorial published in the People’s Daily. He called the protests dongluan (meaning “turmoil” or “rioting”) by a “tiny minority.” These highly emotive terms were associated with the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution. Rather than tamping down the students’ fervor, Deng’s editorial further inflamed it. The government had just made the second of several grave mistakes that would lead to the Tiananmen Square Massacre of June, 1989.

April 24, 1863 (a Friday)

Abraham Lincoln

On this date, the Union Army of the United States issued General Order No. 100, signed and authorized by President Abraham Lincoln, which provided a code of conduct for federal soldiers and officers when dealing with Confederate prisoners and civilians during the American Civil War.  There was no document like it in the world at the time, and other countries soon adopted the code. In fact, its influence can be seen on the Geneva Convention.

The German-American jurist and political philosopher Francis Lieber was the principle civilian proponent and principle author of the order, and so it has come to be known as the Lieber Code of 1863.  It is also known as Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field, or Lieber Instructions.  Its main sections were concerned with, among other things, how prisoners of war should be treated.  More specifically, it forbade the use of torture to extract confessions and described the rights and duties of prisoners of war and of capturing forces, to wit, Article 16:

Military necessity does not admit of cruelty–that is, the infliction of suffering for the sake of suffering or for revenge, nor of maiming or wounding except in fight, nor of torture to extort confessions.

Lieber consistently opposed the abuse of prisoners, and he quickly dispensed with the notion that captured Southern soldiers should be treated as criminals, traitors, or bandits. Instead, they were to be housed humanely and fed “plain and wholesome food.” Torture and public humiliation were forbidden, and chivalry was very much alive: To reward exemplary bravery and honor, captors could even return sidearms to enemy officers.

The irony of a Republican predecessor opposing torture of enemy combatants nearly 150 years before Bush the Second condoned the practice has not been lost on critics of Bush II. Of course, apologists for the more recent Republican president are fond of pointing out that in other areas, such as habeas corpus, Lincoln was hardly a paragon protector of rights and legal ethics. I fail to see how that exonerates Bush II for his deplorable behavior.

As David Bosco, an assistant professor at the American University School of International Service and a contributing writer to Foreign Policy magazine, has written in an article in The American Scholar entitled “Moral Principle vs. Military Necessity“:

Lieber and Lincoln proudly published their code, flawed and ambiguous though it was. The nation’s current leadership has preferred secret memoranda and strained interpretations. Too often now, the noble effort to expand and codify the international law that Lieber gloried in no longer appeals to the world’s most powerful state. For the good of international law and of the United States, that must change.

April 22, 1989 (a Saturday)

At picture right, it’s Zhou Yongjun on the steps of the Great Hall of the People on April 22, 1989. Zhou is flanking Guo Haifeng, who is holding a scroll with the students’ demands to reform China.

On this date, the state funeral for Hu Yaobang, the reform-minded Chinese Communist leader whom the students were honoring, was held.  A small handful of student leaders, including Zhou Yongjun and Guo Haifeng, appeared on the steps of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, clutching their petition for Chinese reform.  They knelt down on the steps in the classic Chinese tradition of waiting for the emperor to receive their petition.  Chinese government officials refused to receive the delegation.  This moment became an iconic photo of the Tiananmen Square protests.

The Seven Point Peition

The “Seven Point Petition” had been drafted on April 18, 1989.In the early morning, hundreds of students from Peking University had gathered around the Monument to People’s Heroes at Tiananmen Square. They had spent the previous night there guarding the wreaths and flowers dedicated to the newly deceased Hu Yaobang.  Wang Dan, Guo Haifeng, Li Jinjin, and Zhang Boli all had been among the crowd and proposed to write a formal petition to the government. After much discussion, the following became their seven demands for government reform:

• Reevaluate and praise Hu Yaobang’s contributions
• Negate the previous anti-”spiritual pollution” and anti-”Bourgeois Liberation” movements
• Allow unofficial press and freedom of speech
• Publish government leaders’ income and holdings
• Abolish the “Beijing Ten-Points” [restricting public assembly and demonstrations]
• Increase education funding and enhance the compensation for intellectuals
• Report this movement faithfully

The rebuff of the students would prove to be the first of several grave mistakes by the government that led to the Tiananmen Square Massacre in June, 1989.  On April 23, 1989, Zhou was elected the first President of the Autonomous Students Federation of Beijing Universities.  The students had decided that they needed a central organization to speak for the whole array of Beijing schools that were represented in Tiananmen Square.

Retrospective

Hua Tianyou, professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, sculpted the May 4th Movement of 1919, a relief on the Monument to the Peoples Heroes, in Beijing in June 1953.

On May 4, 1919, thousands of students from 13 Beijing universities had gathered in Tiananmen Square to protest their government’s weak response to the Treaty of Versailles, which included terms that many felt were unfair to China. That movement soon spread to Shanghai and from students to workers, paving the way for the formation of the Communist Party. Party leaders had viewed the May Fourth movement as so critical to the Communist revolution that in 1958, when they unveiled the Monument to the People’s Heroes in the center of Tiananmen Square, the faces of the 1919 protestors were carved into one side.

In 1989, when students once again converged on the square, they chose the monument as their base. “May Fourth was very important to Chinese history,” says Wang Chaohua, a student organizer who appeared on the government list of 21 most-wanted leaders after the Tiananmen crackdown. “Like the students of May Fourth, we wanted to propose something new.” In both 1919 and 1989, says Wang, who recently completed a doctorate in Asian languages and literature at the University of California at Los Angeles, “political authorities did not command the public imagination. The vacuum was filled by intellectual energy.“

April 17, 1975 (a Thursday)

Khmer Rouge fighters celebrate as they enter Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975.

On this date, Phnom Penh in Cambodia fell under the control of the Khmer Rouge, the guerrilla group led by Pol Pot that was funded and fueled by Chinese Communists.  Pol Pot immediately directed a ruthless program to “purify” Cambodian society of capitalism, Western culture, religion, and all foreign influences.  He wanted to turn Cambodia into an isolated and totally self-sufficient Maoist agrarian state.  Foreigners were expelled, embassies closed, and the currency abolished.  Markets, schools, newspapers, religious practices, and private property were forbidden.   Members of the Lon Nol government, public servants, police, military officers, teachers, ethnic Vietnamese, Christian clergy, Muslim leaders, members of the Cham Muslim minority, members of the middle-class, intellectuals, and the educated were identified and executed.  Anyone who opposed was killed.

An undated photograph shows forced laborers digging canals in Kampong Cham province, part of the massive agrarian infrastructure the Khmer Rouge planned for the country.

The Khmer Rouge forced all city residents into the countryside and to labor camps. During the three years, eight months, and 20 days of Pol Pot’s rule, Cambodia faced its darkest days; an estimated 2 million Cambodians or 30% of the country’s population died by starvation, torture, or execution. Almost every Cambodian family lost at least one relative during this most gruesome holocaust.

