2012 – Page 59 – Wis[s]e Words

Seventeenth-century Burma and the Dutch East India Company — Wil O. Dijk

Published on February 25, 2012Leave a comment

Cover of Seventeenth-century Burma and the Dutch East India Company

Seventeenth-century Burma and the Dutch East India Company 1634-1680
Wil O. Dijk
348 pages including index
published in 2006

I got this book out of the library soley on the strength of the author’s own story. Wil O. Dijk was born in Kobe, Japan in 1934, the daughter of a Dutch businessman and a Montenegrin-Burmese (!) mother. As a child she lived in Japan and Burma, with her brother got sent to Singapore when war broke out in 1941, became a prisoner of the Japanese there, like so many other children, while her mother fled to India and her father joined the British 14th army. They all survived war and after being reunited with their parents she and her brother spent some years at boarding school in Holland, before they returned east to Karachi when the Korean War broke out. There she stayed, met her husband, a Dutch foreign service employee, travelled with him from posting to posting all over the world, raising three daughters in the process, then came to stay in Holland permanently in the 1980ties. Wanting to reconnect with her Asian roots, she enrolled as a mature student at Leiden first to study Japanology, then to specialise in Burmese history, the end result of which is this book, written when she was well in her seventies!

Even without the author’s lifestory I would’ve gotten this book though. The focus in Dutch colonial history has understandably always been with Indonesia as well as with the colonies in the Americas, Surinam and the Dutch West Indies, as these were the most enduring, important and longest lived Dutch colonial ventures. With some exceptions (Nieuw Amsterdam obviously, South Africa), the rest of Dutch colonial history is mainly a concern for specialists. Which as Wil O. Dijk makes clear in her introduction, goes double for Dutch involvement with Burma, largely neglected even by specialists, yet no less important and interesting for it.

About as frustrating as the original

Published on February 24, 2012Leave a comment

Choose your own Youtube Adventure. Via.

First thing to remember is that Israel has the bomb

Published on February 23, 20121 Comment

Arthur Silber is annoyed with a Peter Beinart article that’s supposedly opposed to any war with Iran:

Given the attention it is receiving from those who are nominally opposed to the United States’ foreign policy of criminal, aggressive war and intervention, it is understandable that unwary readers will view Peter Beinart’s article, “The Crazy Rush to Attack Iran,” as strongly opposed to an attack on Iran. And while Beinart’s piece may very superficially appear to oppose such an attack, opposition of this kind is no opposition at all. And it is far worse than that: Beinart accepts the entire framework of those whose warmongering he criticizes, and he thus makes an attack on Iran more likely, not less.

For those of us who paid attention back during the runup to the Wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, this is hardly surprising coming from Beinart, who spent most of it cheerleading for them, as well as policing the bordaries of acceptable dissent. Which is what he’s doing here, as in his very first paragraph he frames in such a way as to concede most of the issue to the supporters of a war:

The debate over whether Israel should attack Iran rests on three basic questions. First, if Iran’s leaders got the bomb, would they use it or give it to people who might? Second, would a strike substantially retard Iran’s nuclear program? Third, if Israel attacks, what will Iran do in response?

This framing is of course completely embraced in the mainstream news media, where the question of whether or not Iran is actually even trying to create a nuclear bomb rarely is asked anymore. Any true opponent of war on Iran therefore needs to go back to this basic question: is Iran actually trying to create nuclear weapons and, as importantly, is this any business of ours as long as Israel, which does have several hundreds nuclear bombs and has had them for decades, isn’t dealt with in the same way? If instead you go by the assumption that Iran is building a bomb and that this is a Matter of Concern, you are already conceding much of the rationale for military action, at best you’re now arguing about tactics. Which is just what Beinart wants of course. Beinart isn’t interested in stopping a war or oposing it, he’s just concerned about seeming to oppose it.

In the meantime the whole issue of an Israeli attack on Iran is as much a giant distraction attempt as it is a real threat. For both Israel and the US having the focus on Iranian misbehaviour and the potential, sadly likely to be disproportionate Israel response, rather than on their own internal problems comes in very handy. It’s a distraction measure and while an attack on Iran can’t be entirely ruled out, it is unlikely to actually happen when the mere threat of it is so useful to both countries. Beinart’s weaselly article is just a small part of it.

Liberal paternalism and the burqa

Published on February 22, 20126 Comments

I want to highlight part of a comment Alex made at a recent post:

Strangely, I’m strongly in favor of the burqa ban, which you referred to as foulness. My philosophical reasoning here is strongly affected by my emotions and the way I was brought up. I was brought up as a strongly conservative Christian, and sent to Christian schools my entire life, including boarding school in high school, and the dress codes were very strict. I look back on my entire childhood as abuse and torture, that affected me absolutely as much as the beatings. Given that most “women” are expected to start wearing these costumes at puberty, when they are not in control of any part of their lives, is giving too much control to parents. I know this raises issues of what an adult woman can choose for herself, but the adult women I know in any kind of conservative religion are mad and usually poor or no education which would enable them to have the economic freedom to choose, and they are kept from making real outside social connections which might offer them the support to make real choices.

As he himself acknowledges, this is a fine example of paternalism in action, where you’re so convinced these women wearing burqas need to be delivered from their oppression that you’re willing to send them to jail for it. This sort of attitude has a not very proud history on the left (*cough*eugenics*cough* and we should be very careful with it. For a start, just because your reason for wanting to ban the burqa is all meant in the best interests of its wearers, it doesn’t mean that the people actively trying to do this are motivated by anything more noble than a spot of Muslim bullying. Modern bigotry often hides behind a phony concern for “western” values and liberties.

Furthermore and quite obviously, a burqa ban denies agency to the very women who we are supposedly trying to liberate from their oppression, by making it clear that they cannot be trusted to make the right choice on their own. A burqa ban also supposed that the view of the burqa as a symbol of male oppression of women is the only correct one and that women cannot choose to wear it for any reason other than that somebody is forcing them. It therefore denies the existence of any woman who has made that choice for religious or other reasons. Finally, it also supposes that “we” know what’s best for “them”, when it may very well be that the burqa is just a minor issue or no issue at all in the lives of most Muslim women living in the Netherlands.

A burqa ban also means that those women who wear them for religious reasons are forced to choose between the law and their religion, never a happy occurrence, while those who are forced into it through social pressure or their evil husbands will have other tensions to worry about…

Let’s not forget also that the number of women who wear the full burqa, rather than just a headscarf, is very low: probably less than twohundred in the entire country. Not really a “problem” we need a law for, in other words.

Shrove Tuesday

Published on February 21, 2012Leave a comment

As a born and raised protestant in a fairly “heavy” part of the country, I don’t really have carnival traditions, nor knew about Shrove Tuesday until Sandra introduced me to it. Making pancakes that day was an old family tradition of hers, something her father did and she did as well, if she remembered in time. And as with most of her cooking, her pancakes, especially the light crepe like ones we ate with a bit of sugar and lemon, were wonderful. So much better than anything I could make that I didn’t bother to even try, but rather heated up some store bought poffertjes in the oven, the sad single man’s best alternative…

Not feeling too wonderful anyway, as my brain seems intent to slowly leak out of my nose and eyes: either I got someone’s cold, something Cronenbergian is going on in my skulll or hayfever season has started even earlier than normal. All in all I feel like death warmed over, poffertjes the most substantial thing I felt like eating.

Not to end on a bummer, here’s George Benson with Breezin’: