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demand was accompanied by the warning that unless France complied by September 26, 1941 these establishments would be occupied by force. Asked by the French Ambassador in Tokyo that the Japanese army be instructed to avoid the use of force, the Japanese Foreign Minister replied that he could not issue such instructions, unless French acceptance of Japanese demands was guaranteed. To avoid creating unnecessary trouble, he suggested that the French Ambassador strongly recommend to the Governor General the acceptance of the demands of the Japanese army. According to a report which had been received on September 28, 1941 from the Japanese army in French Indo-China, the Governor General had finally given in to the Japanese demands, and the question was settled satisfactorily.[1297] 536. Vichy Reports on Japanese Experimental Broadcast On September 23, 1941 radio reception of Japanese broadcast directed to America and the South Seas was reported as favorable by the Japanese Ambassador in Vichy. However, the Ambassador advised that extreme caution be exercised in regard to some items, such as the stressing by the Japanese news agency, Domei, of the Japanese-American negotiations and the prediction of their completion, whereas all such reports were denied in America each time. He suggested that the handling of such broadcasts be left to foreign news commentators.[1298] In conducting experimental broadcasts to Vichy, Tokyo learned on September 30, 1941 that the reception on only one station had been good on all three days of the experiment. Due to the existence of a powerful French broadcast using a wave length very close to the Japanese frequency, the other two stations had not been heard. In suggesting improvements, the Japanese Ambassador asked that the telegraphic messages be repeated twice, and that any sort of urgent message, which they intended to send properly later, be sent tentatively at the time of the experimental broadcast.[1299] [1295] III, 1012. [1296] III, 1013. [1297] III, 1014. [1298] III, 1015. [1299] III, 1016. [264] THE "MAGIC" BACKGROUND OF PEARL HARBOR 537. Japanese Army Arrests Annamites in French Indo-China Finding that the Vichy government was inclined to procrastinate in expelling or imprisoning Chungking representatives in the French colony, the Japanese army arrested more than 100 of the Annamites in Hanoi and Haiphong on September 25 and 26, 1941.[1300] Since, according to The Central China Daily News of September 1, 1941, the Nanking government had assumed police supervision of the French concession at Hankow,[1301] and since France officially protested, it was logical that an inquiry concerning the arrest of the Annamites in French Indo-China should originate in Nanking. On October 2, 1941 the Chinese Foreign Office announced that the French Embassy Councilor had apologized for a Japanese raid on the Chinese Consulate General in Hanoi, French Indo-China, thus assuming responsibility for the Japanese arrests in an attempt to assure French sovereignty in French Indo-China.[1302] In protesting such action, and in requesting the release of the pro-Chungking Chinese, the French had termed the action an indisputable violation of French sovereignty.[1303] A communique, originated on October 2, 1941 by Lt. Col. Sakuji Hayashi of the Japanese Sumida organization, to answer the charge that the arrests were a violation of French sovereignty, declared that Japan had repeatedly demanded the expulsion of the leaders of the anti-Japanese Chinese residents, and this request had for six months been repeatedly ignored. Since the Japanese claimed that the Annamites and pro-Chungking Chinese were not only attempting to get hold of Japanese army secrets, but were preventing the Chinese residents in French Indo-China from becoming friendly to Japan, the Japanese army found it necessary for reasons of self-defense to take emergency measures. Since France had recognized the Japanese occupation of French Indo-China, it should recognize any action which in the interest of self-defense was incidental to that recognition.[1304] 538. German Ambassador Suggests Use of French Annamite in Japanese Sabotage Plans The German Ambassador in Berlin suggested on October 2, 1941 that a French Annamite who had been living in Germany be issued a Japanese passport for the purpose of a brief visit to Japan. The Annamite, Pierre Fauquenot, was found to be a person whom Japan could use in its policies toward French Indo-China, having been imprisoned since December, 1939 in France. As the former editor of L'Alerte, a French language newspaper published in Saigon, he had been arrested because he had advocated that Japan and French Indo-China join hands. For this reason the German Ambassador felt that Japan should both protect him and treat him hospitably regardless of what its policies toward French Indo-China happened to be. Other plans regarding Mr. Fauquenot included his going to Japan on board the Asama Maru, his working in Japan for a time and his returning eventually to French Indo-China where he would be valuable in the furthering of Japanese Schemes.[1305] http://34819louis0j0sheehan0esquire.wordpress.com 539. Japan Plans Use of Transferrable Yen or Gold in Exchange Payment On October 3, 1941 Ambassador Kato was instructed to negotiate in the matter of French payment to Japan after considering the following points concerning the exchange of currency: American, British and Dutch currencies, being frozen, could not be utilized; the balance of Swiss franc funds, being small, could be procured only through the "free yen block"; Japan was reluctant to offer marks, since it owed marks to Germany; the procuring of funds in Italy [1300] Facts on File, 1941, p. 380. [1301] Facts on File, 1941, p. 349; See Volume II, Part C, "Hankow Incident," pp. 517-519. [1302] Facts on File, 1941, p. 388. [1303] III, 1017-1018. [1304] III, 1018. [1305] III, 1019. [265] was attended with difficulties; the Portuguese and Spanish currencies had not been used recently, and consequently, funds in these currencies were very small. The payment could be made in gold, since Japan's holding of this had reached a comparatively large sum, and it was believed that French Indo-China preferred settlement in gold, although there was also the possibility that the fear of inflation would bring a request that payment be made in commodities which could not be supplied in a hurry.[1306] 540. Japan Requests Additional 100,000,000 Piasters for Occupation Force On October 4, 1941 an additional request of 100,000,000 piasters to be used for the maintenance expenses of the Occupation Force between January and December 1942, was transmitted to Ambassador Kato for presentation to the French government. It was estimated that between January and March 1942, the Japanese army in French Indo-China would require 30,000,000 piasters,[1307] or approximately 10,000,000 piasters[1308] per month.[1309] Apparently having sent to Tokyo an explanation of the fixed rate of exchange for the purchase of gold by the Bank of French Indo-China, Ambassador Kato was instructed on October 7, 1941 to wire more details in connection with this matter since his previous explanation had not permitted Tokyo to reach a correct understanding. The Japanese Ambassador was also instructed to inform Tokyo immediately as to how much this official rate differed from the Japanese fixed rate.[1310] Exerting more pressure on Vichy to secure the additional 66,000,000 piasters formerly requested as a supplementary payment for the support of the Japanese Occupation Force in 1941, Tokyo advised Ambassador Arsene Henry of the revision of the itemized account of billeting costs, aviation facilities, supply department, and shipping facilities, and urged him to recommend its acceptance. Ambassador Kato was directed to present the revised estimate to the Vichy government, and to negotiate immediately for a settlement.[1311] 541. Japanese Official Carries Secret Documents to Hanoi and Saigon Precaution was taken in the sending of Mr. Ryuta Ono, Secretary of the Foreign Office, from Kobe to Hanoi on October 6, 1941. It was asked that Japanese officials in Hanoi facilitate his passage through customs, and ensure that the documents for Saigon were dispatched immediately by reliable mail.[1312] 542. Japanese Ambassadors Suggest Decorations for German Diplomats in Vichy On October 7, 1941 Ambassador Oshima requested that Japan consider the conferring of decorations on German Ambassador Heinrich Otto Abetz and his staff in Vichy, in view of the assistance extended to the Japanese Embassy in Paris during the joint defense negotiations. The First Class Order of the Rising Sun was suggested for the Ambassador, as well as other decorations suitable to the positions of his staff members.[1313] The Japanese Ambassador in Vichy echoed this request on October 15, 1941 when he transmitted the information that the [1306] III, 1020. [1307] Approximately $2,400,000 in American money. [1308] Approximately $800,000. [1309] III, 1021. [1310] III, 1022. [1311] III, 1023. [1312] III, 1024. [1313] III, 1025. [266] THE "MAGIC" BACKGROUND OF PEARL HARBOR information that the Italian government planned to confer decorations on Germany's diplomatic staff at Vichy in the near future, and suggested that Japan also recognize the group.[1314] 543. France Accedes to Japanese Demand for Additional 10,000 Tons of Rubber On October 9, 1941 Mr. Arnald informed Mr. Harada that France had decided to comply with Japan's desires for an increase of 10,000 tons of rubber, 7,000 of which were to be taken from the portion destined for America and 3,000 tons of which were to come from increased production. Mr. Arnald also expressed the hope that Japan would not oppose the export of 3,000 tons of rubber to America. The Japanese representative replied that he did not know whether his government would accept this proposal, but that he would transmit it to Tokyo.[1315] For the purpose of further expediting the rubber question, along with other matters, which would have a bearing on the negotiations scheduled to be held at Vichy in January 1941, Minister Iwataro Uchiyama arrived at Hanoi on October 13, 1941. Tokyo announced that Ambassador Yutaka(?) Yoshizawa would depart for his post in mid-November.[1316] 544. France Protests Against Japanese Demands for Dapuko Barracks At the insistence of the Governor General of Indo-China, Tokyo was informed on October 16, 1941 of the details of "a grave incident" which arose in connection with a request to quarter Japanese troops at Dapuko, an important military and ammunition center of the French colony. Lt. Col. Hayashi of the Japanese Army said that if this request were refused, the barracks at Hanoi would be seized, which statement was later withdrawn on the order of Lt. Gen. Shijiro Iida, who said that sending troops into Hanoi would be contrary to the joint defense agreement. Lt. Col. Hayashi asserted that he had a direct promise that Japanese troops would be quartered at Dapuko, but Col. Rene-Marie Jouan, Commander of the Indo-Chinese forces, maintained that French Indo-China could not permit Lt. Col. Hayashi to use the military barracks at Dapuko, and denied that the promise was anything but an offer for houses in the neighborhood.[1317] 545. French Indo-China Fears Collapse of Financial Structure After negotiating with French officials in Hanoi concerning the payment of the 66,000,000 piasters by France which was also being negotiated in Vichy, Minister Uchiyama reported that French Indo-Chinese authorities were not so much concerned with how to make the payment, but with the possibility of the colonies' small-scaled financial structure being upset by the expenditure of such a large sum of money. Since the question of payment was an urgent matter, the Governor General had requested that Japan submit a proposal in writing. On October 16, 1941 the Japanese official asked permission, in compliance with French Indo-China's request, to submit a proposal ostensibly as his own, but derived from his official instructions.[1318] [1314] III, 1026. [1315] III, 1027. [1316] III, 1028. [1317] III, 1029. [1318] III, 1030. [267] [268 blank] THE "MAGIC" BACKGROUND OF PEARL HARBOR PART C—JAPANESE DIPLOMATIC ACTIVITIES THROUGHOUT THE WORLD (k) Japanese-Chungking Relations 546. Chungking Leaders Open Southwestern Military Conference According to schedule, Chungking National Government authorities met and opened the southwestern military conference at Kweiyang in the province of Kweichow August 2, 1941. Pai Chunghsi, Commander-in-Chief of the Ninth Route Army, was in charge of activities in which military representatives from the provinces of Kwantung, Kwangshi, Yunan, Kweichow, Runan, and Szechwan participated. These conference delegates were scheduled to decide such questions as (1) the strengthening of control on military transportation in the southwest; (2) the defense of the Yunan, Kwangshi and Kwangtung Provinces, and (3) the organization of a general British-Chinese counter offensive.[1319] Following the opening ceremonies on August 2, 1941 and the rendering of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's speech of instructions, Pai Chung-hsi summoned several leading nationalists together, including the Kwantung Army Commander and the Commanders of the Kwangshi and the Nineteenth Route Armies for a conference. Should British authorities request aid, it was decided at this meeting that China would send an army of 15,000 men into Burma.[1320] According to Japanese intelligence reports this southwest meeting was to be followed by a northwest military conference which would be held in Tienshui, the capitol of Kansu Province.[1321] 547. Japanese Intelligence Discerns American-British Aid to China On August 6, 1941 the Tokyo radio broadcast an intelligence report from Berlin concerning the increased severity of the bombing of Chungking since January, 1941. Incendiary bombing in particular, having been stepped up, was expected to have a profound effect on morale in the Chungking area. This report also revealed that approximately one hundred American fighter planes and four hundred American airmen had been transported to that capitol in May.[1322] Another intelligence report of August 11, 1941 from Shanghai divulged that fourteen air bases were to be constructed in September with the help of America, Britain, and Russia.[1323] 548. Transportation Experts Visit China In China at this time was Mr. Daniel Arnstein, one of the three American transportation experts who had been commissioned to improve facilities along congested traffic routes. From a newspaper reporter, who, shortly after talking with Mr. Arnstein, returned to the United States, Consul Muto in San Francisco learned of the existing conditions in the Chungking territories. According to Mr. Arnstein, roads between the Iashio and Yannanfu districts had been in exceptionally bad repair; but under the supervision of United States Army engineers, a paving job had already been undertaken. Using 10,000 tons of asphalt and 4500 American-made trucks, thirty-two American engineers were supervising the task of completing transportation [1319] III, 1031. [1320] III, 1032. [1321] III, 1031. [1322] III, 1033. [1323] III, 1034. [269] facilities, policing, and repairing communications lines. As a result of such activity, by September 8, 1941, transportation capacities for one month had been doubled to approximately 30,000 tons.[1324] 549. Japanese Demand That Macao Authorities Halt Allied Smuggling Having received orders from the Japanese Foreign Minister on June 28, 1941 urging that they file a protest with the local government of Macao, southern seaport in China, requesting strict surveillance of all activities associated with smuggled material to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's forces,[1325] the Japanese chiefs of the army and naval general staffs in Canton discussed steps to be taken, in a meeting on August 19, 1941. Protests regarding the stopping of pro-enemy activities were to be filed by Acting Consul Fukui. In the event that these representations were rejected, it was decided that Japanese ships would blockade the southern coast.[1326] These details of the demands which were presented to the Macao government included: (1) A ban on all shipment of goods into enemy territories via the unoccupied coastal region; (2) Constant supervision of the port of Macao to prevent smuggling; (3) Complete cooperation of the Macao government in according necessary facilities and protection to the Japanese within its territory; (4) The closing of all organizations connected with the Chungking regime; (5) The disbanding and prosecution of all espionage organizations; and, (6) The suppression and punishment of members of enemy firms and transportation companies as well as the suppression of anti-Japanese propaganda, opinions, newspapers, societies, et cetera.[1327] However, it appeared that Macao authorities had not acceded to these demands by September 16, 1941; for Japan had already taken steps to enforce its threat. On that date a Japanese military patrol boat in the Macao harbor fired on a Portuguese official's patrol boat without warning and despite its clear displayal of the Portuguese flag. The Portuguese government immediately protested to Japan, but by October 13 Tokyo had made no answer.[1328] 550. Chinese Communists Take Advantage of British-American-Russian Conferences to Present Demands Japanese intelligence reports indicated to Tokyo that Chinese Communists Chen Shao-yu, Lin Piao, Lin T'su-han, and Lin Po-chao had decided to leave Yunan-Fu in Shensi by plane for Moscow on November 24, 1941. By taking advantage of the British-American-Russian conference, they planned to maneuver a favorable turn in the boundary dispute. These Chinese Communist leaders had sent a wire to the American representative at Chungking, Owen Lattimore, assuring him that they favored joint negotiations among Great Britain, the United States, and Soviet Russia and stating that their demands included: (1) legitimate existence status as well as recognition of equal treatment for the Communist army; (2) the development of the northwest section; (3) the reorganization of the National Association for Assisting the Administration; and, (4) the abolition of the Right Wing of the anti-Communistic platform. Chau En-lai, another Chinese Communist leader, had previously discussed these demands with Mr. Lattimore.[1329] [1324] III, 1035. [1326] III, 1036. [1326] III, 1037. [1327] III, 1038. [1328] III, 1039. [1329] III, 1040. [270] THE "MAGIC" BACKGROUND OF PEARL HARBOR 551. Mao Tse-tung Promotes Communist-Nationalist Relations Another spy report located Communist Mao Tse-tung at Hami on August 19, 1941. On August 19, 1941. On August 25 he was observed to be leaving that city for Moscow. During his stay in Hami, it was believed that he had been occupied with the promotion of Nationalist-Communist relations. Now that he was in Moscow on September 4, 1941, Mao Tse-tung was expected to conclude a compromise of all problems between the Nationalists in China and the Communists in Moscow. It was believed that he would attempt to obtain from the Russian capitol additional equipment and instructions for Communist forces, as well as the development of a concrete joint policy between Chinese and Russian forces. While in Moscow, he planned to work out the details of future anti-Japanese strategy and the role to be played in this strategy by the Communists.[1330] 552. Chinese Educator Believes Anti-Communist Faction will Impede Joint Russo-Chinese Military Action Japanese officials considered many sources in coordinating their intelligence on the Chinese-Russian collaboration and found it of importance to record on September 1, 1941, an observation by a Chinese educator, Huang Yen-pei, who had discussed the joint military action between Russia and China at a dinner meeting in Hongkong. Mr. Yen-pei believed that joint military action between Russia and China would formally be agreed upon with the aid of Great Britain and the United States. On the other hand, he explained that the anti-Soviet faction in China feared Russia and was following the opportunistic policy of compromising with Japan while at the same time advocating anti-Japanese resistance.[1331] 553. Chinese Educator Claims Only Anti-Japanese Encirclement Policy will Save Chungking Mr. Huang Yen-pei also stressed the fact that United States aid to China was not reaching advanced bases in time to accomplish its purpose. Citing as an example two hundred American planes which had been shipped to China, he pointed out that it took two days to assemble each plane, thus making it a year before the entire two hundred could be used in the war. This left many American-trained pilots without effective employment.