Skulls of victims of the Khmer Rouge at the Killing Fields.

Perhaps the most notorious of the atrocities that occurred under the rule of Pol Pot occurred at Security Prison 21 (S-21), formerly the Tuol Svay Prey High School (named after a royal ancestor of King Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia) in Phnom Penh.  The five buildings of the complex were converted in August 1975 into a prison and interrogation center by the Khmer Rouge regime.  All the classrooms were converted into cells. The windows were enclosed in iron bars and covered in barbed wire. The classrooms on the ground floor were divided into tiny cells, 0.8 x 2 meters each, for one prisoner. Female prisoners were housed on the middle floors and the upper-story classrooms were converted into mass cells.

S-21 Tuol Sleng Prison was formerly a school.

One of the administration offices belonged to Comrade Duch, a former teacher and the infamous commandant of S-21 who recently stood trial and eventually apologized for his crimes. Alongside Duch was a workforce of 1,720 staff, comprising prison warders, office personnel, interrogators, and general workers. Many of the sub-units of the prison were staffed by children between the ages of 10 and 15 who were specially selected and trained for their role. They became increasingly dissocialized and evil, and were exceptionally cruel and disrespectful towards the adult prisoners and staff. Children also formed the majority of the medical staff and were untrained.

From 1975 to 1979, an estimated 17,000 people were imprisoned at S-21 (some estimates suggest a number as high as 20,000, though the real number is unknown); there were only twelve known survivors.  At any one time, the prison held between 1,000 to 1,500 inmates.  They were repeatedly tortured and coerced into naming family members and close associates, who were in turn arrested, tortured, and killed.

Thousands of children died in S-21 Tuol Sleng.

The Khmer Rouge required that the prison staff make a detailed dossier for each prisoner.  Included in the documentation was a photograph.  Since the original negatives and photographs were separated from the dossiers in the 1979-1980 period, most of the photographs remain anonymous today.  The photographs are currently exhibited at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, located at the former site of S-21 in Phnom Penh. (Tuol Sleng in Khmer [tuəl slaeŋ] means “Hill of the Poisonous Trees” or “Strychnine Hill”.)

Prisoner Pon Ny, in leg chain (undated).

Every morning, all prisoners were ordered to pull their shorts down to the ankles so they could be inspected. Despite remaining shackled, they were then ordered to exercise by moving their legs and arms up and down. Prisoners were inspected four times a day to check their shackles weren’t loose.

Toilets consisted of small iron and plastic buckets and prisoners had to ask permission of the guards before relieving themselves. If they didn’t, they were beaten or whipped with electrical wire as punishment. They had to stay silent at all times unless being interrogated and risked electrocution if they disobeyed any of the many regulations.

Bathing consisted of a tube of running water poked through a window to splash water on them for a short time. This happened only every two or three days at most, sometimes as rarely as fortnightly. Unhygienic living conditions caused many prisoners to become infected with skin rashes and other diseases and no medicine was given for treatment.

On January 7, 1979, Vietnam invaded and freed the Cambodian people from Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror. Six hundred thousand Cambodians fled to Thai border refugee camps. Fearful to return back to Cambodia, many Cambodians had no choice but to emigrate to the United States, France, or Australia.

Today, many people and organizations are educating the world about the Cambodian Killing Fields. Only through awareness will the world remember the lessons of the genocide, honor the memories of the 2 million killed, and promote peace and tolerance so as to not to relive the same dark days.

Suggested reading:

• Haing Ngor and Roger Warner, Survival in the Killing Fields (New York, NY: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2003). [First published in 1987 as A Cambodian Odyssey by Macmillan Publishing Company.]

April 15, 1989 (a Saturday)

Hu Yaobang (r.) and Deng Xiaoping – Sept 1981

On this date, former Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang, deposed in 1987, died of a massive heart attack. People began to gather in Tiananmen Square to commemorate Hu and voice their discontents. This was the beginning of events that would lead to the Tiananmen Square massacrein June.

Hu Yaobang was a reformist, who served as General Secretary from 1980 to 1987. He advocated rehabilitation of people persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, greater autonomy for Tibet, rapprochement with Japan, and social and economic reform. As a result, he was forced out of office by the hardliners in January of 1987, and made to offer humiliating public “self-criticisms” for his allegedly bourgeois ideas.

Chinese Students Demonstrate After Hu Yaobang’s Death, photo dated 21-22 April 1989.

One of the charges leveled against Hu was that he had encouraged (or at least allowed) wide-spread student protests in late 1986. As General Secretary, he refused to crack down on such protests, believing that dissent by the intelligentsia should be tolerated by the Communist government.

Official media made just brief mention of Hu’s death, and the government at first did not plan to give him a state funeral. In reaction, university students from across Beijing marched on Tiananmen Square, shouting acceptable, government-approved slogans, and calling for the rehabilitation of Hu’s reputation. Bowing to this pressure, the government decided to accord Hu a state funeral after all.

Lead, Violence, and Society

Big Business conducted a Big Experiment with America’s youth you never knew about.

When Rudy Giuliani ran for mayor of New York City in 1993, he campaigned on a platform of bringing down crime and making the city safe again. It was a comfortable position for a former federal prosecutor with a tough-guy image, but it was more than mere posturing. Since 1960, rape rates had nearly quadrupled, murder had quintupled, and robbery had grown fourteenfold. New Yorkers felt like they lived in a city under siege.

Giuliani won the election and selected Boston police chief Bill Bratton as the NYPD’s new commissioner. Bratton aggressively cracked down on small crimes, believing bigger crimes would drop as well. And they did.

But in fact, violent crime had actually peaked in New York City in 1990, four years before the Giuliani-Bratton era. By the time they took office, it had already dropped 12 percent. And it continued to drop. And drop. And drop. By 2010, violent crime rates in New York City had plunged 75 percent from their peak in the early ’90s.

It’s not just New York that saw a big drop in crime. In city after city, violent crime peaked in the early ’90s and then began a steady and spectacular decline. Washington, DC, didn’t have either Giuliani or Bratton, but its violent crime rate dropped 58 percent since its peak. Dallas’ fell 70 percent. Newark: 74 percent. Los Angeles: 78 percent.

The disappearance of lead from gas and paint is one of the most compelling hypotheses to explain the decline of violent crime in America, especially in cities — big cities, with their density and traffic, were particularly vulnerable to airborne lead.

It’s the only hypothesis that persuasively explains both the rise of crime in the ’60s and ’70s and its fall beginning in the ’90s. Two other hypotheses — the baby boom demographic bulge and the drug explosion of the ’60s — at least have the potential to explain both, but neither one fully fits the known data. Only gasoline lead, with its dramatic rise and fall following World War II, can explain the equally dramatic rise and fall in violent crime. In fact, gasoline lead may explain as much as 90 percent of the rise and fall of violent crime over the past half century.

Having said that, it’s important to note that the evidence so far is not conclusive in favor of any of the hypotheses.

