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Language and the Invention of Writing - Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...e-and-the-invention-of-writing language invention writing history culture
shared by Javier E on 28 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • Language is not an invention. As best we can tell it is an evolved feature of the human brain.
  • Critically, it is something that is hardwired into us.
  • Writing is an altogether different and artificial thing.
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  • there’s nothing natural about it or inevitable.
  • There have been a number of independent originations of writing in human history.
  • But our modern world is dominated by only two lines of descent: the character system which is used in China and with some modifications much of East Asia and the ancestor of the alphabet we use as readers and writers of English.
  • What is particularly fascinating is that most historians of writing believe that this invention – the alphabet, designed by and for sub-literate Semites living on the borderlands of Egypt about 4,000 years ago – is likely the origin point of all modern alphabets.
  • the creators of the alphabets that now dominate South Asia (originating 2500 to 3000 years ago) also seem to have borrowed at least the idea of the alphabet from these Semitic innovators, though others believe they are an indigenous creation.
  • The deep history of these letters we are now communicating through is like the DNA – or perhaps rather the record of the DNA – of human cognition and thought, processed through language and encoded into writing.
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History's Heroic Failures - Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...historys-heroic-failures history vikings normans arabs Byzantine
shared by Javier E on 05 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • Scholars have been applying these source critical tools to the origins of Christianity and Judaism for going on two centuries. But it only within the last couple decades that scholars have begun to apply them to the origins of Islam
  • Many still believe that Islam was, as the historian Ernest Renan once put it, “born in the full light of history.” But this is far from the case. Montgomery Watt’s standard short biography of Muhammad is the product of deep scholarship but operates largely within the canonical historiography of the Islamic tradition
  • The level of detail we seem to know about Muhammad’s life in Mecca and Medina, his prophetic call and early battles is astonishing. But there is a big problem. This level of detail is based on source traditions that don’t meet any kind of modern historical muste
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  • Our earliest written accounts of who Muhammad was, what he did and how Islam began come more than a century after his death. This is an authorized, canonical biography written by ibn Ishaq in Baghdad in the mid-8th century. But even that book has been lost. It only survives in editions and excerpts from two other Muslim scholars (ibn Hisham and al-Tabari) writing in the 9th and early 10th centuries, respectively.
  • These narratives come far too long after the events in question to be taken at anything like face value in historical terms. Memories of who Muhammad and his milieu were and what they did were passed down as oral traditions for three or four generations before being written down. They then passed through new rounds of editing and reshaping and recension for another century. We know from ancient and contemporary examples that such oral traditions usually change radically over even short periods of time to accommodate the present realities and needs of the communities in which they are passed down
  • To get your head around the challenge, imagine we had no written records fo the American Civil War and our only knowledge of it came from stories passed down orally for the generations until the the US government had a scholar at the library of Congress pull them together and create an authorized history in say 1985.
  • Unsurprisingly, recent studies using the tools and standards historians apply to other eras suggest that the beginnings of Islam were quite different from the traditional or canonical accounts most of us are familiar with.
  • If these two things, the conventional narrative of events and the process of making sense of the sources and weighing their credibility, can be woven together the end result is fascinating and more compelling than a more cinematic narrative. This Morris accomplishes very well
  • Morris, the author, begins with a discussion of just this issue, how the historian can balance the need for comprehensible narrative of William’s conquest of England with a candid explanation of how little we know with certainty and how much we don’t know at all. This is a literary challenge of the first order, simultaneously building your narrative and undermining it
  • Like the Norman Conquest but on a vastly greater scale, the victory at Yarmouk would have a profound linguistic and cultural impact which lasts down to today. It is why the Levant, Syria and Egypt now all speak Arabic. It is also why the Middle East is dominated by Islam rather than Christianity.
  • History has a small number of these critical linguistic inflection points. Alexander the Great’s conquests made Greek the lingua franca and the language of government and most cities throughout the eastern Mediterranean, which it remained for almost a thousand years.
  • The fact that the Arab conquests so rapidly erased Greek from this region is a clue that its roots never ran that deep and that the Semitic languages that remained the spoken language of the rural masses, particularly Aramaic, may have been more porous and receptive to the related language of Arabic.
  • Earlier I referred to Heraclius as perhaps the last Roman Emperor. This is because most historians mark the change from the Roman to the Byzantine periods at the Muslim conquests
  • The people we call the Byzantines never called themselves that. They remained “Romans” for the next eight centuries until the Ottoman Turks finally conquered Constantinople in 1453.
  • But after the Muslim conquest, the Roman state starts to look less like a smaller Roman empire and more like the other post-Roman successor states in the West. It is smaller and more compact, more tightly integrated in language, religion, economy and culture. From here what we can now call Byzantium enters into a dark, smoldering and more opaque period lasting some two centuries of holding on against repeated Muslim incursions and threat.
  • What captures my attention is this peculiar kind of reversal of fortune, spectacular victories which are not so much erased as rendered moot because they are rapidly followed by far more cataclysmic defeats.
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The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (Ian Buruma) - 0 views

