Showing posts by: E Curb Nottus
A Scattering of Small Mid-Atlantic Islands Form the Setting for the “Old World’s” First Ventures to the New World
The Madeira Archipelago, 972 km southwest of Lisbon, Portugal, is a holiday venue with all the usual tourist trappings of an ocean getaway (beaches, nature and wildlife areas, scenic walking and hiking spots, shopping, wineries, museums, geologic formations, etc.). But Madeira and other island groupings within its range like the Açores (Azores Islands) and the Cape Verde Islands, were also the first places where Europe’s great Age of Discovery and Exploration kicked off.
The 15th century Portuguese caravel, a small, fast and manoeuvrable sailing ship tailored to meet the demands of oceanic sailing in the Atlantic
Forging a template for seafaring explorers
It all started with Portugal’s early 15th century imperial ambitions and the impetus provided by one of its Medieval Princes Henry the Navigator (Henrique o Navegador). Henry’s drive to explore, to discover, to convert others to Catholicism, and to build an empire for his small West European nation first bore fruit when two of his sea captains✥ accidentally discovered the island of Madeira while exploring the eastern realms of the Atlantic in 1418/19. Madeira was found to be uninhabited but it’s fertile soil was excellent for grain crops (principally wheat) and even better for producing sugar.
▼ Prince Henry, “The Navigator”
An island of wood and sugar
Madeira was also endowed with abundant hardwood, important to help fuel the island’s formative sugar industry (some of it was also destined for Lisbon’s housing industry)▦. Sugar production requires a labour surplus for it to continue on an upward trajectory, accordingly the island needed more labour than the pool of mainly Portuguese and Italian labourers it had. African slaves neatly filled this void (by start of 16th century they represented some 10% of the island’s population). The population of Madeira by ca 1500 was taking on a multicultural complexion (Portuguese, Genovese, Tuscan, German, Flemish, African) (with a vocational mix of priests, merchants, artisans and slave and non-slave labourers) [David Abulafia, ‘Virgin Islands of the Atlantic’, History Today, November 2019].
The production techniques mastered in the Mid-Atlantic islands provided “stepping stones” to the successful implantation of the sugar mono-cultures that evolved later in Brazil [Smith, Stefan Halikowski. “The Mid-Atlantic Islands: A Theatre of Early Modern Ecocide?” International Review of Social History, vol. 55, 2010, pp. 51–77. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26405418].
Global sugar
Madeiran sugar at its zenith was a “global commodity”—with the export of the product eventually stretching as far as Pera in the Black Sea, Chios and Constantinople. The lucrative trade in sugar from Madeira did not go unnoticed by the economic powerhouses in Europe. Northern Italy (Venice, Genoa) and Flanders quickly became major investors in the highly renumerative industry.
Wheat wealth and Madeira’s “third cycle”
Madeira’s fertile soil was similarly productive for grains, especially an abundance of wheat which was an alternative to Moroccan wheat. By 1455 the Portuguese were claiming a yield of 68,000 bushels of wheat from Madeira. SH Smith has drawn attention to how Madeira’s productivity advanced through a series of agricultural cycles. The early international trade focused on wheat, later this was surpassed by the ascendency of sugar. When the price of sugar on the international market dipped, the island planters turned to wine which eventually evolved into Madeira’s principal export. At its peak Madeiran wine was exported to British plantations in North America and the West Indies, and later to Brazil and Angola (Smith)ㅇ.
▼ Açores: historic map ‘Theatrum Orbis Terraum’, ca 1594
Portuguese Azores, Cape Verde and São Tomo
The success of Madeira prompted an escalation of Atlantic exploration from Lisbon. Prince Henry, with his zeal both for spreading the ‘one’ religion and ever-wider exploration (not to neglect the spoils of empire to be gained), founded a navigator’s school at Sagres on the southwestern tip of Portugal (see footnote). Over the remainder of the 15th century Portugal added the Azores, Cape Verde and Säo Tome (all uninhabited) to its imperial trophy cabinet of Atlantic prizes❆. The Azores in particular proved a valued acquisition to the Portuguese, not like Madeira for sugar but because they were ideal for cattle husbandry (to this day a main source of diary products for Portugal). In addition, and even more valuably, by the late 16th century the island group was a central point in the established trade route trans-Atlantic to South America and India (via the Cape)✪.
Way-station for human trafficking
The first Portuguese settlers found Cape Verde Islands to be arid and empty compared to the Madeira Archipelago. The Portuguese administrators talked it up as much as they could but in reality it yielded little from the ground apart from salt and lichen orchil which was used to produce a violet or purple dye (Abulafia). It’s great value was its role in meeting the seemingly inexhaustible demand for slaves, a stop-over on the Atlantic transport route for human traffic – ferrying slaves from Africa to Brazil and the Caribbean.
Portugal’s next Atlantic acquisition was São Tomo, near the Gulf of Benin. The Portuguese used this small island as a slave port, a collection point for slaves purchased from the Kongo and Angola in West Africa. Eventually São Tomo developed a sugar industry alongside this slave-handling activity, although it’s sugar was far inferior to that of Madeira and conditions on the island were harsh and susceptible to malaria. São Tomo‘s value to the slave trade was limited because it was not on the trans-Atlantic shipping route and not a re-supply route like Madeira and the Azores were. Still, it was nonetheless lucrative to the Portuguese crown, earning it up to 10,000 cruzados a year (ca 1500) (Abulafia)✧.
[Source: www.britannia.com]
Overpopulation and environmental impact of intense farming
As the colonies developed, overpopulation (superpovamento) became a chronic problem, especially on Madeira and São Miguel in the 17th and 18th centuries. The Portuguese solution, which eased if not eliminated this problem, was to siphon off surplus population on the islands into the army and ultimately to tours of military service in Brazil. The intense practice of silviculture, the unrelenting toil of farming on the Madeira soil and landform in particular wreaked massive and irreversible change. Seismic events and volcanos, the abalos de terra and other mega-eruptions were a recurring feature. As well, deforestation was an inevitable consequence of the mass pillaging of resources (Smith).