[1332] In addition, the Chinese government continued to put pressure on the Chinese Communists. The best troops were still far behind the front lines, and the so-called anti-Japanese counter attack was labelled by Mr. Yen-pei as nothing more than propaganda. Nothing, he said, would save Chungking but the formation of an anti-Japanese encirclement policy by Great Britain, the United States, and Russia. Mr. Yen-pei also expressed his fear that civil war might exhaust China should Moscow fall and Russian support of Chinese Communists be withdrawn. Apparent friction between Communists and Nationalists throughout China made the danger of a split within the government seem imminent.[1333] 554. Japan Detects Growing Anti-Communist Sentiment in Nationalist Headquarters Many indications of increasing anti-Communistic and pro-German sentiments among Chinese Nationalistic leaders were observed by Japanese agents. In a report from Shanghai on September 6, 1941 a plan recently adopted by Chungking General Headquarters was revealed as advocating the spread of propaganda to condemn Chinese Communist activities which were considered subversive and impeding the continuation of the war against Japan. [1330] III, 1041. [1331] III, 1042. [1332] Ibid. [1333] Ibid. [271] The unification of the various armies and the increase of the power of the Nationalist forces were included in the plan, as well as the diplomatic policy of appearing to be in line with England and the United States while secretly sealing amicable relations with Germany and Italy. This plan called for an attack by Chinese government troops upon Indo-Chinese troops.[1334] 555. Chiang Kai-shek Encounters Opposition to Establishment of Southwestern Military Headquarters. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire On September 12, 1941 Japanese agents in Shanghai revealed that Chiang Kai-shek had already laid plans for the establishment of military headquarters for southwestern territories in Kunming. In view of the fact that the Generalissimo met with opposition from some of his commanders who opposed a southward movement by the central army, Chiang Kai-shek's plan was said to have ended in failure. When the Generalissimo had telegraphed to Haku Su-ki, one of his officials in Kunming, to organize military headquarters in that city, the official asked that the Generalissimo himself visit the southwest to direct the establishment of the military base.[1335] http://34819louis0j0sheehan0esquire.wordpress.com 556. Chicago Times Writer Labels Russian Aid to China Insignificant As Japanese officials continued to measure the significance of Chinese-Russian relations, they learned in a dispatch from Moscow the opinion of a Chicago Times reporter, regarding Russian aid. The reporter believed that only an insignificant amount of help had come from Russia to Chiang Kai-shek, although he had observed that many Russian troops were stationed in the Chinese border towns of Suchow, Lanchow, and Hami.[1336] Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire </p> 5362555 2009-01-12 04:20:23 2009-01-12 04:20:23 open open turkey-2-tur-001002-louis-j-sheehan-esquire-5362555 publish 0 0 post 0 maji Leningrad 2.len.0 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2009/01/12/leningrad-2-len-0-louis-j-sheehan-esquire-5362535/ Mon, 12 Jan 2009 04:10:41 +0100 Beforethebigbang 5362535 2009-01-12 04:10:41 2009-01-12 04:10:41 open open leningrad-2-len-0-louis-j-sheehan-esquire-5362535 publish 0 0 post 0 maji Oshima 2.osh.1002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2009/01/12/oshima-2-osh-1002-louis-j-sheehan-esquire-5362526/ Mon, 12 Jan 2009 04:05:46 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire THE "MAGIC" BACKGROUND OF PEARL HARBOR would meet the invading armies with unyielding resistance. Japan could not overlook the difficulties of administering such territories when conquered, territories vast in their geography, intense and severe in their climate, and poorly supplied with transportation facilities. In addition, with the German army progressing at its present slow pace, Tokyo also realized that Commissar Joseph Stalin would be able to retreat to the Ural Mountains, thereby temporarily frustrating the German plan to bring chaos to the Red Regime. Therefore, according to Tokyo, unless the German army were to exhibit a more "blitzlike" advance, the Stalin power would continue to be a dominating influence in the Far East and a menace to Japan.[1078] 436. Ambassador Oshima Again Urges Active Support of Tripartite Pact Ambassador Oshima on August 9, 1941 directed a dispatch to the Foreign Minister, reiterating his former pleas for active support for the Tripartite Pact. He explained that despite Tokyo's numerous statements advising Germany that the Japanese were conducting their policies in accord with the aims and spirit of the Pact, unless the plans, by which this support was to materialize were forcefully executed in the near future, Japan might give an impression of disinterest. The full fruits of cooperation would not be garnered through individual efforts. Stressing that it was not his intention that Japan should court Germany and Italy, he continued that they should cooperate with a view toward future benefits for the Empire.[1079] Ambassador Oshima explained that Hitler had already offered his support to Japan should a clash occur between that country and the United States.[1080] 437. Ambassador Oshima Reveals German Organization for the Occupation of Russia On the same day Ambassador Oshima acknowledged that Germany had not devised a course of action beyond the annihilation of the Russian field forces. Germany, however, had set up a governing organization under the head of Dr. Alfred Rosenburg to administer the conquered territories. The proposed policy of destroying Communism at its source coincided unalterably with the intention of the Japanese government, Ambassador Oshima pointed out; and it was only fair, in fact essential, that Japan now cooperate closely and unconditionally with the Axis to insure harmony in the future. As soon as the Japanese Empire had determined its aims and policies, Ambassador Oshima suggested that Japan and Germany negotiate for the settlement of jurisdictional disputes which might arise upon the partitioning of Russian territory.[1081] Ambassador Oshima had previously revealed that Germany planned to take direct control of affairs in conquered Russia for a ten-year period after the occupation, occupying all the area up to the Ural Mountains. Dr. Rosenberg, German-appointed Minister of State for the occupied territory, would establish his office in Moscow. According to Germany's postwar plan the three Baltic countries and a part of White Russia were to be united to form a Baltic district, and an enlarged Ukraine and the Caucasus would form two other political areas. Finland would receive the Kola peninsula and the Karelian area, while Rumania would recover Bessarabia and Bukovina. Hungary would receive a small area in exchange for the cession of a portion to Slovakia. No change in the former German policy toward Poland was expected.[1082] 438. Rumors of Japanese Representations to U.S.S.R. Reach Germany A few days later the German Minister at Hsinking was reportedly under the impression that Japan had made representations to the Soviet Union. Although it appeared that Japanese [1078] III, 806. [1079] III, 807. [1080] III, 808. [1081] III, 809. [1082] III, 810. [223] Home Affairs Department had revealed such information to the Nichi-Nichi main office, but had killed the story immediately, the German official still had had time to intercept it. 439. Ambassador Oshima's Resignation Is Refused Despite Ambassador Oshima's persistent requests to return to Japan, the Home Office insisted that he remain in Berlin. In a secret dispatch on August 12, 1941 Foreign Minister Toyoda re-emphasized the fact that although the Ambassador's point of view was understood, his presence in Berlin remained a necessity.[1084] 440. The German Army Progresses Against Russia Ambassador Heinrich D. Stahmer informed the Japanese Ambassador that the German army by August 14 had completely encircled Leningrad and had occupied the northeast area. In the south, Odessa had been invested. The Dnepropetrovsk power plant, largest in Soviet Russia, was to be the next objective of the advancing forces. Ambassador Stahmer divulged the encouraging information to Ambassador Oshima that German losses in the six weeks of war had been unbelievably small with a total dead of only 30,000. Since the Japanese Ambassador had recently concluded a tour of the battlefield, he was convinced that these figures were reasonably accurate. Russian and British air attacks on Berlin, Ambassador Stahmer declared, were attempting to prove that Germany did not have aerial supremacy. This was only a political move, unrelated to actual conditions. He cautioned Japan to be wary of Russian-British propaganda.[1085] 441. Germany Advises Evacuation of Consular Officials From Occupied Territories On instruction from the German government all Consular officials in the occupied areas of France, Belgium, Holland, Luxemburg, and Norway were to close their offices by September 1, 1941 and to evacuate the areas. Ambassador Oshima notified the Home Office on August 12 that Minister Paul Schmidt, German Chief of Protocol, had confided to him that this order was not to be applied to Japan.[1086] On August 16, 1941 Ambassador Oshima reported to Tokyo that he had recently dispatched Consul Shigero Imai to Brussels to bring the Imperial portraits, then in possession of the Antwerp Consulate, to the Berlin office.[1087] Further arrangements were made on August 23, 1941 for the evacuation of Japanese officials from occupied areas.[1088] That Japan had instigated a license system applying to foreigners leaving that country was wired to Ambassador Oshima. He was instructed to determine the extent of such restrictions in Germany and other countries to which he was accredited. Since Japan's license system would not effect members of Foreign Embassies, Ministries, Consulates and their families unless such a system were manifested against Japan in other countries, the Ambassador was directed to discover the extent and application of the restrictions.[1089] 442. Manchukuoan-German Trade Retarded by War As the Russo-German war progressed, increased restrictions upon Japanese-German trade were being felt, but it was difficult for Japanese officials to explain the seriousness of the situation to their Axis partners. One instance of restricted trade to Germany was the forced discontinuance of the Manchukuoan supply of soy beans. It was feared that the mere excuse of a Russo- [1084] III, 812. [1085] III, 813. [1086] III, 814. [1087] III, 815. [1088] III, 816. [1089] III, 817. [224] THE "MAGIC" BACKGROUND OF PEARL HARBOR German war would seem a feeble pretext to German authorities considering the fact that Germany would probably counter with the argument that Manchukuo need not be concerned with the problem of overland transportation. By August 12, 1941 Japanese spokesman had agreed that they should attempt to convince Germany that since Japan was adopting emergency measures in the North in order to assist Germany, and since there was a limited supply of soy beans for domestic consumption in Manchukuo already, it would be impossible to live up to the May agreement in regard to shipments to Germany.[1090] By October 8, 1941 considerable Manchurian merchandise amounting to $215,000 which was en route to Germany through Russia had been confiscated. Since Germany would probably never receive the shipments and could not be expected to pay for them, Japan found itself in the position of settling the deal with Manchuria. In an attempt to avoid paying the retail price for the shipments which it had transhipped to Germany, Japan consulted with Ambassador Oshima and Minister Umetsu.[1091] 443. Japan Learns of German Undercover Activities in China On the other hand, German progress in China did not seem to be suffering since, with the freezing of assets in Tientsin, German firms were reported to be secretly purchasing United States and British real estate. This was distressing Japanese authorities, and it was advised that Japan seek the German government's cooperation either through the German Ambassador or through Dr. Helmut Wohlthat.[1092] Thus, Consul Makoto Okuma on August 18, 1941,[1093] inquired of German authorities regarding the rumored encroachment on Japanese rights in the Tientsin area. In response, German spokesmen declared that they had been giving ample support to Japan's policy of freezing British and American assets. Stating that they had no specific knowledge of any German-Allied dealings, they agreed that should the Japanese submit concrete evidence, such practice would be dealt with properly. In the instance of the German firm of Meruchaasu which was under suspicion, it was revealed that they had already issued a warning. When Consul Okuma inquired about German-Jewish activities he was reassured that not one of the German firms in this area was Jewish, even though the Jews in that area were socially respected.[1094] 444. Japan Cultivates the Interest of the German People Despite these somewhat strained relations between merchants in China, the general attitude toward Japan in Germany gradually became one of increasing interest. According to Ambassador Oshima the sudden surge of interest in Japan was giving rise to a demand for materials in the form of German language publications propagandizing Japan. He reported that distribution of effective information concerning Japan was being disseminated through libraries, universities, publishers, government offices, and through the party and picked individuals. The material was nonetheless proving insufficient, and he urged the publication of new and supplementary volumes. Currently popular editions were Nippon, Contemporary Japan, The East Asia Economic and the Japan Trade Monthly.[1095] 445. Ambassador Oshima Admonishes Tokyo for Lack of Decisive Attitude Ambassador Oshima was becoming increasingly aroused that no definite instructions in regard to Japan's policy in the Russo-German conflict had been forthcoming from Tokyo. On [1090] III, 818. [1091] III, 819. [1092] III, 820. [1093] III, 821. [1094] Ibid. [1096] III, 822. [225] August 20, 1941 he transmitted a caustic reminder that no word except an account of Foreign Minister Toyoda's conferences with Ambassadors Constantin Smetanin and Eugene Ott on July 9 had been forthcoming and that it was impossible to know the real intention of the Home Office merely on the basis of such conversations. http://louis2j2sheehan.bloggerteam.com He also took this opportunity to request immediate information on Japanese-American relations, revealing that the government had become quite perturbed over the existing circumstances.[1096] http://louis2j2sheehan.bloggerteam.com In a severe rebuke for the government's failure to inform its field representatives of the current situation, Ambassador Oshima telegraphed that he could not conclude that Foreign Minister Toyoda either feared that secrecy would not be maintained or that the government had not as yet decided upon a definite policy. Should Tokyo be withholding information for security reasons, Ambassador Oshima declared that every Japanese representative at the risk of his life would maintain secrecy. Should the second reason prevail, Ambassador Oshima urged that, regardless of the inconclusiveness of the information, he be told even what Mr. Toyoda himself was considering.[1097] 446. Ambassador Oshima Objects to Japan's Use of Russian News Releases Ambassador Oshima also complained bitterly of Japan's objective broadcasts of Russo-German frontline activities, stating that Tokyo, on two occasions, August 9 and 10, 1941, had broadcast Tass reports to the effect that Russian planes had raided Berlin on August 7 and 8. Ambassador Oshima pointed out that actually only an air raid alarm had been sounded and that no great damage, such as was reported, had been inflicted. Stressing the fact that Japan would certainly be equally outraged should Germany deign to broadcast as facts the Chungking government reports, he suggested that Japan attempt to control future broadcasts. He further pointed out that since the German Foreign Office was constructing a large receiving station by which it would be able to listen minutely to broadcasts from the whole world, it would now be most important that Japan exercise caution in her transmissions.[1098] The Ambassador continued to emphasize the ill will and confused feelings which such a policy of broadcasting would invoke throughout the Empire. This kind of reporting not only would cause misunderstanding among German officials and among Japanese living outside of Berlin, but there was a danger that it would injure the veracity of Japanese overseas broadcasts. Therefore, he urged that the Foreign Office consult with the broadcasting department and take suitable steps regarding the regulating of broadcasting reports originating in Russia.[1099] 447. Foreign Minister Toyoda Upholds Japan's Methods In rebuke, on August 22, 1941, Foreign Minister Toyoda reminded Mr. Oshima that the Japanese government had been following a policy of handling worldwide broadcasts objectively and impartially in the hope of fostering confidence. He stressed the point that from the very fact that German broadcasts had been so severely regulated, their China and South Seas propaganda power had become worthless. He also countered that such examples as the Ambassador had pointed out were extremely rare and challenged him to listen over a period of several days to verify this. Substantiating evidence for the report of a Russian raid on Berlin had been garnered from Domei dispatches and had originated in London and Vichy, the Foreign Minister revealed. Again he emphasized [1096] III, 823. [1097] III, 824. [1098] III, 825. [1099] III, 826. [226] THE "MAGIC" BACKGROUND OF PEARL HARBOR the fact that the Japanese broadcasting companies, working in unison with all government branches, were completely supporting their Foreign Office policy of upholding the Tripartite agreement.[1100] 448. Ambassador Oshima Confers with Field Marshal Keitel By August 25, 1941, according to Ambassador Oshima who had been gathering battle reports from various sources[1101] including the German Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, with whom he talked on August 23 at General Headquarters,[1102] German strategy was meeting with unprecedented success. In a lengthy six part dispatch transmitted on August 25, 1941, Ambassador Oshima attempted to convey to his Home Office the current trend of Russo-German hostilities, as related to him by the Field Marshal. Accordingly, he revealed that Russian casualties were estimated to be about five million, with a definitely known total of 1,250,000 prisoners and twice that many dead. Only the equivalent of about 60 divisions of the 260 which had appeared on battlefields remained, and these seemed to be haphazardly slapped together, resulting in low military efficiency. It had been estimated that the armed strength of the Soviet Union had fallen to one third of its original strength. The shortage of equipment and officer material was apparent. In some cases sergeants commanded battalions and in others a lieutenant would be in charge of a regiment. Judging from the population it would be possible to organize about 20 more divisions, but in so doing they would practically exhaust the source of supply. Female battalions had already made an appearance. Although the Russian forces were still rich in manpower, they no longer were equipped or trained to fight with any degree of efficiency.[1103] On the other hand, in regard to German losses, the Field Marshal stated that casualties were less than 160,000, the dead to date reaching 40,000. War reports from the southern front showed Odessa completely encircled while Dnepropetrovsk, located in a field warfare area and very strongly fortified, was being subjected to artillery fire before German forces would make any direct in-fighting attempt. It was pointed out that in order to avoid the damage resulting from suburban warfare, Kiev was being subjected to destruction by artillery fire, to be followed up by infantry attacks. Sudden and rapid developments in the Ukraine sector had enabled the German army to annihilate the greater part of Marshal Semyon Mikhailovich Budenny's forces, Field Marshal Keitel revealed. Because of the speed with which this advance had been conducted, all grains and other goods were left intact. From this point the German forces were scheduled to push on across the Dnieper River to Harikohu and Donbasu.