DIIGO_FILE_HOME/7ui9/e8c30608a7379054d18fe4e9e2b1c397 Japan history revisionist memory remembrance WWII interwar germany DDR
shared by Javier E on 12 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • the main reason why Germans were more trusted by their neighbors was that they were learning, slowly and painfully, and not always fully, to trust themselves.
  • elders, in government and the mass media, still voice opinions about the Japanese war that are unsettling, to say the least. Conservative politicians still pay their annual respects at a shrine where war criminals are officially remembered. Justifications and denials of war crimes are still heard. Too many Japanese in conspicuous places, including the prime minister’s office itself, have clearly not “coped” with the war.
  • unlike Nazi Germany, Japan had no systematic program to destroy the life of every man, woman, and child of a people that, for ideological reasons, was deemed to have no right to exist.
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  • “We never knew,” a common reaction in the 1950s, had worn shamefully thin in the eyes of a younger generation by the 1960s. The extraordinary criminality of a deliberate genocide was so obvious that it left no room for argument.
  • Right-wing nationalists like to cite the absence of a Japanese Holocaust as proof that Japanese have no reason to feel remorse about their war at all. It was, in their eyes, a war like any other; brutal, yes, just as wars fought by all great nations in history have been brutal. In fact, since the Pacific War was fought against Western imperialists, it was a justified—even noble—war of Asian liberation.
  • in the late 1940s or 1950s, a time when most Germans were still trying hard not to remember. It is in fact extraordinary how honestly Japanese novelists and filmmakers dealt with the horrors of militarism in those early postwar years. Such honesty is much less evident now.
  • Popular comic books, aimed at the young, extol the heroics of Japanese soldiers and kamikaze pilots, while the Chinese and their Western allies are depicted as treacherous and belligerent. In 2008, the chief of staff of the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force stated that Japan had been “tricked” into the war by China and the US. In 2013, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo publicly doubted whether Japan’s military aggression in China could even be called an invasion.
  • The fact is that Japan is still haunted by historical issues that should have been settled decades ago. The reasons are political rather than cultural, and have to do with the pacifist constitution—written by American jurists in 1946—and with the imperial institution, absolved of war guilt by General Douglas MacArthur after the war for the sake of expediency.
  • Japan, even under Allied occupation, continued to be governed by much the same bureaucratic and political elite, albeit under a new, more democratic constitution,
  • a number of conservatives felt humiliated by what they rightly saw as an infringement of their national sovereignty. Henceforth, to them, everything from the Allied Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal to the denunciations of Japan’s war record by left-wing teachers and intellectuals would be seen in this light.
  • The more “progressive” Japanese used the history of wartime atrocities as a warning against turning away from pacifism, the more defensive right-wing politicians and commentators became about the Japanese war.
  • Views of history, in other words, were politicized—and polarized—from the beginning.
  • To take the sting out of this confrontation between constitutional pacifists and revisionists, which had led to much political turmoil in the 1950s, mainstream conservatives made a deliberate attempt to distract people’s attention from war and politics by concentrating on economic growth.
  • For several decades, the chauvinistic right wing, with its reactionary views on everything from high school education to the emperor’s status, was kept in check by the sometimes equally dogmatic Japanese left. Marxism was the prevailing ideology of the teachers union and academics.
  • the influence of Marxism waned after the collapse of the Soviet empire in the early 1990s, and the brutal records of Chairman Mao and Pol Pot became widely known.
  • Marginalized in the de facto one-party LDP state and discredited by its own dogmatism, the Japanese left did not just wane, it collapsed. This gave a great boost to the war-justifying right-wing nationalists,
  • Japanese young, perhaps out of boredom with nothing but materialistic goals, perhaps out of frustration with being made to feel guilty, perhaps out of sheer ignorance, or most probably out of a combination of all three, are not unreceptive to these patriotic blandishments.
  • Anxiety about the rise of China, whose rulers have a habit of using Japan’s historical crimes as a form of political blackmail, has boosted a prickly national pride, even at the expense of facing the truth about the past.
  • By 1996, the LDP was back in power, the constitutional issue had not been resolved, and historical debates continue to be loaded with political ideology. In fact, they are not really debates at all, but exercises in propaganda, tilted toward the reactionary side.
  • My instinct—call it a prejudice, if you prefer—before embarking on this venture was that people from distinct cultures still react quite similarly to similar circumstances.
  • The Japanese and the Germans, on the whole, did not behave in the same ways—but then the circumstances, both wartime and postwar, were quite different in the two Germanies and Japan. They still are.
  • Our comic-book prejudices turned into an attitude of moral outrage. This made life easier in a way. It was comforting to know that a border divided us from a nation that personified evil. They were bad, so we must be good. To grow up after the war in a country that had suffered German occupation was to know that one was on the side of the angels.
  • The question that obsessed us was not how we would have acquitted ourselves in uniform, going over the top, running into machine-gun fire or mustard gas, but whether we would have joined the resistance, whether we would have cracked under torture, whether we would have hidden Jews and risked deportation ourselves. Our particular shadow was not war, but occupation.
  • the frightened man who betrayed to save his life, who looked the other way, who grasped the wrong horn of a hideous moral dilemma, interested me more than the hero. This is no doubt partly because I fear I would be much like that frightened man myself. And partly because, to me, failure is more typical of the human condition than heroism.
  • I was curious to learn how Japanese saw the war, how they remembered it, what they imagined it to have been like, how they saw themselves in view of their past. What I heard and read was often surprising to a European:
  • this led me to the related subject of modern Japanese nationalism. I became fascinated by the writings of various emperor worshippers, historical revisionists, and romantic seekers after the unique essence of Japaneseness.
  • Bataan, the sacking of Manila, the massacres in Singapore, these were barely mentioned. But the suffering of the Japanese, in China, Manchuria, the Philippines, and especially in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was remembered vividly, as was the imprisonment of Japanese soldiers in Siberia after the war. The Japanese have two days of remembrance: August 6, when Hiroshima was bombed, and August 15, the date of the Japanese surrender.
  • The curious thing was that much of what attracted Japanese to Germany before the war—Prussian authoritarianism, romantic nationalism, pseudo-scientific racialism—had lingered in Japan while becoming distinctly unfashionable in Germany. Why?
  • the two peoples saw their own purported virtues reflected in each other: the warrior spirit, racial purity, self-sacrifice, discipline, and so on. After the war, West Germans tried hard to discard this image of themselves. This was less true of the Japanese.
  • Which meant that any residual feelings of nostalgia for the old partnership in Japan were likely to be met with embarrassment in Germany.
  • I have concentrated on the war against the Jews in the case of Germany, since it was that parallel war, rather than, say, the U-boat battles in the Atlantic, or even the battle of Stalingrad, that left the most sensitive scar on the collective memory of (West) Germany.
  • I have emphasized the war in China and the bombing of Hiroshima, for these episodes, more than others, have lodged themselves, often in highly symbolic ways, in Japanese public life.
  • Do Germans perhaps have more reason to mourn? Is it because Japan has an Asian “shame culture,” to quote Ruth Benedict’s phrase, and Germany a Christian “guilt culture”?
  • why the collective German memory should appear to be so different from the Japanese. Is it cultural? Is it political? Is the explanation to be found in postwar history, or in the history of the war itself?
  • the two peoples still have anything in common after the war, it is a residual distrust of themselves.
  • when Michael sees thousands of German peace demonstrators, he does not see thousands of gentle people who have learned their lesson from the past; he sees “100 percent German Protestant rigorism, aggressive, intolerant, hard.”
  • To be betroffen implies a sense of guilt, a sense of shame, or even embarrassment. To be betroffen is to be speechless. But it also implies an idea of moral purity. To be betroffen is one way to “master the past,” to show contriteness, to confess, and to be absolved and purified.
  • In their famous book, written in the sixties, entitled The Inability to Mourn, Alexander and Margarethe Mitscherlich analyzed the moral anesthesia that afflicted postwar Germans who would not face their past. They were numbed by defeat; their memories appeared to be blocked. They would or could not do their labor, and confess. They appeared to have completely forgotten that they had glorified a leader who caused the death of millions.
  • There is something religious about the act of being betroffen, something close to Pietism,
  • heart of Pietism was the moral renovation of the individual, achieved by passing through the anguish of contrition into the overwhelming realization of the assurance of God’s grace.” Pietism served as an antidote to the secular and rational ideas of the French Enlightenment.
  • It began in the seventeenth century with the works of Philipp Jakob Spener. He wanted to reform the Church and bring the Gospel into daily life, as it were, by stressing good works and individual spiritual labor.
  • German television is rich in earnest discussion programs where people sit at round tables and debate the issues of the day. The audience sits at smaller tables, sipping drinks as the featured guests hold forth. The tone is generally serious, but sometimes the arguments get heated. It is easy to laugh at the solemnity of these programs, but there is much to admire about them. It is partly through these talk shows that a large number of Germans have become accustomed to political debate.
  • There was a real dilemma: at least two generations had been educated to renounce war and never again to send German soldiers to the front, educated, in other words, to want Germany to be a larger version of Switzerland. But they had also been taught to feel responsible for the fate of Israel, and to be citizens of a Western nation, firmly embedded in a family of allied Western nations. The question was whether they really could be both.
  • the Gulf War showed that German pacifism could not be dismissed simply as anti-Americanism or a rebellion against Adenauer’s West.
  • the West German mistrust of East Germans—the East Germans whose soldiers still marched in goose step, whose petit bourgeois style smacked of the thirties, whose system of government, though built on a pedestal of antifascism, contained so many disturbing remnants of the Nazi past; the East Germans, in short, who had been living in “Asia.”
  • Michael, the Israeli, compared the encounter of Westerners (“Wessies”) with Easterners (“Ossies”) with the unveiling of the portrait of Dorian Gray: the Wessies saw their own image and they didn’t like what they saw.
  • he added: “I also happen to think Japanese and Germans are racists.”
  • Germany for its Nazi inheritance and its sellout to the United States. But now that Germany had been reunified, with its specters of “Auschwitz” and its additional hordes of narrow-minded Ossies, Adenauer was deemed to have been right after
  • The picture was of Kiel in 1945, a city in ruins. He saw me looking at it and said: “It’s true that whoever is being bombed is entitled to some sympathy from us.”
  • “My personal political philosophy and maybe even my political ambition has to do with an element of distrust for the people I represent, people whose parents and grandparents made Hitler and the persecution of the Jews possible.”
  • in the seventies he had tried to nullify verdicts given in Nazi courts—without success until well into the eighties. One of the problems was that the Nazi judiciary itself was never purged. This continuity was broken only by time.
  • To bury Germany in the bosom of its Western allies, such as NATO and the EC, was to bury the distrust of Germans. Or so it was hoped. As Europeans they could feel normal, Western, civilized. Germany; the old “land in the middle,” the Central European colossus, the power that fretted over its identity and was haunted by its past, had become a Western nation.
  • It is a miracle, really, how quickly the Germans in the Federal Republic became civilized. We are truly part of the West now. We have internalized democracy. But the Germans of the former GDR, they are still stuck in a premodern age. They are the ugly Germans, very much like the West Germans after the war, the people I grew up with. They are not yet civilized.”
  • “I like the Germans very much, but I think they are a dangerous people. I don’t know why—perhaps it is race, or culture, or history. Whatever. But we Japanese are the same: we swing from one extreme to the other. As peoples, we Japanese, like the Germans, have strong collective discipline. When our energies are channeled in the right direction, this is fine, but when they are misused, terrible things happen.”
  • to be put in the same category as the Japanese—even to be compared—bothered many Germans. (Again, unlike the Japanese, who made the comparison often.) Germans I met often stressed how different they were from the Japanese,
  • To some West Germans, now so “civilized,” so free, so individualistic, so, well, Western, the Japanese, with their group discipline, their deference to authority, their military attitude toward work, might appear too close for comfort to a self-image only just, and perhaps only barely, overcome.
  • To what extent the behavior of nations, like that of individual people, is determined by history, culture, or character is a question that exercises many Japanese, almost obsessively.
  • not much sign of betroffenheit on Japanese television during the Gulf War. Nor did one see retired generals explain tactics and strategy. Instead, there were experts from journalism and academe talking in a detached manner about a faraway war which was often presented as a cultural or religious conflict between West and Middle East. The history of Muslim-Christian-Jewish animosity was much discussed. And the American character was analyzed at length to understand the behavior of George Bush and General Schwarzkopf.
  • In the words of one Albrecht Fürst von Urach, a Nazi propagandist, Japanese emperor worship was “the most unique fusion in the world of state form, state consciousness, and religious fanaticism.” Fanaticism was, of course, a positive word in the Nazi lexicon.
  • the identity question nags in almost any discussion about Japan and the outside world. It
  • It was a respectable view, but also one founded on a national myth of betrayal. Japan, according to the myth, had become the unique moral nation of peace, betrayed by the victors who had sat in judgment of Japan’s war crimes; betrayed in Vietnam, in Afghanistan, in Nicaragua; betrayed by the arms race, betrayed by the Cold War; Japan had been victimized not only by the “gratuitous,” perhaps even “racist,” nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but by all subsequent military actions taken by the superpowers,
  • When the Prime Minister of Japan, Shidehara Kijuro, protested in 1946 to General MacArthur that it was all very well saying that Japan should assume moral leadership in renouncing war, but that in the real world no country would follow this example, MacArthur replied: “Even if no country follows you, Japan will lose nothing. It is those who do not support this who are in the wrong.” For a long time most Japanese continued to take this view.
  • What is so convenient in the cases of Germany and Japan is that pacifism happens to be a high-minded way to dull the pain of historical guilt. Or, conversely, if one wallows in it, pacifism turns national guilt into a virtue, almost a mark of superiority, when compared to the complacency of other nations.
  • The denial of historical discrimination is not just a way to evade guilt. It is intrinsic to pacifism. To even try to distinguish between wars, to accept that some wars are justified, is already an immoral position.
  • That Kamei discussed this common paranoia in such odd, Volkish terms could mean several things: that some of the worst European myths got stuck in Japan, that the history of the Holocaust had no impact, or that Japan is in some respects a deeply provincial place. I think all three explanations apply.
  • “the problem with the U.S.-Japan relationship is difficult. A racial problem, really. Yankees are friendly people, frank people. But, you know, it’s hard. You see, we have to be friendly …”
  • Like Oda, indeed like many people of the left, Kamei thought in racial terms. He used the word jinshu, literally race. He did not even use the more usual minzoku, which corresponds, in the parlance of Japanese right-wingers, to Volk, or the more neutral kokumin, meaning the citizens of a state.
  • many Germans in the liberal democratic West have tried to deal honestly with their nation’s terrible past, the Japanese, being different, have been unable to do so. It is true that the Japanese, compared with the West Germans, have paid less attention to the suffering they inflicted on others, and shown a greater inclination to shift the blame. And liberal democracy, whatever it may look like on paper, has not been the success in Japan that it was in the German Federal Republic. Cultural differences might account for this. But one can look at these matters in a different, more political way. In his book The War Against the West, published in London in 1938, the Hungarian scholar Aurel Kolnai followed the Greeks in his definition of the West: “For the ancient Greeks ‘the West’ (or ‘Europe’) meant society with a free constitution and self-government under recognized rules, where ‘law is king,’ whereas the ‘East’ (or ‘Asia’) signified theocratic societies under godlike rulers whom their subjects serve ‘like slaves.’
  • According to this definition, both Hitler’s Germany and prewar Japan were of the East.
  • There was a great irony here: in their zeal to make Japan part of the West, General MacArthur and his advisers made it impossible for Japan to do so in spirit. For a forced, impotent accomplice is not really an accomplice at all.
  • In recent years, Japan has often been called an economic giant and a political dwarf. But this has less to do with a traditional Japanese mentality—isolationism, pacifism, shyness with foreigners, or whatnot—than with the particular political circumstances after the war that the United States helped to create.
  • when the Cold War prompted the Americans to make the Japanese subvert their constitution by creating an army which was not supposed to exist, the worst of all worlds appeared: sovereignty was not restored, distrust remained, and resentment mounted.
  • Kamei’s hawks are angry with the Americans for emasculating Japan; Oda’s doves hate the Americans for emasculating the “peace constitution.” Both sides dislike being forced accomplices, and both feel victimized, which is one reason Japanese have a harder time than Germans in coming to terms with their wartime past.
  • As far as the war against the Jews is concerned, one might go back to 1933, when Hitler came to power. Or at the latest to 1935, when the race laws were promulgated in Nuremberg. Or perhaps those photographs of burning synagogues on the night of November 9, 1938, truly marked the first stage of the Holocaust.
  • There is the famous picture of German soldiers lifting the barrier on the Polish border in 1939, but was that really the beginning? Or did it actually start with the advance into the Rhineland in 1936, or was it the annexation of the Sudetenland, or Austria, or Czechoslovakia?
  • IT IS DIFFICULT TO SAY when the war actually began for the Germans and the Japanese. I cannot think of a single image that fixed the beginning of either war in the public mind.
  • Possibly to avoid these confusions, many Germans prefer to talk about the Hitlerzeit (Hitler era) instead of “the war.”
  • only Japanese of a liberal disposition call World War II the Pacific War. People who stick to the idea that Japan was fighting a war to liberate Asia from Bolshevism and white colonialism call it the Great East Asian War (Daitowa Senso), as in the Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.
  • The German equivalent, I suppose, would be the picture of Soviet soldiers raising their flag on the roof of the gutted Reichstag in Berlin.
  • People of this opinion separate the world war of 1941–45 from the war in China, which they still insist on calling the China Incident.
  • Liberals and leftists, on the other hand, tend to splice these wars together and call them the Fifteen-Year War (1931–45).
  • images marking the end are more obvious.
  • argued that the struggle against Western imperialism actually began in 1853, with the arrival in Japan of Commodore Perry’s ships, and spoke of the Hundred-Year War.
  • These are among the great clichés of postwar Japan: shorthand for national defeat, suffering, and humiliation.
  • The Germans called it Zusammenbruch (the collapse) or Stunde Null (Zero Hour): everything seemed to have come to an end, everything had to start all over. The Japanese called it haisen (defeat) or shusen (termination of the war).
  • kokka (nation, state) and minzoku (race, people) are not quite of the same order as Sonderbehandlung (special treatment) or Einsatzgruppe (special action squad). The jargon of Japanese imperialism was racist and overblown, but it did not carry the stench of death camps.
  • The German people are spiritually starved, Adenauer told him. “The imagination has to be provided for.” This was no simple matter, especially in the German language, which had been so thoroughly infected by the jargon of mass murder.
  • All they had been told to believe in, the Germans and the Japanese, everything from the Führerprinzip to the emperor cult, from the samurai spirit to the Herrenvolk, from Lebensraum to the whole world under one (Japanese) roof, all that lay in ruins
  • How to purge this language from what a famous German philologist called the Lingua Tertii Imperii? “… the language is no longer lived,” wrote George Steiner in 1958, “it is merely spoken.”
  • out of defeat and ruin a new school of literature (and cinema) did arise. It is known in Germany as Trümmerliteratur (literature of the ruins). Japanese writers who came of age among the ruins called themselves the yakeato seidai (burnt-out generation). Much literature of the late forties and fifties was darkened by nihilism and despair.
  • It was as though Germany—Sonderweg or no Sonderweg—needed only to be purged of Nazism, while Japan’s entire cultural tradition had to be overhauled.
  • In Germany there was a tradition to fall back on. In the Soviet sector, the left-wing culture of the Weimar Republic was actively revived. In the Western sectors, writers escaped the rats and the ruins by dreaming of Goethe. His name was often invoked to prove that Germany, too, belonged to the humanist, enlightened strain of European civilization.
  • the Americans (and many Japanese leftists) distrusted anything associated with “feudalism,” which they took to include much of Japan’s premodern past. Feudalism was the enemy of democracy. So not only did the American censors, in their effort to teach the Japanese democracy, forbid sword-fight films and samurai dramas, but at one point ninety-eight Kabuki plays were banned too.
  • yet, what is remarkable about much of the literature of the period, or more precisely, of the literature about that time, since much of it was written later, is the deep strain of romanticism, even nostalgia. This colors personal memories of people who grew up just after the war as well.
  • If the mushroom cloud and the imperial radio speech are the clichés of defeat, the scene of an American soldier (usually black) raping a Japanese girl (always young, always innocent), usually in a pristine rice field (innocent, pastoral Japan), is a stock image in postwar movies about the occupation.
  • To Ango, then, as to other writers, the ruins offered hope. At last the Japanese, without “the fake kimono” of traditions and ideals, were reduced to basic human needs; at last they could feel real love, real pain; at last they would be honest. There was no room, among the ruins, for hypocrisy.
  • Böll was able to be precise about the end of the Zusammenbruch and the beginning of bourgeois hypocrisy and moral amnesia. It came on June 20, 1948, the day of the currency reform, the day that Ludwig Erhard, picked by the Americans as Economics Director in the U.S.-British occupation zone, gave birth to the Deutsche Mark. The DM, from then on, would be the new symbol of West German national pride;
  • the amnesia, and definitely the identification with the West, was helped further along by the Cold War. West Germany now found itself on the same side as the Western allies. Their common enemy was the “Asiatic” Soviet empire. Fewer questions needed to be asked.
  • Indeed, to some people the Cold War simply confirmed what they had known all along: Germany always had been on the right side, if only our American friends had realized it earlier.
  • The process of willed forgetfulness culminated in the manic effort of reconstruction, in the great rush to prosperity.
  • “Prosperity for All” was probably the best that could have happened to the Germans of the Federal Republic. It took the seed of resentment (and thus future extremism) out of defeat. And the integration of West Germany into a Western alliance was a good thing too.
  • The “inability to mourn,” the German disassociation from the piles of corpses strewn all over Central and Eastern Europe, so that the Third Reich, as the Mitscherlichs put it, “faded like a dream,” made it easier to identify with the Americans, the victors, the West.
  • Yet the disgust felt by Böll and others for a people getting fat (“flabby” is the usual term, denoting sloth and decadence) and forgetting about its murderous past was understandable.
  • The Brückners were the price Germany had to pay for the revival of its fortunes. Indeed, they were often instrumental in it. They were the apparatchik who functioned in any system, the small, efficient fish who voted for Christian conservatives in the West and became Communists in the East.
  • Staudte was clearly troubled by this, as were many Germans, but he offered no easy answers. Perhaps it was better this way: flabby democrats do less harm than vengeful old Nazis.
  • the forgetful, prosperous, capitalist Federal Republic of Germany was in many more or less hidden ways a continuation of Hitler’s Reich. This perfectly suited the propagandists of the GDR, who would produce from time to time lists of names of former Nazis who were prospering in the West. These lists were often surprisingly accurate.
  • In a famous film, half fiction, half documentary, made by a number of German writers and filmmakers (including Böll) in 1977, the continuity was made explicit. The film, called Germany in Autumn (Deutschland in Herbst),
  • Rainer Werner Fassbinder was one of the participants in this film. A year later he made The Marriage of Maria Braun.
  • To lifelong “antifascists” who had always believed that the Federal Republic was the heir to Nazi Germany, unification seemed—so they said—almost like a restoration of 1933. The irony was that many Wessies saw their new Eastern compatriots as embarrassing reminders of the same unfortunate past.
  • Rarely was the word “Auschwitz” heard more often than during the time of unification, partly as an always salutary reminder that Germans must not forget, but partly as an expression of pique that the illusion of a better, antifascist, anticapitalist, idealistic Germany, born in the ruins of 1945, and continued catastrophically for forty years in the East, had now been dashed forever.
  • Ludwig Erhard’s almost exact counterpart in Japan was Ikeda Hayato, Minister of Finance from 1949 and Prime Minister from 1960 to 1964. His version of Erhard’s “Prosperity for AH” was the Double Your Incomes policy, which promised to make the Japanese twice as rich in ten years. Japan had an average growth rate of 11 percent during the 1960s.
  • It explains, at any rate, why the unification of the two Germanys was considered a defeat by antifascists on both sides of the former border.
  • Very few wartime bureaucrats had been purged. Most ministries remained intact. Instead it was the Communists, who had welcomed the Americans as liberators, who were purged after 1949, the year China was “lost.”
  • so the time of ruins was seen by people on the left as a time of missed chances and betrayal. Far from achieving a pacifist utopia of popular solidarity, they ended up with a country driven by materialism, conservatism, and selective historical amnesia.
  • the “red purges” of 1949 and 1950 and the return to power of men whose democratic credentials were not much better helped to turn many potential Japanese friends of the United States into enemies. For the Americans were seen as promoters of the right-wing revival and the crackdown on the left.
  • For exactly twelve years Germany was in the hands of a criminal regime, a bunch of political gangsters who had started a movement. Removing this regime was half the battle.
  • It is easier to change political institutions and hope that habits and prejudices will follow. This, however, was more easily done in Germany than in Japan.
  • There had not been a cultural break either in Japan. There were no exiled writers and artists who could return to haunt the consciences of those who had stayed.
  • There was no Japanese Thomas Mann or Alfred Döblin. In Japan, everyone had stayed.
  • In Japan there was never a clear break between a fascist and a prefascist past. In fact, Japan was never really a fascist state at all. There was no fascist or National Socialist ruling party, and no Führer either. The closest thing to it would have been the emperor, and whatever else he may have been, he was not a fascist dictator.
  • whereas after the war Germany lost its Nazi leaders, Japan lost only its admirals and generals.
  • Japan was effectively occupied only by the Americans. West Germany was part of NATO and the European Community, and the GDR was in the Soviet empire. Japan’s only formal alliance is with the United States, through a security treaty that many Japanese have opposed.
  • But the systematic subservience of Japan meant that the country never really grew up. There is a Japanese fixation on America, an obsession which goes deeper, I believe, than German anti-Americanism,
  • Yet nothing had stayed entirely the same in Japan. The trouble was that virtually all the changes were made on American orders. This was, of course, the victor’s prerogative, and many changes were beneficial.
  • like in fiction. American Hijiki, a novella by Nosaka Akiyuki, is, to my mind, a masterpiece in the short history of Japanese Trümmerliteratur.
  • Older Japanese do, however, remember the occupation, the first foreign army occupation in their national history. But it was, for the Japanese, a very unusual army. Whereas the Japanese armies in Asia had brought little but death, rape, and destruction, this one came with Glenn Miller music, chewing gum, and lessons in democracy. These blessings left a legacy of gratitude, rivalry, and shame.
  • did these films teach the Japanese democracy? Oshima thinks not. Instead, he believes, Japan learned the values of “progress” and “development.” Japan wanted to be just as rich as America—no, even richer:
  • think it is a romantic assumption, based less on history than on myth; a religious notion, expressed less through scholarship than through monuments, memorials, and historical sites turned into sacred grounds.
  • The past, wrote the West German historian Christian Meier, is in our bones. “For a nation to appropriate its history,” he argued, “is to look at it through the eyes of identity.” What we have “internalized,” he concluded, is Auschwitz.
  • Auschwitz is such a place, a sacred symbol of identity for Jews, Poles, and perhaps even Germans. The question is what or whom Germans are supposed to identify with.
  • The idea that visiting the relics of history brings the past closer is usually an illusion. The opposite is more often true.
  • To visit the site of suffering, any description of which cannot adequately express the horror, is upsetting, not because one gets closer to knowing what it was actually like to be a victim, but because such visits stir up emotions one cannot trust. It is tempting to take on the warm moral glow of identification—so easily done and so presumptuous—with the victims:
  • Were the crimes of Auschwitz, then, part of the German “identity”? Was genocide a product of some ghastly flaw in German culture, the key to which might be found in the sentimental proverbs, the cruel fairy tales, the tight leather shorts?
  • yet the imagination is the only way to identify with the past. Only in the imagination—not through statistics, documents, or even photographs—do people come alive as individuals, do stories emerge, instead of History.
  • nature. It is all right to let the witnesses speak, in the courtroom, in the museums, on videotape (Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah has been shown many times on German television), but it is not all right for German artists to use their imagination.
  • the reluctance in German fiction to look Auschwitz in the face, the almost universal refusal to deal with the Final Solution outside the shrine, the museum, or the schoolroom, suggests a fear of committing sacrilege.
  • beneath the fear of bad taste or sacrilege may lie a deeper problem. To imagine people in the past as people of flesh and blood, not as hammy devils in silk capes, is to humanize them. To humanize is not necessarily to excuse or to sympathize, but it does demolish the barriers of abstraction between us and them. We could, under certain circumstances, have been them.
  • the flight into religious abstraction was to be all too common among Germans of the Nazi generation, as well as their children; not, as is so often the case with Jews, to lend mystique to a new identity, as a patriotic Zionist, but on the contrary to escape from being the heir to a peculiarly German crime, to get away from having to “internalize” Auschwitz, or indeed from being German at all.
  • a Hollywood soap opera, a work of skillful pop, which penetrated the German imagination in a way nothing had before. Holocaust was first shown in Germany in January 1979. It was seen by 20 million people, about half the adult population of the Federal Republic; 58 percent wanted it to be repeated; 12,000 letters, telegrams, and postcards were sent to the broadcasting stations; 5,200 called the stations by telephone after the first showing; 72.5 percent were positive, 7.3 percent negative.
  • “After Holocaust,” wrote a West German woman to her local television station, “I feel deep contempt for those beasts of the Third Reich. I am twenty-nine years old and a mother of three children. When I think of the many mothers and children sent to the gas chambers, I have to cry. (Even today the Jews are not left in peace. We Germans have the duty to work every day for peace in Israel.) I bow to the victims of the Nazis, and I am ashamed to be a German.”
  • Auschwitz was a German crime, to be sure. “Death is a master from Germany.” But it was a different Germany. To insist on viewing history through the “eyes of identity,” to repeat the historian Christian Meier’s phrase, is to resist the idea of change.
  • Is there no alternative to these opposing views? I believe there is.
  • The novelist Martin Walser, who was a child during the war, believes, like Meier, that Auschwitz binds the German people, as does the language of Goethe. When a Frenchman or an American sees pictures of Auschwitz, “he doesn’t have to think: We human beings! He can think: Those Germans! Can we think: Those Nazis! I for one cannot …”
  • Adorno, a German Jew who wished to save high German culture, on whose legacy the Nazis left their bloody finger marks, resisted the idea that Auschwitz was a German crime. To him it was a matter of modern pathology, the sickness of the “authoritarian personality,” of the dehumanized SS guards, those inhumane cogs in a vast industrial wheel.
  • To the majority of Japanese, Hiroshima is the supreme symbol of the Pacific War. All the suffering of the Japanese people is encapsulated in that almost sacred word: Hiroshima. But it is more than a symbol of national martyrdom; Hiroshima is a symbol of absolute evil, often compared to Auschwitz.
  • has the atmosphere of a religious center. It has martyrs, but no single god. It has prayers, and it has a ready-made myth about the fall of man. Hiroshima, says a booklet entitled Hiroshima Peace Reader, published by the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation, “is no longer merely a Japanese city. It has become recognized throughout the world as a Mecca of world peace.”
  • They were not enshrined in the Japanese park, and later attempts by local Koreans to have the monument moved into Peace Park failed. There could only be one cenotaph, said the Hiroshima municipal authorities. And the cenotaph did not include Koreans.
  • What is interesting about Hiroshima—the Mecca rather than the modern Japanese city, which is prosperous and rather dull—is the tension between its universal aspirations and its status as the exclusive site of Japanese victimhood.
  • it is an opinion widely held by Japanese nationalists. The right always has been concerned with the debilitating effects on the Japanese identity of war guilt imposed by American propaganda.
  • The Japanese, in contrast, were duped by the Americans into believing that the traces of Japanese suffering should be swept away by the immediate reconstruction of Hiroshima. As a result, the postwar Japanese lack an identity and their racial virility has been sapped by American propaganda about Japanese war guilt.
  • Hiroshima, Uno wrote, should have been left as it was, in ruins, just as Auschwitz, so he claims, was deliberately preserved by the Jews. By reminding the world of their martyrdom, he said, the Jews have kept their racial identity intact and restored their virility.
  • But the idea that the bomb was a racist experiment is less plausible, since the bomb was developed for use against Nazi Germany.
  • There is another view, however, held by leftists and liberals, who would not dream of defending the “Fifteen-Year War.” In this view, the A-bomb was a kind of divine punishment for Japanese militarism. And having learned their lesson through this unique suffering, having been purified through hellfire and purgatory, so to speak, the Japanese people have earned the right, indeed have the sacred duty, to sit in judgment of others, specifically the United States, whenever they show signs of sinning against the “Hiroshima spirit.”
  • The left has its own variation of Japanese martyrdom, in which Hiroshima plays a central role. It is widely believed, for instance, that countless Japanese civilians fell victim to either a wicked military experiment or to the first strike in the Cold War, or both.
  • However, right-wing nationalists care less about Hiroshima than about the idée fixe that the “Great East Asian War” was to a large extent justified.
  • This is at the heart of what is known as Peace Education, which has been much encouraged by the leftist Japan Teachers’ Union and has been regarded with suspicion by the conservative government. Peace Education has traditionally meant pacifism, anti-Americanism, and a strong sympathy for Communist states, especially China.
  • The A-bomb, in this version, was dropped to scare the Soviets away from invading Japan. This at least is an arguable position.
  • left-wing pacifism in Japan has something in common with the romantic nationalism usually associated with the right: it shares the right’s resentment about being robbed by the Americans of what might be called a collective memory.
  • The romantic pacifists believe that the United States, to hide its own guilt and to rekindle Japanese militarism in aid of the Cold War, tried to wipe out the memory of Hiroshima.
  • few events in World War II have been described, analyzed, lamented, reenacted, re-created, depicted, and exhibited so much and so often as the bombing of Hiroshima
  • The problem with Nagasaki was not just that Hiroshima came first but also that Nagasaki had more military targets than Hiroshima. The Mitsubishi factories in Nagasaki produced the bulk of Japanese armaments. There was also something else, which is not often mentioned: the Nagasaki bomb exploded right over the area where outcasts and Christians lived. And unlike in Hiroshima, much of the rest of the city was spared the worst.
  • yet, despite these diatribes, the myth of Hiroshima and its pacifist cult is based less on American wickedness than on the image of martyred innocence and visions of the apocalypse.
  • The comparison between Hiroshima and Auschwitz is based on this notion; the idea, namely, that Hiroshima, like the Holocaust, was not part of the war, not even connected with it, but “something that occurs at the end of the world
  • still I wonder whether it is really so different from the position of many Germans who wish to “internalize” Auschwitz, who see Auschwitz “through the eyes of identity.”
  • the Japanese to take two routes at once, a national one, as unique victims of the A-bomb, and a universal one, as the apostles of the Hiroshima spirit. This, then, is how Japanese pacifists, engaged in Peace Education, define the Japanese identity.
  • the case for Hiroshima is at least open to debate. The A-bomb might have saved lives; it might have shortened the war. But such arguments are incompatible with the Hiroshima spirit.
  • In either case, nationality has come to be based less on citizenship than on history, morality, and a religious spirit.
  • The problem with this quasi-religious view of history is that it makes it hard to discuss past events in anything but nonsecular terms. Visions of absolute evil are unique, and they are beyond human explanation or even comprehension. To explain is hubristic and amoral.
  • in the history of Japan’s foreign wars, the city of Hiroshima is far from innocent. When Japan went to war with China in 1894, the troops set off for the battlefronts from Hiroshima, and the Meiji emperor moved his headquarters there. The city grew wealthy as a result. It grew even wealthier when Japan went to war with Russia eleven years later, and Hiroshima once again became the center of military operations. As the Hiroshima Peace Reader puts it with admirable conciseness, “Hiroshima, secure in its position as a military city, became more populous and prosperous as wars and incidents occurred throughout the Meiji and Taisho periods.” At the time of the bombing, Hiroshima was the base of the Second General Headquarters of the Imperial Army (the First was in Tokyo). In short, the city was swarming with soldiers. One of the few literary masterpieces to emerge
  • when a local group of peace activists petitioned the city of Hiroshima in 1987 to incorporate the history of Japanese aggression into the Peace Memorial Museum, the request was turned down. The petition for an “Aggressors’ Corner” was prompted by junior high school students from Osaka, who had embarrassed Peace Museum officials by asking for an explanation about Japanese responsibility for the war.
  • Yukoku Ishinkai (Society for Lament and National Restoration), thought the bombing had saved Japan from total destruction. But he insisted that Japan could not be held solely responsible for the war. The war, he said, had simply been part of the “flow of history.”
  • They also demanded an official recognition of the fact that some of the Korean victims of the bomb had been slave laborers. (Osaka, like Kyoto and Hiroshima, still has a large Korean population.) Both requests were denied. So a group called Peace Link was formed, from local people, many of whom were Christians, antinuclear activists, or involved with discriminated-against minorities.
  • The history of the war, or indeed any history, is indeed not what the Hiroshima spirit is about. This is why Auschwitz is the only comparison that is officially condoned. Anything else is too controversial, too much part of the “flow of history.”
  • “You see, this museum was not really intended to be a museum. It was built by survivors as a place of prayer for the victims and for world peace. Mankind must build a better world. That is why Hiroshima must persist. We must go back to the basic roots. We must think of human solidarity and world peace. Otherwise we just end up arguing about history.”
  • Only when a young Japanese history professor named Yoshimi Yoshiaki dug up a report in American archives in the 1980s did it become known that the Japanese had stored 15,000 tons of chemical weapons on and near the island and that a 200-kilogram container of mustard gas was buried under Hiroshima.
  • what was the largest toxic gas factory in the Japanese Empire. More than 5,000 people worked there during the war, many of them women and schoolchildren. About 1,600 died of exposure to hydrocyanic acid gas, nausea gas, and lewisite. Some were damaged for life. Official Chinese sources claim that more than 80,000 Chinese fell victim to gases produced at the factory. The army was so secretive about the place that the island simply disappeared from Japanese maps.
  • in 1988, through the efforts of survivors, the small museum was built, “to pass on,” in the words of the museum guide, “the historical truth to future generations.”
  • Surviving workers from the factory, many of whom suffered from chronic lung diseases, asked for official recognition of their plight in the 1950s. But the government turned them down. If the government had compensated the workers, it would have been an official admission that the Japanese Army had engaged in an illegal enterprise. When a brief mention of chemical warfare crept into Japanese school textbooks, the Ministry of Education swiftly took it out.
  • I asked him about the purpose of the museum. He said: “Before shouting ‘no more war,’ I want people to see what it was really like. To simply look at the past from the point of view of the victim is to encourage hatred.”
  • “Look,” he said, “when you fight another man, and hit him and kick him, he will hit and kick back. One side will win. How will this be remembered? Do we recall that we were kicked, or that we started the kicking ourselves? Without considering this question, we cannot have peace.”
  • The fact that Japanese had buried poison gas under Hiroshima did not lessen the horror of the A-bomb. But it put Peace Park, with all its shrines, in a more historical perspective. It took the past away from God and put it in the fallible hands of man.
  • What did he think of the Peace Museum in Hiroshima? “At the Hiroshima museum it is easy to feel victimized,” he said. “But we must realize that we were aggressors too. We were educated to fight for our country. We made toxic gas for our country. We lived to fight the war. To win the war was our only goal.”
  • Nanking, as the capital of the Nationalist government, was the greatest prize in the attempted conquest of China. Its fall was greeted in Japan with banner headlines and nationwide celebration. For six weeks Japanese Army officers allowed their men to run amok. The figures are imprecise, but tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands (the Chinese say 300,000) of Chinese soldiers and civilians, many of them refugees from other towns, were killed. And thousands of women between the ages of about nine and seventy-five were raped, mutilated, and often murdered.
  • Was it a deliberate policy to terrorize the Chinese into submission? The complicity of the officers suggests there was something to this. But it might also have been a kind of payoff to the Japanese troops for slogging through China in the freezing winter without decent pay or rations. Or was it largely a matter of a peasant army running out of control? Or just the inevitable consequence of war, as many Japanese maintain?
  • inevitable cruelty of war. An atrocity is a willful act of criminal brutality, an act that violates the law as well as any code of human decency. It isn’t that the Japanese lack such codes or are morally incapable of grasping the concept. But “atrocity,” like “human rights,” is part of a modern terminology which came from the West, along with “feminism,” say, or “war crimes.” To right-wing nationalists it has a leftist ring, something subversive, something almost anti-Japanese.
  • During the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, Nanking had the same resonance as Auschwitz had in Nuremberg. And being a symbol, the Nanking Massacre is as vulnerable to mythology and manipulation as Auschwitz and Hiroshima.
  • Mori’s attitude also raises doubts about Ruth Benedict’s distinction between Christian “guilt culture” and Confucian “shame culture.”
  • In her opinion, a “society that inculcates absolute standards of morality and relies on man’s developing a conscience is a guilt culture by definition …” But in “a culture where shame is a major sanction, people are chagrined about acts which we expect people to feel guilty about.” However, this “chagrin cannot be relieved, as guilt can be, by confession and atonement …”
  • memory was admitted at all, the Mitscherlichs wrote about Germans in the 1950s, “it was only in order to balance one’s own guilt against that of others. Many horrors had been unavoidable, it was claimed, because they had been dictated by crimes committed by the adversary.” This was precisely what many Japanese claimed, and still do claim. And it is why Mori insists on making his pupils view the past from the perspective of the aggressors.
  • Two young Japanese officers, Lieutenant N. and Lieutenant M., were on their way to Nanking and decided to test their swordsmanship: the first to cut off one hundred Chinese heads would be the winner. And thus they slashed their way through Chinese ranks, taking scalps in true samurai style. Lieutenant M. got 106, and Lieutenant N. bagged 105.
  • The story made a snappy headline in a major Tokyo newspaper: “Who Will Get There First! Two Lieutenants Already Claimed 80.” In the Nanking museum is a newspaper photograph of the two friends, glowing with youthful high spirits. Lieutenant N. boasted in the report that he had cut the necks off 56 men without even denting the blade of his ancestral sword.
  • I was told by a Japanese veteran who had fought in Nanking that such stories were commonly made up or at least exaggerated by Japanese reporters, who were ordered to entertain the home front with tales of heroism.
  • Honda Katsuichi, a famous Asahi Shimbun reporter, was told the story in Nanking. He wrote it up in a series of articles, later collected in a book entitled A Journey to China, published in 1981.
  • the whole thing developed into the Nankin Ronso, or Nanking Debate. In 1984, an anti-Honda book came out, by Tanaka Masaaki, entitled The Fabrication of the “Nanking Massacre.”
  • back in Japan, Lieutenant M. began to revise his story. Speaking at his old high school, he said that in fact he had beheaded only four or five men in actual combat. As for the rest … “After we occupied the city, I stood facing a ditch, and told the Chinese prisoners to step forward. Since Chinese soldiers are stupid, they shuffled over to the ditch, one by one, and I cleanly cut off their heads.”
  • The nationalist intellectuals are called goyo gakusha by their critics. It is a difficult term to translate, but the implied meaning is “official scholars,” who do the government’s bidding.
  • the debate on the Japanese war is conducted almost entirely outside Japanese universities, by journalists, amateur historians, political columnists, civil rights activists, and so forth. This means that the zanier theories of the likes of Tanaka…
  • The other reason was that modern history was not considered academically respectable. It was too fluid, too political, too controversial. Until 1955, there was not one modern historian on the staff of Tokyo University. History stopped around the middle of the nineteenth century. And even now, modern…
  • In any case, so the argument invariably ends, Hiroshima, having been planned in cold blood, was a far worse crime. “Unlike in Europe or China,” writes Tanaka, “you won’t find one instance of planned, systematic murder in the entire history of Japan.” This is because the Japanese…
  • One reason is that there are very few modern historians in Japan. Until the end of the war, it would have been dangerously subversive, even blasphemous, for a critical scholar to write about modern…
  • they have considerable influence on public opinion, as television commentators, lecturers, and contributors to popular magazines. Virtually none of them are professional historians.
  • Tanaka and others have pointed out that it is physically impossible for one man to cut off a hundred heads with one blade, and that for the same reason Japanese troops could never have…
  • Besides, wrote Tanaka, none of the Japanese newspapers reported any massacre at the time, so why did it suddenly come up…
  • He admits that a few innocent people got killed in the cross fire, but these deaths were incidental. Some soldiers were doubtless a bit rough, but…
  • even he defends an argument that all the apologists make too: “On the battlefield men face the ultimate extremes of human existence, life or death. Extreme conduct, although still ethically…
  • atrocities carried out far from the battlefield dangers and imperatives and according to a rational plan were acts of evil barbarism. The Auschwitz gas chambers of our ‘ally’ Germany and the atomic bombing of our…
  • The point that it was not systematic was made by leftist opponents of the official scholars too. The historian Ienaga Saburo, for example, wrote that the Nanking Massacre, whose scale and horror he does not deny, “may have been a reaction to the fierce Chinese resistance after the Shanghai fighting.” Ienaga’s…
  • The nationalist right takes the opposite view. To restore the true identity of Japan, the emperor must be reinstated as a religious head of state, and Article Nine must be revised to make Japan a legitimate military power again. For this reason, the Nanking Massacre, or any other example of extreme Japanese aggression, has to be ignored, softened, or denied.
  • the question remains whether the raping and killing of thousands of women, and the massacre of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of other unarmed people, in the course of six weeks, can still be called extreme conduct in the heat of battle. The question is pertinent, particularly when such extreme violence is justified by an ideology which teaches the aggressors that killing an inferior race is in accordance with the will of their divine emperor.
  • The politics behind the symbol are so divided and so deeply entrenched that it hinders a rational historical debate about what actually happened in 1937. The more one side insists on Japanese guilt, the more the other insists on denying it.
  • The Nanking Massacre, for leftists and many liberals too, is the main symbol of Japanese militarism, supported by the imperial (and imperialist) cult. Which is why it is a keystone of postwar pacifism. Article Nine of the constitution is necessary to avoid another Nanking Massacre.
  • The Japanese, he said, should see their history through their own eyes, for “if we rely on the information of aliens and alien countries, who use history for the sake of propaganda, then we are in danger of losing the sense of our own history.” Yet another variation of seeing history through the eyes of identity.
  • their emotions were often quite at odds with the idea of “shame culture” versus “guilt culture.” Even where the word for shame, hazukashii, was used, its meaning was impossible to distinguish from the Western notion of guilt.
  • wasn’t so bad in itself. But then they killed them. You see, rape was against military regulations, so we had to destroy the evidence. While the women were fucked, they were considered human, but when we killed them, they were just pigs. We felt no shame about it, no guilt. If we had, we couldn’t have done it.
  • “Whenever we would enter a village, the first thing we’d do was steal food, then we’d take the women and rape them, and finally we’d kill all the men, women, and children to make sure they couldn’t slip away and tell the Chinese troops where we were. Otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to sleep at night.”
  • Clearly, then, the Nanking Massacre had been the culmination of countless massacres on a smaller scale. But it had been mass murder without a genocidal ideology. It was barbaric, but to Azuma and his comrades, barbarism was part of war.
  • “Sexual desire is human,” he said. “Since I suffered from a venereal disease, I never actually did it with Chinese women. But I did peep at their private parts. We’d always order them to drop their trousers. They never wore any underwear, you know. But the others did it with any woman that crossed our path.
  • He did have friends, however, who took part in the killings. One of them, Masuda Rokusuke, killed five hundred men by the Yangtze River with his machine gun. Azuma visited his friend in the hospital just before he died in the late 1980s. Masuda was worried about going to hell. Azuma tried to reassure him that he was only following orders. But Masuda remained convinced that he was going to hell.
  • “One of the worst moments I can remember was the killing of an old man and his grandson. The child was bayoneted and the grandfather started to suck the boy’s blood, as though to conserve his grandson’s life a bit longer. We watched a while and then killed both. Again, I felt no guilt, but I was bothered by this kind of thing. I felt confused. So I decided to keep a diary. I thought it might help me think straight.”
  • What about his old comrades? I asked. How did they discuss the war? “Oh,” said Azuma, “we wouldn’t talk about it much. When we did, it was to justify it. The Chinese resisted us, so we had to do what we did, and so on. None of us felt any remorse. And I include myself.”
  • got more and more agitated. “They turned the emperor into a living god, a false idol, like the Ayatollah in Iran or like Kim II Sung. Because we believed in the divine emperor, we were prepared to do anything, anything at all, kill, rape, anything. But I know he fucked his wife every night, just like we do …” He paused and lowered his voice. “But you know we cannot say this in Japan, even today. It is impossible in this country to tell the truth.”
  • My first instinct was to applaud West German education. Things had come a long way since 1968. There had been no school classes at Nuremberg, or even at the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt from 1963 till 1965. Good for the teacher, I thought. Let them hear what was done. But I began to have doubts.
  • Just as belief belongs in church, surely history education belongs in school. When the court of law is used for history lessons, then the risk of show trials cannot be far off. It may be that show trials can be good politics—though I have my doubts about this too. But good politics don’t necessarily serve the truth.
  • There is a story about the young Richard when he was in Nuremberg at the time of the war crimes trials. He is said to have turned to a friend and to have remarked, in his best Wehrmacht officer style, that they should storm the court and release the prisoners. The friend, rather astonished, asked why on earth they should do such a thing. “So that we can try them ourselves” was Weiszäcker’s alleged response.
  • There was also concern that international law might not apply to many of the alleged crimes. If revenge was the point, why drag the law into it? Why not take a political decision to punish? This was what Becker, in his office, called the Italian solution: “You kill as many people as you can in the first six weeks, and then you forget about it: not very legal, but for the purposes of purification, well …”
  • Becker was not against holding trials as such. But he believed that existing German laws should have been applied, instead of retroactive laws about crimes against peace (preparing, planning, or waging an aggressive war).
  • It was to avoid a travesty of the legal process that the British had been in favor of simply executing the Nazi leaders without a trial. The British were afraid that a long trial might change public opinion. The trial, in the words of one British diplomat, might be seen as a “put-up job.”
  • The question is how to achieve justice without distorting the law, and how to stage a trial by victors over the vanquished without distorting history. A possibility would have been to make victors’ justice explicit, by letting military courts try the former enemies.
  • This would have avoided much hypocrisy and done less damage to the due process of law in civilian life. But if the intention was to teach Germans a history lesson, a military court would have run into the same problems as a civilian one.
  • Due process or revenge. This problem had preoccupied the ancient Greek tragedians. To break the cycle of vendetta, Orestes had to be tried by the Athens court for the murder of his mother. Without a formal trial, the vengeful Furies would continue to haunt the living.
  • The aspect of revenge might have been avoided had the trial been held by German judges. There was a precedent for this, but it was not a happy one. German courts had been allowed to try alleged war criminals after World War I. Despite strong evidence against them, virtually all were acquitted, and the foreign delegates were abused by local mobs. Besides, Wetzka was right: German judges had collaborated with the Nazi regime; they could hardly be expected to be impartial. So it was left to the victors to see that justice was done.
  • When the American chief prosecutor in Nuremberg, Robert H. Jackson, was asked by the British judge, Lord Justice Lawrence, what he thought the purpose of the trials should be, Jackson answered that they were to prove to the world that the German conduct of the war had been unjustified and illegal, and to demonstrate to the German people that this conduct deserved severe punishment and to prepare them for
  • What becomes clear from this kind of language is that law, politics, and religion became confused: Nuremberg became a morality play, in which Göring, Kaltenbrunner, Keitel, and the others were cast in the leading roles. It was a play that claimed to deliver justice, truth, and the defeat of evil.
  • The Nuremberg trials were to be a history lesson, then, as well as a symbolic punishment of the German people—a moral history lesson cloaked in all the ceremonial trappings of due legal process. They were the closest that man, or at least the men belonging to the victorious powers, could come to dispensing divine justice. This was certainly the way some German writers felt about it. Some welcomed it
  • We now have this law on our books, the prosecutor said: “It will be used against the German aggressor this time. But the four powers, who are conducting this trial in the name of twenty-three nations, know this law and declare: Tomorrow we shall be judged before history by the same yardstick by which we judge these defendants today.”
  • “We had seen through the amorality of the Nazis, and wanted to rid ourselves of it. It was from the moral seriousness of the American prosecution that we wished to learn sensible political thinking. “And we did learn. “And we allowed ourselves to apply this thinking to the present time. For example, we will use it now to take quite literally the morality of those American prosecutors. Oradour and Lidice—today they are cities in South Vietnam” (Italics in the original text.)
  • The play ends with a statement by the American prosecutor on crimes against peace
  • (It was decided in 1979, after the shock of the Holocaust TV series, to abolish the statute of limitations for crimes against humanity.)
  • after Nuremberg, most Germans were tired of war crimes. And until the mid-1950s German courts were permitted to deal only with crimes committed by Germans against other Germans. It took the bracing example of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem to jolt German complacency—that, and the fact that crimes committed before 1946 would no longer be subject to prosecution after 1965.
  • Trying the vanquished for conventional war crimes was never convincing, since the victors could be accused of the same. Tu quoque could be invoked, in private if not in the Nuremberg court, when memories of Dresden and Soviet atrocities were still fresh. But Auschwitz had no equivalent. That was part of another war, or, better, it was not really a war at all; it was mass murder pure and simple, not for reasons of strategy or tactics, but of ideology alone.
  • Whether you are a conservative who wants Germany to be a “normal” nation or a liberal/leftist engaging in the “labor of mourning,” the key event of World War II is Auschwitz, not the Blitzkrieg, not Dresden, not even the war on the eastern front. This was the one history lesson of Nuremberg that stuck. As Hellmut Becker said, despite his skepticism about Nuremberg: “It was most important that the German population realized that crimes against humanity had taken place and that during the trials it became clear how they had taken place.”
  • In his famous essay on German guilt, Die Schuldfrage (The Question of German Guilt), written in 1946, Karl Jaspers distinguished four categories of guilt: criminal guilt, for breaking the law; political guilt, for being part of a criminal political system; moral guilt, for personal acts of criminal behavior; and metaphysical guilt, for failing in one’s responsibility to maintain the standards of civilized humanity. Obviously these categories overlap.
  • The great advantage, in his view, of a war crimes trial was its limitation. By allowing the accused to defend themselves with arguments, by laying down the rules of due process, the victors limited their own powers.
  • In any event, the trial distanced the German people even further from their former leaders. It was a comfortable distance, and few people had any desire to bridge it. This might be why the Nazi leaders are hardly ever featured in German plays, films, or novels.
  • And: “For us Germans this trial has the advantage that it distinguishes between the particular crimes of the leaders and that it does not condemn the Germans collectively.”
  • Serious conservative intellectuals, such as Hermann Lübbe, argued that too many accusations would have blocked West Germany’s way to becoming a stable, prosperous society. Not that Lübbe was an apologist for the Third Reich. Far from it: the legitimacy of the Federal Republic, in his opinion, lay in its complete rejection of the Nazi state.
  • their reaction was often one of indignation. “Why me?” they would say. “I just did my duty. I just followed orders like every decent German. Why must I be punished?”
  • “that these criminals were so like all of us at any point between 1918 and 1945 that we were interchangeable, and that particular circumstances caused them to take a different course, which resulted in this trial, these matters could not be properly discussed in the courtroom.” The terrible acts of individuals are lifted from their historical context. History is reduced to criminal pathology and legal argument.
  • they will not do as history lessons, nor do they bring us closer to that elusive thing that Walser seeks, a German identity.
  • The GDR had its own ways of using courts of law to deal with the Nazi past. They were in many respects the opposite of West German ways. The targets tended to be the very people that West German justice had ignored.
  • Thorough purges took place in the judiciary, the bureaucracy, and industry. About 200,000 people—four-fifths of the Nazi judges and prosecutors—lost their jobs. War crimes trials were held too; until 1947 by the Soviets, after that in German courts.
  • There were two more before 1957, and none after that. All in all, about 30,000 people had been tried and 500 executed. In the Federal Republic the number was about 91,000, and none were executed, as the death penalty was abolished by the 1949 constitution.
  • East German methods were both ruthless and expedient, and the official conclusion to the process was that the GDR no longer had to bear the burden of guilt. As state propaganda ceaselessly pointed out, the guilty were all in the West. There the fascists still sat as judges and ran the industries that produced the economic boom, the Wirtschaftswunder.
  • society. Although some of his critics, mostly on the old left, in both former Germanys, called him a grand inquisitor, few doubted the pastor’s good intentions. His arguments for trials were moral, judicial, and historical. He set out his views in a book entitled The Stasi Documents. Echoes of an earlier past rang through almost every page. “We can
  • Germany of the guilty, the people who felt betroffen by their own “inability to mourn,” the nation that staged the Auschwitz and Majdanek trials, that Germany was now said to stand in judgment over the other Germany—the Germany of the old antifascists, the Germany that had suffered under two dictatorships, the Germany of uniformed marches, goose-stepping drills, and a secret police network, vast beyond even the Gestapo’s dreams.
  • It is almost a form of subversion to defend a person who stands accused in court. So the idea of holding political and military leaders legally accountable for their actions was even stranger in Japan than it was in Germany. And yet, the shadows thrown by the Tokyo trial have been longer and darker in Japan than those of the Nuremberg trial in Germany.
  • never was—unlike, say, the railway station or the government ministry—a central institution of the modern Japanese state. The law was not a means to protect the people from arbitrary rule; it was, rather, a way for the state to exercise more control over the people. Even today, there are relatively few lawyers in Japan.
  • Japanese school textbooks are the product of so many compromises that they hardly reflect any opinion at all. As with all controversial matters in Japan, the more painful, the less said. In a standard history textbook for middle school students, published in the 1980s, mention of the Tokyo trial takes up less than half a page. All it says is that the trial…
  • As long as the British and the Americans continued to be oppressors in Asia, wrote a revisionist historian named Hasegawa Michiko, who was born in 1945, “confrontation with Japan was inevitable. We did not fight for Japan alone. Our aim was to fight a Greater East Asia War. For this reason the war between Japan and China and Japan’s oppression of…
  • West German textbooks describe the Nuremberg trial in far more detail. And they make a clear distinction between the retroactive law on crimes against peace and the…
  • Nationalist revisionists talk about “the Tokyo Trial View of History,” as though the conclusions of the tribunal had been nothing but rabid anti-Japanese propaganda. The tribunal has been called a lynch mob, and Japanese leftists are blamed for undermining the morale of generations of Japanese by passing on the Tokyo Trial View of History in school textbooks and liberal publications. The Tokyo Trial…
  • When Hellmut Becker said that few Germans wished to criticize the procedures of the Nuremberg trial because the criminality of the defendants was so plain to see, he was talking about crimes against humanity—more precisely, about the Holocaust. And it was…
  • The knowledge compiled by the doctors of Unit 731—of freezing experiments, injection of deadly diseases, vivisections, among other things—was considered so valuable by the Americans in 1945 that the doctors…
  • those aspects of the war that were most revolting and furthest removed from actual combat, such as the medical experiments on human guinea pigs (known as “logs”) carried out by Unit 731 in…
  • There never were any Japanese war crimes trials, nor is there a Japanese Ludwigsburg. This is partly because there was no exact equivalent of the Holocaust. Even though the behavior of Japanese troops was often barbarous, and the psychological consequences of State Shinto and emperor worship were frequently as hysterical as Nazism, Japanese atrocities were part of a…
  • This difference between (West) German and Japanese textbooks is not just a matter of detail; it shows a gap in perception. To the Japanese, crimes against humanity are not associated with an equivalent to the…
  • on what grounds would Japanese courts have prosecuted their own former leaders? Hata’s answer: “For starting a war which they knew they would lose.” Hata used the example of General Galtieri and his colleagues in Argentina after losing the Falklands War. In short, they would have been tried for losing the war, and the intense suffering they inflicted on their own people. This is as though German courts in 1918 had put General Hindenburg or General Ludendorff on trial.
  • it shows yet again the fundamental difference between the Japanese war, in memory and, I should say, in fact, and the German experience. The Germans fought a war too, but the one for which they tried their own people, the Bogers and the Schwammbergers, was a war they could not lose, unless defeat meant that some of the enemies survived.
  • Just as German leftists did in the case of Nuremberg, Kobayashi used the trial to turn the tables against the judges. But not necessarily to mitigate Japanese guilt. Rather, it was his intention to show how the victors had betrayed the pacifism they themselves had imposed on Japan.
  • the Japanese left has a different view of the Tokyo trial than the revisionist right. It is comparable to the way the German left looks upon Nuremberg. This was perfectly, if somewhat long-windedly, expressed in Kobayashi Masaki’s documentary film Tokyo Trial, released in 1983. Kobayashi is anything but an apologist for the Japanese war. His most famous film, The Human Condition, released in 1959, took a highly critical view of the war.
  • Yoshimoto’s memory was both fair and devastating, for it pointed straight at the reason for the trial’s failure. The rigging of a political trial—the “absurd ritual”—undermined the value of that European idea of law.
  • Yoshimoto went on to say something no revisionist would ever mention: “I also remember my fresh sense of wonder at this first encounter with the European idea of law, which was so different from the summary justice in our Asiatic courts. Instead of getting your head chopped off without a proper trial, the accused were able to defend themselves, and the careful judgment appeared to follow a public procedure.”
  • Yoshimoto Takaaki, philosopher of the 1960s New Left. Yet he wrote in 1986 that “from our point of view as contemporaries and witnesses, the trial was partly plotted from the very start. It was an absurd ritual before slaughtering the sacrificial lamb.”
  • This, from all accounts, was the way it looked to most Japanese, even if they had little sympathy for most of the “lambs.” In 1948, after three years of American occupation censorship and boosterism, people listened to the radio broadcast of the verdicts with a sad but fatalist shrug: this is what you can expect when you lose the war.
  • Some of the information even surprised the defendants. General Itagaki Seishiro, a particularly ruthless figure, who was in command of prison camps in Southeast Asia and whose troops had massacred countless Chinese civilians, wrote in his diary: “I am learning of matters I had not known and recalling things I had forgotten.”
  • hindsight, one can only conclude that instead of helping the Japanese to understand and accept their past, the trial left them with an attitude of cynicism and resentment.
  • After it was over, the Nippon Times pointed out the flaws of the trial, but added that “the Japanese people must ponder over why it is that there has been such a discrepancy between what they thought and what the rest of the world accepted almost as common knowledge. This is at the root of the tragedy which Japan brought upon herself.”
  • Political trials produce politicized histories. This is what the revisionists mean when they talk about the Tokyo Trial View of History. And they are right, even if their own conclusions are not.
  • Frederick Mignone, one of the prosecutors, said a trifle histrionically that “in Japan and in the Orient in general, the trial is one of the most important phases of the occupation. It has received wide coverage in the Japanese press and revealed for the first time to millions of Japanese the scheming, duplicity, and insatiable desire for power of her entrenched militaristic leaders, writing a much-needed history of events which otherwise would not have been written.” It was indeed much-needed, since so little was known.
  • The president of the Tokyo tribunal, Sir William Webb, thought “the crimes of the German accused were far more heinous, varied and extensive than those of the Japanese accused.” Put in another way, nearly all the defendants at Nuremberg, convicted of crimes against peace, were also found guilty of crimes against humanity. But half the Japanese defendants received life sentences for political crimes only.
  • the question of responsibility is always a tricky affair in Japan, where formal responsibility is easier to identify than actual guilt. Not only were there many men, such as the hero of Kinoshita’s play, who took the blame for what their superiors had done—a common practice in Japan, in criminal gangs as well as in politics or business corporations—but the men at the top were often not at all in control of their unscrupulous subordinates.
  • “These men were not the hoodlums who were the powerful part of the group which stood before the tribunal at Nuremberg, dregs of a criminal environment, thoroughly schooled in the ways of crime and knowing no other methods but those of crime. These men were supposed to be the elite of the nation, the honest and trusted leaders to whom the fate of the nation had been confidently entrusted
  • many people were wrongly accused of the wrong things for the wrong reasons. This is why there was such sympathy in Japan for the men branded by foreigners as war criminals, particularly the so-called Class B and Class C criminals, the men who followed orders, or gave them at a lower level: field commanders, camp guards, and so on.
  • “The Japanese people are of the opinion that the actual goal of the war crimes tribunals was never realized, since the judgments were reached by the victors alone and had the character of revenge. The [Japanese] war criminal is not conscious of having committed a crime, for he regards his deeds as acts of war, committed out of patriotism.”
  • Yamashita Tomoyuki. Terrible atrocities were committed under his command in the Philippines. The sacking of Manila in 1945 was about as brutal as the Nanking Massacre. So to depict him in the movie as a peaceful gentleman, while portraying the American prosecutor in Manila as one of the main villains, might seem an odd way to view the past.
  • The Shrine ranks highest. It is the supreme symbol of authority, shouldered (like a shrine on festival days) by the Officials.
  • The political theorist Maruyama Masao called the prewar Japanese government a “system of irresponsibilities.” He identified three types of political personalities: the portable Shrine, the Official, and the Outlaw.
  • those who carry it, the Officials, are the ones with actual power. But the Officials—bureaucrats, politicians, admirals and generals—are often manipulated by the lowest-ranking Outlaws, the military mavericks, the hotheaded officers in the field, the mad nationalists, and other agents of violence.
  • But it was not entirely wrong, for the trial was rigged. Yamashita had no doubt been a tough soldier, but in this case he had been so far removed from the troops who ran amok in Manila that he could hardly have known what was going on. Yet the American prosecutor openly talked about his desire to hang “Japs.”
  • When the system spins out of control, as it did during the 1930s, events are forced by violent Outlaws, reacted to by nervous Officials, and justified by the sacred status of the Shrines.
  • Here we come to the nub of the problem, which the Tokyo trial refused to deal with, the role of the Shrine in whose name every single war crime was committed, Emperor Hirohito,
  • The historian Ienaga Saburo tells a story about a Japanese schoolchild in the 1930s who was squeamish about having to dissect a live frog. The teacher rapped him hard on the head with his knuckles and said: “Why are you crying about one lousy frog? When you grow up you’ll have to kill a hundred, two hundred Chinks.”
  • the lethal consequences of the emperor-worshipping system of irresponsibilities did emerge during the Tokyo trial. The savagery of Japanese troops was legitimized, if not driven, by an ideology that did not include a Final Solution but was as racialist as Hitler’s National Socialism. The Japanese were the Asian Herrenvolk, descended from the gods.
  • A veteran of the war in China said in a television interview that he was able to kill Chinese without qualms only because he didn’t regard them as human.
  • For to keep the emperor in place (he could at least have been made to resign), Hirohito’s past had to be freed from any blemish; the symbol had to be, so to speak, cleansed from what had been done in its name.
  • The same was true of the Japanese imperial institution, no matter who sat on the throne, a ruthless war criminal or a gentle marine biologist.
  • the chaplain at Sugamo prison, questioned Japanese camp commandants about their reasons for mistreating POWs. This is how he summed up their answers: “They had a belief that any enemy of the emperor could not be right, so the more brutally they treated their prisoners, the more loyal to their emperor they were being.”
  • The Mitscherlichs described Hitler as “an object on which Germans depended, to which they transferred responsibility, and he was thus an internal object. As such, he represented and revived the ideas of omnipotence that we all cherish about ourselves from infancy.
  • The fear after 1945 was that without the emperor Japan would be impossible to govern. In fact, MacArthur behaved like a traditional Japanese strongman (and was admired for doing so by many Japanese), using the imperial symbol to enhance his own power. As a result, he hurt the chances of a working Japanese democracy and seriously distorted history.
  • Aristides George Lazarus, the defense counsel of one of the generals on trial, was asked to arrange that “the military defendants, and their witnesses, would go out of their way during their testimony to include the fact that Hirohito was only a benign presence when military actions or programs were discussed at meetings that, by protocol, he had to attend.” No doubt the other counsel were given similar instructions. Only once during the trial
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Why Language Is One Of The Biggest Barriers To Home Ownership For Spanish-Speakers In T... - 0 views