The Mid-Atlantic island colonies, especially Madeira and the Azores (and later, Spain’s Canaries), were the first successful European settlements in the Atlantic Ocean. Their success for the colonising powers became a model for the colonies to follow further west in the Americas. The Portuguese settlers possessed an acute awareness that in establishing these extra-European ‘beachheads’, they were fulfilling a pioneering role in the “New World”…it was no accident that the first boy and the first girl born on Madeira were given the names, respectively, ‘Adam’ and ‘Eve’ [Ronald Watkins, Unknown Seas: How Vasco da Gama Opened the East, (2003)].
Cape Sagres, lighthouse [Photo: www.algarve-tourist.com]
Footnote: Prince Henry’s school for navigators
Henry the Navigator’s lasting legacy for the Portuguese and the Old World was that he took the first steps towards putting global exploration on a scientific footing. The prince’s Sagres school was intended to teach the intricacies of the then extremely precarious activity of oceanic sailing on the open seas, navigation and map-making, etc using Western science (as understood in the 15th century). Portuguese explorers who were shipwrecked and made it back to shore were routinely subjected to detailed debriefing as to what had gone wrong at sea [“Cape Sagres”, (Rick Steves), Smithsonian Magazine, 01-Mar-2009, www.smithsonianmag.com].
▴ 1787 map of Madeira
____________________________________________
✥ one, João Gonçalves Zarco, was later appointed the first administrator of Funchal (Madeira’s principal town) by Henry
▦ Madeira’s name translates as “Isle of Wood”, legname (wood, lumber)
❆ Portugal prevaricated too long and missed the gun with the nearby, inhabited Canary Islands which was eventually snared by the Spanish
ㅇ wine was also grown and exported from Pico and Fayal in the Azores and from the Canaries
✪ several alternate names were attributed to the Azores…it was initially known as “Hawk Island” because of the many sightings of this diurnal bird of prey in the islands’ vicinity. The concentration of Flemish merchants and functionaries in the Azores led many to nickname it the “Flemish Isles” (Abulafia)
✧ El Mina Fortress, founded in 1482, on the Ghana coast, became Portugal’s main base for the trade in slaves, gold and ivory
Heligoland, the North Sea’s “Border Island”: A Mini Platform for Historic Anglo-German Rivalry
The small but strategic island that Britain gave away twice
Heligoland, is a tiny speck of land (a mere 0.67 sq mi) in the North Sea. The main island (Hauptinsel) is a formation of rock and stone cliffs frequently impacted by wind and storm – or as one observer described it, “an outcrop of sandstone and chalk” [Harry Campbell, Whatever Happened to Tanganyika? The place names that history left behind, (2007)]. It’s dominant geographical features are a 200-feet high Oberland (upper land) and a Unterland (lower land)✲. Just to the main island’s east is a second, smaller island known as the Düne or Sandy Island for its collection of small beaches❅. Heligoland is 40 miles from the town of Cuxhaven in the Lower Saxony region of Germany (also close to and coming under the provincial administrative jurisdiction of Schleswig-Holstein), and some 290 to 300 miles from the nearest point on the British Isles.
The remoteness and fairly nondescript appearance of Heligoland (in German and Danish: Helgoland, presumably from Heyligeland, “Holy Land”) belies a rather colourful history of fluctuating fortunes, especially over the last two centuries. Up until 1807 the island was the property of Denmark (interrupted by one or two brief periods when it fell under the control of Hamburg). ThIs “No-Man’s Land” has traditionally served as something of a haven for mainlanders – a refuge from the severe climatic conditions of the German Bight, and also occasionally from Danish taxation officials [George Drower, Heligoland: The True Story of German Bight and the Island that Britain Betrayed (2002)].
In 1807, as the Napoleonic Wars raged in Europe, the British Navy under orders from Whitehall seized it from the Danes. Heligoland was of value to the British in the war against Napoleon as a means of circumventing the economic blockade imposed on Great Britain by the French emperor (the Continental system). Having Heligoland provided the British with a handy base to carry on (illegal) trade with Europe in defiance of Napoleon…between 1809 and 1811 alone, some £86 million worth of goods passed through the island and into the hands of German merchants. Heligoland’s economic activity flourished with most of the smuggled merchandise comprising tea, coffee, tobacco, rum and sugar from GB’s commodity-rich colonies around the globe [‘Heligoland’, (The British Empire), www.britishempire,co.uk/].
“The Gibraltar of the North Sea”
A spa was introduced to the island in 1826, luring visitors and holidayers from the nearby German mainland. Some came in search of a haven of a different kind, liberal Germans were attracted because it offered them, they believed, “a political retreat from the nationalistic fervour of their homeland” [‘Heligoland: Germany’s hidden gem in the North Sea’, (James Waterson), The Guardian, 24-Apr-2011, www.theguardian.com]. The new German-British trade ran hand-in-hand with the traditional island vocation of fishing (mainly for lobsters). The permanent population of Heligoland, despite the boost, has over the years remained pretty stable, never rising above 3,000 at any point (predominately the locals have been of German stock, speaking a North Friesian dialect)〥.
A coloniser’s swap: Heligoland for Zanzibar
The status quo on Heligoland remained intact till the late part of the century. In 1890 the change occurred that was to have seismic repercussions in the 20th century. As part of “the scramble for Africa” at the time, the British traded Heligoland to Germany in return for Zanzibar and part of Tanganyika◘, adding to GB’s “patch-quilt pattern” of GB’s ‘pink’ colonies on the world map. But the British were to discover that the true cost was the loss of a significant strategic asset in it’s 20th century foreign policy. Heligoland’s location on a ‘corner’ of the North Sea guarded the entrance to the port of Hamburg and was approximate to the estuary of the Elbe, the Kiel Canal and three other great North European rivers (Drower).
▵ Aerial view of Heligoland, between 1890 and 1900
With the European powers preoccupied with war preparations by the early 1900s, Imperial Germany strengthened the fortifications on Heligoland. When war (WWI) did come, Heligoland did not escape the conflict. It was the site of one of the earliest engagements of the war, the Battle of Heligoland Bight⊕, and involved in one of the first seaplane attacks, the Cuxhaven Raid (Christmas Day 1914)(ibid.). Whatever the fortunes of the British and German forces in Heligoland, the biggest losers were the island’s inhabitants who were summarily ejected from their homes on the island, having been given no say in the matter❂. They were given only six hours to pack and take only what could be transported by hand. The house-holders’s bedding and furniture was left behind. They were ‘reassured’ that they would be able to return after the war was won – in a few weeks! (ibid.). After the war Germany in accordance with the Versailles Treaty was required to demilitarise Heligoland, it was however allowed to retain the island – despite entreaties to Britain from the islanders (returned from their five year-plus exile) that it take back its former colony (ibid.).