[1104] Along the northern front the Leningrad-Moscow railroad had already been cut at Chudovo and the German army had laid siege to the outlying districts of Leningrad from which is was reported that Marshall Kliment Voroshilov had fled. In Estonia, Revel remained the only unconquered area. Here again the German forces were avoiding rushing tactics and were concentrating on heavy artillery fire, the Field Marshal explained. The Finnish forces in cooperation with the Germans had advanced to the area between Lake Ladoga and Lake Onega. For the purpose of seizing the Murmansk area, General Eduard Dietl, famed for his defense of Narvik, was reportedly arriving from Norway with his forces via the sea.[1105] German divisions on the central front had been diverted to both the southern and northern theaters, the latter group reaching a point southeast of Leningrad, and joining forces with the troops in that area. [1100] III, 827. [1101] III, 828. [1102] III, 829. [1103] III, 830. [1104] III, 831. (The Kana word Harikohu is believed by United States translators to be Kharkov; and the Kana word Donbasu, to be Rostov.) [1105] Ibid. [227] 449. Field Marshal Keitel Explains German's War Aims Explaining the aims of the German forces, Field Marshal Keitel told Ambassador Oshima that they were preparing to launch the second phase of the war soon. The goal of this phase included the capture of the entire region from Rostov to Moscow and the industrial area around Leningrad. These campaigns should be concluded by early November at which time the Russian field forces would have been destroyed. The Caucasus area was to be seized, but this action might not be initiated until December. No prediction about forces to be sent to the Urals could be made until the completion of the second phase. The Field Marshal blamed any delays on weather conditions and the stubborn resistance of the Russian masses.[1106] 450. Nationalist Chinese in Germany Present a Problem to the Axis On September 2, 1941, Ambassador Oshima reported that a problem had arisen in connection with Chinese Nationalists in Berlin. Although Li Sheng-Wei had been appointed as Nanking Ambassador to Germany, he was experiencing transportation difficulties and would not be on hand to control the situation in Germany for some time. As a means of meeting the existing emergency Ambassador Oshima suggested that Nanking appoint an honorary consul in Berlin, which appointment would be approved by Tokyo, to deal with these "depraved anti-Japanese rascals". Ambassador Oshima declared that the plan to establish an honorary consul had been thoroughly approved by the German government. If Nanking wished, Berlin had offered to select several "New Order" advocates to collaborate with Nanking representatives for the improvement of Japanese-Chinese-German relations. Ambassador Oshima requested the Foreign Minister's approval.[1107] 451. Japanese-German Trade Continues Despite Difficulties of War Japan and Germany continued to rely upon each other for transportation facilities as, according to a September 1 dispatch, German and Italian Ambassadors in Tokyo requested that Japanese ships be made available for transporting Axis documents from Tokyo to South America. Japan had been in agreement provided that Italian airplanes flying between Italy and Rio de Janeiro and Santiago be made available for the transportation of Japanese documents which were secret or confidential in nature.[1108] Tokyo wired that Ambassador Oshima urge the German Ministry of Finance in Berlin to approve Japan's request to draw from German peso funds in Argentina the equivalent of 7,000,000 yen to apply against Japanese purchases of cowhide. As compensation, Foreign Minister Toyoda explained, Japan was offering petroleum and other goods as well as foreign money. Although the details of the negotiations had been communicated to the German government via its representatives in Tokyo, by September 2, 1941, no action had been forthcoming and two of Japan's ships were already in South American waters prepared to load the cargo.[1109] In the meantime, the Japanese embassy in Berlin was experiencing difficulties in distinguishing between official and civilian, urgent and non-urgent goods. Twenty-seven thousand tons of freight which was destined for Japan had accumulated, and although instructions from Tokyo stipulated that the goods be divided into four categories with the number of tons in each, Ambassador Oshima was at loss to cope with the matter and requested that hereafter more explicit arrangements be completed in Tokyo.[1110] [1106] Ibid. [1107] III, 832. [1108] III, 833. [1109] III, 834. [1110] III, 835. [228] THE "MAGIC" BACKGROUND OF PEARL HARBOR On September 6, 1941 Ambassador Oshima made a report concerning Germany's growing economic control over the Balkan States with the exception of Turkey. He declared that since Germany's imports were in excess of its exports especially in its trade with Rumania, it had resorted to changing the exchange rate in its own favor. In addition to this Germany had exported large quantities of arms to these countries, thus strengthening itself militarily as well as adjusting its trade balance. Ambassador Oshima also revealed that an optimistic view prevailed in the Balkan states in regard to the new period plans[1111] which were designed to increase production since at the present time agriculture appeared to be in an extremely primitive state. However, by supplying implements and fertilizers, the German government hoped to prevent a decline in agricultural production and, depending upon such endeavor, might eventually be able to increase by 50,000 tons such oil bearing crops as soy beans. However, no general radical increase in agricultural production could be expected within the next two or three years.[1112] According to Ambassador Oshima, by strict control, Germany was assuring itself of the Balkan supply which was larger than in previous years. The commercial and economic implications of Germany's plan to develop the River Danube water route connecting it with the Rhine to facilitate uninterrupted shipment of petroleum, grains, lumber, etc., were emphasized in regards to the future prosperity of Europe.[1113] According to Minister Sikao Matashima the German army's activities had only slightly affected agricultural production in the Balkans, and harvest appeared even better than in previous years. There was a resulting tendency toward collaboration of additional Balkan countries with the Reich. These nations were operating under a produce pact with Germany in accordance with which they were supplying raw materials in exchange for German war materials, farm tools, medicines, etc. The mark became the unit of exchange in all trade transactions between Germany and the Balkans. Trade between the Balkan nations themselves was to be regulated in the Berlin Exchange Control Bureau with all loans to Germany being repaid by manufactured articles. This, it will be seen, established a virtual Balkan trade block in which Germany controlled an export market and would be economically sovereign. Germany now was getting more arms from the Balkans and transporting them over safer routes. Although currency exchange rates were unstable at present, Minister Matashima was confident that after Germany had won the Russian war, the situation would improve.[1114] 452. German Army Plans to Advance Along Leningrad-Sverdlovsk Railroad After Leningrad Falls On September 3, 1941, a message transmitted from Moscow to Tokyo on the progress of Russo-German hostilities was re-broadcast to Hsinking despite the previous warning of Ambassador Oshima in Berlin that Japan should be more cautious of Russian reports. In this case, however, it was predicted that, after the capture of Leningrad, one part of the German army would advance along the line of the Leningrad-Sverdlovsk railroad and other part, the main force, would advance with the central army toward Moscow. Should the Germans be successful in dealing Russia a knockout blow in Leningrad, Moscow, and Kharkov, it would be but a brief step to the oil fields of Grozny. With the withdrawal from these three important cities Russia would lose four-fifths of its war industries. The same report revealed that the Soviet Republics' government outwardly appeared calm. As yet there were no signs of collapse in the Red army which stubbornly resisted the Germans [1111] III, 836. Five or ten year plan worked out or put into effect in the Balkan States. [1112] III, 836. [1113] III, 837. [1114] III, 838. [229] in its attempt to carry on a long war. But it was predicted that soon the army would deteriorate, and such possibilities, it was believed, were causing much concern in America and England.[1115] On September 4, 1941, Ambassador Oshima reported activities at the front as they had been explained by a reliable German source. In this statement the encirclement of Leningrad had been completed with the occupation of Slusselburg. Among the prisoners captured during the fighting in this neighborhood were armed citizens as well as workers operating tanks. The strategy involved in taking the city was to rely principally upon shelling and bombing and to avoid street fighting. With regard to activities in the Kiev area it was believed that since Soviet forces to the east could no longer retreat, mopping-up activities would be completed in the following week. German forces had crossed the Dnieper River all along the line from Dnepropetrovsk south and were gaining steadily.[1116] 453. Rumors of Mobilization on Bulgarian-Turkish Border Disproved From Turkey came rumblings of massive troop concentrations on the Bulgarian-Turkish border. In order to obtain first-hand information Japanese representatives there made an official trip to Bulgaria, where it was discovered that not more than eleven Bulgarian divisions and not more than five German regiments were located. Hence, although at first it had been thought that Field Marshal Sigmund Liszt's army was stationed there, later data seemed to disprove this theory. With regard to Turkish-German relations, it was believed that Germany would not be inclined to hurry her negotiations until the eastern front had been brought under control even though trade negotiations had been scheduled to begin on September 2, 1941.[1117] 454. Ambassador Oshima Tours Occupied European Countries On September 8, 1941 Ambassador Oshima advised Foreign Minister Toyoda that he would leave the following day for a tour of German occupied territories in Belgium, the Netherlands and northern France at the invitation of the German government.[1118] 455. Ambassador Oshima Again Threatens Resignation Again on September 20, 1941, Ambassador Oshima threatened Tokyo with his resignation if Japan did not clarify its intentions with regard to the Japanese-American negotiations. Complaining that such an explanation as the Foreign Minister had transmitted on September 10, 1941,[1119] was little more than routine diplomatic material, Ambassador Oshima stated that it was impossible for him to know the truth regarding his own government. The pro-Axis Ambassador continued that although outwardly the Japanese government claimed that the Japanese-American negotiations would not violate the spirit of the Three Power Agreement, he was doubtful. Asserting that he had been "in a fog" since July 2, 1941 when the national policy was decided, Ambassador Oshima stated that he felt incapable of performing his duties satisfactorily.[1120] [1115] III, 839. [1116] III, 840. [1117] III, 841. [1118] III, 842. [1119] III, 843. [1120] III, 844. [230] THE "MAGIC" BACKGROUND OF PEARL HARBOR 456. German National Defense Ministry Estimates Current Situation The Vice Chief of the General Staff in Tokyo forwarded to the Washington delegation an estimate of the current situation on September 20, 1941. This estimate, reportedly originating from the German attache in the United States, had been sent to the Japanese representatives in Berlin by the German National Defense Ministry; and Tokyo requested that its authenticity be investigated in Washington. The German attache was credited with stating that if Japan attacked Russia, England would aid the Soviet Union; but that unless Japan attacked the Philippines or seriously menaced the American transport routes, the United States would not declare war against Japan. This reluctance on the part of America would greatly decrease its prestige in the Pacific area. He stressed that it was of vital importance to the Axis Powers that the United States be kept in "some dilemma" concerning Far Eastern problems. Employing a policy of delay because its fleet was divided between two oceans and because its air force and army were lacking in strength, the United States was attempting to use economic pressure to conceal its weaknesses. The German attache pointed out that if Japan procrastinated, the British and Americans would have had time to combine their naval strength and Japan would have "lost an excellent prize by chasing the sun".[1121] 457. Japan Repudiates Poland Although Ambassador Oshima had failed in his efforts to persuade former Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka that Japan should accede in Germany's demand that Poland be repudiated, it appeared by August 15, 1941, that under the new Cabinet, final steps in this direction would be taken. The Japanese Ambassador was notified that after talking with Ambassador Ott, Foreign Minister Toyoda had agreed to call a special meeting of the Privy Council in September at which time the Japanese Embassy in Poland would be abolished and the Polish Embassy in Japan would be repudiated.[1122] However, circumstances prohibited the presentation of this request to the Privy Council before October and the Council was not expected to give its approval until October 3, 1941, at which time the Polish Ambassador would be notified.[1123] 458. Germany Explains the Greer Incident Meanwhile, on September 8, Germany's Vice Minister Ernst Von Weizsacker accounted to Tokyo via Ambassador Oshima for the Greer incident which involved a German submarine attack on a United States warship. He explained that the submarine upon approaching the vessel for identification purposes had been fired upon. However, he said, although attacked, the submarine dove and waited two hours during which the attack continued; and then it surfaced, sighted the warship, and released two torpedoes in self-defense. At Ambassador Oshima's query as to Germany's intention in the matter, the Vice Minister replied that he did not know Hitler's intentions but personally he did not believe that too much ado should be made about it. According to Ambassador Oshima, President Roosevelt appeared to be using the incident to stir up a war spirit in the United States. Nevertheless, Ambassador Oshima believed that since no diplomatic steps had been taken, nothing more would come of the affair.[1124] 459. Ambassador Oshima Learns of German Transactions for South American Money On September 11, 1941, Ambassador Oshima divulged that Germany was holding large sums of money in South American branch banks which it was attempting to obtain before the [1121] III, 845-846. [1122] III, 847. [1123] III, 848. [1124] III, 849. [231] American freezing order went into effect. These assets Berlin hoped to obtain primarily by selling gold, but also by affixing the funds held by Germans in South America, purchasing raw materials, and by "bootlegging" South American currencies.[1125] Only four days later the Ambassador revealed that transactions were being made at 10 per cent under the market price by German representatives in Lisbon with Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil.[1126] 460. New Japanese-German Shipping Problems Arise http://louis2j2sheehan.bloggerteam.com Meanwhile some new questions were arising regarding neutral shipping. Ambassador Oshima wired his home government on September 17, 1941 to explain its decisions on several points. Items under discussion by the army and navy and Japanese merchants in Berlin involved the transporting of freight. Such problems involved an interpretation of the word "neutral", a decision as to type of freight, and the necessity for obtaining navicerts. Ambassador Oshima also explained that the Berlin contingent desired that all freight be collected at Marseilles and then shipped by water to Lisbon thereby eliminating the use of the inefficient Spanish railroads. In this regard he wanted to know whether or not there would be an official British inspection and if so how thorough such a search would be.[1127] Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. </p> 5362526 2009-01-12 04:05:46 2009-01-12 04:05:46 open open oshima-2-osh-1002-louis-j-sheehan-esquire-5362526 publish 0 0 post 0 magi xiang 2.xia.0002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2009/01/10/xiang-2-xia-0002-louis-j-sheehan-esquire-5351827/ Sat, 10 Jan 2009 04:10:28 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . Two years ago a team of engineers amazed the world (Harry Potter fans in particular) by developing the technology needed to make an invisibility cloak. Now researchers are creating laboratory-engineered wonder materials that can conceal objects from almost anything that travels as a wave. That includes light and sound and—at the subatomic level—matter itself. And lest you think that cloaking applies only to the intangible world, 2008 even brought a plan for using cloaking techniques to protect shorelines from giant incoming waves.http://Louis-J-Sheehan.biz Engineer Xiang Zhang, whose University of California at Berkeley lab is behind much of this work, says, “We can design materials that have properties that never exist in nature.” These engineered substances, known as metamaterials, get their unusual properties from their size and shape, not their chemistry. Because of the way they are composed, they can shuffle waves—be they of light, sound, or water—away from an object. To cloak something, concentric rings of the metamaterial are placed around the object to be concealed. Tiny structures—like loops or cylinders—within the rings divert the incoming waves around the object, preventing both reflection and absorption. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.biz The waves meet up again on the other side, appearing just as they would if nothing were there. The first invisibility cloak [subscription required], designed by engineers at Duke University and Imperial College London, worked for only a narrow band of microwaves. Xiang and his colleagues created metamaterials that can bend visible light backward—a much greater challenge because visible light waves are so small, under 700 nanometers wide. That meant the engineers had to devise cloaking components only tens of nanometers apart. Xiang’s group also cleared another design hurdle. A competing team had devised a metamaterial to cloak visible light, but it was just one atom thick, too flimsy to deflect anything more than a single sheet of incoming light. Xiang’s new metamaterials have heft. Last March José Sánchez-Dehesa and Daniel Torrent, physicists at the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain, presented a design that would allow a cloaked submarine to hide from sonar. This technology could also allow an orchestra patron sitting behind a cloaked column to hear music as clearly as one in an unobstructed spot. In September French and British physicists presented a plan for using metamaterials to shield shorelines from the impact of massive waves. Their proposed device [subscription required] would look like a scaled-up acoustic cloak: concentric circles of posts surrounding a hidden object. When a wave hits them, the posts would redirect it around the object without ever breaking the wave. The researchers say that such a device could be used to protect isolated spots in the ocean—like drilling platforms or low-lying islands—or coastal regions vulnerable to tsunamis. But the weirdest extension of the cloaking concept is undoubtedly the “matter” cloak described this past year by Shuang Zhang, a postdoctoral associate in Xiang’s lab. Subatomic particles like electrons travel as waves, and Shuang showed how metamaterials could be used to divert an atomic wave the same way the invisibility cloak re­directs a light wave. If such a device could be scaled up to the human-size world (far from certain, alas), it might be able to steer a bullet around a bulletproof cloak. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire .</p> 5351827 2009-01-10 04:10:28 2009-01-10 04:10:28 open open xiang-2-xia-0002-louis-j-sheehan-esquire-5351827 publish 0 0 post 0 xiang fuel 2.fue.02 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2009/01/10/fuel-2-fue-02-louis-j-sheehan-esquire-5351815/ Sat, 10 Jan 2009 03:56:00 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . Nine billion gallons of corn ethanol were produced in the United States in 2008, twice as much as in 2006. By the end of the year, though, dreams of a sustainable, domestically produced fuel that could help end our addiction to oil had deflated. The puncturing reasons came from all directions. Corn ethanol, aided by a generous subsidy from the federal government, has had the lead in alternative fuels, but recent studies reveal that it is much more costly, both economically and environmentally, than people had thought. Sharply rising grain prices underscored ethanol’s impact on household budgets and the global food supply. And then oil prices tumbled, making ethanol significantly less competitive in the energy marketplace.http://louisjsheehan.blogspot.com Transportation fuel accounts for 28 percent of the country’s energy use. With oil reserves headed inexorably for depletion, shortages and more wild price swings (like last summer’s $147-a-barrel spike) very likely loom ahead. http://louisjsheehan.blogspot.comThe vexing question—surely one of the greatest scientific and technological challenges of our time—is what will take petroleum’s place. There are other biofuels, but they have drawbacks too. The first U.S. facility for converting algae into fuel is expected to open soon in Rio Hondo, Texas, but it will take decades to achieve significant production. Cellulosic ethanol can be derived from inedible crops like switchgrass, but the technology is still largely confined to the laboratory. And many types of biofuel require vast amounts of land, leaving less acreage available for food crops. If biofuels aren’t the answer, what is? Surprisingly, the thing that replaces oil might not be a liquid fuel. It might not, strictly speaking, be a fuel at all. Nor is it some exotic source you have never heard of. It is electricity. And it is already making its way into an auto dealership near you. Troubles With Ethanol The U.S. Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 [pdf] set a target to produce 9 billion gallons of biofuel in 2008. Forecasters predict the past year’s American corn harvest will come in at 12 billion bushels. Meeting the biofuel mandate required 4 billion of those bushels: One-third of the harvest was dedicated to creating corn ethanol, which makes up just 4.5 percent of our gasoline supply. Land-based biofuels also pose serious environmental threats. “The reason we think biofuels can reduce global warming is because we assume the feed crop will take carbon out of the air,” says Tim Searchinger of Princeton, the lead author of a report on biofuels’ environmental impact in a February issue of Science [subscription required]. “That’s true. But we’re forgetting something: The land was already removing carbon.” He found that over 30 years, corn-based ethanol would actually increase emissions by nearly 100 percent, because farmers exploit previously unfarmed land to grow corn for ethanol. In November researchers at the University of Texas at Austin found that producing corn ethanol consumes 28 gallons of water per mile traveled, whereas conventional petroleum uses 0.15 gallon. “In order to grow enough corn, we’ve been pushing to the fringes, into land that needs extensive irrigating,” says Otto Doering, professor of agricultural economics at Purdue University. “The question is, how much longer can we support that push?” The collapse in corn prices in the latter half of 2008 should cool plans to drastically increase production. With corn trading at $3.50 a bushel, just half its June high, farmers will have less incentive to invest in expensive irrigation equipment and crop expansion. Unpromising Options Where does that leave us? The push for biofuels will continue because we have already made a commitment to ethanol. The 2007 Energy Act mandates that biofuel production increase over the next 14 years, culminating in 36 billion gallons in 2022.http://louisjsheehan.blogspot.com “If this were a pure science issue, I think we’d be done with ethanol by now,” says Robert Rapier, a former chemical engineer at ConocoPhillips and the current director of engineering at AccSys Technology. “We’ve created an infrastructure and a cycle that’s very hard to beat.” Yet there is another way to displace oil, one that is attracting interest from academics and industry alike. In July a report from MIT, On the Road in 2035, found that if a market for lightweight hybrid and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles were developed, the United States could cut its gas consumption by 68 billion gallons—about half our current fuel use—within 27 years. Return of the Electric Car The new electric cars reflect huge advances in concept and technology. A plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) utilizes both electric and combustion motors, circumventing the limited storage capacity of even the latest, much improved batteries. The forthcoming Chevrolet Volt is expected to run 40 miles purely on electricity. Beyond that range, its combustion engine will kick in, powering a generator for its onboard battery. If used for short trips and recharged regularly at a household outlet, it would use no gasoline at all. Hybrid vehicles, which do not plug in but also use both gas and electric engines, are bringing the technology mainstream. Last year Toyota sold more than 180,000 of its hybrid Prius, and the company is reportedly working on a PHEV version of the car. Meanwhile, just about every automaker is working on a new generation of electric vehicles, including both hybrids and cars that operate entirely on electricity stored in batteries. Much depends on how quickly electric vehicles infiltrate the market and whether consumers will recharge them during off-peak hours. According to a 2008 study from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the existing grid could support 50 million new PHEV vehicles, assuming that drivers plug in during off-peak hours and allow their batteries to charge at a modest 120-volt/15-amp rate. (In this projection, 50 million light-duty PHEVs would constitute a 25 percent market share by 2030.) However, if the same number of vehicles were all charging at 5 p.m. on a beefier, 240-volt/30-amp circuit, the grid would need 160 additional gigawatts of capacity, requiring the construction of 160 new power plants. “The biggest challenge won’t be building the infrastructure; it will be changing consumer habits and expectations,” says Stan Hadley, coauthor of the report. End of the Road for Liquid Fuels? Something still has to generate all those gigawatts, of course. In the United States that something is often coal: 49 percent of the nation’s electricity is derived from it. Renewables, including wind, solar, and hydro, currently account for barely 8.5 percent. Nonetheless, “electricity opens up so many other sources,” Hadley says. “Nukes, renewables, natural gas; anything that makes power is fair game.” In fact, Searchinger says that the biomass currently tapped for biofuels would be put to better use making electricity. “The process of converting biomass into liquid fuel uses half of the energy in the feedstock. It’s far more efficient to burn the biomass for electricity and then use the electricity in cars.” That is in part because you waste less making the electricity and also because electric engines convert as much as 75 percent of available energy into forward motion, compared with the 20 percent energy conversion rate of gasoline engines. Better still would be electricity from a new generation of emissions-free solar photovoltaic panels. In March the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory demonstrated a thin-film solar photovoltaic cell that is 19.9 percent efficient, two-thirds better than the industry average of 12 percent. Wind power, too, is a promising clean resource. A 2008 U.S. Department of Energy report projects that 20 percent of the nation’s electrical demand can be supplied by wind power by 2030. For now, the benefits of a plug-in and all-electric vehicle fleet reside largely in the realm of theory. But with the Chevrolet Volt scheduled for a 2010 introduction, the PHEV Prius reportedly slated to debut at about the same time, and Nissan’s announcement in May that it will bring a vehicle powered entirely by electricity to the U.S. commercial market in 2010, theory may soon give way to a new motoring reality. “Electrifying the transport sector is a game changer,” says Dave Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research. “We’re not talking about 10 or 15 percent gains in efficiency; we’re talking about exponential gains,” equivalent to—in the Volt’s case—about 100 miles per gallon. If the past year has taught us anything, it is to be wary of outsize claims. But we have also learned that we have the technology to reshape the transportation landscape—and that is a lesson that could resonate for decades to come. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.</p> 5351815 2009-01-10 03:56:00 2009-01-10 03:56:00 open open fuel-2-fue-02-louis-j-sheehan-esquire-5351815 publish 0 0 post 0 fuel

2008

Gravity http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/ http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping Mon, 07 Jul 2008 06:52:48 +0200 http://www.blog.ca en 1.0 http://www.blog.ca http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/ machiavellian Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/12/19/machiavellian-louis-j-sheehan-esquire-5247022/ Fri, 19 Dec 2008 18:12:00 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. One method of torture used in Florentine jails during the glorious days of the Renaissance was the strappado: a prisoner was hoisted into the air by a rope attached to his wrists, which had been tied behind his back, and then suddenly dropped toward the floor as many times as it took to get him to confess. Since the procedure usually dislocated the shoulders, tore the muscles, and rendered one or both arms useless, it is remarkable that Niccolò Machiavelli, after reportedly undergoing six such “drops,” asked for pen and paper and began to write. http://louis2j2sheehan.blogspot.com Machiavelli had nothing to confess. Although his name had been found on an incriminating list, he had played no part in a failed conspiracy to murder the city’s newly restored Medici rulers. (Some said that it was Giuliano de’ Medici who had been targeted, others that it was his brother Cardinal Giovanni.) He had been imprisoned for almost two weeks when, in February, 1513, in a desperate bid for pardon, he wrote a pair of sonnets addressed to the “Magnificent Giuliano,” mixing pathos with audacity and apparently inextinguishable wit. “I have on my legs, Giuliano, a pair of shackles,” he began, and went on to report that the lice on the walls of his cell were as big as butterflies, and that the noise of keys and padlocks boomed around him like Jove’s thunderbolts. Perhaps worried that the poems would not impress, he announced that the muse he had summoned had hit him in the face rather than render her services to a man who was chained up like a lunatic. http://louis3j3sheehan3.blogspot.com To the heir of a family that prided itself on its artistic patronage, he submitted the outraged complaint “This is the way poets are treated!” Machiavelli was not especially known for his poetry, and few would have called him a man with a claim to Medici support. His family was distinguished but far from rich, and had definite republican associations. Two of his father’s cousins had been beheaded for their opposition to the dynasty’s founder, Cosimo de’ Medici, who had effectively brought the historic republic to an end, in 1434, the better to protect the family bank’s enormous fortune. During Machiavelli’s youth, his father seems to have gained him entrée to the scholarly circles around the widely beloved Lorenzo de’ Medici, who had managed to rule Florence for decades without the Florentines’ feeling the brunt or shame of being ruled. But Lorenzo had died in 1492, and, two years later, the Medici were thrown out of the city. Machiavelli was twenty-five; Giuliano de’ Medici, Lorenzo’s youngest son, was fifteen. While Machiavelli had nothing to do with the religious regime of the Dominican preacher Savonarola, who replaced the Medici—he disdained the preacher’s pious “lies” even while admiring his republican reforms—he came into his own once the city turned against its savior and Savonarola (after suffering fourteen drops of the strappado) was hanged. In 1498, when both God and Savonarola’s supporters lost their government posts, Machiavelli found himself with a job. For the next fourteen years, he proudly served an independent city-state that had returned to its republican form, but was now carefully buttressed to withstand Medici forces lurking at its borders, or the threat that other wealthy families might pose. The chief safeguard of the city’s liberty was the Great Council: an administrative body with a membership of more than three thousand citizens, which gave Florence, with a population of some fifty thousand, the most broadly representative government of its time. At the age of twenty-nine, Machiavelli was appointed Second Chancellor, with responsibilities for the city’s correspondence and domestic reports. His immense physical and intellectual energy (he casually boasted of making “Greek, Latin, Hebraic, and Chaldean” references) seems to account for his additional appointment, within a month, as Secretary of the so-called Ten of War, which sent him on remote diplomatic missions, usually in the face of impending crisis. War was never far off. These were years when France, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire, battling over rival claims, sent their formidable armies marching across the weak and continually sparring Italian states; Milan, Genoa, Florence, Venice, Naples, and any number of smaller duchies, marquisates, and republics found it hard to defend themselves, for lack of a united front. To make matters worse, the varied Italian powers relied on mercenary troops that traded sides more easily than today’s big-league ballplayers, signing a new contract as soon as a better offer came along. Machiavelli thrived on the urgency and the uproar, filling his saddlebags with books and galloping off to argue the Florentine case, then report back on what he had found. In one report, he described his duties as weighing what the ruler’s “intentions are, what he really wants, which way his mind is turning, and what might make him move ahead or draw back”; he wrote of the need “to conjecture the future through negotiations and incidents.” All in all, it seems that he was expected to bring the gifts of a psychologist to the task of a prophet. He did it very well. Although his lack of wealth kept him from achieving the rank of ambassador—officially a mere envoy, he styled himself, rather grandly, the Florentine Secretary—his unblinking judgments made him the right-hand man of the republic’s chief official, Piero Soderini. He was set to work at the courts of King Louis XII of France, Pope Julius II, and the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian, all the while studying the differing forms of government and temperament offered to his view. Like most psychologists, Machiavelli was insatiably curious about the human mind. And no one he met impressed him more than Cesare Borgia, the son of the Spanish Pope Alexander VI, who was at the height of his power when, in 1502, he received Machiavelli in the ducal palace of Urbino—by candlelight, as legend has it, dressed all in black, already a figure of self-consciously theatrical menace. Borgia had recently conquered Urbino, along with a large swath of central Italy, by means of daring, speed, and treachery. (Machiavelli especially admired a maneuver in which Borgia had asked the Duke of Urbino to lend him his artillery to help take a nearby town, then turned on the undefended duchy and took it instead.) Machiavelli could not help but contrast Borgia’s stunning effectiveness with the frustratingly slow and prudent Florentine republic, which displayed the deficiencies as well as the virtues of the need for popular consensus, and he wrote excitedly to his bosses in the Palazzo della Signoria of the lessons offered by this majestic enemy. In the ruthless young warrior he saw a potential hero: a leader strong enough to expel the foreign armies and transform Italy from a poetic entity into a real one. http://louis4j4sheehan4.blogspot.com The most practical lesson that the dazzled envoy took from Borgia was the deployment of a citizen army. At one point in his campaigns, after his hired mercenaries had conspired against him, Borgia had been forced to draft peasants from his conquered territories. Machiavelli recognized the advantages of such a system, which were made particularly clear when Florence’s mercenary army, warring against Pisa, ignominiously turned and fled once the fighting got too rough. Who, after all, was willing to die for a handful of florins (particularly the meagre handful paid by the republic)? On the other hand, who was not willing to die for one’s country? In 1505, Machiavelli argued the case for a Florentine citizen militia, and on a brisk February day in 1506 several hundred Tuscan farmers paraded through the Piazza della Signoria, snappily dressed in red-and-white trousers and white caps. Despite the commedia-dell’arte air, just three years later Machiavelli led a thousand citizen troops in the latest of fifteen years of attacks on Pisa, and—to general astonishment—the Florentines won. Machiavelli’s military reputation remained sterling until 1512, when the militia, defending the neighboring town of Prato from Spanish troops, broke ranks and ran as shamelessly as the most craven mercenaries. Worse, the defeat left Florence on the losing side of a wider battle between France and the allied forces of Spain and Pope Julius II. With Florence vulnerable, a long-resentful pro-Medici faction seized its chance, and the republican government was overthrown. And so it happened that in September, 1512, after an absence of eighteen years, the Medici rode back into the city. Within days, Machiavelli’s militia and the Great Council were dismissed. Although Machiavelli soon lost his position as Secretary, he seems to have believed that he maintained some authority, writing a formal plea on behalf of Piero Soderini, whom he had helped to escape on the eve of the Medici return. This exceptional document—published for the first time in English, as “A Caution to the Medici,” in “The Essential Writings of Machiavelli” (edited and translated by Peter Constantine; Modern Library; $17.95)—presents an argument against the Medici faction’s continued blackening of Soderini’s name. Machiavelli offers a political rationale (“The Medici government would only weaken itself by attacking a man who is in exile and cannot harm it”) for what seems an attempt to defend a friend and, in his name, the Florentine people. Of course, any illusions of influence were dispelled a few months later, in February, 1513, by jail and the strappado. Whether Giuliano de’ Medici ever read the sonnets that Machiavelli dedicated to him is a matter of dispute, but his intervention was not ultimately required. After a month behind bars, Machiavelli was released, thanks to an amnesty granted upon Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici’s election to the papacy as Leo X, the first Medici pope. (“God has granted us the papacy,” he reportedly told Giuliano. “Let us enjoy it.”) For four days, Florence was alight with pride and the heady prospect of favors from the overflowing papal coffers: fireworks, bonfires, pealing bells, and cannonades all greeted the weary former Secretary as he made his way home. Even now, Machiavelli hoped that “these new masters of ours” would find his services of use. He was experienced, he was (at forty-three) extremely vigorous, and during his many years of civil service he had shown himself a trustworthy man. “My poverty is evidence of my fidelity and virtue,” he confided to a friend. And he desperately needed a job. That spring, still unemployed, he retreated from the city to live with his wife and children on the family farm, near San Casciano, in taunting view of the tower of the Palazzo della Signoria. It was a sprawling and ramshackle place, and he was sadly out of his element, catching birds and playing cards; his worldly friends sent mocking regards to the chickens. But in the evening, approaching his study, he stripped off his muddy clothes and put on his ambassadorial attire. “Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients,” he wrote, in one of the most famous letters of the Renaissance, “where I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives for their actions, and they, out of their human kindness, answer me.” Livy, Cicero, Virgil, Tacitus: he wrote their answers down