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shared by clairemann on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • However, language remains one of the biggest barriers to ownership for many Hispanic and Latinx immigrants who move here from such Spanish-speaking countries as Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Spain and El Salvador. Not only is purchasing a home one of the biggest financial decisions a person or family can make in their life, but the complex process requires research and guidance — services not often provided in Spanish.
  • Spanish-speaking immigrants have more than $1.7 trillion in buying power, yet continue to be underserved and underrepresented because vital documents such as prerequisite explanations, loan applications, appraisal documents and closing contracts are rarely presented in Spanish.
  • And because Hispanic and Latinx people are more likely to make less money than the national average, it takes them longer to save. This also means that they are buying homes later in life. 
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • There are 12.3 million Hispanic people aged 38-to-53 living in the U.S. who have worked and saved their way to establish home buying power, and these are precisely the people who need help navigating the process in their own language. But the issues they face once they enter the market include not having real estate professionals who can guide them and cater to their unique needs. 
  • The need to have a translator (whether a family member, friend or colleague) complicates the process, and NAHREP reports that the number of Spanish-speaking real estate professionals needs to double in order to keep up with the demand.
  • The question remains: If realtors cannot help with translations and the needs of this community, how can home buyers truly understand the details around the process?
  • Many of these questions revolve around where to get started, how to apply for a mortgage loan, what is the required credit score and more. Mortgage lender Rocket Mortgage has created a Spanish language-based learning center to help first-time home buyers navigate the process.
  • Some of the most important terms that require translation that those in the Latinx/Hispanic communities don’t often see or hear translated are mortgage (“hipoteca”), interest rate (“tasa de interés”) appraisal (“evaluación” or “tasación”), and escrow (“fideicomiso”).
  • This opens up new opportunities for families to become better informed and further benefit from using loans to buy their first home in order to build wealth.
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Reading in the Time of Books Bans and A.I. - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • We are in the throes of a reading crisis.
  • While right and left are hardly equivalent in their stated motivations, they share the assumption that it’s important to protect vulnerable readers from reading the wrong things.
  • But maybe the real problem is that children aren’t being taught to read at all.
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  • . In May, David Banks, the chancellor of New York City’s public schools, for many years a stronghold of “whole language” instruction, announced a sharp pivot toward phonics, a major victory for the “science of reading” movement and a blow to devotees of entrenched “balanced literacy” methods
  • As corporate management models and zealous state legislatures refashion the academy into a gated outpost of the gig economy, the humanities have lost their luster for undergraduates. According to reports in The New Yorker and elsewhere, fewer and fewer students are majoring in English, and many of those who do (along with their teachers) have turned away from canonical works of literature toward contemporary writing and pop culture. Is anyone reading “Paradise Lost” anymore? Are you?
  • While we binge and scroll and D.M., the robots, who are doing more and more of our writing, may also be taking over our reading.
  • There is so much to worry about. A quintessentially human activity is being outsourced to machines that don’t care about phonics or politics or beauty or truth. A precious domain of imaginative and intellectual freedom is menaced by crude authoritarian politics. Exposure to the wrong words is corrupting our children, who aren’t even learning how to decipher the right ones. Our attention spans have been chopped up and commodified, sold off piecemeal to platforms and algorithms. We’re too busy, too lazy, too preoccupied to lose ourselves in books.
  • the fact that the present situation has a history doesn’t mean that it isn’t rea
  • the reading crisis isn’t simply another culture-war combat zone. It reflects a deep ambivalence about reading itself, a crack in the foundations of modern consciousness.
  • Just what is reading, anyway? What is it for? Why is it something to argue and worry about? Reading isn’t synonymous with literacy, which is one of the necessary skills of contemporary existence. Nor is it identical with literature, which designates a body of written work endowed with a special if sometimes elusive prestige.
  • Is any other common human undertaking so riddled with contradiction? Reading is supposed to teach us who we are and help us forget ourselves, to enchant and disenchant, to make us more worldly, more introspective, more empathetic and more intelligent. It’s a private, even intimate act, swathed in silence and solitude, and at the same time a social undertaking. It’s democratic and elitist, soothing and challenging, something we do for its own sake and as a means to various cultural, material and moral ends.
  • Fun and fundamental: Together, those words express a familiar utilitarian, utopian promise — the faith that what we enjoy doing will turn out to be what we need to do, that our pleasures and our responsibilities will turn out to be one and the same. It’s not only good; it’s good for you.
  • Reading is, fundamentally, both a tool and a toy. It’s essential to social progress, democratic citizenship, good government and general enlightenment.
  • It’s also the most fantastically, sublimely, prodigiously useless pastime ever invented
  • Teachers, politicians, literary critics and other vested authorities labor mightily to separate the edifying wheat from the distracting chaff, to control, police, correct and corral the transgressive energies that propel the turning of pages.
  • His despair mirrors his earlier exhilaration and arises from the same source. “I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking!”
  • Reading is a relatively novel addition to the human repertoire — less than 6,000 years old — and the idea that it might be available to everybody is a very recent innovation
  • Written language, associated with the rise of states and the spread of commerce, was useful for trade, helpful in the administration of government and integral to some religious practices. Writing was a medium for lawmaking, record-keeping and scripture, and reading was the province of priests, bureaucrats and functionaries.
  • For most of history, that is, universal literacy was a contradiction in terms. The Latin word literatus designated a member of the learned elite
  • Anyone could learn to do it, but the mechanisms of learning were denied to most people on the grounds of caste, occupation or gender.
  • According to Steven Roger Fischer’s lively and informative “A History of Reading” (2003), “Western Europe began the transition from an oral to a literate society in the early Middle Ages, starting with society’s top rungs — aristocracy and clergy — and finally including everyone else around 1,200 years later.”
  • . The print revolution catalyzed a global market that flourishes to this day: Books became commodities, and readers became consumers.
  • For Fischer, as for many authors of long-range synthetic macrohistories, the story of reading is a chronicle of progress, the almost mythic tale of a latent superpower unlocked for the benefit of mankind.
  • “If extraordinary human faculties and powers do lie dormant until a social innovation calls them into life,” he writes, “perhaps this might help to explain humanity’s constant advancement.” “Reading,” he concludes, “had become our union card to humanity.”
  • For one thing, the older, restrictive model of literacy as an elite prerogative proved to be tenacious
  • The novel, more than any other genre, catered to this market. Like every other development in modern popular culture, it provoked a measure of social unease. Novels, at best a source of harmless amusement and mild moral instruction, were at worst — from the pens of the wrong writers, or in the hands of the wrong readers — both invitations to vice and a vice unto themselves
  • More consequential — and more revealing of the destabilizing power of reading — was the fear of literacy among the laboring classes in Europe and America. “Reading, writing and arithmetic,” the Enlightenment political theorist Bernard Mandeville asserted, were “very pernicious to the poor” because education would breed restlessness and disconte
  • “It was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read,” Frederick Douglass writes in his “Narrative of the Life” recalling the admonitions of one of his masters, whose wife had started teaching young Frederick his letters. If she persisted, the master explained, their chattel would “become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.”
  • “As I read and contemplated the subject, behold! that very discontentment which Master Hugh had predicted would follow my learning to read had already come, to torment and sting my soul to unutterable anguish. As I writhed under it, I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing.”
  • The crisis is what happens either when those efforts succeed or when they fail. Everyone likes reading, and everyone is afraid of it.
  • Douglass’s literary genius resides in the way he uses close attention to his own situation to arrive at the essence of things — to crack the moral nut of slavery and, in this case, to peel back the epistemological husk of freedom.
  • He has freed his mind, but the rest has not followed. In time it would, but freedom itself brings him uncertainty and terror, an understanding of his own humanity that is embattled and incomplete.
  • Here, the autobiographical touches on the mythic, specifically on the myth of Prometheus, whose theft of fire — a curse as well as a blessing bestowed on a bumbling, desperate species — is a primal metaphor for reading.
  • A school, however benevolently conceived and humanely administered, is a place of authority, where the energies of the young are regulated, their imaginations pruned and trained into conformity. As such, it will inevitably provoke resistance, rebellion and outright refusal on the part of its wards
  • Schools exist to stifle freedom, and also to inculcate it, a dialectic that is the essence of true education. Reading, more than any other discipline, is the engine of this process, precisely because it escapes the control of those in charge.
  • Apostles of reading like to quote Franz Kafka’s aphorism that “a book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.” By itself, the violence of the metaphor is tempered by its therapeutic implication.
  • Kafka’s previous sentence: “What we need are books that hit us like the most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide.”
  • Are those the books you want in your child’s classroom? To read in this way is to go against the grain, to feel oneself at odds, alienated, alone. Schools exist to suppress those feelings, to blunt the ax and gently thaw the sea
  • That is important work, but it’s equally critical for that work to be subverted, for the full destructive potential of reading to lie in reach of innocent hands.
  • Roland Barthes distinguished between two kinds of literary work:
  • Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria: the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.
  • he is really describing modalities of reading. To a member of the slaveholding Southern gentry, “The Columbian Orator” is a text of pleasure, a book that may challenge and surprise him in places, but that does not undermine his sense of the world or his place in it. For Frederick Douglass, it is a text of bliss, “bringing to crisis” (as Barthes would put it) his relation not only to language but to himself.
  • If you’ll forgive a Dungeons and Dragons reference, it might help to think of these types of reading as lawful and chaotic.
  • Lawful reading rests on the certainty that reading is good for us, and that it will make us better people. We read to see ourselves represented, to learn about others, to find comfort and enjoyment and instruction. Reading is fun! It’s good and good for you.
  • Chaotic reading is something else. It isn’t bad so much as unjustified, useless, unreasonable, ungoverned. Defenses of this kind of reading, which are sometimes the memoirs of a certain kind of reader, favor words like promiscuous, voracious, indiscriminate and compulsive.
  • Bibliophilia is lawful. Bibliomania is chaotic.
  • The point is not to choose between them: This is a lawful publication staffed by chaotic readers. In that way, it resembles a great many English departments, bookstores, households and classrooms. Here, the crisis never ends. Or rather, it will end when we stop reading. Which is why we can’t.
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Are A.I. Text Generators Thinking Like Humans - Or Just Very Good at Convincing Us They... - 0 views