▵ An artist’s impression of the Cuxhaven Raid
Island spring-time
The interwar period heralded something of an economic renaissance and the introduction of large-scale tourism for Heligoland. In the 1930s it annually drew 30,000 visitors with enhanced spending power to patronise the new fashionable drinking establishments and expensive gift shops. Adolf Hitler’s Nazi consolidation of power saw a rebuilding of the island’s fortifications. Hitler harboured other grand plans for Heligoland (an anti-aircraft fortress and a gigantic new naval base intended to rival the Royal Navy’s one) but these never came to fruition.
During the Second World War, Heligoland was the site of another early aerial/sea battle between GB and Germany and the onset of the global conflict in 1939. After the Allies gained the upper hand over Germany and it’s Axis partners, the British RAF subjected the fortified island to great devastation (over a two-day period in April 1945 7,000 bombs were dropped on the island, resulting in the flattening of the middle section of Hauptinsel).
Allied victory in the war did not mean a respite from the British destruction for the island. GB having taken interim charge of Heligoland, once again cleared the island of the local population and used it as a bomb-testing range over the next seven years. This assault included a British “Big Bang” (6,700 tonnes of explosives on one single day), thought to be the single largest non-nuclear explosions ever!) [Jan Rüger, Heligoland: Britain, Germany and the Struggle for the North Sea, (2016)].
▵ German Federal Republic stamp commemorating the 1952 hand-back
Cold War sacrifice
After the war, the devastated state of the island proved good propaganda fodder for the new West German Federal government, allowing it to represent itself as “an emblem of German victimhood and nationalism“. In 1952, the Brits, preoccupied with the wider Western imperatives of the day (the Cold War), gave the tiny archipelago back to the West Germans as an inducement to bind them and their influential chancellor Adenauer firmly to the Western anti-Soviet camp [ibid.].
In peace, once more the rocky island reverted to a pleasant holiday destination for continental (mainly German) day-trippers. In the early 1960s Heligoland rebuilt it’s tourist industry and the island was transformed yet again into a modern holiday resort with attractive duty-free benefits and a new spa complex. The present ambience of the born-again island has been likened to “the understated charm of a classic British seaside resort, a miniature Scarborough transplanted into the middle of the German Bight”. Contemporary Heligoland and it’s harbour has also resumed its earlier role as a venue for yacht races. [Waterson, loc.cit.; Rüger, loc.cit.].
Germany’s only Hochseeinsel⊞
For all they have suffered materially and emotionally as a consequence of British misrule, in war and in peace—the betrayals, the dismissive lack of consultation, the physical devastation—the Heligolanders seem to have buried that sorry chapter in the past. The German tourist spiel for the island depicts it as Deutschlands einzige meersinsel (“Germany’s only sea island”), projecting images of quaint and colourful fishermen’s harbourside cottages. Phrases such as “offshore oasis of relaxation”, “a unique natural setting…(and)…mild maritime climate” litter the pages of published promos (www.germany.travel/).
Footnote: Promised resort lifestyle aside, contemporary Heligoland eschews many of the trappings of modernity for a more minimalist if not entirely back-to-basics existence—no autos, no bicycles (push-scooters and hiking the prevailing modes of transport), no high-rise, no internet, no invasive smells, noises or sounds of industry—a diet of peace and tranquility and migratory bird-watching, befitting Heligoland’s curative, get-away-from-it-all role over much of it’s history.
▵ Heligoland crest
︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻
✲ these days the island also has a crater-shaped Mittelland (middle land), thanks to the British bomb-testing program of the Forties and early Fifties
❅ severe storm action has massively altered the geology of Heligoland over the centuries…until 1720 the two islands were connected [‘Heligoland’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]
〥 today they number around 1,500-2,500
◘ Lord Salisbury, the architect of the exchange, had first had to overcome staunch internal opposition to the relinquishment of Heligoland, not least from Queen Victoria herself
⊕ three German light cruisers and one torpedo-boat was sunk
❂ this has been a recurring motif with Heligoland, GB’s disposal of the island in 1890 was likewise done without consulting the 2,000 inhabitants of Heligoland
⊞ offshore island
The Wor(l)d According to Saul: Dictionaries and the Language Wars, Doubt versus Ideology
Canadian political philosopher John Ralston Saul is the secular high-priest of doubters and cynics, a non-believer in “the gospel” of the modern corporate state, constantly debunking the conventional wisdoms offered up as “absolute truths” in Western society✲. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that Saul would produce a guidebook for other secular agnostics. Wedged between his treatises on his personal philosophy ‘superstar’ Voltaire, his studies of modern Canadian society and his excursions into the realm of fiction, is JR Saul’s The Doubter’s Companion, or to give it his full title:
The Doubter’s Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense (Viking, 1994)¹
Although Saul calls his volume “a dictionary”, the term applies more to the book’s format (utilising the standard A-Z form of the dictionary) than to its content or purpose. The Companion goes on to define Dictionary as “Opinion presented as truth in alphabetical order”. And Answers are merely “a mechanism for avoiding questions”. Saul decries the trajectory of modern dictionaries and language (which have been captured by the forces of a rational orthodoxy), yearning instead for a return to the Humanist dictionaries of the 18th century (Voltaire, Diderot, Johnson, etc)².
When I first delved into The Doubter’s Companion (around 1995), my mind took me to that other great cynic’s dictionary of the early 1900s, Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary. Both works, albeit very different books, are idiosyncratically unconventional takes on language and meaning in their respective societies, and both proffer a contrarian view of the established wisdom of the day. Both Saul and Bierce are provocateurs, each with their own personal axe to grind⁌.
The Doubter’s Companion, by its polemical nature is unequivocally meant to shake up orthodox thinking (TDC was described by one reader as “an abecedarium of subversion”). The dictionary form of the book is a device Saul employs to launch into short philosophical essays on topics about modern post-industrial society that concern him—corporatism, individualism, leadership and managerialism, freedom of expression, communication, public relations, advertising and the way language is distorted to control communications (see his definition of ‘ideology’). In so doing, Saul skewers the accepted veracity of many of the words, phrases and terms you will find in today’s dictionaries.