and, adding observations from the history he had witnessed, toward the end of 1513 he completed a little book about statecraft—a book of strictly practical matters, dealing with armies and fortresses, with ways of holding on to power—that he resolved would demonstrate his usefulness once and for all to Giuliano, since it discussed people and their actions “as they are in real truth, rather than as they are imagined.” Never before or since has a writer so clearly proved that the truth is a dangerous thing. “The Prince,” Machiavelli’s how-to guide for sovereigns, turned out to be “a scandal that Western political thought and practice has been gazing at in horror and in fascination since its first publication,” to quote from Albert Russell Ascoli’s introduction to Peter Constantine’s new translation (Modern Library; $8; also included in “The Essential Writings of Machiavelli”). Circulated in manuscript for years, the book was not published until 1532—nearly five years after Machiavelli’s death—and received its first significant critique within the decade, from an English cardinal who pronounced the author “an enemy of the human race.” Machiavelli stood accused of having inspired Henry VIII to defy papal authority and seize ecclesiastical power for the crown. Some thirty years later, in France, the book was blamed for inciting Queen Catherine de’ Medici to order the massacre of two thousand rebel Protestants. (There seems to have been little besides her family connection to warrant the Machiavellian association.) His notoriety grew, less through knowledge of the offending book than through the many lurid and often skewed attacks it prompted, with titles on the order of “Stratagems of Satan.” Wherever a sovereign usurped power from the church or the nobility, whenever ostentatious deceit or murderous force was used, Machiavelli was spied in the shadows, scribbling at his desk amid the olive groves, his quill dipped in a poison so potent that it threatened the power structures of Europe. What caused the furor? Here, out of context and placed end to end (a method not unfamiliar to his attackers), are some of Machiavelli’s most salient and satanic points: “A prince, particularly a new prince, cannot afford to cultivate attributes for which men are considered good. In order to maintain the state, a prince will often be compelled to work against what is merciful, loyal, humane, upright, and scrupulous”; “A wise ruler cannot and should not keep his word when it would be to his disadvantage”; “Men must be either flattered or eliminated, because a man will readily avenge a slight grievance, but not one that is truly severe”; “A man is quicker to forget the death of his father than the loss of his patrimony.” And, the distilled spirit of this dark brew: “How one lives and how one ought to live are so far apart that he who spurns what is actually done for what ought to be done will achieve ruin rather than his own preservation.” To underscore how shocking such notions were, they should be compared with other examples from the genre in which Machiavelli was consciously working: the “Mirrors of Princes,” a type of professional primer offered by advisers to young or recently elevated monarchs, meant to shape their judgment and, with it, the future of the state. A philosopher could not hope for a more direct influence on the fate of mankind than by writing such a book; or, practically speaking, for a better advertisement for a royal job. Erasmus, whose “Education of a Christian Prince” was written two years after Machiavelli’s work—he presented his treatise first to Charles of Aragon and, after it failed to elicit the desired financial result, to Henry VIII—spun his pious counsel around the central thesis “What must be implanted deeply and before all else in the mind of the prince is the best possible understanding of Christ.” Machiavelli, on the other hand, proposed the best possible understanding of the methods of Cesare Borgia. There is a context, however, that, if not ameliorating, is richly complicating and easily overlooked in the light of Machiavelli’s aphoristic skill. One doesn’t wish to fall back on the excuse that this is the way that rulers (or other people) often behave, although it is true that Machiavelli no more invented political evil by describing it than Kinsey invented sex. Like all the celebrated artists of his time and place—and statecraft was one of the Renaissance arts—Machiavelli was in thrall to ancient pagan models. But there is a crucial difference: a painter could situate a Madonna within a classical portico without disturbing the figure’s Christian meaning. Works that delve beneath the surface of classical forms to get at classical thinking—works of literature, philosophy, politics—require a recognition, at least, of the conflict between pagan and Christian ideals: strength versus humility, earthly life versus the hereafter, the hero versus the saint. http://louis5j5sheehan.blogspot.com For Machiavelli, the choice was not difficult. The Roman republic was for him the undisputed golden age; even before writing “The Prince,” he had begun a commentary on Livy’s “History of Rome,” closely analyzing the Roman system of liberty and leaving no doubt that he was a republican at heart. (“It is not the particular good but the common good that makes cities great. And without doubt this common good is observed nowhere but in a republic.”) But Christian piety had sapped the strength needed to bring this heroic form of government back to life. The great republic of his own era had failed because the men entrusted with its liberties did not know how to fight for them. He had seen his friend Soderini forfeit Florence by refusing to limit the freedoms ultimately employed against him by his enemies; that is, by trusting that goodness and decency could triumph over the implacable vices and envious designs of men. http://louis5j5sheehan5.blogspot.com This was not Borgia’s defect. Yet he was not a monster, if one considered the question of morals honestly, in terms of the good actually accomplished rather than the reputation created for oneself. Unafraid of being known for cruelty, Borgia had deposed a number of petty rulers who were so weak that robbery and murder had been rampant in their lands, until—“with a few exemplary executions”—he established peace and order. Machiavelli asserts that Borgia had thus proved more genuinely merciful than the Florentines, who, guarding their reputation, had allowed the town of Pistoia to be destroyed by factional fighting rather than intervene with their own arms. “A prince, therefore, must not fear being reproached for cruelty,” he concludes, issuing one of the memorably black-hearted maxims that do not mean exactly what they say. (On the question of murdering a few to save a greater number, Thomas More took a similar position in “Utopia,” which followed “The Prince” by just three years and, giving its name to the very notion of political idealism, has stood in moral counterpoint ever since.) For Machiavelli, cruel and unusual measures were to be used only out of necessity, to be ended quickly, and to be converted into benefits (safety, security, wealth) for the prince’s subjects. Rulers who perpetrated needless or excessive cruelties—such as King Ferdinand of Spain, who had robbed his country’s Christianized Jews and Moors, and then expelled them—are rebuked, no matter what their achievements may have been. “These means can lead to power,” Machiavelli confirms, and then departs from his famous counsel of Realpolitik to add, “but not glory.” So is he in fact a moralist? Or, heaven forbid, a saint? Machiavelli was a very precise writer, continually reworking his manuscripts to achieve a style that is as clear as daylight. Writing in his native Tuscan-inflected Italian (rather than in the scholarly Latin commonly used for significant works), he relied on simple words and expressions, proud of his freedom from the “unnecessary artifice with which so many writers gild their work.” One of the conundrums that Machiavelli poses for his readers is that this verbal clarity lends itself to such uncertain meaning. Peter Constantine, who has won many awards for his staggeringly multilingual work in translating Chekhov, Thomas Mann, Voltaire, and Sophocles (among others), has translated “The Prince” with the stated intention of winning its author the status of “a major stylist, a writer of beautiful prose.” True, “major stylist” is rarely one’s first thought when Machiavelli comes up in conversation. And when a book has been translated as often as “The Prince”—there are more than half a dozen English translations currently in print—some new claim is expected. Yet, on careful comparison, the most stylistically elegant version of “The Prince” remains George Bull’s nearly fifty-year-old translation, a taut and almost Hemingwayesque account of Machiavelli’s strong republican prose. (Sample evidence: Constantine renders one of Machiavelli’s famous sentences, “Since a prince must know how to use the nature of the beast to his advantage, he must emulate both the fox and the lion, because a lion cannot defy a snare, while a fox cannot defy a pack of wolves.” Defy a snare? Bull’s less wordy version is smoother English and also better mimics the punch of Machiavelli’s Italian: “So, as a prince is forced to know how to act like a beast, he must learn from the fox and the lion; because the lion is defenceless against traps and a fox is defenceless against wolves.”) A translator’s work is meant to be transparent, providing access to a text without agenda or interpretation. But the choice even of a word can amplify a thought in a significant way. Constantine may not provide the most nimbly literary Machiavelli, but he pushes us in the right political direction when, early in “The Prince,” he offers: “Even with the most powerful army, if you want to invade a state, you need the support of the people.” No other version of this line is quite as democratically ringing, not even Machiavelli’s, which states that the success of an invasion depends on the favore de’ provinciali, a phrase rendered by Bull as “the goodwill of the inhabitants” and by other translators in more or less the same comparatively pedestrian way. The support of the people: this idea or a near variant—“el popolo amico,” “la benivolenzia populare”—occurs throughout Machiavelli’s little book and slowly gathers weight as the one possession that the prince cannot afford to be without. Constantine is right to underscore it. The following observations—which could never pass as “Machiavellian”—should be viewed against the author’s more famously glittering advice: “A prince must have the people on his side, otherwise he will not have support in adverse times”; “A prince need not worry unduly about conspiracies when the people are well disposed toward him. But if they are his enemies and hate him, he must fear everything and everybody.” And the forthright climax of this theme: “The best fortress for the prince is to be loved by his people.” http://louisjjjsheehan.blogspot.com Presented as no more than another component of the book’s message of self-serving Realpolitik, Machiavelli’s steady drumming of the lesson that the prince must treat his subjects well has an almost subliminal force. Whether the prince turns out to be a lion or a fox, “The Prince” sets a trap to render him, in relation to his people, a lamb. Machiavelli is often credited with the phrase “The end justifies the means.” Although he never used exactly these words, and the notion appears to date from Greek tragedy, the implied moral relativism is essential to his work. Insofar as “The Prince” was intended as a means to an end, however, it was a failure: there is no evidence that Giuliano de’ Medici ever read it, and the Florentine successor to whom Machiavelli eventually dedicated the book, Giuliano’s despotic nephew Lorenzo, was said to have preferred the gift of a pair of hounds. In any case, neither prince saw fit to offer the author a job. Within the plan of the book itself, the final chapter envisions an end so important—the unification of the Italian states—that it justifies not only whatever means must be used to attain it but whatever language must be used to describe it. The prose suddenly becomes effusive, lyrical, and determinedly rousing: the verbal equivalent of pennants flying, trumpets sounding. For Machiavelli is no longer justifying or advising but actively urging the prince toward a goal, and it is a goal much larger than personal power. “Italy, after so many years, must welcome its liberator,” he declares. “The love with which these lands that have suffered a flood of foreign armies will receive him will be boundless, as will be their thirst for vengeance, iron loyalty, their devotion and tears. All doors will be flung open. What populace would not embrace such a leader?” Judged as a means to this end, too, “The Prince” was a failure: it was three hundred and fifty years before Machiavelli’s nationalist hopes prevailed. Still, he understood that many of his ideas, being so radically new, would meet resistance. Living in the age of great explorers—his assistant in the Florentine Chancery was Agostino Vespucci, cousin of Amerigo—Machiavelli saw himself as one of their company, with a mission “no less dangerous” than seeking “unknown seas and continents.” To the culture at large, the danger was real. “The Prince” offered the first major secular shock to the Christianized state in which we still live. Long before Darwin, Machiavelli showed us a credible world without Heaven or Hell, a world of “is” rather than “should be,” in which men were coolly viewed as related to beasts and earthly government was the only hope of bettering our natural plight. Although his ideas have drawn sporadic support throughout history—among seventeenth-century English anti-monarchists, among nineteenth-century German nationalists—it was not until the present age that scholars began to separate the man from his cursed reputation. Roberto Ridolfi’s landmark biography, of 1954, made a passionate case for its subject’s Italian warmth of spirit. Leo Strauss, a few years later, claimed that Machiavelli intended his most outrageous statements merely to startle and amuse. And, in full redemption, Sebastian de Grazia’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Machiavelli in Hell,” of 1989, argued for the quondam devil’s stature as a profoundly Christian thinker. There is today an entire school of political philosophers who see Machiavelli as an intellectual freedom fighter, a transmitter of models of liberty from the ancient to the modern world. Yet what is most astonishing about our age is not the experts’ desire to correct our view of a maligned historical figure but what we have made of that figure in his most titillatingly debased form. “The Mafia Manager: A Guide to the Corporate Machiavelli”; “The Princessa: Machiavelli for Women”; and the deliciously titled “What Would Machiavelli Do? The Ends Justify the Meanness” represent just a fraction of a contemporary, best-selling literary genre. Machiavelli may not have been, in fact, a Machiavellian. But in American business and social circles he has come to stand for the principle that winning—no matter how—is all. And for this alone, for the first time in history, he is a cultural hero. “After everything was lost” is the way that Machiavelli referred to the years after he emerged from prison, failed to regain his job, and languished outside the halls of power. But even while he lamented his fate, and continued to angle for Medici favor, he went on writing, almost feverishly, and in a variety of forms. He completed his “Discourses on the First Decade of Livy,” a scholarly ode to the republican ideal—John Adams loved this book—which he seems to have read aloud to friends in the increasingly anti-Medici circle that gathered in the gardens of the Rucellai palace. He devoted himself to poetry, working on classical themes in Dantesque terza rima, and he discovered a gift for the theatre. Most striking, in the midst of these dark years, he turned to comedy. There was the one about the devil who was afraid of his wife; the one he adapted from the Roman playwright Terence; and then there was “The Mandrake,” a satiric, bawdy, often scatological farce involving the timeless trio of aspiring lover, stupid husband, and venal priest, all conspiring to get a Renaissance Sophia Loren into bed. It was the greatest hit of Machiavelli’s career. http://louisjjjsheehan.blogspot.com Although the date of composition is uncertain—the observation that “here in Florence, if you’re not in with the ruling party . . . you can’t even get a dog to bark at you” describes a long-term quandary—we know that the play was first put on in 1520, in a production so successful that Pope Leo X ordered a command performance at the papal court later that year. And so, seven years after everything was lost, and thanks to the Pope’s delight in a show that happily trafficked in adultery and the shifty morals of the clergy—this in the same year that Leo X excommunicated Martin Luther—Machiavelli at last came into Medici favor, and everything was more or less regained. To succeed in life a man must be adaptable. This is a prime lesson of “The Prince,” and Machiavelli appears to have been determined to live by it. A republican during the republic, a royal servant when princes rule: “He who conforms his course of action to the quality of the times will fare well.” From Leo X and his cousin Giulio de’ Medici—the Archbishop of Florence and its de-facto ruler since the death of the despised Lorenzo—Machiavelli now received a commission to write an official “History of Florence,” an assignment that placed him in distinguished literary company, and carried the suggestion of other plum tasks to come. But a corollary, if contradictory, lesson of “The Prince” is that, try as he might, “man cannot deviate from that to which nature inclines him.” In composing his Medici-commissioned history, Machiavelli agonized over how to present the Medici, and the result is anything but the work of a courtier. Recounting how the family’s desire to “wield exclusive power” had led it to crush all political opposition, leaving other parties with no alternative except plots and murderous conspiracies, he concluded bluntly that under the Medici regime “liberty was unknown in Florence.” In the matter of conspiracies, in 1522 a plot to murder Giulio de’ Medici was found to have originated among the learned circle of the Rucellai palace gardens. The circle was disbanded; Machiavelli’s closest friends were exiled or beheaded. He, however—in circumstances very different from the Medici conspiracy a decade earlier—was neither arrested nor implicated. Scholars have agreed with the Florentine authorities that Machiavelli knew nothing of the plot; he was too historically suspect a figure for his friends to risk including. But Ross King, in his brief biography “Machiavelli: Philosopher of Power,” points out how curiously often Machiavelli writes about political conspiracy, and the overt sympathy with which he handles the conspirators; in the portion of the “History” that Machiavelli was composing in 1522, he treats the fifteenth-century ringleader of a plot against the Sforza tyrant of Milan with the respect due to a Roman republican hero. It is difficult not to wonder, at least, about Machiavelli’s innocence in these events. Of course, in 1522 there was not a scrap of evidence against him. But then it may have been the incriminating scrap of 1513 that made him think so hard about the rules by which conspirators must proceed: confide in absolutely no one except when absolutely necessary, try to leave no one alive who might be able to take revenge, and, above all, never put anything in writing. Even military opportunities returned, when, in 1523, Giulio de’ Medici succeeded to the papacy as Clement VII. During a time when the pressure of foreign claims was mounting, Machiavelli was entrusted with maintaining Florence’s fortifications. He did his job enthusiastically—even ecstatically—and well. When, in the spring of 1527, the Emperor’s armies thundered south through Italy, they bypassed the terrified city, judging the walls and forts too difficult to breach. Instead, the angry, starving, part-Spanish, part-Lutheran, barely controllable army marched directly on to Rome, where soldiers poured through the walls and viciously sacked the city—robbing, raping, murdering, and destroying for days on end. Machiavelli himself helped Clement to escape. But he had done even more for his beloved Florence than he knew, and less for himself. In the ensuing chaos, the Medici regime in Florence was overthrown; the republic was restored; the Great Council was reinstated. This was everything that Machiavelli had hoped for even when he