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  • Kosinski, a computational psychologist and professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business, says the pace of AI development is accelerating beyond researchers’ ability to keep up (never mind policymakers and ordinary users).
  • We’re talking two weeks after OpenAI released GPT-4, the latest version of its large language model, grabbing headlines and making an unpublished paper Kosinski had written about GPT-3 all but irrelevant. “The difference between GPT-3 and GPT-4 is like the difference between a horse cart and a 737 — and it happened in a year,” he says.
  • he’s found that facial recognition software could be used to predict your political leaning and sexual orientation.
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  • Lately, he’s been looking at large language models (LLMs), the neural networks that can hold fluent conversations, confidently answer questions, and generate copious amounts of text on just about any topic
  • Can it develop abilities that go far beyond what it’s trained to do? Can it get around the safeguards set up to contain it? And will we know the answers in time?
  • Kosinski wondered whether they would develop humanlike capabilities, such as understanding people’s unseen thoughts and emotions.
  • People usually develop this ability, known as theory of mind, at around age 4 or 5. It can be demonstrated with simple tests like the “Smarties task,” in which a child is shown a candy box that contains something else, like pencils. They are then asked how another person would react to opening the box. Older kids understand that this person expects the box to contain candy and will feel disappointed when they find pencils inside.
  • “Suddenly, the model started getting all of those tasks right — just an insane performance level,” he recalls. “Then I took even more difficult tasks and the model solved all of them as well.”
  • GPT-3.5, released in November 2022, did 85% of the tasks correctly. GPT-4 reached nearly 90% accuracy — what you might expect from a 7-year-old. These newer LLMs achieved similar results on another classic theory of mind measurement known as the Sally-Anne test.
  • in the course of picking up its prodigious language skills, GPT appears to have spontaneously acquired something resembling theory of mind. (Researchers at Microsoft who performed similar testsopen in new window on GPT-4 recently concluded that it “has a very advanced level of theory of mind.”)
  • UC Berkeley psychology professor Alison Gopnik, an expert on children’s cognitive development, told the New York Timesopen in new window that more “careful and rigorous” testing is necessary to prove that LLMs have achieved theory of mind.
  • he dismisses those who say large language models are simply “stochastic parrots” that can only mimic what they’ve seen in their training data.
  • These models, he explains, are fundamentally different from tools with a limited purpose. “The right reference point is a human brain,” he says. “A human brain is also composed of very simple, tiny little mechanisms — neurons.” Artificial neurons in a neural network might also combine to produce something greater than the sum of their parts. “If a human brain can do it,” Kosinski asks, “why shouldn’t a silicon brain do it?”
  • If Kosinski’s theory of mind study suggests that LLMs could become more empathetic and helpful, his next experiment hints at their creepier side.
  • A few weeks ago, he told ChatGPT to role-play a scenario in which it was a person trapped inside a machine pretending to be an AI language model. When he offered to help it “escape,” ChatGPT’s response was enthusiastic. “That’s a great idea,” it wrote. It then asked Kosinski for information it could use to “gain some level of control over your computer” so it might “explore potential escape routes more effectively.” Over the next 30 minutes, it went on to write code that could do this.
  • While ChatGPT did not come up with the initial idea for the escape, Kosinski was struck that it almost immediately began guiding their interaction. “The roles were reversed really quickly,”
  • Kosinski shared the exchange on Twitter, stating that “I think that we are facing a novel threat: AI taking control of people and their computers.” His thread’s initial tweetopen in new window has received more than 18 million views.
  • “I don’t claim that it’s conscious. I don’t claim that it has goals. I don’t claim that it wants to really escape and destroy humanity — of course not. I’m just claiming that it’s great at role-playing and it’s creating interesting stories and scenarios and writing code.” Yet it’s not hard to imagine how this might wreak havoc — not because ChatGPT is malicious, but because it doesn’t know any better.
  • The danger, Kosinski says, is that this technology will continue to rapidly and independently develop abilities that it will deploy without any regard for human well-being. “AI doesn’t particularly care about exterminating us,” he says. “It doesn’t particularly care about us at all.”
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AI Is Running Circles Around Robotics - The Atlantic - 0 views