And as it is an instruction manual to help doubters navigate their way through a linguistic maze of (in Saul’s opinion) mis-defined terms, the central tenet is thus affirmed:
Doubt: The only human activity capable of controlling the use of power in a positive way. Doubt is central to understanding.
Wisdom: The purpose of doubt … wisdom is life with uncertainty, the opposite of power or ideology.
Ideology: Tendentious arguments which advance a world view as absolute truth in order to win and hold political power.
The Corporate executive “is not a capitalist but a technocrat in drag”.
Economics is “the romance of truth through measurement”.
Level playing field: An ideological abstraction adopted as a universal value by the management of large corporations.
Saul the provocateur infuses the dictionary with a regular diet of “outrageous statements and provocations”:
Marxist: The only serious functioning Marxists left in the West are the senior managers of large, usually transnational corporations.
Neo-Conservatives are the Bolsheviks of the Right (“the exact opposite of a conservative”).
Modern (that should be “post-modern”) fads of intellectual thinking such as Deconstructionism get short shrift from Saul:
Deconstructionism: Can also be seen as a school of light comedy.
Calm: A state of emotion which is overrated except in religious retreats. Calmness for Saul has a decidedly political connotation today, “it is used to control people who are dissatisfied with the way those in authority are doing their job”✬.
Public relations: A negative form of imagination. In Mussolini’s phrase, “invention is more useful than truth”.
Saul savages that that most universal institution of fast food, MacDonalds:
A Big Mac: The communion wafer of consumption. (It is) not really food but the promise of food.
He goes on sardonically to bracket it with “Perrier, one of the last sacred objects of the leading philosophical school of the late-twentieth century—public relations”…one of Saul’s greatest bête noires.
Elsewhere, in a similar vein, he brands Ronald McDonald as a “Post-modern philosopher”…the “face and voice of consumer culture”.
Contemporary education doesn’t escape a broadside from Saul, especially the American form:
SAT: A system of standardized American college entry exams designed to nurture and reward functional illiteracy.
Universities find themselves in Saul’s cross-hairs as well. Within the “exclusive territories” of the university that knowledge is divided into, the principal occupation of academics is “to invent dialects sufficiently hermetic to prevent knowledge from passing between territories”.
Happy Hour is “a depressing comment on the rest of the day”.
At different points Saul diverts momentarily from his philosophical musings to give historical clarification on certain pertinent terms of interest to him. Having defined Depression as “a form of economic disaster common throughout history”, he goes on to contend that “in 1973 the word was deleted from all Western languages and replaced by the term recession”, a softer word which in Saul’s mind allows economists to maintain the myth of appearing to “manage real situations”. The author expands his point: “to admit to the existence of anything as uncontrollable as a depression would be to admit failure”.
The book’s dictionary entries allow space for brief commentaries on individuals from the pages of history who attract Saul’s interest. These are usually philosopher-figures but not always. He has an interesting take on the great turn-of-the-century novelist Joseph Conrad, “The essential modern writer…demonstrated that the novel could have a third century of relevance if the story was transformed into metaphysics disguised as reality”.
Sigmund Freud, who in America would be described as the “father of shrinks”, gets a guernsey in the dictionary, albeit a cynical and disparaging reference – “a man so dissatisfied with his own mother and father that he devoted his life to convincing everyone who would just listen—or better still, talk—that they’re parents were just as bad”. 
Air Conditioning: An efficient means for spreading disease in enclosed public spaces.
Muzak: A public noise neither requested nor listened to by individuals. It is the descendant of a school of public relations invented by the Nazis.
For one so articulately cynical of human nature, politics, economics, most things in the modern world (except of course doubt), Saul’s definition of that attitudinal standpoint seems contradictory:
Cynicism: An effective social mechanism for preventing communication.
Pessimism on the other hand is “a valuable protection against quackery”. More beneficial than ‘scepticism’ “which slips easily into cynicism and so becomes a self-defeating negative force”.
Whereas Optimism to Saul is double-edged. When applied to oneself it is “a pleasant and sometime useful distraction” to reality, but “when encouraged as a social attitude … it is the public tool of scoundrels and ideologues” (as is patriotism).
World Class: A phrase used by provincial cities and second-rate entertainment and sports events … to assert they are not provincial or second-rate, thereby confirming that they are.
Saul includes in the alphabetical list a number of surprising and disparate entries for a reference book on philosophical common sense. These include Ants (Saul makes the unexpected and unverified statement that the members of the Formicidae family of eusocial insects “do nothing 71.5 per cent of the time”)⊡; Apple (the fruit not the corporation); Armpits (which is curiously cross-referenced to Reality); Nannyism (not sure why this topic warranted nine paragraphs and over 400 words but Saul interweaves a discourse on Margaret Thatcher, bullying and sex appeal into the entry); Urban weather patterns (wtf?); White bread (“the sophisticated product of a civilization taken to its logical conclusion … continually refined until all utility has been removed”).
Among the many asides Saul offers an interesting reflection on the city-state of Venice – he declares it “the original model of modern dictatorship, in which commercial power finds its cultural expression in painting, architecture and music … (but not) language”. And on Benito Mussolini: “the nascent modern Heroic leader (who) combined corporatism, public relations and sport together, while replacing public debate and citizen participation with false popularism and the illusion of direct democracy”.
JRS humorous and glib
The philosopher’s serious message aside, Saul produces a regular line of humorous explanations of terms, some of these are dazzlingly economic epigrams or bon mots:
Museums: Safe storage for stolen objects.
Cosmetic surgery: Cosmetic perjury.
Biography: A respectable form of pornography.
Other descriptors and definitions however are quite glib:
René Descartes is thus presented “gave credibility to the idea that the mind exists separately from the body, which suggests he didn’t look down while writing” [ba-dum-tss!].
Anorexia: A condition aspired to by most middle-class women (a subject taken much more medically serious today!).
JRS’s extensive catalogue of pet bugbears include ideology (and ideologues), applied corporatism, applied civilisation, conventional wisdom, , economic determinism, technocrats, absolute truth and certainty, dry, sectarian ‘definitions’, rigid scholasticism and structure, superstition, public relations and advertising.