appeared to be on the other side. He was seen not as brilliantly adaptable, however, but simply as on the other side. As a Medici supporter, he found himself once again unemployed, subject to the same sort of political suspicions as when the Medici had first returned. But, at fifty-eight, he no longer had the resources to start over. He developed mysterious stomach ailments and took to his bed, and within weeks of the republic’s restoration Machiavelli died, attended by his loving children, his loyal friends, and a priest. Odd, that an expert at winning should have lost so much, and then lost it all again. In however perverse a way, Machiavelli was no less a martyr to his convictions than Thomas More, who was beheaded—and eventually canonized—for his refusal to condone the royal power grab that Henry VIII purportedly learned from “The Prince.” Of course, More had the courage to stand in opposition to the moral direction of his times. Machiavelli was his times: he gave permanent form and force to its political habits and unspoken principles. Although it is often said that modern politics begins with Machiavelli, most politicians still run and hide at the mention of his name. In 1972, Henry Kissinger, the most arguably “Machiavellian” counsellor of princes this country has ever seen, recoiled at the insinuation that he had learned anything from the Florentine Secretary, stating, “There is very little of Machiavelli’s one can use in the contemporary world.” (Kissinger’s only competitor in this area, Karl Rove, is the subject of a new biography titled “Machiavelli’s Shadow.”) Yet we continue to flounder in the break between politics and ethics that Machiavelli made impossible to ignore: private life and public life; personal morality and Realpolitik. We insist that our leaders convince us that they are exemplary and (increasingly) God-fearing human beings, who are nevertheless able to protect us from enemies not so constrained. How is this to be done? Do we really want to know? Most important, as we emerge from the century that gave Utopia a bad name—in which Hitler and Stalin and other genocidal princes believed they were building superior worlds, in which the means was annihilation and the end an illusion—we are still arguing bitterly over the question of whether the end justifies the means. Are there any acts that one’s sense of honor (or conscience, or ability to sleep at night) forbid one to commit—as an individual, as a nation—no matter what the promised end? Machiavelli did not question the use of torture for political purposes, even after he had been its victim. “When the very safety of the country depends upon the resolution to be taken,” he wrote in the “Discourses,” “no considerations of justice or injustice, humanity or cruelty, not of glory or of infamy, should be allowed to prevail.” http://louisjjjsheehan.blogspot.com This has doubtless been the tacit position of many governments throughout history; it is openly the position of a large segment of our government now, with Vice-President Cheney warning of the need for going to “the dark side” in dealing with terrorist suspects, and Attorney General Mukasey undecided about which methods of “enhanced” interrogation constitute torture. There is no question, however, about the method used on Machiavelli, the strappado—also known today as “Palestinian hanging”—which was responsible for the death of an Iraqi detainee in C.I.A. custody at Abu Ghraib in 2003: the prisoner was suspended by his arms, which had been shackled behind his back, and died of asphyxiation. Private morality may be presumed to prevail again when the country is strong and secure, although Machiavelli, unlike those who offer such consolation, admitted that the nature of mankind makes it unlikely that there ever will be such a time. “I love my country more than my own soul,” Machiavelli wrote, yet a full assessment of his work makes that decision far from clear. Then, as now, it is a terrible choice. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. </p> 5247022 2008-12-19 18:12:00 2008-12-19 18:12:00 open open machiavellian-louis-j-sheehan-esquire-5247022 publish 0 0 post 0 esquire machiavellian louis j. sheehan Waste 7.was.001002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/12/18/waste-7-was-001002-louis-j-sheehan-esquire-5240109/ Thu, 18 Dec 2008 08:39:59 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure. The history, the first official account of its kind, is circulating in draft form here and in Washington among a tight circle of technical reviewers, policy experts and senior officials. It also concludes that when the reconstruction began to lag — particularly in the critical area of rebuilding the Iraqi police and army — the Pentagon simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up the failures. In one passage, for example, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is quoted as saying that in the months after the 2003 invasion, the Defense Department “kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces — the number would jump 20,000 a week! ‘We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.’ ” Mr. Powell’s assertion that the Pentagon inflated the number of competent Iraqi security forces is backed up by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former commander of ground troops in Iraq, and L. Paul Bremer III, the top civilian administrator until an Iraqi government took over in June 2004. Among the overarching conclusions of the history is that five years after embarking on its largest foreign reconstruction project since the Marshall Plan in Europe after World War II, the United States government has in place neither the policies and technical capacity nor the organizational structure that would be needed to undertake such a program on anything approaching this scale. The bitterest message of all for the reconstruction program may be the way the history ends. The hard figures on basic services and industrial production compiled for the report reveal that for all the money spent and promises made, the rebuilding effort never did much more than restore what was destroyed during the invasion and the convulsive looting that followed. By mid-2008, the history says, $117 billion had been spent on the reconstruction of Iraq, including some $50 billion in United States taxpayer money. The history contains a catalog of revelations that show the chaotic and often poisonous atmosphere prevailing in the reconstruction effort.http://louis6j6sheehan6esquire.wordpress.com ¶When the Office of Management and Budget balked at the American occupation authority’s abrupt request for about $20 billion in new reconstruction money in August 2003, a veteran Republican lobbyist working for the authority made a bluntly partisan appeal to Joshua B. Bolten, then the O.M.B. director and now the White House chief of staff. “To delay getting our funds would be a political disaster for the President,” wrote the lobbyist, Tom C. Korologos. “His election will hang for a large part on show of progress in Iraq and without the funding this year, progress will grind to a halt.” With administration backing, Congress allocated the money later that year. ¶In an illustration of the hasty and haphazard planning, a civilian official at the United States Agency for International Development was at one point given four hours to determine how many miles of Iraqi roads would need to be reopened and repaired. The official searched through the agency’s reference library, and his estimate went directly into a master plan. Whatever the quality of the agency’s plan, it eventually began running what amounted to a parallel reconstruction effort in the provinces that had little relation with the rest of the American effort. ¶Money for many of the local construction projects still under way is divided up by a spoils system controlled by neighborhood politicians and tribal chiefs. “Our district council chairman has become the Tony Soprano of Rasheed, in terms of controlling resources,” said an American Embassy official working in a dangerous Baghdad neighborhood. “ ‘You will use my contractor or the work will not get done.’ ” A Cautionary Tale The United States could soon have reason to consult this cautionary tale of deception, waste and poor planning, as troop levels and reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan are likely to be stepped up under the new administration. The incoming Obama administration’s rebuilding experts are expected to focus on smaller-scale projects and emphasize political and economic reform. Still, such programs do not address one of the history’s main contentions: that the reconstruction effort has failed because no single agency in the United States government has responsibility for the job. Five years after the invasion of Iraq, the history concludes, “the government as a whole has never developed a legislatively sanctioned doctrine or framework for planning, preparing and executing contingency operations in which diplomacy, development and military action all figure.” Titled “Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience,” the new history was compiled by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, led by Stuart W. Bowen Jr., a Republican lawyer who regularly travels to Iraq and has a staff of engineers and auditors based here. Copies of several drafts of the history were provided to reporters at The New York Times and ProPublica by two people outside the inspector general’s office who have read the draft, but are not authorized to comment publicly. Mr. Bowen’s deputy, Ginger Cruz, declined to comment for publication on the substance of the history. But she said it would be presented on Feb. 2 at the first hearing of the Commission on Wartime Contracting, which was created this year as a result of legislation sponsored by Senators Jim Webb of Virginia and Claire McCaskill of Missouri, both Democrats. The manuscript is based on approximately 500 new interviews, as well as more than 600 audits, inspections and investigations on which Mr. Bowen’s office has reported over the years. Laid out for the first time in a connected history, the material forms the basis for broad judgments on the rebuilding program. In the preface, Mr. Bowen gives a searing critique of what he calls the “blinkered and disjointed prewar planning for Iraq’s reconstruction” and the botched expansion of the program from a modest initiative to improve Iraqi services to a multibillion-dollar enterprise. Mr. Bowen also swipes at the endless revisions and reversals of the program, which at various times gyrated from a focus on giant construction projects led by large Western contractors to modest community-based initiatives carried out by local Iraqis. While Mr. Bowen concedes that deteriorating security had a hand in spoiling the program’s hopes, he suggests, as he has in the past, that the program did not need much outside help to do itself in. Despite years of studying the program, Mr. Bowen writes that he still has not found a good answer to the question of why the program was even pursued as soaring violence made it untenable. “Others will have to provide that answer,” Mr. Bowen writes. “But beyond the security issue stands another compelling and unavoidable answer: the U.S. government was not adequately prepared to carry out the reconstruction mission it took on in mid-2003,” he concludes. The history cites some projects as successes. The review praises community outreach efforts by the Agency for International Development, the Treasury Department’s plan to stabilize the Iraqi dinar after the invasion and a joint effort by the Departments of State and Defense to create local rebuilding teams. But the portrait that emerges over all is one of a program’s officials operating by the seat of their pants in the middle of a critical enterprise abroad, where the reconstruction was supposed to convince the Iraqi citizenry of American good will and support the new democracy with lights that turned on and taps that flowed with clean water. Mostly, it is a portrait of a program that seemed to grow exponentially as even those involved from the inception of the effort watched in surprise. Early Miscalculations On the eve of the invasion, as it began to dawn on a few officials that the price for rebuilding Iraq would be vastly greater than they had been told, the degree of miscalculation was illustrated in an encounter between Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, and Jay Garner, a retired lieutenant general who had hastily been named the chief of what would be a short-lived civilian authority called the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. The history records how Mr. Garner presented Mr. Rumsfeld with several rebuilding plans, including one that would include projects across Iraq. “What do you think that’ll cost?” Mr. Rumsfeld asked of the more expansive plan. http://louis6j6sheehan6esquire.wordpress.com “I think it’s going to cost billions of dollars,” Mr. Garner said. “My friend,” Mr. Rumsfeld replied, “if you think we’re going to spend a billion dollars of our money over there, you are sadly mistaken.” In a way he never anticipated, Mr. Rumsfeld turned out to be correct: before that year was out, the United States had appropriated more than $20 billion for the reconstruction, which would indeed involve projects across the entire country. Mr. Rumsfeld declined to comment on the history, but a spokesman, Keith Urbahn, said that quotes attributed to Mr. Rumsfeld in the document “appear to be accurate.” Mr. Powell also declined to comment. The secondary effects of the invasion and its aftermath were among the most important factors that radically changed the outlook. Tables in the history show that measures of things like the national production of electricity and oil, public access to potable water, mobile and landline telephone service and the presence of Iraqi security forces all plummeted by at least 70 percent, and in some cases all the way to zero, in the weeks after the invasion. Subsequent tables in the history give a fast-forward view of what happened as the avalanche of money tumbled into Iraq over the next five years. Dashed Expectations By the time a sovereign Iraqi government took over from the Americans in June 2004, none of those services — with a single exception, mobile phones — had returned to prewar levels. http://louis6j6sheehan6esquire.wordpress.com And by the time of the security improvements in 2007 and 2008, electricity output had, at best, a precarious 10 percent lead on its levels under Saddam Hussein; oil production was still below prewar levels; and access to potable water had increased by about 30 percent, although with Iraq’s ruined piping system it was unclear how much reached people’s homes uncontaminated. Whether the rebuilding effort could have succeeded in a less violent setting will never be known. In April 2004, thousands of the Iraqi security forces that had been oversold by the Pentagon were overrun, abruptly mutinied or simply abandoned their posts as the insurgency broke out, sending Iraq down a violent path from which it has never completely recovered. At the end of his narrative, Mr. Bowen chooses a line from “Great Expectations” by Dickens as the epitaph of the American-led attempt to rebuild Iraq: “We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as people could make up their minds to give us. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire </p> 5240109 2008-12-18 08:39:59 2008-12-18 08:39:59 open open waste-7-was-001002-louis-j-sheehan-esquire-5240109 publish 0 0 post 0 iraq rakowski 8.rak.0 Louis J. Sheehan,Esquire http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/12/16/rakowski-8-rak-0-louis-j-sheehan-esquire-5228838/ Tue, 16 Dec 2008 01:28:31 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>Louis J. Sheehan,Esquire. CLUNKY cogs in the propaganda machine, communist journalists in eastern Europe were a dreary and dutiful lot. Mieczyslaw Rakowski was different. Polityka, the magazine he edited for 24 years, was the most readable official publication in the Soviet block: cogent, insightful, sometimes irreverent. http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.wordpress.com To foreigners reporting on the long slow death of the Soviet empire, Mr Rakowski was still more interesting in person, giving candid and waspish assessments of the communist regime’s political, economic and personal shortcomings. He was amusing and friendly company, at a time when congeniality was as scarce in the east as toilet paper or matches. Unlike most senior communists, he was not pompous, bullying or hidebound: you could easily believe that he was just another human being, not a defender of a system based on lies and mass murder. Mr Rakowski did a less impressive job, however, dealing with the people who would eventually run Poland. He habitually sneered at Lech Walesa, the leader of the Solidarity trade union, calling him “Dr Walesa” in a dig at the shipyard electrician’s lack of formal education: a big deal in intellectually snobbish Poland. http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.wordpress.com The Gdansk accords of 1980 gave Poland a few precious months of free public life, but broke down because of Solidarity’s demand for freedom to decide on Poland’s future, and not just to discuss it. Mr Rakowski, by then deputy prime minister and ostensibly representing the interests of the proletariat, memorably lost his temper with the workers’ representatives: “You’d be herding cows if it wasn’t for this system”—pause—“and so would I.” In that sense Mr Rakowski symbolised Poland’s post-war story. A peasant’s son and a teenage lathe operator, he was talent-spotted by a communist regime which, installed by Soviet military force, was hungry for brain power. He rose through the system in the 1950s, at a time when Poland’s rulers struggled for wiggle-room inside the Soviet block and showed something of a human face at home. For many, the modernisation and industrialisation the regime brought were welcome, regardless of the political label attached to them. Fried snowballs Mr Rakowski was usually seen as an arch-trimmer, a prime example of the collaboration forced on Poland by its history. His ability to blow with the wind was best described in a scalding article (published abroad) called “The hairstyles of Mieczyslaw Rakowski”, which noted how the tousled blond locks of the youthful idealist gave way to the grizzled grey of the apparatchik. To Norman Davies, a British historian, the “crumpled faces” of Mr Rakowski and his like revealed their story: “pliable Greeks in a world ruled by cruel Roman savages, whom they serve with infinite regret and infinite agility.” But it was not all trimming. In the 1960s Mr Rakowski publicly opposed the death penalty, then a heretical and dangerous stance. His finest hour came in 1968, when a quarrel between two factions in the communist party bubbled over into a public anti-Semitic (ostensibly “anti-Zionist”) frenzy. Mr Rakowski stood firm and refused to sack any Jews. Asked to reprint a pre-war article critical of Jews, he refused, saying their ashes were “scattered in the fields around Auschwitz”. Many Poles thought their Nazi and Soviet tormentors were two sides of the same coin; it was remarkable for a senior communist to agree in public, even in part. But unlike some, he did not leave the party, either then or after martial law was imposed in 1981. With scores killed and thousands jailed, Mr Rakowski became the right-hand man of the country’s new military leader, General Wojciech Jaruzelskihttp://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.wordpress.com. He was ambiguous about whether he still truly believed in a democratic form of communism; Leszek Kolakowski, the exiled philosopher, rightly described that as “fried snowballs”. Mr Rakowski preferred to argue that communism protected Poland from the Soviet Union, whereas full-scale opposition would be futile. The anti-communist fighters had died in the forests; the pre-war government, in exile in London, was a husk; the Catholic church was a reactionary force. If history had placed Poland in the communist camp, then hope lay only in being its happiest barracks. Mr Rakowski’s great ambition was to lead the communist party. He eventually became first secretary (as the job was called), but he was last as well as first, acting as the party’s undertaker in 1989 after the round-table talks paved the way for freedom and true independence. Usually celebrated as an unalloyed triumph, that transfer of power had its drawbacks. Privatisation, launched by Mr Rakowski in the dying years of communism, had allowed influential insiders to start turning power into money to safeguard their positions. Dodgy foreign trade outfits, linked with military intelligence, flourished. Party