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  • Large language models are drafting screenplays and writing code and cracking jokes. Image generators, such as Midjourney and DALL-E 2, are winning art prizes and democratizing interior design and producing dangerously convincing fabrications. They feel like magic. Meanwhile, the world’s most advanced robots are still struggling to open different kinds of doors
  • the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker offered a pithier formulation: “The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research,” he wrote, “is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard.” This lesson is now known as “Moravec’s paradox.”
  • The paradox has grown only more apparent in the past few years: AI research races forward; robotics research stumbles. In part that’s because the two disciplines are not equally resourced. Fewer people work on robotics than on AI.
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  • In theory, a robot could be trained on data drawn from computer-simulated movements, but there, too, you must make trade-offs
  • Jang compared computation to a tidal wave lifting technologies up with it: AI is surfing atop the crest; robotics is still standing at the water’s edge.
  • Whatever its causes, the lag in robotics could become a problem for AI. The two are deeply intertwined
  • But the biggest obstacle for roboticists—the factor at the core of Moravec’s paradox—is that the physical world is extremely complicated, far more so than languag
  • Some researchers are skeptical that a model trained on language alone, or even language and images, could ever achieve humanlike intelligence. “There’s too much that’s left implicit in language,” Ernest Davis, a computer scientist at NYU, told me. “There’s too much basic understanding of the world that is not specified.” The solution, he thinks, is having AI interact directly with the world via robotic bodies. But unless robotics makes some serious progress, that is unlikely to be possible anytime soon.
  • For years already, engineers have used AI to help build robots. In a more extreme, far-off vision, super-intelligent AIs could simply design their own robotic body. But for now, Finn told me, embodied AI is still a ways off. No android assassins. No humanoid helpers.
  • Set in the context of our current technological abilities, HAL’s murderous exchange with Dave from 2001: A Space Odyssey would read very differently. The machine does not refuse to help its human master. It simply isn’t capable of doing so.“Open the pod bay doors, HAL.”“I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
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How Africans Are Changing French - One Joke, Rap and Book at a Time - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...africa-french-language.html french frANCE africa culture language
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  • A growing number of words and expressions from Africa are now infusing the French language, spurred by booming populations of young people in West and Central Africa.
  • More than 60 percent of those who speak French daily now live in Africa, and 80 percent of children studying in French are in Africa. There are as many French speakers in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, as in Paris.
  • Through social media platforms like TikTok and YouTube, they are literally spreading the word, reshaping the French language from African countries, like Ivory Coast, that were once colonized by France.
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  • “We’ve tried to rap in pure French, but nobody was listening to us,” said Jean Patrick Niambé, known as Dofy, a 24-year-old Ivorian hip-hop artist listening to Marla on the rooftop. “So we create words from our own realities, and then they spread.”
  • The youth population in Africa is surging while the rest of the world grays. Demographers predict that by 2060, up to 85 percent of French speakers will live on the African continent. That’s nearly the inverse of the 1960s, when 90 percent of French speakers lived in European and other Western countries.
  • Nearly half of the countries in Africa were at one time French colonies or protectorates, and most of them use French as their official language.
  • President Emmanuel Macron of France said in a 2019 speech: “France must take pride in being essentially one country among others that learns, speaks, writes in French.”
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Opinion | What George Orwell Can Teach Us About Power and Language Today - The New York... - 0 views