References:

• Howard W. Mielke, Sammy Zahran. The urban rise and fall of air lead (Pb) and the latent surge and retreat of societal violence. Environment International, 2012; 43: 48 DOI: 10.1016/j.envint.2012.03.005
• Rick Nevin. How Lead Exposure Relates to Temporal Changes in IQ, Violent Crime, and Unwed Pregnancy. Environmental Research, May 2000; 83 (1): 1-22

April 6, 1895 (a Saturday)

On this date, Oscar Wilde was arrested after losing a libel case against the Marquess of Queensberry.

Wilde had been engaged in an affair with the marquess’s son since 1891, but when the outraged marquess denounced him as a homosexual, Wilde sued the man for libel. However, he lost his case when evidence strongly supported the marquess’s observations. Homosexuality was classified as a crime in England at the time, and Wilde was arrested, found guilty, and sentenced to two years of hard labor

April 6, 2012: A Tribute to Fang Lizhi!

Fang Lizhi, shown in this June 4, 1999 photo at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

On this date, Fang Lizhi, the Chinese astrophysicist whom many regarded as “China’s Sakharov,” died at age 76 in Arizona.

Fang Lizhi — who worked on his nation’s elite nuclear program in the 1950s — was one of the most brilliant Chinese scientists of his era. He was also the most courageous.

In the 1980s, when he broke with communist orthodoxy and spoke out on human rights and democracy, he was the highest-ranking person in the People’s Republic ever to do so. In the years and months leading up to the Tiananmen demonstrations in 1989, he dared to tell the historical facts – about Mao, the Party, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution – to a new generation. His trenchant words inspired a generation of Chinese youth but led to his firing, expulsion from the Communist Party and forced exile, which lasted until his death.

He once explained that it was the principles of science — which values doubt, independent judgment and egalitarianism — that led him to embrace human rights. Fang warned in 2010: “Regardless of how widely China’s leaders have opened its market to the outside world, they have not retreated even half a step from their repressive political creed.” How much did China lose by forcing a citizen with his gifts to live the last 22 years of his life in exile?

April 3, 1948 (a Saturday)

Child survivors made homeless by the 4/3 Jeju Island massacre, May 1948.

April 3, 1948, is the day attributed to the start of a prolonged massacre on the island of Jeju committed by South Korean government forces. From 1947 to 1948, an estimated 30,000 people were killed.

The conflict began after World War II with Korea regaining its independence after Japan’s 35 years of colonial rule over the peninsula. On November 14, 1947, the United Nations passed UN Resolution 112, calling for a general election over the whole Korean peninsula under the supervision of a UN commission. However, the Soviet Union, occupying the northern part of the peninsula, refused to comply with the UN resolution and denied the UN Commission access. The UN General Assembly adopted a new resolution calling for elections in areas accessible to the UN Commission, which at that time included only members of the United States Army Military Government in Korea, also known as USMAGIK.

On Jeju, this was met with both happiness and concern. With Japan being kicked out of the country, Korea had no government and many Jeju citizens objected that the election for the country’s first president, scheduled for May 10, 1948, was only occurring in Korea’s southern half. By voting in the election, they would have been supporting the divide of the country. In response, the people of Jeju went on a general strike, deteriorating the island’s relationship with its country’s fragile government.

Official apology of South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun.

On March 1, 1947, Jeju islanders gathered in Gwandeokjeong, Jeju City, to commemorate its Independence Movement Day and to simultaneously protest the upcoming presidential election. Through much confusion and to the quell the protest, police open fired on the crowd killing six people.

In response to the government’s continual suppression of the people of Jeju, on the early morning of April 3, 1948, a small group of islanders attacked police stations and political figures. In turn, the government labeled the citizens of Jeju as Communists and the newly formed US-backed South Korean government set out to cleanse the island of opponents to democracy.

This was the beginning of the Jeju Massacre (commonly referred to as 4.3, or “sa sam” in Korean).

Oh Seung Kook, 55, deputy secretary general at the Jeju April 3 Peace Foundation, who started to study the events surrounding this tragic aspect in Jeju’s history in order to provide a Jeju perspective, said that concerning the massacre, “The government needs to think about the Jeju people’s perspective. [At that time] the people of Jeju just really wanted a unified Korea,” meaning that the people opposed the election not because they were Communists, but because they wanted to prevent the bisection of their country.

Jeju declared an island of world peace.

Kim Seok Bo is a survivor of the Jeju Massacre. He escaped from the throes of death while army soldiers were shooting the villagers of Bukchon on January 17, 1949. At midnight he went to the nearby village of Neobeunsungi with his mother after the army had begun the massacre.

“My mother was trying to find my brother and sister relying on the moonlight. When I was there with my mother, I saw lots and lots of corpses. I saw a man who lost half of his face. I was so scared,” he said.

Five hundred people, half of all those who were living in Bukchon village at that time, were killed. They were killed in many places around Bukchon village like Dang Pat, Neo Beun Soong Ee, and the Bukchon Elementary School field.

“The armies were taking people to Dang Pat by car. At that time, people didn’t see cars very often, so people tried to get into them. They didn’t know it was a road to death. When my family arrived at Dang Pat, my brothers and sister had already been killed and my mother and I were the only survivors from our family.”

Those from the village were separated into two camps; those who were related to police officers and those who were not, with the former being saved and the latter executed.

“Soon, the commander came and ordered them to stop shooting people. We wriggled out of the crowd and hid among the police officers’ families since they were the only people who were allowed to live.”

He said that it has only been recently that he has been able to discuss the massacre, and even still it is very difficult to go into great detail. The reason for this, he continued, is that some of the other survivors in the village don’t like for him to share his experiences.

“I think survivors don’t want to think about the massacre. Neither do I. It’s painful to think about that time and talk about it to people. However, I want many people to know about this horrible historical event called 4.3.”

So do I.

Although Jeju Island is known for its beautiful scenery, world peace is not about beautiful scenery. In Jeju, it comes from extending the lessons learned from the 4.3 Massacre. Lessons like, “true peace is not fighting one another for ideological differences” and, “basic human rights are the greatest value we must pursue at all times.” These morals aren’t just lessons that should have been learned at the time of the incident, they are still valid today and should be universally applied.

References:

• Seeking Truth after 50 Years: The National Committee for Investigation of the Truth about the Jeju 4.3 Events. (2009) The International Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol. 3: 406–423, doi: 10.1093/ijtj/ijp014

March 29, 1979 (a Thursday)

Ban the Chinese Government

On 29 March 1979, Wei Jingsheng, an electrician at the Beijing Zoo, was arrested by Chinese Communist bosses for writing the article “Do We Want Democracy or a New Dictatorship?” It had appeared in the March 1979 issue of Exploration, in which he warned the Chinese people that Deng Xiaoping could turn into a new dictator if the present political system continued. Wei’s boldness infuriated Deng, who ordered Wei’s arrest. Six months later at a show trial from which his family and friends were excluded, he was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment and placed in solitary confinement as an example to others. A transcript of the trial, in which Wei rejected the charges against him, came into hands of editors of April 5th Forum, who printed it in their magazine. They too were arrested.