funds that Mr Rakowski had shipped out of the country returned (via a KGB courier) to launch a new post-communist party. http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.wordpress.com Mr Rakowski’s career fizzled out, fittingly, in an abortive bid for the Polish senate in 2005. His successful opponent was Radek Sikorski, now foreign minister, who had fled Poland as a political refugee from the martial law that Mr Rakowski so steadfastly defended. Louis J. Sheehan,Esquire. </p> 5228838 2008-12-16 01:28:31 2008-12-16 01:28:31 open open rakowski-8-rak-0-louis-j-sheehan-esquire-5228838 publish 0 0 post 0 rakowski Pakistan Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/12/15/pakistan-louis-j-sheehan-esquire-5226020/ Mon, 15 Dec 2008 13:46:14 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>Commentary No. 247, December 15, 2008 "Pakistan: Obama's Nightmare" On the evening of Nov. 26, 2008, a small group of 10 persons attacked two luxury hotels and other sites in central Mumbai (India) and, over several days, managed both to kill and hurt a very large number of persons and to create massive material destruction in the city. It took several days before the slaughter was brought to an end. It is widely believed that the attacks were the work of a Pakistani group called Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET), a group thought to be similar in motivation to al-Qaeda, perhaps directly linked to it. The world press immediately called the Mumbai massacres the 9/11 of India, a repetition of the attacks al-Qaeda launched against the United States in 2001. The motivations and strategy of al-Qaeda in 2001 were largely misunderstood in 2001, both by the U.S. government and by analysts. The same thing risks happening now. Al-Qaeda in 2001 was of course seeking to humiliate the United States. But this was, from a strategic point of view, only a secondary motivation. Al-Qaeda has always made clear that its primary objective is the re-creation of the Islamic caliphate. And, as a matter of political strategy, it has considered that the necessary first step is the collapse of the governments of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Al-Qaeda considers that these two governments have been the essential political supports of Western (primarily U.S.) political dominance in the greater Middle East, and therefore the biggest obstacles to the re-creation of the caliphate, whose initial geographic base would of course be in this region. The attack of September 11 can be seen as an attempt to get the U.S. government to engage in political activities that would put pressures on the Saudi and Pakistani governments of a kind that would undermine their political viability. The primary actions of the U.S. government in the region since 2001 - the invasion first of Afghanistan and then of Iraq - certainly met the expectations of al-Qaeda. What has been the result? The Saudi government has reacted with great political astuteness, fending off U.S. pressures that would have weakened it internally, and has been able thus far to minimize al-Qaeda political success in Saudi Arabia. The Pakistani government has been far less successful. The regime in Islamabad is far weaker in 2008 than its predecessor regime was in 2001, while the political strength of al-Qaeda-type elements has been on a steady rise. The Mumbai attacks seem to have been an effort to weaken the Pakistani state still further. Of course, LET wished to hurt India and those seen as its allies - the United States, Great Britain, and Israel - but this was a secondary objective. The primary objective was to bring down the Pakistani government. In Pakistan, as in every country of the world, the political elites are nationalist and seek to further the geopolitical interests of their country. This objective is fundamentally different from that of al-Qaeda-like groups, for whom the only legitimate function of a state is to further the re-creation of the caliphate. The persistent refusal of the Western world to understand this distinction has been a major source of al-Qaeda's continuing strength. It is what will turn Pakistan into Obama's nightmare. What are Pakistan's geopolitical interests? Before anything else, it worries about its principal neighbors, India and Afghanistan. These concerns have fashioned its geopolitical strategy for the last sixty years. Pakistan sought powerful allies against India. It found two historically, the United States and China. Both the United States and China supported Pakistan for one simple reason, to keep India in check. India was seen by both as too close geopolitically to the Soviet Union, with whom both the United States and China were in conflict. In the 1990s, with the end of the Cold War and the momentary geopolitical weakness of Russia, both the United States and China sought tentatively to obtain closer relations with India. India was geopolitically a more important prize than Pakistan, and Pakistan knew this. One of the ways Pakistan reacted was to expand its role in (and control over) Afghanistan, by supporting the eventually successful Taliban takeover of the country. What happened after 2001? The United States invaded Afghanistan, ousted the Taliban, and installed a government which had elements friendly to the United States, to Russia, even to Iran, but not at all to Pakistan. At the same time, the United States and India got still cozier, with the new arrangements on nuclear energy. So, the Pakistani government turned a blind eye to the renewal of Taliban strength in the northwest tribal regions bordering Afghanistan. The Taliban elements there, supported by al-Qaeda elements, renewed military operations in Afghanistan - and with considerable success, it should be noted. The United States became quite upset, pressed the Pakistani army to act militarily against these Taliban/al-Qaeda elements, and itself engaged in direct (albeit covert) military action in this region. The Pakistani government found itself between a rock and a hard place. It had never had much capacity to control matters in the tribal regions. And the attempts it made as a result of U.S. government pressure weakened it still further. But its inefficacy pushed the U.S. military to act even more directly, which led to severe anti-American sentiment even among the most historically pro-American elites. What can Obama do? Send in troops? Against whom? The Pakistani government itself? It is said that the U.S. government is particularly concerned with the nuclear stockpile that Pakistan has. Would the United States try to seize this stockpile? Any action along these lines - and Obama recklessly hinted at such actions during the electoral campaign - would make the Iraqi fiasco seem like a minor event. It would certainly doom Obama's domestic objectives. There will be no shortage of people who will counsel him that doing nothing is unacceptable weakness. Is that Obama's only alternative? It seems clear that pursuing his agenda, as he himself has defined it, requires getting out from under the unending and geopolitically fruitless U.S. activities in the Middle East. Iraq will be easy, since the Iraqis will insist on U.S. withdrawal. Afghanistan will be harder, but a political deal is not impossible. Iran can be negotiated. The Israel/Palestine conflict is for the moment unresolvable, and Obama may be able to do little else than let the situation fester still longer. But Pakistan requires a decision. If a Pakistani government is to survive, it will have to be one that can show it holds its own geopolitically. This will not be at all easy, given the internal situation, and an angry Indian public opinion. If there is anywhere where Obama can act intelligently, this is the place. by Immanuel Wallerstein [Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein, distributed by Agence Global. For rights and permissions, including translations and posting to non-commercial sites, and contact: rights@agenceglobal.com, 1.336.686.9002 or 1.336.286.6606. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically, or e-mail to others, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To contact author, write: immanuel.wallerstein@yale.edu. These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.] Becky Dunlop, Secretary Fernand Braudel Center http://fbc.binghamton.edu/ Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire </p> 5226020 2008-12-15 13:46:14 2008-12-15 13:46:14 open open pakistan-louis-j-sheehan-esquire-5226020 publish 0 0 post 0 pakistan louis j. sheehan esquire medieval 2.med.00100 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/12/13/medieval-2-med-00100-louis-j-sheehan-esquire-5216523/ Sat, 13 Dec 2008 21:09:46 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . One of the oldest and most valuable collections of handwritten medieval books in the world, housed in the magnificent baroque halls of the library in this town’s abbey, is going online with the help of a $1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For centuries scholars from around the world have flocked to the Stiftsbibliothek — literally, the abbey library — in this quaint town nestled in the rolling hills of eastern Switzerland, to pore over its vast collection of manuscripts, many written and illustrated before the year 1000. The collection includes material as varied as curses against book thieves, early love ballads, hearty drinking songs and a hand-drawn ground plan for a medieval monastery, drafted around A.D. 820, the only such document of its kind.http://louis7j7sheehan7esquire.wordpress.com The library is believed to have been founded in the ninth century, about two centuries after an Irish monk named Gallus established the monastery that would become the center of the city that now bears his name. The monastery was dissolved by local authorities in 1805. The library is now the property of the Roman Catholic church. Today, as computer technology improves, scanning library collections has become commonplace. Google has embarked on an ambitious project to scan entire libraries into databases. Last month the executive arm of the European Union appropriated $175 million for a program, known as Europeana, to digitize European libraries. The idea to scan the library’s manuscripts — above all, the 350 that date from before 1000 — was born as a reaction to the devastating floods that swept Dresden, Germany, and its artworks in 2002, said Ernst Tremp, an expert on medieval history who is the library director. What started as a pilot project in 2005 grew sharply last year, when the Gallen project was incorporated into a program to digitize all of Switzerland’s roughly 7,000 medieval manuscripts. At the same time the Mellon Foundation agreed to finance the St. Gallen project with a two-year, $1 million grant, with an option to extend it for another two years after 2009. St. Gallen, Donald J. Waters of the foundation wrote in an e-mail message, “fits into a larger plan to help make key sources of evidence for medieval studies available online.” So now, day by day, a team of scanning experts works in a small room above the library, gingerly arranging manuscripts on two large frames that use suction devices to spread the pages and lasers to ensure that they are not spread so wide as to damage a binding. High-resolution digital cameras and video recorders then copy the pages and download the images to a database, where they are prepared for presentation on the library’s Web site, www.cesg.unifr.ch. Already, about 200 manuscripts are in the database, and 144 are available online. Christoph Flüeler, an expert on early manuscripts who is overseeing the scanning, said the ability to put such a database online affordably was made possible by the reduced price of computer memory, which he said costs about a fifth what it did early in the decade. “We can now achieve very good quality,” he said. “Six or seven years ago, such memory was simply not affordable.” The project has increased the number of visitors the abbey library draws, to an expected 130,000 this year from about 100,000 a decade ago. In addition, an even greater number of people are now studying the library manuscripts on their computers than study them in the library itself. http://louis7j7sheehan7esquire.wordpress.com “The library has become more visible,” Mr. Flüeler said. “On the Internet we now have more visitors than in the real library.” The project is also starting to make the library more accessible to local people. Despite regular exhibits of outstanding books, some said, visiting hours were always limited and reception areas narrow; visitors had to line up in a confined hallway, and there was no gift shop or cafeteria. “It is a jewel,” said Dr. Uwe Lorenz, of the library. The doctor, the retired director of gynecology at St. Gallen’s main hospital, is a part-time James Joyce scholar and knowledgeable about the town’s literary history. Despite his praise, Dr. Lorenz, like others, has criticisms. “They should have done a lot more,” he said. “I know many people in St. Gallen who have never set foot in the library.” Others have been rankled that foreign money was necessary to put the manuscripts online. “The government depicted the library on a postcard, with the caption ‘St. Gallen can do it,’ ” the local newspaper Tagblatt said. “All well and good. But America did it.” For much of the city’s history, relations between the monastery and the townspeople have been tense. Michael Fischbacher, whose family company, Christian Fischbacher, has traded in textiles, the traditional mainstay of the local economy, since 1819, said the abbey library was “something we’re proud of.” “It’s the most important thing in this town,” he continued.http://louis7j7sheehan7esquire.wordpress.com But the town’s history, he added, had been marked by “division between the townspeople, basically the merchant class and the monks, even before the Reformation.” When the Reformation came, the town turned Protestant, while the surrounding territories, ruled by the monastery’s prince-abbot, remained Catholic. The town’s Protestant church, a soaring neo-Gothic edifice, stands across from the Catholic cathedral. “Keeping each other in check,” Mr. Fischbacher said. “Very Swiss.” The scanning has increased the requests from museums and libraries to borrow the manuscripts themselves and to use the illustrations in books and other publications. So great have the demands become that Mr. Flüe-ler set up a small company last year to handle them, with the profits going toward financing the scanning. Still, he said, online availability would not prevent scholars from visiting the library. “It should always be possible to see the manuscripts physically,” he said. And, of course, the project has lifted the library in the eyes of local people. “It’s really their pride,” said David Stern, an American musician recently named principal conductor of the city’s symphony orchestra and opera. That pride apparently will not prevent the project from keeping an eye out for partners. Would it ever link up with Google? Mr. Flüeler emphasized that Google’s project involved the high-speed scanning of printed books, not the page-by-page scanning of priceless manuscripts. Still, if someone from Google came to visit, he said, “I would be interested in a conversation.” Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire </p> 5216523 2008-12-13 21:09:46 2008-12-13 21:09:46 open open medieval-2-med-00100-louis-j-sheehan-esquire-5216523 publish 0 0 post 0 manuscripts Tracy http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/12/12/tracy-5208095/ Fri, 12 Dec 2008 06:04:32 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>Tracy Marie Kroh was last seen on Aug. 5, 1989, in the square of Millersburg. The 17-year-old's car was found there, parked and locked, a day later. Now her two sisters are hoping a billboard on Route 225 in Halifax Twp. will help solve the mystery of her disappearance. The billboard, which has photos of Kroh at age 17 and what she might look like today, was funded by the Dauphin County district attorney's office, Crime Stoppers of Dauphin County, and a family friend, James Chad Moore of Millersburg. Kroh's sisters, Kim Masser of South Hanover Twp., and Tammy Hoffman of Halifax, hope the billboard will encourage anyone who might have information to tell what they know to police. After all this time, though, the sisters said they are convinced Tracy is dead. "She wouldn't have just ran away," Hoffman said. "That's why I think something happened to her, something out of her control. "There is always a little bit of hope," she said. "I keep hoping I will pick up the phone and it will be her or someone who knows what happened to her." Masser expressed regret that their father, Ivan Kroh, died of cancer without knowing what happened to Tracy. "It would mean a great deal to us to know that Tracy is resting where she belongs, next to our father, instead of wherever she is now," she said. Fran Chardo, Dauphin County first assistant district attorney, said he also hopes the billboard will lead someone to come forward. "Tracy didn't run away," Chardo said. "Her disappearance was a crime, and we are convinced that someone has information about what happened to her. "We have a working theory on what happened," he said. "That theory is a product of the investigation throughout the past 19 years." Chardo said he couldn't discuss the theory or any recent tips to police. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire </p> 5208095 2008-12-12 06:04:32 2008-12-12 06:04:32 open open tracy-5208095 publish 0 0 post 0 murder ii Tracy http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/12/12/tracy-5208080/ Fri, 12 Dec 2008 06:01:59 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>Tracy Marie Kroh was last seen on Aug. 5, 1989, in the square of Millersburg. The 17-year-old's car was found there, parked and locked, a day later. Now her two sisters are hoping a billboard on Route 225 in Halifax Twp. will help solve the mystery of her disappearance.http://sheehan.myblogsite.com The billboard, which has photos of Kroh at age 17 and what she might look like today, was funded by the Dauphin County district attorney's office, Crime Stoppers of Dauphin County, and a family friend, James Chad Moore of Millersburg. Kroh's sisters, Kim Masser of South Hanover Twp., and Tammy Hoffman of Halifax, hope the billboard will encourage anyone who might have information to tell what they know to police. After all this time, though, the sisters said they are convinced Tracy is dead.http://sheehan.myblogsite.com "She wouldn't have just ran away," Hoffman said. "That's why I think something happened to her, something out of her control. "There is always a little bit of hope," she said. "I keep hoping I will pick up the phone and it will be her or someone who knows what happened to her." Masser expressed regret that their father, Ivan Kroh, died of cancer without knowing what happened to Tracy. "It would mean a great deal to us to know that Tracy is resting where she belongs, next to our father, instead of wherever she is now," she said. Fran Chardo, Dauphin County first assistant district attorney, said he also hopes the billboard will lead someone to come forward. "Tracy didn't run away," Chardo said. "Her disappearance was a crime, and we are convinced that someone has information about what happened to her. "We have a working theory on what happened," he said. "That theory is a product of the investigation throughout the past 19 years." Chardo said he couldn't discuss the theory or any recent tips to police. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire http://louisjsheehan.blogstream.com </p> 5208080 2008-12-12 06:01:59 2008-12-12 06:01:59 open open tracy-5208080 publish 0 0 post 0 murder 8517814 Beforethebigbang http://wordpress.com/ 127.0.0.1 2008-12-12 06:03:59 2008-12-12 06:03:59 yes 1 0 0 Betsy Aardsma 7.bet.999299 Louis J. Sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/12/08/betsy-aardsma-7-bet-999299-louis-j-sheehan-5178819/ Mon, 08 Dec 2008 03:15:25 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>They are old men now, long retired from the state police, but they can't forget a slaying case they never solved. They are haunted by the memory of Betsy Aardsma, a woman from Holland, Mich., who on Nov. 28, 1969, lay dead before them on a gurney in a hallway of Ritenhour Student Health Center at Penn State University. "When I retired from the state police, I went to Arizona, but I never let it go," said Ron Tyger, 69, one of the original investigators. Aardsma was stabbed once in the chest while doing research in the cramped and dimly lit stacks of Pattee Library. As she slumped to the floor, pulling books down on top of herself, her killer pulled out the knife and fled into the night. Between 30 and 40 state troopers worked on the case, interviewing hundreds of students and following leads around the country, especially to Michigan. Nothing came of their efforts. And it disturbs them. "I know these guys want me to solve this," said Trooper Kent Bernier, the current investigator, who at age 40 was born the year before the killing. "They talk to me about it regularly. http://louis6j6sheehan.blogspot.com "It means a lot to them, because it was a case that hit them square in the face back then. And it's never going to let me go, either," Bernier said. Betsy Aardsma's friends and teachers said she was among the best America had to offer in the late 1960s. Artistic and poetic, imbued with liberal ideals and empathy for the underprivileged, she planned to join the Peace Corps after graduating with honors from the University of Michigan in 1969. But her boyfriend, David L. Wright, wouldn't promise to wait for her, so she dropped those plans and followed him to central Pennsylvania. Wright began classes at the Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey, while Aardsma enrolled in the graduate English program at Penn State's main campus, taking the bus to Harrisburg on weekends. She perished in one of the bloodier years of the 1960s, when the Manson family and the Zodiac killer were attacking in California and an unknown serial killer was murdering women around the University of Michigan. Aardsma's family were relieved she was leaving Ann Arbor. They thought State College would be safe. Instead, they were about to enter a nightmare that has lasted four decades. Bright and popular: Betsy Aardsma was like many other women in small towns across America when she came of age in the mid-1960s. Intrigued by the larger world, wanting a life of the mind and a life of helping others, she was unsure about being a traditional wife and mother. Her hometown was founded by Calvinist religious dissidents from the Netherlands in 1847 and was known for being conservative and insular. As the local saying went, "if you're not Dutch, you're not much." It was half joke, half belief. In the 1960s, Holland had about 25,000 people, predominantly descendants of those original settlers and many, like the Aardsmas, having Dutch names. The city has two dominant religious denominations, the moderate Reformed Church and the ultraconservative Christian Reformed Church. Both believe God's will determines every event in life, good or bad. Humans are "predestined" at birth for heaven or hell. Betsy Aardsma's pastor at Trinity Reformed Church told mourners at her funeral that her killing was "God's will," according to one of her friends who was there. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.blogspot.com Richard and Esther Aardsma, Betsy's parents, were graduates of Hope College, a Reformed Church liberal arts college in Holland. He worked as a sales tax auditor for the Michigan Treasury Department, and she was a homemaker and former teacher. The Aardsmas were a solidly middle-class couple, raising their four children in a house on leafy West 37th Street in Holland. Betsy was the second-oldest. Betsy thrived at Holland High School, leading her class as a sophomore and eventually graduating fifth as a senior. Art, English, and biology were her favorites. Sometimes she planned to become a physician, other times a medical illustrator. Judith Jahns Aycock recalled that Aardsma loved the colorful English literature teacher Olin Van Lare, who was prone to bursting into tears during moving passages of poetry. Teachers loved her in return. Verne C. Kupelian, a history teacher who later opened a teen dance club in Holland patronized by Aardsma and her friends, still cherishes a poem she wrote for him. Dirk Bloemendaal Sr., who taught physiology, a senior-level biology course, recalled that Aardsma was a hard worker in a difficult class, where all students dissected cats. "I think I ended up giving her a straight 'A' in the class, and it was not an easy class," he said. "She was really the kind of person you love to have in your class." Aardsma hung out with a group of girls whose names appear in academic honors stories in the Sentinel from junior high through National Honor Society and graduation. Her best friend was Jan Sasamoto Brandt, a Japanese-American girl whose parents had relocated to Holland from the West Coast during World War II, when many fellow Japanese-Americans on the coast were being interned in camps. "She was artistic, and I was bright also. But I was more the serious bright and she was more artistic, so I think we balanced each other pretty well," Brandt said. Aardsma had long reddish-brown hair and hazel eyes. She was 5 feet, 8 inches tall, and slim. She was never short of male admirers, friends recalled, but she wasn't boy-crazy and never stayed with one for long. Aardsma also had a dark side, sometimes seeming to foresee that her life would be unaccountably short. A poem she wrote as a high school sophomore, "Why Do I Live?" was cited by her pastor at her funeral as evidence she accepted God's will and embraced death. http://louis1j1sheehan.blogspot.com 'Kind of gutsy': At some point in late high school or early college, Betsy Aardsma spent a week on a mission program run by the Reformed Church on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico and taught art to what were then called "ghetto" children in nearby Grand Rapids. That is known from published reports after her death and confirmed by her former brother-in-law Dennis Wegner. None of her immediate family would agree to interviews for this story. Her sister Carole, now a Reformed Church minister, commented only that, "I've said all I'm going to say." Her younger sister could not be reached. But friends, teachers and more distant family members like Wegner opened up. Their recollections, along with information already in the public record, enabled this story to be written in detail. Aardsma entered Hope College in the Honors Program in the fall of 1965, intending to pursue the pre-med program, which has always been one of Hope's strengths. She would have preferred to start college at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, according to Brandt, who spent all four years there. They even talked about rooming together. But her family was a Hope College family -- in addition to her parents, her older sister, Carole, was a graduate, and her brother would eventually go. Betsy Aardsma finally agreed to go, too. "When we came to Hope College, it was really strict," said Tamara Lockwood Quinn, who like Aardsma lived in Voorhees Hall. "Lights out at 9 o'clock, chapel three times a week." Aardsma's freshman roommate was Linda DenBesten Jones of South Holland, Ill., who recalled her as friendly, accommodating to a fault, fascinating to talk to and perhaps an early feminist. "She wanted to be a doctor. I think that's pretty feminist," Jones said. "I thought it was kind of gutsy to say you were going to be a doctor. I didn't know anybody else who was going to be a doctor. In the classes she was in, she was one of the few women in it." Men found Aardsma intriguing, among them fellow Hope student George Arwady, the current publisher of the Newark Star-Ledger newspaper in New Jersey. He recalled being in an honors English class with her and dating her once, but he remembered little else about her. Aardsma could hold her own in a conversation about just about anything. "She was always into really deep things and then was just so creative," Margo Hakken Zeedyk said. "She had a real good sense of humor, but at the same time, it was a little dry. Real clever." But not all her dates were as friendly as Arwady. Jones recalled one date that her mother told the state police about after Aardsma was killed. "Who had kind of snarled at her one time in the dorm," Jones said. "I remember it. [Betsy] saw that as very sinister and scary. At the time, I thought, oh, come on, he's just kind of dramatic." Aardsma did OK in pre-med classes, Jones recalled, but decided during that first year that her English classes were far more enjoyable than biology or chemistry. After her sophomore year, for what her friends believe were academic and social reasons, Aardsma transferred to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Putting dreams aside: When she arrived at Michigan in the fall of 1967, the campus was engulfed in the fervor of the anti-Vietnam War movement. The school had been known for its liberal politics through much of the decade. Students for a Democratic Society was organized there in 1960, and Michigan student Bill Ayers, who became a household name during the 2008 presidential campaign, was a leader of the group that fall. Aardsma was more drawn to another organization that had a special connection to the University of Michigan, the Peace Corps. President John F. Kennedy first talked about sending Americans to Third World countries to help fight poverty during an impromptu speech on the Michigan campus in 1960. Aardsma would see in the Peace Corps a way to live out her desire to help the world's less fortunate. She found herself somewhat lonely, however, when she first moved to Ann Arbor. Even though her friend Jan Sasamoto Brandt was there, Brandt was in a sorority and the two had started to drift apart during the two-year separation. Aardsma missed her Holland friends but kept in touch through the mail. "Intellectually, this place is not as alive as it should be," she complained in a letter in September 1967 to high school friend Phyllis "Peggy" Wich Vandenberg, who was at Marquette University in Wisconsin. "I run into asses every day." But she also encountered "a good number of acutely aware people" and was happy that no matter the type of person, U of M had a lot of them. In her senior year, she shared an apartment with three other women. It was below an apartment shared by four members of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity. One of them was David L. Wright, a son of a psychiatrist from Elmhurst, Ill. Wright, a senior, was pre-med. They had met as juniors, but now their friends pushed the relationship. "She was just a very brilliant person, extremely smart," said Wright, now a kidney specialist in Rockford, Ill. "Good sense of humor. Just a wonderful person." As happy as Betsy Aardsma was that final spring in Ann Arbor, she was among many women on campus worried by slayings taking place around them. Serial killer John Norman Collins, now serving a life term at a prison in Michigan, had resumed killing women in March 1969. Police believe he killed at least four women between March and July 1969. He was tried and convicted in the summer of 1970 for the last murder, that of Karen Sue Beineman of Grand Rapids. Meanwhile, Aardsma's boyfriend, Wright, became one of 64 people accepted into the third class at the Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey, which had opened in the fall of 1967. Aardsma graduated from Michigan with "distinction and honors" in English. But as much as she cared for Wright, she still wanted to join the Peace Corps and go to Africa for a year. She applied and was accepted, according to Wright and Brandt. It made for an unhappy summer in Holland. Aardsma initially told Brandt she wouldn't be able to be in her wedding that August because she expected to be shipped off to Africa by then. That was before Wright decided he wasn't crazy about the idea of his girlfriend going away for a year. "She asked if I would wait for her and so forth," Wright said. "And I sort of selfishly said, I just don't know what will happen." Aardsma canceled her Peace Corps plans and decided to follow Wright to Pennsylvania. She enrolled at Penn State, although the graduate English program was at the main campus in State College, nearly a hundred miles from his med school in Hershey. She put her dreams aside and focused on a career as a teacher -- albeit at the college level -- like her sister Carole and her mother. Because of the ongoing killings, her family was relieved she was getting out of Ann Arbor. "When she moved to Penn State, we thought, oh, thank God, she's at a place where she's safe, not out at the University of Michigan," said Wegner, her former brother-in-law. Premonition of early death: Penn State's main campus in State College was not entirely tranquil in the fall of 1969. Since the winter of 1967-68, Penn State had seen protests by black students at the school. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, brought matters to a head. About five weeks later, black students took over Old Main. "I was held prisoner for a half-day," said Charles L. Lewis, a retired Penn State vice president for student services. "They were trying to get attention and held me in a room with a half-dozen of us. Let me out in about four hours." Students had a list of demands, including raising black enrollment at the main campus to 400 -- out of 26,000 students -- the following fall. They wanted more black professors, graduate students, athletes and coaches. Meanwhile, Wright and other students at the med school in Hershey, which was still under construction, found themselves living in some of the red brick cottages on the Milton Hershey School campus. Classes and labs were held in the new, crescent-shaped building that is still the heart of the medical center, which began admitting patients in the fall of 1970. Aardsma lived with her roommate Sharon Brandt (no relation to Jan Sasamoto Brandt) in Atherton Hall, home of many graduate students on the main Penn State campus. Long-distance telephone calls were still expensive in 1969, so she wrote Wright a letter every day. The last one arrived the morning after her death. The class that would figure in Aardsma's death was English 501 with professor Harrison Meserole, described as "brilliant, a former concert pianist" by John Swinton, who was a student there in 1969. Students in Meserole's class learned how to ferret out mysteries that scholars solve, said Swinton, who later joined the English faculty. It was an introduction to research. "His course was really tough and required an awful lot of library work," he said. "And sometimes a lot of digging in the library. A lot of work in the Rare Books Room, a lot of photocopy perusal." Aardsma made new friends at Penn State, among them Linda Marsa, another English graduate student. "She always seemed like a young Katharine Hepburn," Marsa said of Aardsma. "You know, with those kind of angular features and this curly, reddish hair that she pinned up. Lean and lanky with that same kind of sarcastic, funny, witty attitude." Aardsma spent only eight weeks at Penn State, from her arrival in late September until her death on Nov. 28, but managed to make an impression. A friend, never identified, told The Associated Press after her death that Aardsma loved black literature, especially the works of James Baldwin. An unidentified professor quoted in the same story said she had "the deep sensitivity of an artist for others' feelings." Marsa, who called herself a political radical, said she and Aardsma were as one in their opposition to the Vietnam War. Wegner said in a 1972 news article that Aardsma led a campus discussion group against the war on national Vietnam Moratorium Day, which was Oct. 15, 1969. Aardsma saw her boyfriend on weekends, taking the bus from State College to Harrisburg and back if he didn't drive up. Wright recalled that about midway through the semester, or about the end of October, she seemed troubled. Aardsma told him she wanted to move to Harrisburg and enroll in courses there, probably at Penn State Harrisburg. "In retrospect, when I thought about that, I wondered if she was worried about something up there," Wright said. "My wife's theory is that she just wanted to move things along and be closer." But according to Wegner, Betsy had previously expressed a premonition of early death in her writings. Around that time, he said, she told her mother, "I don't know why I'm here. I have this weird feeling about being here." 'A certain ambivalence': Wright said he and Aardsma were never formally engaged, but he probably would have given her a ring that Christmas with a wedding to follow in the summer of 1970. So at the time of their last visit on Nov. 26-27, 1969, it would have been impossible for her to "break off the engagement." That Aardsma might have angered Wright by doing so has been one of several long-standing rumors in the case, even though the state police accepted the doctor's alibi after intensive interrogation. http://louis0j0sheehan.blogspot.com Phyllis Wich Vandenberg recalled nothing in the letters she and Aardsma continued to exchange that fall to suggest a break-up was imminent. Dr. Steven Margles, a fellow medical student who lived in the same house as Wright, saw no evidence of trouble in the relationship. A bigger question, perhaps, is whether Aardsma was eager to get married and become a doctor's wife, which at the time carried a job description that didn't involve an independent career. There was a Hershey Medical Student Wives Club, at that time. It is mentioned periodically in 1968-69 copies of the medical college's Vital Signs newsletter now in the files of the Derry Twp. Historical Society. One of the club's stated purposes: "To prepare [members] for their role as physicians' wives." Aardsma's friend Marsa remembered her asking: "Is this what I want? Do I want the kids and the keys to the Country Squire?" A Country Squire was a Ford station wagon and a symbol of traditional 1960s family life. Marsa said Aardsma loved Wright and went to visit him often, "but she had a certain ambivalence that I think was very natural." Aardsma, Wright and perhaps a half-dozen other medical students, male and female, got together for Thanksgiving dinner on Nov. 27 at the house where the handful of female medical students resided. The women cooked, and it was "a real nice time," Wright said. During that day, Aardsma called her family in Holland to wish them a happy Thanksgiving. Wegner, who with his then-wife, Carole Aardsma, was visiting from Madison, Wis., said everyone got on the phone with her. Wright said he and Aardsma talked about her staying in Hershey for the weekend, but that he simply had too much studying to do for finals. And she needed to do research in the library for her English 501 paper -- due in less than two weeks -- for Meserole. That night, Wright drove her to the bus depot in Harrisburg, in the 400 block of Market Street. It was the last time he saw her alive. "And I always wonder if she had stayed down that weekend what would have happened," Wright said, calling it one of his biggest regrets. The sound of falling books: "How is it she didn't scream? This isn't instant death. Even if it's six minutes. You would think she would scream. It's so weird." --Dr. Steven Margles, friend of David Wright "I mean, people have talked about, what was she doing there? She was in an area where she was supposed to be, according to what we could discover. She was doing what she was supposed to be doing, and somebody killed her." -- State police Trooper Kent Bernier There is much about the stabbing death of Betsy Aardsma that remains a mystery, which is one reason state police and journalists find the case compelling. Aardsma and her roommate, Sharon Brandt, left Atherton Hall about 10 minutes before 4 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 28, intending to do work at Pattee Library, the main library at Penn State. Aardsma was wearing a sleeveless red dress over a white cotton turtleneck sweater, which led to speculation she was going to the library to meet someone. "I didn't know she was wearing that," said Linda Marsa. "That would have definitely been out of character for Betsy. She was pretty casual, if not necessarily hip in the way she dressed. A dress and white cotton shirt on a cold November day to do research in the stacks? That's not normal." According to Penn State English professor Sasha Skucek, who has researched the Aardsma case for years, they made a brief stop in Burrowes Hall to talk to professor Nicholas Joukovsky, who taught the English 501 class with Meserole. Then Aardsma and Brandt walked to Pattee Library and parted company. Aardsma headed for Meserole's office in the basement of Pattee Library. He was the chief bibliographer for PMLA, the journal of the Modern Language Association, and needed to be near the books. "We had a steady stream of students coming in that afternoon to talk about their research projects," said Priscilla Letterman Meserole, then the professor's secretary and later his wife. Harrison Meserole is dead. "She had on a red dress," Meserole said. "I remember I complimented her on her dress." Then Aardsma headed down a narrow staircase into the cramped, dimly lit stacks, the seemingly endless rows of floor-to-ceiling shelves where the books are kept. Few students