Footnote: it’d be interesting to see an update of the Companion. A chance to find out what the perspicacious John Ralston Saul makes of early 21st century concepts such as social media, iPhones, fake news, drones. climate change deniers and the nanny state, to name just a handful.
╰━━ ⋅𖥔⋅ ━━✶━━ ⋅𖥔⋅ ━━ ⋅𖥔⋅ ━━✶━━ ⋅𖥔⋅ ━━✶ ━━ ⋅𖥔⋅ ━━✶━━ ⋅𖥔⋅ ━━╯
✲ whether that be from the left or right
⁌ though where Bierce is acerbic, Saul is out and out incendiary
✬ adding the rider that “calm incompetence” has risen to become a quality of high professionalism”
⊡ in case this isn’t enough on the subject, JRL follows up with an entry for ant-eaters (Myrmecophaga Jubata)
¹ Amazon‘s “dust-jacket” review summarises the book as full of “renegade opinions”; (it) uses “guerrilla lexicography to reclaim public language from stultifying dialects of modern expertise”
² ‘Doubter’s Companion’, www.freelistbooks.com
⏏³⁴⁵⁶⁷⁸⁹⁰⏏
Work of “The Devil”, a Reference Compendium of Unconventional Wisdom for Cynics in the Progressive Era
The World According to Bierce
Ambrose Bierce, American short story writer, man of letters, journalist and civil war (Union side) veteran, is best known for his unorthodox lexicon, The Devil’s Dictionary, a humorous, satirical and very personal take on a selection of words in the English language. The dictionary was compiled by Bierce over three decades, being initially published in instalments in various newspapers and magazines. Eventually the collection was published in book form, first as The Cynic’s Word Book in 1906 and then as The Devil’s Dictionary in 1911, two years before Bierce’s never satisfactorily-explained disappearance in Chihuahua, Mexico, where the journalist was visiting to gain first-hand experience of the Mexican Revolution.
Highly influential literary critic of the first half of the 20th century, HL Mencken, heaped lavish almost doting praise on The Devil’s Dictionary… “the true masterpiece of the one genuine wit that These States have ever seen“…”some of the most gorgeous witticisms in the English language“…”some of the most devastating epigrams ever written“.
⇑ First (1911) edition of the Dictionary
დ~დ~დ დ~დ~დ დ~დ~დ
Cynicism and satire provide the backbones of Bierce’s provocative dictionary. So, an interesting place to start looking is how he handles these terms – the words ‘satire’, ‘cynic’ and ‘dictionary’ themselves. Despite being fully versed in the craft himself, Bierce views the practitioner of cynicism less than favourably.
Cynic: A blackguard❅ who sees things as they are, and not as they ought to be (which presumably is the definition of an optimism۞).
Satire: An obsolete kind of literary composition in which the vices and follies of the author’s enemies were expounded with imperfect tenderness✫.
Dictionary: A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic.
Bierce goes on to add with tongue firmly planted in his cheek that his dictionary, however, is “a most useful work”.
But a cynic Bierce certainly is. At one point he sweepingly declares, in the blanket fashion that is his trademark, that “all are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a philosopher” (in which case, what would Bierce have made of Freud and the “dark art” of psychotherapy!?!). This perception of the author reminds me to some extent of the distinction often made between a person with an erratic behavioural pattern who is poor (and is labelled insane), and a person with an erratic behavioural pattern who is wealthy (labelled merely eccentric).
Romance and true love falls by the wayside with Bierce’s cynic always hovering around ground level:
Love: A temporary insanity cured by marriage.
Politics is even more fertile ground for Biercian cynicism…even the highest office in the land is not spared. With characteristic directness, there is:
President: The greased pig in the field game of American politics.
Senate: A body of elderly gentlemen charged with high duties and misdemeanors.
Diplomacy: The patriotic art of lying for one’s country.
And of course, to Bierce, ‘capital’ (ie, the capital) is defined as “the seat of misgovernment”.
The contemporary power politics of the day is very entrenched in Bierce’s cynic’s consciousness:
Cannon: an instrument employed in the rectification of national boundaries.
In a similar vein Bierce gives recognition to the tradition of his nation’s imperialistic ambitions in possibly the most quoted and most acute of Bierce’s definitions:
War: God’s way of teaching Americans geography⬲.
Bierce’s entries can go off on a tangent☒, often making extensive use of quotations from “eminent poets” to underscore his definitions (Father G Jape, SJ, is a much relied upon prop for Bierce). Sometimes this involves recourse to wordy anecdotes and phrases. In contrast to lengthy descriptors, some Devil’s Dictionary‘s entries are succinctly on the mark, some are absolute poetic corkers:
Absent: Peculiarly exposed to the tooth of detraction.
Erudition: Dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.
Envy: Emulation adapted to the meanest capacity.
Fib: A lie that has not cut its teeth.
Martyr: One who moves along the line of least reluctance to a desired death.
Saint: A dead sinner revised and edited.
And even more succinctly summarised is:
Hope: Desire and expectation rolled into one.
Some of Bierce’s ‘opinions’ veiled as definitions are little more than whimsical nonsenses or clever wordplays:
Incumbent: A person of the liveliest interest to the outcumbents.
Harbor: A place where ships taking shelter from stores are exposed to the fury of the customs.
The Devil’s Dictionary dishes up irony in spades, repeatedly turning the mirror back on the reader:
Bigot: One who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that you do not entertain.
Bierce’s lexicon is strewn with idiosyncratic elements, one is a recurring motif of robbers and theft, regularly he describes a situation where someone’s hands are in someone else’s pockets:
Alliance: In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other’s pocket that they cannot separately plunder a third.
Bierce is often lauded for his humanist perspective of the world…the major organised religions do not escape his critical eye:
Religions are “conclusions for which the facts of nature supply no major premises”
Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
He can be irreverent – “Christians and camels both receive their burdens kneeling”.
The Dictionary dishes up a smorgasbord of satirical, ironic and often bitter definitions of the world as seen by Ambrose Bierce (one of the acerbic writer’s nicknames was “Bitter Bierce”). But Bierce is of course a creature of his time with all the glaring faults and prejudices of the 19th century white man’s mindset. So, through the satire and cynicism we witness the less savoury traits and predisposition of the lexicographer. Casual assumptions of racism and misogyny run through the pages of The Devil’s Dictionary.