March 28, 2009 (a Saturday)

.

On this date, the Chinese Communist Party bosses marked 50 years of direct control over Tibet by raising their national flag in the regional capital and commemorating a new political holiday honoring what they call the “liberation of slaves from brutal feudal rule”. Testimonials about the “misery of life” in old Tibet kicked off the short ceremony – televised live from in front of the Potala Palace in Lhasa – to mark the end of the Dalai Lama’s rule in Tibet. March 28 marks the date when Beijing ended the 1959 Tibetan uprising, sending the Dalai Lama over the Himalayas into exile and placing Tibet under its direct rule for the first time.

In contrast, the Tibetan government-in-exile said on its Web site that the new holiday, crowned “Serfs Liberation Day”, would be a day of mourning for Tibetans around the world. “Tibetans consider this observance offensive and provocative,” it said.

Press Statement: China’s Serf Emancipation Day Hides Repression in Tibet
The Kashag
27 March 2009

China’s decision to observe tomorrow as the so-called Serf Emancipation Day is aggravating problems in Tibet. Tibetans consider this observance offensive and provocative. We believe the observance of the “Serf Emancipation Day” on 28 March is aimed at destabilizing and creating chaos in Tibet by a few individuals with overriding self-interest. If the Tibetans, losing their patience, took to the streets in protest, the Chinese leaders will have the excuse to use even more brutal force to crackdown.

Already the whole of Tibet is under heavy security clampdown, with additional troops deployed. Despite these measures, Tibetans, considering conditions in Tibet unbearable, collectively and individually, are taking to the streets, distributing pamphlets calling for freedom, bringing down the Chinese flag and replacing it with the Tibetan flag. This year, Tibetans did not celebrate the Tibetan New Year to mourn those killed in last year’s crackdown on the widespread protests that erupted throughout Tibet. In a development unprecedented in the history of Tibet, Tibetans in Kanze in eastern Tibet have decided not to farm their fields in a unique form of civil disobedience to protest China’s heavy-handed rule. One monk, Tashi Sangpo of Ragya monastery in Golok in north-eastern Tibet was arrested on 10 March 2009, for allegedly hoisting a Tibetan flag. He escaped his captors and drowned himself in the nearby Yellow River. These acts and many more are the true Tibetan attitude to “emancipation” by China.

This day will be observed by Tibetans throughout the world and especially those in Tibet as a day of mourning. No less a figure than Hu Yaobang, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, who visited Lhasa in 1980, apologized to the Tibetan people and said the conditions in Tibet were worse than pre-1959 Tibet.

The late Panchen Lama said in 1989, a few days before his untimely death, that on the whole China’s rule in Tibet brought greater suffering than benefit for the Tibetan people.

Since 1949/50 when China invaded Tibet, over 1.2 million Tibetans died as a direct result of Chinese communist rule and more than 6,000 monasteries were razed to the ground. Today, it is hard to come across a Tibetan family that has not had at least one member imprisoned or killed by the Chinese regime. This day will be observed as the day when the Tibetans as a people lost all vestiges of their basic individual and collective freedoms.

One justification for China’s “liberation” of Tibet is that old Tibet was feudal and repressive. This is a blatant distortion of the nature of Tibet’s old society. In the early mid-20th century, there was no big gap between the peasants in Tibet and China. Moreover, the Tibetan peasants enjoyed more freedom and better living conditions.

To prove that the old Tibetan society was repressive, the Chinese authorities are currently organising an exhibition of Tibetan prisons and the punishments meted out. However, the reality is that the size of Nangze Shar Prison in Lhasa, heavily used in Chinese propaganda, could accommodate not more than a score of prisoners. In fact, the total number of prisoners in the whole of Tibet before 1959 hardly crossed hundred. After the so-called liberation and emancipation of the Tibetan “serfs”, prisons have come up in every part of Tibet. In Lhasa alone, there are 5 major prisons with a total prison population between 3,500 – 4,000.

The best judge of whether they have been “liberated” is the Tibetan people. They vote with their feet and lives by crossing the Himalayas to seek freedom and happiness outside of their “liberated” Tibet. They also sacrifice their lives to inform the world of the terrible conditions prevailing in Tibet. This was massively demonstrated last year when a series of sustained and widespread protests erupted throughout Tibet. If the “serfs” are happy with their “emancipation”, why are they risking lives and limbs to protest Chinese rule in Tibet.

“Just as Europe can’t return to the medieval era and the United States can’t go back to the times before the Civil War, Tibet can never restore the old serf society era,” Zhang Qingli, the Communist Party boss of the region, told the crowd of more than 13,000. But his statement reflects how the Chinese government continues its deceit and propaganda: the people of Tibet, including the Dalai Lama, do NOT seek to institute a “serf” society. In 1963 the Dalai Lama promulgated a constitution for a democratic Tibet. It has been successfully implemented, to the extent possible, by the Government-in-exile.

Furthermore, at the risk of stating the obvious, the fact that a country is backward cannot justify invading it. Backwardness was often advanced as a justification for 19th century colonialism, what Rudyard Kipling called “The White Man’s burden” when he encouraged the United States to colonize the Philippines. The fact that China relies on the “backwardness” argument to support its occupation of Tibet is a further indication of a classic colonial occupation.

Thus, the Chinese invaded and annexed Tibet to exploit its untapped natural resources, pure and simple. “Tibet belongs to China, not a few separatists or the international forces against China. Any conspiracy attempting to separate the region from China is doomed to fail,” Zhang said.

Also, how could China have “liberated” Tibet in 1949 if it claims prior sovereignty? It is odd that China, on the one hand, claims that Tibet has been part of China since the 13th century, and then, on the other, claims that it “liberated” Tibet in 1949 from an unfortunate past. But, liberated it from what? You can only liberate a country from a situation that your country does not control. Therefore, the Chinese government’s use of the term “liberate” seems to be an admission that China has not governed Tibet contiguously since the Mongol invasions. Either this, or it would have to argue that it was liberating Tibet from circumstances that China created while Tibet was under its control.

It should be noted that numerous countries made statements in the course of UN General Assembly debates following the invasion of Tibet that reflected their recognition of Tibet’s independent status. Thus, for example, the delegate from the Philippines declared: “It is clear that on the eve of the Chinese invasion in 1950, Tibet was not under the rule of any foreign country”. He described China’s occupation as “the worst type of imperialism and colonialism past or present”. The delegate from Thailand reminded the assembly that the majority of states “refute the contention that Tibet is a part of China.” The US joined most other UN members in condemning the Chinese “aggression” and “invasion” of Tibet.