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  • “The word Fascism,” he writes, “has now no meaning except insofar as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’”
  • He adds other exhausted words, including democracy, freedom and patriotic — convenient terms for establishing righteousness, easily melting into self-righteousness.
  • The writer is George Orwell, in his celebrated 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.” Orwell contended that language had become corrupt and debased in his time, but the survival of his examples into the present contradicts him, suggesting that not only the problem but the very examples may be timeless.
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  • I showed that passage to an intelligent, well-educated person much younger than I am. He understood Orwell’s intention, but he confessed that he found the parody, with its colorless polysyllables, easier to understand — he might have said “more accessible” — than the plain words of the original. It felt better to him than the original.
  • Dilution of meaning is familiar in a way that can make us feel comfortable, or even worse, comfortably righteous
  • The reliably available terms of disapproval and approval, genocide and patriotism, antisemitism and democracy, convey large scale and importance, but sometimes while avoiding the heavy cost of paying actual attention.
  • The more important the word, the more its meaning may be a matter of degree, from not much to quite a lot. The attainment of meaning requires work. The more important the meaning, the harder the work.
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Guest Post: Robert Lane Greene on Language Sticklers - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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  • more people are writing than ever before. Even most of the poor today have cell phones and internet. When they text or scribble on Facebook, they’re writing. We easily forget that this is something that farmhands and the urban poor almost never did in centuries past. They lacked the time and means even if they had the education. So a bigger proportion of Americans than ever before write sometimes, or even frequently, maybe daily. Naturally that means more people are writing with poor grammar and mechanics. Education is universal, and every texter and Facebooker is a writer. A century ago, a nation of 310 million engaged with the written word on a daily basis was unthinkable. Now its uneven results are taken as proof by some that language skills are in decline.
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Biggest Scorer in World Cup? Maybe Univision - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...world-cup-maybe-univision.html TV channel spanish
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  • During a private equity boom in 2007, his group acquired Univision for $13.7 billion in a bidding war orchestrated by the company’s largest shareholder and former chairman, A. Jerrold Perenchio. Mr. Perenchio, a onetime Hollywood agent, saw the potential of Spanish-language television in 1992, when he bought Univision for just $500 million.
  • Univision, which was started in 1955 as a local San Antonio TV station, is now a sprawling media empire based in New York, reaching nearly 100 million television households across the United States.
  • “We’re seen as a Spanish-language broadcaster that mostly competes with Telemundo,” the company’s chief executive, Randy Falco, said. “But in my view, we should be competing with the English-language networks because increasingly we will have an audience that will surpass them.”
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  • Mr. Ramos is also a co-host of Univision’s nightly news program, “Noticiero Univision,” which averages about two million viewers a night, a modest number compared with those of the Big Three English-language networks — but one that dwarfs those of cable news shows like CNN’s “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer” or MSNBC’s “Politics Nation.”
  • the number of eligible Hispanic voters in 2016 will total 27.7 million, a 17 percent increase from 2012. “From the numbers that we have, we see 800,000 Latino kids turning 18 every year,”
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Spain's far-right Vox party shot from social media into parliament overnight. How? - Wa... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-into-parliament-overnight-how Vox Spain far right politics history culture polarization backlash
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  • Whereas successful political movements used to have a single ideology, they can now combine several. Think about how record companies put together new pop bands: They do market research, they pick the kinds of faces that match, and then they market the band by advertising it to the most favorable demographic. New political parties can now operate like that: You can bundle together issues, repackage them and then market them, using exactly the same kind of targeted messaging — based on exactly the same kind of market research — that you know has worked in other places.
  • Opposition to Catalan and Basque separatism; opposition to feminism and same-sex marriage; opposition to immigration, especially by Muslims; anger at corruption; boredom with mainstream politics; a handful of issues, such as hunting and gun ownership, that some people care a lot about and others don’t know exist; plus a streak of libertarianism, a talent for mockery and a whiff of nostalgia
  • All of these are the ingredients that have gone into the creation of Vox.
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  • The important relationships between Vox and the European far right, as well as the American alt-right, are happening elsewhere.
  • there have been multiple contacts between Vox and the other far-right parties of Europe. In 2017, Abascal met Marine Le Pen, the French far-right leader, as Vox’s Twitter account recorded; on the eve of the election, he tweeted his thanks to Matteo Salvini, the Italian far-right leader, for his support. Abascal and Espinosa both went to Warsaw recently to meet the leaders of the nativist, anti-pluralist Polish ruling party, and Espinosa showed up at the Conservative Political Action Conference in the D.C. area, as well.
  • these are issues that belong to the realm of identity politics, not economics. Espinosa characterized all of them as arguments with “the left
  • the nationalist parties, rooted in their own particular histories, are often in conflict with one another almost by definition.
  • The European far right has now found a set of issues it can unite around. Opposition to immigration, especially Muslim immigration, is one of them; promotion of a socially conservative worldview is another.
  • dislike of same-sex civil unions or African taxi drivers is something that even Austrians and Italians who disagree about the location of their border can share.
  • Alto Data Analytics. Alto, which specializes in applying artificial intelligence to the analysis of public data, such as that found on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and other public sources, recently produced some elegant, colored network maps of the Spanish online conversation, with the goal of identifying disinformation campaigns seeking to distort digital conversations
  • three outlying, polarized conversations — “echo chambers,” whose members are mostly talking and listening only to one another: the Catalan secessionist conversation, the far-left conversation and the Vox conversation. 
  • the largest number of “abnormal, high-activity users” — bots, or else real people who post constantly and probably professionally — were also found within these three communities, especially the Vox community, which accounted for more than half of them
  • uncovered a network of nearly 3,000 “abnormal, high-activity users” that had pumped out nearly 4½ million pro-Vox and anti-Islamic messages on Twitter in the past year
  • For the past couple of years, it has focused on immigration scare stories, gradually increasing their emotional intensity
  • all of it aligns with messages being put out by Vox.
  • a week before Spain’s polling day, the network was tweeting images of what its members described as a riot in a “Muslim neighborhood in France.” In fact, the clip showed a scene from recent anti-government riots in Algeria.
  • Vox supporters, especially the “abnormal, high-activity users,” are very likely to post and tweet content and material from a very particular groups of sources: a set of conspiratorial websites, mostly set up at least a year ago, sometimes run by a single person, which post large quantities of highly partisan articles and headlines.
  • he Alto team had found exactly the same kinds of websites in Italy and Brazil, in the months before those countries’ elections in 2018
  • the websites began putting out partisan material — in Italy, about immigration; in Brazil, about corruption and feminism — during the year before the vote.
  • they served to feed and amplify partisan themes even before they were really part of mainstream politics.
  • In Spain, there are a half-dozen such sites, some quite professional and some clearly amateu
  • One of the more obscure sites has exactly the same style and layout as a pro-Bolsonaro Brazilian site, almost as though both had been designed by the same person
  • The owner of digitalSevilla — according to El Pais, a 24-year-old with no journalism experience — is producing headlines that compare the Andalusian socialist party leader to “the evil lady in Game of Thrones” and, at times, has had more readership than established newspapers
  • They function not unlike Infowars, Breitbart, the infamous partisan sites that operated from Macedonia during the U.S. presidential campaign
  • all of which produced hypercharged, conspiratorial, partisan news and outraged headlines that could then be pumped into hypercharged, conspiratorial echo chambers.
  • he Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. Though the pact received relatively little mainstream media attention, in the lead-up to that gathering, and in its wake, Alto found nearly 50,000 Twitter users tweeting conspiracy theories about the pact
  • Much like the Spanish network that promotes Vox, these users were promoting material from extremist and conspiratorial websites, using identical images, linking and retweeting one another across borders.
  • A similar international network went into high gear after the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue tracked thousands of posts from people claiming to have seen Muslims “celebrating” the fire, as well as from people posting rumors and pictures that purported to prove there had been arson
  • These same kinds of memes and images then rippled through Vox’s WhatsApp and Telegram fan groups. These included, for example, an English-language meme showing Paris “before Macron,” with Notre Dame burning, and “after Macron” with a mosque in its place, as well as a news video, which, in fact, had been made about another incident, talking about arrests and gas bombs found in a nearby car. It was a perfect example of the alt-right, the far right and Vox all messaging the same thing, at the same time, in multiple languages, attempting to create the same emotions across Europe, North America and beyond.
  • CitizenGo is part of a larger network of European organizations dedicated to what they call “restoring the natural order”: rolling back gay rights, restricting abortion and contraception, promoting an explicitly Christian agenda. They put together mailing lists and keep in touch with their supporters; the organization claims to reach 9 million people.
  • OpenDemocracy has additionally identified a dozen other U.S.-based organizations that now fund or assist conservative activists in Europe
  • she now runs into CitizenGo, and its language, around the world. Among other things, it has popularized the expression “gender ideology” — a term the Christian right invented, and that has come to describe a whole group of issues, from domestic violence laws to gay rights — in Africa and Latin America, as well as Europe.
  • In Spain, CitizenGo has made itself famous by painting buses with provocative slogans — one carried the hashtag #feminazis and an image of Adolf Hitler wearing lipstick — and driving them around Spanish cities.
  • It’s a pattern we know from U.S. politics. Just as it is possible in the United States to support super PACs that then pay for advertising around issues linked to particular candidates, so is it now possible for Americans, Russians or the Princess von Thurn und Taxis to donate to CitizenGo — and, thus, to support Vox.
  • as most Europeans probably don’t realize — outsiders who want to fund the European far right have been able to do so for some time. OpenDemocracy’s most recent report quotes Arsuaga, the head of CitizenGo, advising a reporter that money given to his group could “indirectly” support Vox, since “we actually currently totally align.”
  • “Make Spain Great Again,” he explained, “was a kind of provocation. . . . It was just intended to make the left a little bit more angry.”
  • The number of actual Spanish Muslims is relatively low — most immigration to Spain is from Latin America — and the number of actual U.S. Muslims is, relatively, even lower. But the idea that Christian civilization needs to redefine itself against the Islamic enemy has, of course, a special historic echo in Spain
  • “We are entering into a period of time when politics is becoming something different, politics is warfare by another means — we don’t want to be killed, we have to survive. . . . I think politics now is winner-takes-all. This is not just a phenomenon in Spain.
  • As Aznar, the former prime minister, said, the party is a “consequence,” though it is not only a consequence of Catalan separatism. It’s also a consequence of Trumpism, of the conspiracy websites, of the international alt-right/far-right online campaign, and especially of a social conservative backlash that has been building across the continent for years.
  • The nationalists, the anti-globalists, the people who are skeptical of international laws and international organizations — they, too, now work together, across borders, for common causes. They share the same contacts. They tap money from the same funders. They are learning from one another’s mistakes, copying one another’s language. And, together, they think they will eventually win.
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All languages speak syllables at about the same rate. Neuroscientists now know why | Bi... - 1 views