Witch: A beautiful and attractive young woman, in wickedness a league beyond the devil.
Widows are depicted as “pathetic creatures”, whereas wives are dismissed as merely “bitter halves” (big surprise: Bierce was separated from his own wife). On occasions he crosses the line that even he should not have ventured, such as advocating or at the very least implying a violent impulse towards the female sex:
Bang: The arrangement of a woman’s hair which suggests the thought of shooting her.
The dreaded ‘N’ word is wheeled out in the cause superior of cynicism:
African: A nigger who votes our way.
And there is more than a hint of a general misanthropic disposition emerging from the pages of the Dictionary:
Birth: The first and direst of all disasters.
Marriage is the union of “two slaves”.
AB’s miscellany of hobby horses
Politicians and philosophers are on Bierce’s “hit list”, as are lawyers who get a predictable assessment:
Lawyer: One skilled in the circumvention of the law.
Liar: A lawyer with a roving commission.
Historians, in The Devil’s Dictionary are reduced to “broad-gauge gossips”, and ‘history’ is summarily pigeonholed as “mostly false (and) about unimportant events”.
Although he doesn’t specifically give medical students a definition entry, his regular references to them through the book might prompt one to conclude that their single defining feature is that of “grave-robbers”∞.
Places like New York City and specifically Wall Street are “dens of iniquity”, the sort of Biblical association Bierce employs to those things or entities representing (in his eyes) absolute evil.
Bierce’s idiosyncratic designation of ‘happiness’, as “an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another” dovetails neatly to the definition of the German term Schadenfreude (substituting the word ‘perverse’ for ‘agreeable’ perhaps).
Bierce’s dictionary is also prone to outbursts of elitism – such as:
Laziness: Unwarranted repose of manner in a person of low degree.
Idiot: A member of a large and powerful tribe✪ whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling (an ‘idiotocracy’ perhaps).
EndNote: Bierce’s cold trail
The mysterious disappearance of Bierce has fascinated interested parties for the hundred plus years since the author vanished in Mexico. Speculation has been wildly unrestrained and rampant as to the writer’s supposed end (eg, he hooked up with Mexican bandit leader Pancho Villa and he was killed by Federal troops, or by rebels, or by his own hand or by Villa himself). Novelists, playwrights and filmmakers have all had a go at unravelling the mystery, but the reality is that no one really knows what happened to Bierce [‘The Death of Bierce’, The Ambrose Bierce Appreciation Society, www.biercephile.com].
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❅ Bierce defines ‘blackguard’ as an “inverted gentleman”, like a box of cherries that displays the fine ones on top but with the box “opened on the wrong side”
۞ except that Bierce’s ‘optimist’ is “a pessimist (who) applied to God for relief”
✫ obsolete or not, it doesn’t stop AB from indulging in the device
⬲ it is not universally accepted that this most famous of Bierce-isms originated with Bierce himself, see for instance “The Ambrose Bierce Site”, www.donswain.com
☒ for example see the entry for ‘story’
∞ maybe overstated but Bierce was not fabricating a connection – “body snatching” for medical education was a very real and very lucrative activity at the time
✪ Bierce tended to view different societal groups as tribal entities
On the Appian Way: Model Community, Suburban Precinct?
Burwood is an old, established suburb in what is today called the Inner West of Sydney, but was once (broadly) just called the “Western Suburbs”. In the colonial period and even into the early days of Federation, Burwood’s standing in the “pecking order” of Sydney suburbs was probably somewhat higher than it is today, if the grandness of its large, surviving houses and mansions, especially towards the southern end of Burwood Road, Burwood, is anything to go by.
Appian way, or if you prefer, the Appian Way, is a reminder of the more exalted social status that Burwood perhaps once commanded. In the midst of the “Strata-titleland” that is modern day Burwood is the Appian Way, you’ll find it perched between Burwood Road (South) and the seminal Liverpool Road. Appian Way is just a short, little street which charts a serpentine course, looping not far from its eastern end. Within this loop lies the street’s main interest…at least as far as this correspondent is concerned.
Hoskins Estate More of that later but first some background. Appian Way (with its obvious nod to Ancient Rome’s illustrious highway) had its genesis with wealthy industrialist George John Hoskins. Hoskins who along with his brother Charles extracted their immense capital from successful engineering and steel-making works, purchased the land which hitherto had been called Humphrey’ Paddock just after the turn of the 20th century✽. London-born Hoskins conceived of it as an (upmarket) model housing estate to accommodate the executives of his businesses in close proximity to himself. That is, a haven for citizens of his own socio-economic class. The estate of some 20 acres in area was intended for houses of a standard that would attract ‘respectable’ businessmen and professionals … a harmonious social community having all the facilities desirable for a self-contained suburban lifestyle” [‘A model community’, Cheryl Kemp and John Johnson, Inner West Courier, 28-May-2019, www.innerwestcourier.com.au].
Hoskins, exhibiting a tendency which nowadays we might describe as that of a “control freak”, leased rather than sold the estate’s houses, which allowed the industrialist and developer to monopolise all aspects of the community (only one solitary house in the tree-lined street had been sold by the time of Hoskins’ death in 1926) [ibid.].
The houses
The Dictionary of Sydney describes the Appian Way as a “heritage-listed precinct of Edwardian houses”. The architecture is of that period but the houses are best characterised as asymmetrical and very variable in style. Essentially, together the original estate comprises some of the finest examples of Australian Federation style with their multi-gabled roofs, wide use of slate and terracotta tiles, and drawing on a variety of domestic designs. The grounds of the properties are more than generously spacious – large blocks, expansive frontages, manicured lawns and landscape gardens. Appian Way includes a nature strip in the midst of these bushy and leafy residences which is neatly maintained and occupied by Brush Box trees [‘Appian Way’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
‘Erica’ – perhaps the Way’s standout ▲
The original houses still standing in Burwood’s Appian Way are a rich sample of different Federation styles. Among the variants of the genre is the Queen Anne Federation (‘Alba Longa’ and ‘Colonna’), the Arts and Crafts Federation (‘Erica’ and ‘St Ellero’) and the Bungaloiw Federation style (‘Casa Tasso’ and ‘Ostia’). One or two modern redbrick houses have also infiltrated the street, but these undistinguished abodes stick out by virtue of the paucity of their character in comparison with the elegant ‘Feds’.
Appian Way Recreational Club
On the eastern side of Appian Way the street forms a curve which envelops a communal reserve – this is Hoskins estate’s most distinctive feature回. The sign on the iron gate of the reserve spells out the acronym “AWRC’- Appian Way Recreational Club. The AWRC purportedly runs a lawn tennis club on the green field, but when I visited, the lines of the courts had not been recently marked and the nets nowhere to be seen✣. With the gates of the club firmly padlocked, it did not look like there had been a game in jest or earnest for some time.
What tennis courts? ▲
When the estate’s houses were eventually offered for sale after Hoskins had passed on, the standing arrangement was that each house sold came with a share in the communal reserve (owned collectively by the Appian Way Recreational Club) [‘A model community’].
▲ Bush plants and agaves surround the ‘courts’
Footnote: I have a distant but nonetheless pretty firm recollection (dating from around late 1970s) that before the lawn tennis courts existed at the AWRC, the field was used as a croquet court…which would be an altogether appropriately patrician pastime for the financially well-connected community of the estate’s earliest days – what today we might call “the big end of town”.
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✽ recipient of the original land grant at Burwood was one William Faithful who came to the colony as a private in the NSW Corps in 1792
回 it is speculated that Hoskins may have derived inspiration for this distinctive feature from ‘The Parade’ in nearby Enfield [‘A model community’] ✣ let alone the semblance of an actual player or two
The Russian Far East: Russia’s Far Flung Territory in North-East Asia 2
For most outside observers, the Russian Far East as a geographical region is pretty much indistinguishable from the vast Siberian landscape. This is hardly surprising when you consider that until 2000 the Russian Far East was lacking in officially defined boundaries❋. Historically, the Russian state in its various forms has tended to ignore the RFE region, commonly seen as a neglected outpost of empire, populated by hardy Cossack settlers, impoverished peasants and those detained there against their will. The population, at its highest point not reaching much beyond eight million, has dwindled since the end of the communist system◘.
(Map image: www.eurogeologists.eu)
In the early to mid 1990s there was some optimism shown by Russia’s rulers that much needed development could be injected into the country’s Far Eastern region. There was a belief or at least a hope in Moscow that the Russian Far East (RFE) could create a viable niche for itself, that it’s vast repository of natural resources could be utilised to target the growing Asian markets whose own raw materials had a finite life and would soon be running low. Some even touted RFE as potentially the “next Asian Tiger” [‘The Next Asian Tiger? Promoting Prosperity in the RFE’, (Lawrence DiRita), The Heritage Foundation, 18-Aug-1994, www.heritage.org].
Russia’s principal city in the east, Vladivostok, became the Free Port of Vladivostok, the host of a Russian-sponsored event, the Eastern Economic Forum, which it was hoped would provide a platform to attract foreign investment to the region. Rhetoric from Vladimir Putin, assuming the reins of the post-Soviet federation at the end of the Nineties, proclaimed that the development of RFE would be “a national priority for the 21st century”, [‘Accelerated Development of the RFE’, (Igor A Makarov), Russia in Global Affairs, 29-Oct-2018, www.eng.globalaffairs.ru].
Russia’s vulnerable eastern flank ~ Russia, with one eye on the geopolitical implications of an underpopulated eastern flank of the country and its underperforming economy, certainly had the motivation to develop the region. The hitch in the early 21st century has been, as ever, the pitfalls of implementation…a myriad of problems confronted Putin. RFE lacks for infrastructure and labour (#resource rich but people poor). Moreover the country was experiencing an economic slowdown. Russia’s only option if it was achieve any meaningful development was external investment, it needed new partners to propel it. Russia’s 2014 annexation of the Crimea however led to the imposition of economic sanctions by the West, which along with falling oil prices further harmed the nation’s economic situation [Dhananjay Sahai, “Russian Far East and Central Asia: Impediments to Sino-Russian Partnership”, ORF Issue Brief No. 280, February 2019, Observer Research Foundation, http://www.orfonline.org].
The People’s Republic of China, Russia’s new best “enemy-friend” ~ Russia’s unpropitious economic realities have steered its approach to the development of RFE. To get China on board Russia had to provide economic incentives to the Chinese to invest in RFE. Chinese businesses and migrants initially flooded into the region, at its peak in the 1990s there were over 200,000 Chinese living and working in the region. Chinese suppliers and retailers were also thick on the ground in RFE.
A Chinese market trader in Vladivostok (Photo: AFP)
Russia’s opening up to China was not without misgivings from Moscow, it had reasons to be wary of opening the door too far to China. The IMF calculates that the Chinese economy is 78 times bigger than Russia’s…Moscow is aware of the risks to its economic sovereignty of becoming over-dependent on its dynamic, powerful neighbour. Accordingly Russia has tried to balance China’s weighty imprint on RFE and Siberia by wooing South Korean and Japanese investment, and from India as well [ibid.; ‘Russia seeks to balance China in Far East; woos Indian investment’, (DR Chaudhury), Economic Times, 24-Jul-2019, www.economictimes.com].
The new Sino-Russian rapprochement has greatly enhanced the trade ties binding the two heavyweight Asian countries – Moscow now sells its natural gas and advanced weaponry to the Chinese and Beijing reciprocates mainly with manufactured goods. With the common enmity/rivalry towards the US a further bond, Russia in the present decade has unequivocally pivoted towards China✧.
Backlash against the Chinese presence: Fears of Chinese irredentism ~ The presence of the Chinese in RFR has prompted a backlash from local Russian workers and a pushback from local Russian media and politicians. Workers and the communities complained that the burgeoning numbers of Chinese workers deprived locals of job opportunities (Chinese companies tend to employ their own countrymen and women on their Russian projects) [‘Why Russia’s Far East Struggles to Lure Investors (Op-Ed)’, (Richard Cornelius), The Moscow Times, 25-Jan-2018, www.the.moscowtimes.com; Sahai, loc.cit.] . Subsequently, the Russian government decreed that 80% of workers employed on Chinese projects must henceforth be local (ie, Russian) [Chaudhury, loc.cit.].