In the course of Tibet’s 2,000-year history, the country came under a degree of foreign influence only for short periods of time in the 13th and 18th centuries. Few independent countries today can claim as impressive a record. As the ambassador to Ireland at the UN remarked during the General Assembly debates on the question of Tibet, “[f]or thousands of years, or for a couple of thousand of years at any rate, [Tibet] was as free and as fully in control of its own affairs as any nation in this Assembly, and a thousand times more free to look after its own affairs than many of the nations here.”

In May 1991, the Senate of the United States of America passed a resolution declaring Tibet an occupied country whose true representatives are the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Government-in-Exile. Over the years many more resolutions have been passed by various international bodies.

And what has “liberation” meant to the Tibetan people? The International Commission of Jurists (1959 and 1960) judged the Chinese guilty of genocide in Tibet, “the gravest crime of which any person or nation can be accused … the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group” and detailed atrocities to which Tibetans were subjected. These included public execution by shooting, crucifixion, burning alive, drowning, vivisection, starvation, strangulation, hanging, scalding, being buried alive, disemboweling and beheading; imprisonment without trial; torture; forced labour; and forcible sterilization. Many people, including children under 15 years, disappeared without trace.

The United Nations passed a resolution in 1959 calling for respect for the fundamental human rights of the Tibetan people and for their distinctive cultural and religious life based on the principles of fundamental human rights in the Charter of the United Nations and on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Communist China ignored this resolution and 1961 saw another resolution stating that the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights be followed and Tibetans be granted their rights, including the right to self determination. The same was repeated in 1965 by the United Nations General Assembly.

In the 2000s, many view the Chinese genocide in Tibet as the result of the territorial ambitions of the Chinese Communist Party bosses. It is seen as stemming from their systematic attempt to expand the traditional territory of China by annexing permanently the vast, approximately 900,000-square-mile territory of traditional Tibet. Tibet represents about 30 percent of China’s land surface, while the Tibetans represent .004 percent of China’s population. Tibetans were not a minority but an absolute majority in their own historical environment. Chinese government efforts can be seen as aiming at securing permanent control of the Tibetans’ land. For this reason, some observers see genocide in Tibet as not merely referring to the matter of religion, that is, of destroying Tibetan Buddhism. Chinese policies have involved the extermination of more than 1 million Tibetans, the forced relocation of millions of Tibetan villagers and nomads, the population transfer of millions of Chinese settlers, and systematic assimilation.

References:

• Paul Harris. “Is Tibet Entitled to Self-Determination?”  China Digital Times.  Posted on 26 April 2008; accessed on 23 June 2012 at http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2008/04/is-tibet-entitled-to-self-determination/

March 25, 1955 (a Friday)

Allen Ginsberg

On this date, the U.S. Customs Bureau confiscated 520 copies of Allen Ginsberg’s book Howl, which had been printed in England. Ginsberg was openly gay, and this poem has a lot of references to homosexuality. The gay men in this poem generally do not seem to be involved in monogamous relationships with one other person.

Officials alleged that the book was obscene, particularly objecting to:

Line 36

who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,

But the next two lines, among many others, seem equally provocative:

Line 37

who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,

Line 38

who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose gardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,

(You can listen to Ginsberg read Howl on Poets.org.)

City Lights, a publishing company and bookstore in San Francisco owned by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, proceeded to publish the book in the fall of 1956. The publication led to Ferlinghetti’s arrest on obscenity charges. Ferlinghetti was bailed out by the American Civil Liberties Union, which led the legal defense. Clayton Horn (a Sunday school teacher) was the judge for the case and had achieved notoriety earlier that year for sentencing five shoplifters to a screening of The Ten Commandments. The defense brought literary expert after literary expert (9 in total) to the stand to testify to the poem’s literary and social importance and on October 3 Judge Horn ruled the poem was of “redeeming social importance” and Ferlinghetti was cleared.

March 17, 1910 (a Thursday)

Bayard Rustin

On this date, one of the most important leaders of the American civil rights movement from the advent of its modern period in the 1950s until well into the 1980s, Bayard Rustin, was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania. He joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1955 as Martin Luther King Jr.’s special assistant, serving as the organizational co-ordinator for the SCLC March on Washington in 1963.

Rustin was openly gay and advocated on behalf of gay and lesbian causes in the latter part of his career. Interestingly, a high school named for Bayard Rustin that opened in September 2006 in his home town has posted a bio for him on its website that makes no mention of Walter Nagle – his partner for 10 years – or the fact that Rustin was an openly gay man, or any of his work for gay rights.

A year before his death in 1987, Rustin said:

The barometer of where one is on human rights questions is no longer the black community, it’s the gay community.

_________________________________________________________

_________________________________________________________

March 14, 2008 (a Friday)

Chinese military in Lhasa, Tibet on 14 March 2008

On this date, Communist Chinese troops sealed off three of Lhasa’s largest monasteries after Tibet’s biggest protests in almost 20 years deteriorated into violence, with shops and police cars set ablaze.

The most serious violence was touched off about 11 am today, Lhasa time, when monks from the Ramoche monastery prepared to stage a demonstration. According to Jane Macartney of the Times of London, police tried to stop the monks from entering the streets. Then a police car parked outside the monastery gate was set on fire as hundreds of Tibetans rallied around the monks. The protesters were demanding greater freedom of religion before the Beijing Olympic Games.

On Monday, March 10th, about 300 monks from Drepung Monastery on the outskirts of Lhasa had peacefully marched toward Barkhor Street in the central city, but Chinese People’s Armed Police stopped them before they reached the city. Police arrested monks suspected to be “ringleaders”. All the monks were seeking the release of fellow Drepung monks, who apparently had been detained as they tried to celebrate the Dalai Lama’s receipt of the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal in October, 2007.

_____________________________________________________
(↑)Footage posted on the exile Tibetan Web site TibetOnline.tv in December 2011 of a crackdown by Chinese security forces in Tibet in 2008 indicates that the level of repression against Tibetans appears to be much more serious than generally acknowledged by the international community. Analysts believe it was leaked by someone in China, perhaps within the security apparatus, to show the true scale of repression in Tibet and nearby areas in China. _____________________________________________________

On March 13, China’s Foreign Ministry had accused the Tibetan monks of trying to cause social unrest and said the situation in Lhasa was stable. “We are resolutely opposed to any plots attempting to separate Tibet from China,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said.

The Chinese Public Security Bureau imposed carte-blanche censorship of YouTube, the BBC, CNN, the Guardian, and other sites carrying video footage of the Tibetan people’s protests against the Chinese occupation of Tibet.

_____________________________________________________
This video, produced by the Tibetan Government-in-exile in 2009, includes previously unreleased footage showing bound and defenseless Tibetans being brutally beaten in Lhasa in March 2008. _____________________________________________________

Ironically, by objecting to the above video produced by the Tibetan Government-in-exile and then blocking YouTube to make sure that no one in China’s borders could see the footage, the Chinese government made international headlines and ensured that millions more people will see and hear about the atrocity.