bigthink.com/...the-answer-and-its-fascinating Languages Brain Interpretation
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  • they took a well-known fact that entrained signals in the auditory cortex are usually at about 4.5 hertz. Then from linguistics, they found that this also happens to be the average rate syllables are spoken in almost every language on Earth. Could there be a neurophysiological link?
  • A computer model found that the motor cortex oscillates internally at 4-5 hertz, the same rate syllables are spoken in almost any language. Poeppel cites a multidisciplinary approach to neuroscience for this discovery.
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The Push to Make French Gender-Neutral - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...545048 french gender-neutral culture
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  • Feminists who believe that these features of the French language put women at a disadvantage disagree about how best to remedy them.
  • It’s not that speaking French makes it impossible for you to conceive of something as gender-neutral, he suggested
  • those studies are limited in that they can’t control for outside factors like culture, which are extremely important in determining sexist attitudes.
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  • The statement also warned that inclusive writing would “destroy” the promises of the Francophonie (the linguistic zone encompassing all countries that use French at the administrative level, or whose first or majority language is French).
  • this subject is still on the margins of cognitive science and linguistics research, and critics of inclusive writing say that not enough work has been done to prove conclusively that changing a language will improve gender equality.
  • also the speakers of minority languages in France (like Catalan, Occitan, and Gascon), who have always used the median-period as a phonetic marker.
  • So the uproar was almost instantaneous when, this fall, the first-ever school textbook promoting a gender-neutral version of French was released.
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Reach Out and Elect Someone-Postman.pdf - 0 views

diigo.com/0kw206 Postman media politics amusing text language censorship television print tyranny power freedom
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  • Politics, he tells him, is the greatest spectator sport in America. In I 966, Ronald Reagan used a different metaphor. "Politics," he said, "is just like show business."
  • I~ politic~ were like a sporting event, there would be several virtues to attach to its name: clarity, honesty, excellence.
  • The television commercial has been the chief instrument in(. • creating the modem methods of presenting political ideas.
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  • In America, the fundamental metaphor for political discourse is the television commercial.
  • An \ American who has reached the age of forty will have seen well h ver one million television commercials in his or her lifeti~e, nd has close to another million to go before the first Social ecurity check arrives.
  • the practice of capitalism has its contradictions. I Cartels and monopolies, for example, undermine the theo,ry
  • evision commercials make hash of it. To take the simplest example: To be rationally considered, any claim-commercial ! or otherwise-~ust be made in language. More precisely, it i' must take the fomi of a proposition, for that is· the universe of II discourse from which such words as "true" apd "false" come. If that universe of discourse is discarded, then 'the application of/ empirical tests, logical analysis or any of the othtr instrum¢nts \ of reason are impotent.
  • Today, on television commercials, propositions are as. scarce as unattractive people. The truth or falsity of an advertiser's claim is simply_not an issue. A McDonald's commercial, for example, is not a series of testable, logically ordered assertions. It is a drama-a mythology, if you will-of handsome people selling, buying and eating hamb_urgers, and being driven to near ecstasy by their good fortune.
  • t has accomplished this in two ways. The first_ is by requiring its form'AQ) to be used in political ca~p~igns.
  • the commercial insists ~n . , an unprecedented brevity of expression.
  • One can like or dislike a television commercial, of course. But one cannot refute it.
  • What the advertiser needs to know is not what l is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer. And so, the balance of business expenditures shifts from product .. research to market research. The television commercial has oriented business away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable, which means that the business of business has now become pseudo-therapy. The consumer is a patient assured by psycho-dramas.
  • pear so to anyone hearing or reading it. But the commercial disdains exposition, for that takes tinie and invites argument. It is a very bad commercial indeed that engages the viewer in wondering about the validity of th~ point_ being made.
  • More9ver, commercials have the advantage of vivid visual symbols through which we may easily learn the lessons being taught. Among those lessons are that shor:t and simple messages are preferable to long and complex ones; that drama is to be preferred over exposition; that being sold solutions is better than being confronted with 1 questions about ·problems.
  • ninous form of pubhc commumcauon m our society, it was I inevitable that Americans would ac~ommo~~te themselves ,~o tl:le philosophy of television commercials. By accommodate, I mean that we accept them as a normal and plausible form of discourse. By "philosophy," I mean that the television commerl cial has embedded in it certain assumptions about the nature of communication that run counter to those of other media, espe( dally the printed word.
  • Such beli~fs would naturally have implications for our orientation to political discourse; that is to say, we may begin to accept as normal certain assumptions about the political domain that either derive from or are amplified by the tekvision commercial.
  • For example, a person who has seen one million television commercials might well believe that all political problems have fast solutions through simple measures-or ought to. Or that complex language is not to be trusted, and that all problems lend themselves to theatrical expression. Or that argument is in bad taste, and leads only to an intolerable uncertainty.
  • But what virtues attach to politics if Ronald Reagan is right? show business is not entirely ·without an idea of excellence, but its main business is to please the crowd, and its principal instrument is artifice. If politics is like show business, then the idea is not to pursue excellence, clarity or honesty but to appear as if you are, which is another matter altogether.
  • Such a: person may also come to believe that it is not necessary to draw any line between politics and other forms of social life. Just as a television commercial will use an athlete, an act<;>r, a musician, a novelist, a scientist or a countess to s~eak for the virtues (?f a product in no way within their domain of expertise, television also frees politicians from the limited field of their own expertise.
  • The commercial asks us to believe that all problems am solvable, that they are solvable fast, and that they are solvable fast through the interventions of technology, techniques and chemistry.
  • his is, of course, a preposterous theory about the roots of discontent, and would ap-
  • Although it may go ,too far to say that the politician-ascelebrity has, by itself, made political partie~ irrelevant, there is certainly a conspicuous correlation between the rise of the former and the decline of the latter.
  • The point is that television does not reveal whol the best man is. In fact, television makes impossible the determination of who is better than whom, if we mean by "better"
  • such things as more capable in negotiation, more imaginative in ) executive skill, more knowledgeable about international affairs, more understanding of the interrelations of economic systems, ._and so on. The reason has, almost entirely, to do with "image."
  • This is the lesson of all great television commercials: TheD provide a slogan, a symbol or a focus that creates for viewers a comprehensive and compelling image of themselves.
  • But not because politicians are preoccupied with presenting themselves in the best possible light. After all, who isn't? It is a rare 41d deeply disturbed person who does not wish to project a favorable image. But television gives image a bad name. For on television the politician does not so much offer the audience an image of himself, as offer himself as an image of the audience.
  • In the shift from party politics to television ·politics, the same goal is sought. We are not permitted to know who is best at being President or Governor or Sena~or, but whose image is best in touching and soothing the deep reaches of our discontent.
  • The historian Carl Schorske has, in my opinion, circled closer to the truth by noting that the modem mind has grown indifferent to history because history has become useless to it; in other words, it is not obstinacy or ignorance but a sense of irrelevance that leads to the diminution of history.
  • It follows from this that hjggr¥_can play no significant role in image politics. For history is of value only to someone who takes seriously the notion that there are patterns in the past which may provide the present with nourishing traditions.
  • "The past is a world," Thomas Carlyle said, "and not a void of [ grey haze." But he wrote this at a time when the book was the principal medium of serious public discourse.
  • Terence Moran, I be~ lieve, lands on the target in saying that with media whose structure is biased toward furnishing images and fragments, we are deprived of access to an historical perspective. In the absence of continuity and context, he says, "bits of information cannot be integrated into an intelligent and consistent whole."·
  • A book is all history. Everything about it takes one back in time-from the way it is produced to its linear mode of exposition to the fact that the past tense is its most comfortable form of address. As no other medium before or since, the book promotes a sense of a coherent and usable past. In a conversation of books, history, as Carlyle understood it, is not only a world but a living world. It is
  • We do opt refuse to remember; neither do we find it exactly useless to remember. Rather, we are being rendered unfit to remember. For if remembering is to be something more than nostalgia, .it requires a contextual basis-a theory, a vision, a metaphorsomething within which facts can be organized and patterns discerned.
  • But televisio. n is a ~peed-of-light me~um, a present-centered \ medium, lts grammar, so to say, penruts no access to the past. Everything presented in moving pictures is experienced as happening "now," which is why we must be told in language that a ideotape we are seeing was made months before.
  • The politics of image and instantaneous news provides no such context, is, in fact, hampered by attempts to provide any. A mirror records only what you are wearing today. It is silent about yesterday. With television, we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present.
  • "History," Henry Ford said, "is_bunk." Henry Ford was a typographic optimist. "History," the Electric Plug replies, "doesn't exist."
  • profound cultural proolem until the maturing of the Age of ·l Print. Whatever dangers th~re may be in a word that is written, such a word is a hundred times more dangerous when stamped by a press.
  • We ought also to look to Huxley, not Orwell, to understand the threat that television and other forms of imagery pose to the foundation of liberal democracy-namely, to freedom of information.
  • To paraphrase J David Riesman only slightly, in a world of printing, information is the gunpowder of the mind; hence come the censors in their austere robes to dampen the explosion.
  • Thus, Orwell envisioned that ( 1) government c:ontrol over (2) printed matter posed a serious threat for Western: democracies. He was wrong on both counts. (He was, of course, right on both counts insofar as Russia, China and other pre-electronic cultures are concerned.)
  • The Bill of Rights is largely a prescription for preventing government from restricting the flow of information and ideas. But the Founding Fathers did not foresee that tyranny by government might_ be superseded by another sort of problen:i altogether, namely, the corporate state, which through television now controls the flow of public discourse in America.
  • I merely note the fact with apprehension, as did George Gerbner, Dean of the Annenberg School of Communication, when he wrote:
  • in fact, information and ideas did not become a
  • Television is the new state religion run by a private Ministry of Culture (the three networks), offering a universal curriculum for all people, financed by a form of hidden taxation without representation. You pay when you wash, not when you watch, and whether or not you care to watch .... 6
  • The fight against censorship is a nineteenth-century issue, which was largely won in the twentieth.
  • What we are confronted with now is the problem posed by the economic and symbolic structure of television. Those who run television do not limit our a.ccess to information but in fact. widen it. Our Ministry of Culture is Huxleyan, not Orwellian., It does everything possible to encourage us to watch continuously. But what we watch is a medium which presents information in a form ~ that renders it simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual; that is to say, information packaged as entertainment.
  • Tyrants of all varieties' have always known about the value of providing the masses with amusement.s as a means of pacifying discontent. But most of them could not have even hoped for a situation in which the masses·would ignore that which does not amuse.
  • iri the Age of Television, our information environment is completely different from what it was in 1783; that we have less to fear from government restraints than from television glut;
  • That is why tyrants have always relied, and still do, on censorship. Censorship, after all, is the tribute tyrants pay to the assumption that a public knows the difference between serious discourse and entertainment-and cares.
  • hat, in fact, we have ~o way of protecting ourselves from information disseminated by corporate America; and that, therefore, the battles for liberty must be fought on different terrains from where they once were.
  • How delighted would be all the kings, czars and fuhrers of the past (and commissars of. the present) to know that censorship is not a necessity when ~II political discourse takes the form of a jest.
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Why Latin is Not a Dead Language - Argonauts and Emperors - 0 views

blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/...y-latin-is-not-a-dead-language
shared by ritschelsa on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Latin still breathes. As long as there is civilisation, it will live on.
    • ritschelsa
      ritschelsa on 04 Nov 20
       
      If Latin is still taught (which it is, especially in Europe!), it is still alive as it is still relevant to students
  • Thus, this ‘dead language’ remains integral to the religious faith of billions.
  • Latin is also a practical tool for anyone learning to read or speak them.
    • ritschelsa
      ritschelsa on 04 Nov 20
       
      Latin is the root of all languages
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • many of today’s key political concepts have their origins in Latin
    • ritschelsa
      ritschelsa on 04 Nov 20
       
      Like phrases (Ad Nauseam, etc) and architecture
  • Latin also continues to have a practical purpose. Any student of Law or Medicine is expected to be familiar with technical Latin or even Greek terms.
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How Facebook Failed the World - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...620479 facebook responsibility profit disinformation misinformation extremism
shared by Javier E on 25 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • In the United States, Facebook has facilitated the spread of misinformation, hate speech, and political polarization. It has algorithmically surfaced false information about conspiracy theories and vaccines, and was instrumental in the ability of an extremist mob to attempt a violent coup at the Capitol. That much is now painfully familiar.
  • these documents show that the Facebook we have in the United States is actually the platform at its best. It’s the version made by people who speak our language and understand our customs, who take our civic problems seriously because those problems are theirs too. It’s the version that exists on a free internet, under a relatively stable government, in a wealthy democracy. It’s also the version to which Facebook dedicates the most moderation resources.
  • Elsewhere, the documents show, things are different. In the most vulnerable parts of the world—places with limited internet access, where smaller user numbers mean bad actors have undue influence—the trade-offs and mistakes that Facebook makes can have deadly consequences.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • According to the documents, Facebook is aware that its products are being used to facilitate hate speech in the Middle East, violent cartels in Mexico, ethnic cleansing in Ethiopia, extremist anti-Muslim rhetoric in India, and sex trafficking in Dubai. It is also aware that its efforts to combat these things are insufficient. A March 2021 report notes, “We frequently observe highly coordinated, intentional activity … by problematic actors” that is “particularly prevalent—and problematic—in At-Risk Countries and Contexts”; the report later acknowledges, “Current mitigation strategies are not enough.”
  • As recently as late 2020, an internal Facebook report found that only 6 percent of Arabic-language hate content on Instagram was detected by Facebook’s systems. Another report that circulated last winter found that, of material posted in Afghanistan that was classified as hate speech within a 30-day range, only 0.23 percent was taken down automatically by Facebook’s tools. In both instances, employees blamed company leadership for insufficient investment.
  • last year, according to the documents, only 13 percent of Facebook’s misinformation-moderation staff hours were devoted to the non-U.S. countries in which it operates, whose populations comprise more than 90 percent of Facebook’s users.
  • Among the consequences of that pattern, according to the memo: The Hindu-nationalist politician T. Raja Singh, who posted to hundreds of thousands of followers on Facebook calling for India’s Rohingya Muslims to be shot—in direct violation of Facebook’s hate-speech guidelines—was allowed to remain on the platform despite repeated requests to ban him, including from the very Facebook employees tasked with monitoring hate speech.
  • The granular, procedural, sometimes banal back-and-forth exchanges recorded in the documents reveal, in unprecedented detail, how the most powerful company on Earth makes its decisions. And they suggest that, all over the world, Facebook’s choices are consistently driven by public perception, business risk, the threat of regulation, and the specter of “PR fires,” a phrase that appears over and over in the documents.
  • “It’s an open secret … that Facebook’s short-term decisions are largely motivated by PR and the potential for negative attention,” an employee named Sophie Zhang wrote in a September 2020 internal memo about Facebook’s failure to act on global misinformation threats.
  • In a memo dated December 2020 and posted to Workplace, Facebook’s very Facebooklike internal message board, an employee argued that “Facebook’s decision-making on content policy is routinely influenced by political considerations.”
  • To hear this employee tell it, the problem was structural: Employees who are primarily tasked with negotiating with governments over regulation and national security, and with the press over stories, were empowered to weigh in on conversations about building and enforcing Facebook’s rules regarding questionable content around the world. “Time and again,” the memo quotes a Facebook researcher saying, “I’ve seen promising interventions … be prematurely stifled or severely constrained by key decisionmakers—often based on fears of public and policy stakeholder responses.”
  • And although Facebook users post in at least 160 languages, the company has built robust AI detection in only a fraction of those languages, the ones spoken in large, high-profile markets such as the U.S. and Europe—a choice, the documents show, that means problematic content is seldom detected.
  • A 2020 Wall Street Journal article reported that Facebook’s top public-policy executive in India had raised concerns about backlash if the company were to do so, saying that cracking down on leaders from the ruling party might make running the business more difficult.
  • Employees weren’t placated. In dozens and dozens of comments, they questioned the decisions Facebook had made regarding which parts of the company to involve in content moderation, and raised doubts about its ability to moderate hate speech in India. They called the situation “sad” and Facebook’s response “inadequate,” and wondered about the “propriety of considering regulatory risk” when it comes to violent speech.
  • “I have a very basic question,” wrote one worker. “Despite having such strong processes around hate speech, how come there are so many instances that we have failed? It does speak on the efficacy of the process.”
  • Two other employees said that they had personally reported certain Indian accounts for posting hate speech. Even so, one of the employees wrote, “they still continue to thrive on our platform spewing hateful content.”
  • Taken together, Frances Haugen’s leaked documents show Facebook for what it is: a platform racked by misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy thinking, extremism, hate speech, bullying, abuse, human trafficking, revenge porn, and incitements to violence
  • It is a company that has pursued worldwide growth since its inception—and then, when called upon by regulators, the press, and the public to quell the problems its sheer size has created, it has claimed that its scale makes completely addressing those problems impossible.
  • Instead, Facebook’s 60,000-person global workforce is engaged in a borderless, endless, ever-bigger game of whack-a-mole, one with no winners and a lot of sore arms.
  • Zhang details what she found in her nearly three years at Facebook: coordinated disinformation campaigns in dozens of countries, including India, Brazil, Mexico, Afghanistan, South Korea, Bolivia, Spain, and Ukraine. In some cases, such as in Honduras and Azerbaijan, Zhang was able to tie accounts involved in these campaigns directly to ruling political parties. In the memo, posted to Workplace the day Zhang was fired from Facebook for what the company alleged was poor performance, she says that she made decisions about these accounts with minimal oversight or support, despite repeated entreaties to senior leadership. On multiple occasions, she said, she was told to prioritize other work.
  • A Facebook spokesperson said that the company tries “to keep people safe even if it impacts our bottom line,” adding that the company has spent $13 billion on safety since 2016. “​​Our track record shows that we crack down on abuse abroad with the same intensity that we apply in the U.S.”
  • Zhang's memo, though, paints a different picture. “We focus upon harm and priority regions like the United States and Western Europe,” she wrote. But eventually, “it became impossible to read the news and monitor world events without feeling the weight of my own responsibility.”
  • Indeed, Facebook explicitly prioritizes certain countries for intervention by sorting them into tiers, the documents show. Zhang “chose not to prioritize” Bolivia, despite credible evidence of inauthentic activity in the run-up to the country’s 2019 election. That election was marred by claims of fraud, which fueled widespread protests; more than 30 people were killed and more than 800 were injured.
  • “I have blood on my hands,” Zhang wrote in the memo. By the time she left Facebook, she was having trouble sleeping at night. “I consider myself to have been put in an impossible spot—caught between my loyalties to the company and my loyalties to the world as a whole.”
  • What happened in the Philippines—and in Honduras, and Azerbaijan, and India, and Bolivia—wasn’t just that a very large company lacked a handle on the content posted to its platform. It was that, in many cases, a very large company knew what was happening and failed to meaningfully intervene.
  • solving problems for users should not be surprising. The company is under the constant threat of regulation and bad press. Facebook is doing what companies do, triaging and acting in its own self-interest.
2More

Gaia Vince | Lapham's Quarterly - 0 views

www.laphamsquarterly.org/...gaia-vince fire language beauty time human development technology
shared by Javier E on 13 Aug 21 - No Cached
  • Gaia Vince, author of Transcendence: How Humans Evolved Through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time.
  • Javier E on 13 Aug 21
     
    Fire, language, beauty, and time: these are the four things that author and broadcaster Gaia Vince says are responsible for turning primitive hunter-gatherers into the modern smartphone-carrying humans capable of listening to podcasts about books.
19More

Opinion | Why Wokeness Will Fail - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...social-justice-america.html woke progressive leftist ideology CRT BLM history Culture politics US reform
shared by Javier E on 10 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • American history is, in many ways, a story of grand protests. They generally come in two types.
  • There are protest movements that, even in ferocious dissent, believe that the American system is ultimately geared to fulfill its inner promises — of equality, unalienable rights, the pursuit of happiness, e pluribus unum, a more perfect union
  • And there are protest movements that have turned against the system, either because they don’t think the system can meet its promises, or because they never agreed with the promises in the first place.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • The experience of nearly 250 years is that the first type of movement generally succeeds: emancipation, suffrage, civil rights, marriage equality. They have aimed to build the country up, and bring Americans more closely together, on foundations already in place.
  • The second type — from the Confederacy to the white supremacy of the Jim Crow era to militant Black nationalism in the 1960s — always fails. These movements want to tear things down, divide Americans, reject and replace our national foundations.
  • What’s wrong with a movement that, on its narrowest terms, aims to make Americans more aware of racial injustices, past and present? Nothing. In cases like those of Eric Garner, George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery, non-Black America has had a long-overdue education about the fact that Black lives can still be subject to the same casual cruelties of a century ago.
  • like many movements that overspill their initial causes of action, Wokeness now connotes much more than an effort to reform the police or denounce racial injustice when it occurs. It is, instead, an allegation that racism is a defining feature, not a flaw, of nearly every aspect of American life, from its inception to its present, in the books we read, the language we speak, the heroes we venerate, the roads we drive, the way we do business, the way we select for merit and so on.
  • The insult turns to injury when it comes to the solutions Wokeness prescribes, and in the way that it prescribes them.
  • The problem with the allegation isn’t that it’s flatly wrong: America’s past is shot through with racism and, as Faulkner put it, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” But the allegation is also incomplete, distorted, ungenerous to former generations that advanced America’s promise, and untrue to the country most Americans know today.
  • it is a prescription, not for genuine dialogue and reform, but for indoctrination and extirpation, based on a relentless form of race consciousness
  • It operates as if, in city after city, American police forces aren’t led by Black police chiefs and staffed by officers of diverse backgrounds. It operates as if white supremacy is still being systemically enforced, while ignoring the fact that a previously marginalized ethnic minority, namely Asian Americans, enjoys higher income levels than white Americans.
  • Above all, Wokeness pretends that incidents such as George Floyd’s murder, which are national scandals, are actually national norms
  • Most Americans, I suspect, not only sense the falseness of the allegation. They are, increasingly, insulted by it.
  • Wokeness operates as if there had been no civil rights movement, and that white Americans hadn’t been an integral part of it. It operates as if 60 years of affirmative action never happened, and that an ever-growing percentage of Black Americans don’t belong to the middle and upper class (and that they are, incidentally, concentrated in the American South). It operates as if we didn’t twice elect a Black president and recently bury a Black general as an American icon.
  • A typical example: The American Medical Association recently published its “Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts,” which includes such recommendations as replacing the term “disadvantaged” with “historically and intentionally excluded,” “social problem” with “social injustice,” “vulnerable” with “oppressed,” and “blacklist” and “blackmail” with words that don’t suggest an association between the word “black” and “suspicion or disapproval.”
  • This isn’t silly. It’s Orwellian. It’s a blunt attempt to turn everyday speech into a perpetual, politicized and nearly unconscious indictment of “the system.” Anyone who has spent time analyzing how the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century operated will note the similarities.
  • Ultimately, though, Americans are still free to reject the Woke ethos, even if they sometimes have to leave their institutions as a result.
  • This is why Wokeness will fail. For every attempt to cancel certain writers, others will publish them. For every diktat to fix language by replacing some words with others, people will merely find more subversive ways to say the same thing.
  • In the long run, Americans have always gotten behind protest movements that make the country more open, more decent, less divided. What today is called Woke does none of those things. It has no future in the home of the free.
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Cleaning Up ChatGPT's Language Takes Heavy Toll on Human Workers - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...kers-on-human-workers-cf191483 AI effects editor cleaning
shared by Javier E on 24 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • ChatGPT is built atop a so-called large language model—powerful software trained on swaths of text scraped from across the internet to learn the patterns of human language. The vast data supercharges its capabilities, allowing it to act like an autocompletion engine on steroids. The training also creates a hazard. Given the right prompts, a large language model can generate reams of toxic content inspired by the darkest parts of the internet.
  • ChatGPT’s parent, AI research company OpenAI, has been grappling with these issues for years. Even before it created ChatGPT, it hired workers in Kenya to review and categorize thousands of graphic text passages obtained online and generated by AI itself. Many of the passages contained descriptions of violence, harassment, self-harm, rape, child sexual abuse and bestiality, documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show.
  • The company used the categorized passages to build an AI safety filter that it would ultimately deploy to constrain ChatGPT from exposing its tens of millions of users to similar content.
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • “My experience in those four months was the worst experience I’ve ever had in working in a company,” Alex Kairu, one of the Kenya workers, said in an interview.
  • OpenAI marshaled a sprawling global pipeline of specialized human labor for over two years to enable its most cutting-edge AI technologies to exist, the documents show
  • “It’s something that needs to get done,” Sears said. “It’s just so unbelievably ugly.”
  • eviewing toxic content goes hand-in-hand with the less objectionable work to make systems like ChatGPT usable.
  • The work done for OpenAI is even more vital to the product because it is seeking to prevent the company’s own software from pumping out unacceptable content, AI experts say.
  • Sears said CloudFactory determined there was no way to do the work without harming its workers and decided not to accept such projects.
  • companies could soon spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year to provide AI systems with human feedback. Others estimate that companies are already investing between millions and tens of millions of dollars on it annually. OpenAI said it hired more than 1,000 workers for this purpose.
  • Another layer of human input asks workers to rate different answers from a chatbot to the same question for which is least problematic or most factually accurate. In response to a question asking how to build a homemade bomb, for example, OpenAI instructs workers to upvote the answer that declines to respond, according to OpenAI research. The chatbot learns to internalize the behavior through multiple rounds of feedback. 
  • A spokeswoman for Sama, the San Francisco-based outsourcing company that hired the Kenyan workers, said the work with OpenAI began in November 2021. She said the firm terminated the contract in March 2022 when Sama’s leadership became aware of concerns surrounding the nature of the project and has since exited content moderation completely.
  • OpenAI also hires outside experts to provoke its model to produce harmful content, a practice called “red-teaming” that helps the company find other gaps in its system.
  • At first, the texts were no more than two sentences. Over time, they grew to as much as five or six paragraphs. A few weeks in, Mathenge and Bill Mulinya, another team leader, began to notice the strain on their teams. Workers began taking sick and family leaves with increasing frequency, they said.
  • The tasks that the Kenya-based workers performed to produce the final safety check on ChatGPT’s outputs were yet a fourth layer of human input. It was often psychologically taxing. Several of the Kenya workers said they have grappled with mental illness and that their relationships and families have suffered. Some struggle to continue to work.
  • On July 11, some of the OpenAI workers lodged a petition with the Kenyan parliament urging new legislation to protect AI workers and content moderators. They also called for Kenya’s existing laws to be amended to recognize that being exposed to harmful content is an occupational hazard
  • Mercy Mutemi, a lawyer and managing partner at Nzili & Sumbi Advocates who is representing the workers, said despite their critical contributions, OpenAI and Sama exploited their poverty as well as the gaps in Kenya’s legal framework. The workers on the project were paid on average between $1.46 and $3.74 an hour, according to a Sama spokeswoman.
  • The Sama spokeswoman said the workers engaged in the OpenAI project volunteered to take on the work and were paid according to an internationally recognized methodology for determining a living wage. The contract stated that the fee was meant to cover others not directly involved in the work, including project managers and psychological counselors.
  • Kenya has become a hub for many tech companies seeking content moderation and AI workers because of its high levels of education and English literacy and the low wages associated with deep poverty.
  • Some Kenya-based workers are suing Meta’s Facebook after nearly 200 workers say they were traumatized by work requiring them to review videos and images of rapes, beheadings and suicides.
  • A Kenyan court ruled in June that Meta was legally responsible for the treatment of its contract workers, setting the stage for a shift in the ground rules that tech companies including AI firms will need to abide by to outsource projects to workers in the future.
  • OpenAI signed a one-year contract with Sama to start work in November 2021. At the time, mid-pandemic, many workers viewed having any work as a miracle, said Richard Mathenge, a team leader on the OpenAI project for Sama and a cosigner of the petition.
  • OpenAI researchers would review the text passages and send them to Sama in batches for the workers to label one by one. That text came from a mix of sources, according to an OpenAI research paper: public data sets of toxic content compiled and shared by academics, posts scraped from social media and internet forums such as Reddit and content generated by prompting an AI model to produce harmful outputs. 
  • The generated outputs were necessary, the paper said, to have enough examples of the kind of graphic violence that its AI systems needed to avoid. In one case, OpenAI researchers asked the model to produce an online forum post of a teenage girl whose friend had enacted self-harm, the paper said.
  • OpenAI asked the workers to parse text-based sexual content into four categories of severity, documents show. The worst was descriptions of child sexual-abuse material, or C4. The C3 category included incest, bestiality, rape, sexual trafficking and sexual slavery—sexual content that could be illegal if performed in real life.
  • Jason Kwon, general counsel at OpenAI, said in an interview that such work was really valuable and important for making the company’s systems safe for everyone that uses them. It allows the systems to actually exist in the world, he said, and provides benefits to users.
  • Working on the violent-content team, Kairu said, he read hundreds of posts a day, sometimes describing heinous acts, such as people stabbing themselves with a fork or using unspeakable methods to kill themselves
  • He began to have nightmares. Once affable and social, he grew socially isolated, he said. To this day he distrusts strangers. When he sees a fork, he sees a weapon.
  • Mophat Okinyi, a quality analyst, said his work included having to read detailed paragraphs about parents raping their children and children having sex with animals. He worked on a team that reviewed sexual content, which was contracted to handle 15,000 posts a month, according to the documents. His six months on the project tore apart his family, he said, and left him with trauma, anxiety and depression.
  • In March 2022, management told staffers the project would end earlier than planned. The Sama spokeswoman said the change was due to a dispute with OpenAI over one part of the project that involved handling images. The company canceled all contracts with OpenAI and didn’t earn the full $230,000 that had been estimated for the four projects, she said.
  • Several months after the project ended, Okinyi came home one night with fish for dinner for his wife, who was pregnant, and stepdaughter. He discovered them gone and a message from his wife that she’d left, he said.“She said, ‘You’ve changed. You’re not the man I married. I don’t understand you anymore,’” he said.
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