Tibet had varying degrees of autonomy from China until the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949. China invaded the country a year later and annexed the region in 1951.

References:

• Chronology of Peaceful Protests in Tibet since 10 March 2008

• Wikileaks defies Chinese “Great Firewall” with 120 pictures and videos [viewer discretion advised]

March 10, 1959 (a Tuesday)

1 March 1959: Priests lead American Kalmuks in protest against Communist religious persecution of Tibetans at the United Nations building in New York.

On this date, Tibetans banded together in revolt, surrounding the summer palace of the Dalai Lama in defiance of Chinese occupation forces.

China’s occupation of Tibet began nearly a decade before, in October 1950, when troops from its People’s Liberation Army (PLA) invaded the country, barely one year after the Communists gained full control of mainland China. The Tibetan government gave into Chinese pressure the following year, signing a treaty that ensured the power of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the country’s spiritual leader, over Tibet’s domestic affairs. Resistance to the Chinese occupation built steadily over the next several years, including a revolt in several areas of eastern Tibet in 1956. By December 1958, rebellion was simmering in Lhasa, the capital, and the PLA command threatened to bomb the city if order was not maintained.

The March 1959 uprising in Lhasa was triggered by fears of a plot to kidnap the Dalai Lama and take him to Beijing. When Chinese military officers invited His Holiness to visit the PLA headquarters for a theatrical performance and official tea, he was told he must come alone, and that no Tibetan military bodyguards or personnel would be allowed past the edges of the military camp. On March 10, 300,000 loyal Tibetans surrounded Norbulinka Palace, preventing the Dalai Lama from accepting the PLA’s invitation. By March 17, Chinese artillery was aimed at the palace, and the Dalai Lama was evacuated to neighboring India. Fighting broke out in Lhasa two days later, with Tibetan rebels hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned. Early on March 21, the Chinese began shelling Norbulinka, slaughtering tens of thousands of men, women, and children still camped outside. In the aftermath, the PLA cracked down on Tibetan resistance, executing the Dalai Lama’s guards and destroying Lhasa’s major monasteries along with thousands of their inhabitants.

Chinese authorities have interpreted the uprising as a revolt of the Tibetan elite against Communist reforms that were improving the lot of Tibetan “serfs”. Tibetan and third party sources, on the other hand, have usually interpreted it as a popular uprising against the alien Chinese presence. Historian Tsering Shakya has argued that it was a popular revolt against both the Chinese and the Lhasa government, which was perceived as failing to protect the authority and safety of the Dalai Lama from the Chinese.

China’s stranglehold on Tibet and its brutal suppression of separatist activity has continued in the decades following the unsuccessful uprising. Tens of thousands of Tibetans followed their leader to India, where the Dalai Lama has long maintained a government-in-exile in the foothills of the Himalayas.

The 2010 novel The Magician of Lhasa was banned in China for its portrayal of the 1959 Tibetan uprising.

The 2003 film Tibet – Cry of the Snow Lion is an extraordinary documentary about the ongoing destruction of an enlightened 1,700 year old culture.
_______________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________

March 8, 1841 (a Monday)

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

On this date, jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He was the namesake and son of a famed physician. Holmes graduated from Harvard in 1861 and immediately enlisted in the Army, where he was seriously wounded three times.

After the Civil War, Holmes entered Harvard Law School, where his best friend was William James. The New York Times obituary on Holmes reported that the two young men went to Europe together: “while James went on, continuing in Germany his search for the meanings of the universe, Holmes decided that ‘maybe the universe is too great a swell to have a meaning,’ that his task was to ‘make his own universe livable,’ and he dove deep into the study of the law.”

Holmes was admitted to the bar in 1866. He became coeditor of the American Law Review in 1870. Holmes wrote his legal treatise, The Common Law, in 1881, a 15-year labor predicated on his belief that “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.” His recodification of the law from religious foundations to modern jurisprudence was pivotal to the evolution of legal scholarship. Holmes urged “judicial restraint,” or the divorcing of private views from legal opinions.

Scales of Justice

A professor at Harvard Law School, he was appointed at age 41 as an associate justice on the Massachusetts Supreme Court, eventually becoming chief justice. President Teddy Roosevelt appointed him to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1902. He retired in 1932, as the oldest judge to serve. Holmes earned the sobriquet, “The Great Dissenter,” for his many famous dissents, which have long since been adopted as mainstream by courts. Among his well-known legal adages: “The mind of the bigot is like the pupil of the eye: the more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.” “Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.” “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater. . .” “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.” Holmes, like his father, was a Unitarian, who believed in a god, but was creedless. In his obituary in 1935, the New York Times quoted Holmes:

When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas — that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes can be carried out. That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.

March 6, 1943 (a Saturday)

Page 8 of the handmade booklet Manfred Lewin gave to Gad Beck in 1942, now part of the collection of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

In Nazi Germany, the racial laws classified Gad Beck as a “mischling”, or half-breed (his father was Jewish, but his mother had converted to Judaism). He and his father had been detained at a holding compound in the Rosenstrasse in central Berlin since 17 February 1943 awaiting deportation to the East.

After the non-Jewish wives of the prisoners launched a massive street protest that stunned the Nazis, the Beck family members were released on this date (6 March 1943). There were “thousands of women who stood for days… my aunts demanded, ‘Give us our children and men,’” Gad Beck wrote. The Rosenstrasse demonstration helped debunk the widespread myth in post-Holocaust German society that resistance against Nazism was futile.

Gad noted, “The Rosenstrasse event made one thing absolutely clear to me: I won’t wait until we get deported.” Following his release, he joined Chug Chaluzi, an underground Zionist resistance youth group, and played a key role in securing the survival of Jews in Berlin.

Beck had said on numerous occasions and during interviews over his lifetime that the single most important experience that shaped his life was his attempt to rescue his Jewish boyfriend, Manfred Lewin. When the Gestapo rounded up Lewin’s family in October 1942 for deportation to the East (by this time Gad knew what “transport to the East” meant), Beck borrowed a neighbor’s over-sized Hitler Youth uniform and marched into the transit camp in a bid to free his first love. Beck convinced an officer to temporarily put Manfred into his custody.

Manfred Lewin (left) and Gad Beck.

Once outside the camp, though, Lewin stopped dead in his tracks. “I was going out with him from the ‘locker’ and I said, ‘Manfred, now you are free – come!’ And he said no,” Beck recalled in an interview. “And it’s important to understand this: Manfred said, ‘I will never be free if I am not near my family. They are old and they are ill and I have to help them.’ And he went back to the locker without saying goodbye to me. I never saw him again. His entire family died in Auschwitz.”

As Gad returned home after leaving Manfred he said “In those seconds, watching him go, I grew up.”

Gad’s only memento of Manfred was a little notebook with poems, sketches, and essays which Manfred had written, plus a photograph. Gad treasured them throughout his life. Sixty years after it was written, he entrusted the booklet to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The exhibit curator notes: “It became evident how the meaning of this artifact was changed by Manfred’s deportation and death in Auschwitz and by passing years. The booklet, once only meaningful for Gad and Manfred, became a time capsule, a reminder of a friendship, of a group, and of the events that destroyed them all.” The booklet…”now allows us glimpses into the daily life of Jewish Youth in Berlin before and during the deportations. It reminds us of how difficult it is to really understand what happened and how much we can never know.”

____________________________________________________

____________________________________________________

In early 1945, a Jewish spy for the Gestapo betrayed Beck and some of his underground friends. He was subsequently interrogated and interned in a Jewish transit camp in Berlin. During the bombardment of Berlin in the weeks that followed, Gad’s cell was hit, and he was rescued from the rubble and hospitalized. Gad remained at the hospital until, on 24 August 1945, he was freed by the Soviets. “I was liberated by a Jewish soldier of the Russian Army, and he asked me in Yiddish, ‘Are you Gad Beck?’ I said I was. He was so beautiful I could have fallen in love with him. ‘Brother,’ he told me, ‘now you are free.’ And he kissed me.”

Since the war ended, Gad lived in Germany, Palestine, and Austria. He met his life partner, Julius Laufer, in Vienna. In later life he gave many presentations throughout the world and became head of the German Jewish Community.

Beck died 24 June 2012 in a retirement home in Berlin, just six days short of his 89th birthday. He is survived by Julius Laufer, his partner of 35 years. Gad Beck was the last known gay Jewish holocaust survivor alive. Now, literally nobody knows what it was like to be Jewish and gay in the horrors of the Nazi regime. No gay Jewish survivor will ever get to smile at any further milestones in equality for gay people.

References:

• Beck, Gad. An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999).

March 5, 1940 (a Tuesday)

The accepted proposal of Lavrentin Beria to murder all Polish officers who were war prisoners in the Soviet Union.

On this date, pursuant to a note to Joseph Stalin from Lavrentiy Beria proposing to execute all members of the Polish Officer Corps, the members of the Soviet Politburo — Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Kliment Voroshilov, Anastas Mikoyan, Mikhail Kalinin, and Lazar Kaganovich — signed an order to execute 25,700 Polish “nationalists and counterrevolutionaries” kept at camps and prisons in occupied western Ukraine and Belarus. About 8,000 were officers taken prisoner during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, the rest being Poles arrested for allegedly being “intelligence agents, gendarmes, saboteurs, landowners, factory owners, lawyers, priests, and officials.” The reason for the Katyn Forest massacre, according to historian Gerhard Weinberg, is that Stalin wanted to deprive a potential future Polish military of a large portion of its military talent:

It has been suggested that the motive for this terrible step [the Katyn massacre] was to reassure the Germans as to the reality of Soviet anti-Polish policy. This explanation is completely unconvincing in view of the care with which the Soviet regime kept the massacre secret from the very German government it was supposed to impress… A more likely explanation is that… [the massacre] should be seen as looking forward to a future in which there might again be a Poland on the Soviet Union’s western border. Since he intended to keep the eastern portion of the country in any case, Stalin could be certain that any revived Poland would be unfriendly. Under those circumstances, depriving it of a large proportion of its military and technical elite would make it weaker.

Since Poland’s conscription system required every unexempted university graduate to become a reserve officer, the internees included much of the Polish intelligentsia, and the Jewish, Ukrainian, Georgian and Belarusian intelligentsia of Polish citizenship. Thus, the Katyn massacre is one of the deadliest anti-intellectual atrocities in history.

References:

• Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994) p. 107.

February 28, 1947 (a Friday)

An angry mob storms the Yidingmu police station in Taipei on February 28, 1947

On this date, about two thousand people gathered in front of the Bureau of Monopoly in Taipei, Taiwan to protest an incident on the previous evening. The Chinese Governor, Chen Yi, responded with machine guns, killing several people on the spot, which soon led to the massive slaughter of thousands of Taiwanese at the hands of Chinese troops sent from China by Chiang Kai-Shek.

After the end of World War II, the Allied Forces had left the occupation of Taiwan to Chiang, who was still holding on to large parts of China with his Nationalist forces. The Taiwanese, who had been under Japanese rule from 1895 through 1945, initially welcomed the Chinese Nationalist forces. But their joy soon changed into sorrow and anger, when the new authorities turned out to be repressive and corrupt.

The arrest of a woman selling cigarettes without a license on the previous evening (February 27) was the spark which led to large-scale public protests against repression and corruption. For some ten days, Chiang, still on the mainland, and his governor Chen Yi kept up the pretense of negotiations with leaders of the protest movement, but at the same time they sent troops from the mainland.

2-28 Incident in woodcut; the artist was executed.

As soon as the troops arrived, they started rounding up and executing people, in particular scholars, lawyers, doctors, students, and local leaders of the protest movement. A film that aptly recreates the ethos of the times is A City of Sadness(1989). In total between 18,000 and 28,000 people were murdered. Thousands of others were arrested and imprisoned in the “White Terror” campaign which took place in the following decade. Many of these remained imprisoned until the early 1980s.

The 2-28 Incident was the beginning of 40 years of repressive martial law on the island, during which Chiang’s Kuomintang mainlanders ruled the Taiwanese with an iron fist. The book A Borrowed Voice (eds. Linda Arrigo, Lynn Miles) has many first-hand accounts of this dark period in history; notably the cloak-and-dagger type underground activity that expats undertook to smuggle out of Taiwan the names of political prisoners to Amnesty International and the outside world. This period ended only in 1987, when martial law was lifted and Taiwan started to move towards democratization. This is the longest period of martial law in world history.

2-28 Massacre Monument

In 1987, the newly-formed Taiwanese democratic opposition and the Presbyterian Church started to push the Kuomintang authorities to stop covering up the facts and to come to a full airing of the matter. It wasn’t until 1990 that the Kuomintang finally decided, albeit reluctantly, to open the records.

A “2-28 Monument” was unveiled in Taipei in February 1995, which was designed by Mr. Cheng Tze-tsai, a former political prisoner. The following is a translation of text inscribed on the monument:

Governor Chen Yi asked for the dispatch of troops from Nanking. The chairman of the Nationalist government Chiang Kai-shek, without conducting a thorough investigation, responded by sending troops to Taiwan to crack down on [the protesters].

On March 8, the 21st Division of the army under the command of general Liu Yu-ching landed [in Keelung] and as the troops moved down to southern part of Taiwan, they began to shoot indiscriminately. On March 10, martial law was declared. The chief of staff of the Garrison Command, general Ke Yuan-fen, the commander of the fort of Keelung, general Shih Hung-hsi, the commander of the fort of Kaohsiung, general Peng Meng-chi, and the chief of the commander of the military police Chang Mu-tao were responsible for the death of many innocent people during the subsequent crackdown and purges.

Within a few months, the number of deaths, injured and missing persons amounted to tens of thousands. Keelung, Taipei, Chiayi and Kaohsiung suffered the highest number of casualties. It was called the February 28 Incident.

Few people know about the 2-28 Massacre outside of Taiwan, and many Taiwanese today seem to rather not talk about it. It’s a very sensitive issue still, probably because it affected so many people; they couldn’t talk about it then, or now, in their state of denial, preferring to forget the painful past.

For the international community, it is important to understand that the Taiwanese dislike and mistrust of the Chinese and their intentions is not only based on ideological or political differences with China’s present – and undemocratic – regime in Beijing, but deeply rooted in the anguish of a large-scale massacre followed by some 40 years of repressive rule by the Chinese Nationalists.

References:

• George H. Kerr. Formosa Betrayed. (Upland, CA: Taiwan Publishing Co., 1965)
• Linda Gail Arrigo and Lynn Miles, eds. A Borrowed Voice: Taiwan Human Rights through International Networks, 1960–1980. (Taipei, Taiwan: Hanyao Color Printing Co., 2008)

February 19, 1942 (a Thursday)

Order posting.

On this date, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the War Department to define military areas in the western states and to exclude from them anyone who might threaten the war effort.  Key U.S. leaders claimed that all people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast of the U.S. posed a risk to national security. This led to the internment of tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans in what Roosevelt called “concentration camps,” often located in Native American reservations.

When war had seemed imminent with Japan in the Fall of 1941, Roosevelt had assigned a Chicago businessman, Curtis B. Munson, to be a special representative of the State Department and to go to the West Coast and Hawaii to determine the degree of loyalty to be found among the residents of Japanese descent.  Munson toured Hawaii and the Pacific Coast and interviewed Army and Navy intelligence officers, military commanders, city officials, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The overall result of his twenty-five page report was that:

…there is no Japanese “problem” on the Coast. There will be no armed uprising of Japanese. There will undoubtedly be some sabotage financed by Japan and executed largely by imported agents.

…for the most part, the local Japanese are loyal to the U.S. or, at worst, hope that by remaining quiet they can avoid concentration camps or irresponsible mobs. We do not believe that they would be at least any more disloyal than any other racial group in the United States with whom we went to war.

Munson’s report was submitted to the White House on November 7, 1941. It was then circulated to several Cabinet officials, including Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, Attorney General Francis Biddle, and Secretary of State Cordell Hull. On February 5, 1942, Stimson sent a copy of the so-called Munson Report to President Roosevelt, along with a memo stating that War Department officials had carefully studied the document.

The Munson Report should have conclusively put to rest the existence of Japanese sabotage in the United States. The report also should have resolved any fears about the security of the West Coast as well. The lack of any evidence showing the Japanese-Americans being involved in espionage rings should have prevented the need for internment camps, but after the attack on Pearl Harbor the United States government chose to impound innocent people behind barbed wire. The results of Munson’s fact-finding mission were inexplicably suppressed until 1946.

Race prejudice and wartime hysteria.

Although two-thirds of the Japanese-American internees were U.S. citizens, they were targeted because of their ancestry and the way they looked. One internee, when told that the Japanese were put in those camps for their own protection, countered “If we were put there for our protection, why were the guns at the guard towers pointed inward, instead of outward?”

The living conditions in the concentration camps were often unsanitary, with families living in hastily constructed barracks near open sewers. Toilets were shared by everyone in the camp and had little or no privacy. Meals provided to the Japanese were meager and caused a great deal of malnourishment. Despite these poor conditions, programs were eventually put into place that improved the condition of the camps and allowed the prisoners to work for small wages.

On some occasions, riots broke out in the internment camps, resulting in death and injury. In January 1944, a military draft was produced by the government, forcing Japanese Americans in the camps to join the military and fight in World War II. Many of the draftees refused to join the military until they were given civil rights and the government, refusing, placed the resisters in federal prison.

Many prominent Japanese Americans formed lawsuits against the United States government during the internment. Among these were Hirabayashi vs. United States, Yasui vs. United States, and Korematsu vs. United States. These lawsuits placed a lot of pressure on the United States government and made many people question the constitutionality of the internment. On December 17, 1944, the United States declared an end to the internment and the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional on December 18, 1944.

After these events, Japanese Americans were allowed to leave the camps and return to their homes and live normally. By March 20, 1946, all of the internment camps had been closed, although most of the Japanese had become greatly disillusioned with the United States and continued to endure discrimination.

In 1983, a U.S. congressional commission “uncovered” the evidence from the 1940s proving that there had been no military necessity for the unequal, unjust treatment of Japanese Americans during WW II. The commission reported that the causes of the incarceration were rooted in ” … race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”

During the Reagan-Bush years Congress moved toward the passage of Public Law 100-383 in 1988 which acknowledged the injustice of the internment, apologized for it, and provided a $20,000 cash payment to each person who was interned.

February 13, 1913 (a Thursday)

His Holiness the 13th Dalai Lama, Thubten Gyatso

On this date (8th day, first month, Tibetan year of the water ox), His Holiness the 13th Dalai Lama asserted independence of Tibet after returning to Lhasa following three years of exile in India. [The year of declaration of Tibetan independence was mistakenly believed to be 1912 by many.] In the third and fourth paragraphs of the Tibetan Proclamation of Independence, His Holiness stated:

…During the time of Genghis Khan and Altan Khan of the Mongols, the Ming dynasty of the Chinese, and the Ch’ing Dynasty of the Manchus, Tibet and China cooperated on the basis of benefactor and priest relationship. A few years ago, the Chinese authorities in Szechuan and Yunnan endeavored to colonize our territory. They brought large numbers of troops into central Tibet on the pretext of policing the trade marts. I, therefore, left Lhasa with my ministers for the Indo-Tibetan border, hoping to clarify to the Manchu emperor by wire that the existing relationship between Tibet and China had been that of patron and priest and had not been based on the subordination of one to the other. There was no other choice for me but to cross the border, because Chinese troops were following with the intention of taking me alive or dead.

On my arrival in India, I dispatched several telegrams to the Emperor; but his reply to my demands was delayed by corrupt officials at Peking. Meanwhile, the Manchu empire collapsed. The Tibetans were encouraged to expel the Chinese from central Tibet. I, too, returned safely to my rightful and sacred country, and I am now in the course of driving out the remnants of Chinese troops from DoKham in Eastern Tibet. Now, the Chinese intention of colonizing Tibet under the patron-priest relationship has faded like a rainbow in the sky….

The Thirteenth Dalai Lama started international relations, introduced modern postal and telegraph services and, despite the turbulent period in which he ruled, introduced measures to modernize Tibet. On December 17, 1933 he passed away.

The following year a Chinese mission arrived in Lhasa to offer condolences, but in fact they tried to settle the Sino-Tibetan border issue. After the chief delegate left, another Chinese delegate remained to continue discussions. The Chinese delegation was permitted to remain in Lhasa on the same footing as the Nepalese and Indian representatives until it was expelled in 1949.