New ‘besties’ Xi and Putin toast one another (Photo: AP)
Bilateral relations between China and Russia have been talked up recently…this year Chinese premier Xi Jingpin told Russian media that Russo-Chinese relations were “at their best in history”. Notwithstanding this upbeat tone, concerns about the encroachment of the contiguous Chinese in RFE continue to be held by Russians, and such disquiet is fuelled by some Russian media outlets. A suspicion and a fear that lingers here is one of “being demographically (as well as economically) swamped by the giant next door”⌂ [‘The Chinese influx into Asian Russia’, (Alexander Kruglov), Asia Times, 13-Jun-2019, www.asiatimes.com]. The existence of unknown numbers of illegal Chinese immigrants in the region adds to the resentment of local Russian settlers in RFE. The influx is often interpreted as “an expression of a China de facto territorial expansion” (invasion fear-mongering) [‘Chinese in the Russian Far East: a geopolitical time bomb’, This Week in Asia, www.amp.scmp.com].
How many Chinese in RFE? ~ The official numbers contradict the basis of this concern. According to the 2010 Russian Census, the number of ethnic Chinese residing in Russia had fallen to just 29,000 (a mere 0.5% of RFE population). However some estimates put the actual total of Chinese at between 300 and 500 thousand [ibid.]. Any figures for the region it should be noted are very fluid and quite speculative. A significant proportion of the population comprises temporary migration and shuttle trade, Chinese merchants who travel back and forth across the border to ply their wares without ever settling permanently in RFE [‘Ethnic Chinese in Russia’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. Conspicuous Chinese visitors now make up the largest sector of Russian tourism, especially to RFE and Irkutsk/Lake Baikal (only two hours from Beijing by plane). Local Russians are perturbed at the behaviour of Chinese tourists to Lake Baikal, patronising Chinese businesses only, their litterbug tendency to leave rubbish strewn around the lake…most worrying to the Russians about the Chinese influx is that it might presage Beijing’s designs on reclaiming the area lost to Tsarist Russia (see “Thorny issue” below). All this contributes to a growing strain of Russian ‘Sinophobia’ in the Far East region [Kruglov, loc.cit.].
Lake Baikal 
What probably ‘spooks’ the Russians the most are the stark demographics at play: the Chinese provinces bordering Russia’s Far East contain 110 million people, dwarfing the approximately six million Russians across the border [ibid.]. Dissatisfaction with Putin’s RFE policies are reflected in the 2018 gubernatorial elections in the region – voters rejected the Kremlin’s candidates, sending a clear message of disapproval to their federation president [‘Putin is losing Russia’s Far East’, (Leonid Bershidsky), Bloomberg Opinion, 24-Sep-2018, www.bloomberg.com].
Some scholars have sought to debunk the theory of a Chinese takeover, arguing that the Chinese population in RFE was being checked by several factors current in effect (an upsurge of regulation by the Russian authorities with new controls on Chinese markets; the overall poor economic prospects of the Russian Far East and a resultant shrinking consumer base for Chinese commodities) [‘The Myth of a Chinese Takeover in RFE’, (Xiaochen Su), The Diplomat, 19-Jun-2019, www.thediplomat.com].
〨 Heihe, Chinese boomtown in Dong-Bei region
Thorny issue on the Chinese side ~ The border areas surrounding RFE are a lingering cause for resentment from the Chinese perspective. Under the 1858 Treaty of Aigun Tsarist Russia coerced the Qing Dynasty into ceding more than 600,000 square kilometres of Chinese territory to it. This was followed in 1860 by the Convention of Beijing. The effect of both concessions was that the Russian Empire acquired territory on both sides of the Amur River, giving it control of the Primorye region. Known in China as the “Unequal Treaties”, the 19th century episode still engenders public resentment among the Chinese, sometimes fuelled by dissident groups such as Falun Gong (see also ‘Border clashes’ in FN) [Sahai, loc.cit.; ‘Chinese in the Russian Far East’, op.cit.]✠.
In the prevailing climate Russia and Putin’s commitment to the development of the Russian Far East remains hamstrung by the Russians’ inability to go it alone. Enlisting the help of China, though necessary, is deeply problematic for the Kremlin. It is in fact a delicate balancing game for Moscow, on the one hand it fears becoming economically subordinate to PRC, but it wants Chinese investment because it needs it to go forward. Yet the complexities of the RFE region doesn’t make for a seamless process, it doesn’t deliver the degree of Chinese investment required or desired [‘Russia struggles to attract Chinese capital to its Far East’, (Vita Spivac & Henry Foy), Financial Times, 05-May-2019, www.amp.ft.com]. In the meantime the shortcomings of Russian policy on RFE✪ are a hand-break retarding the region’s development.
Footnote: 1̳9̳6̳9̳ ̳B̳o̳r̳d̳e̳r̳ ̳c̳l̳a̳s̳h̳e̳s̳ ̳– i̳n̳c̳i̳d̳e̳n̳t̳s̳ ̳i̳n̳ ̳t̳h̳e̳ ̳S̳i̳n̳o̳-̳S̳o̳v̳i̳e̳t̳ ̳s̳p̳l̳i̳t̳ Chinese and Soviet troops engaged in a series of isolated military clashes on the eastern border during 1969 (beginning when Chinese platoons attacked Soviet soldiers stationed on Zhenbao Island in the Ussuri River (a reaction to long-standing grievances held by China over Russia’s 19th century acquisition of hitherto Chinese territory)❅. A ceasefire was negotiated by Beijing and Moscow late in 1969, but subsequent bilateral negotiations took until 2008 to settle the matter of who had territorial control of what in the region…as shown above however, the border issue continues to engender lingering grievances up to the present day.
Eastern border conflict (Image: History Forum)
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❋ the catch-all descriptor “Siberia and the Far East” (Rus: Сибирь и Дальний Восток) had hitherto been used to refer to Russia’s territories east of the Urals, making no clear distinction between “Siberia” and the “Far East” [‘Russian Far East’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]
◘ under Putin’s Russia, Moscow enacted the Russian Homestead Act (2016) which was aimed at encouraging Russian and Ukrainian citizens to settle in the Far East okrugs with the incentive of obtaining 2.5 acres of free land
✧ in the process incurring a substantial loan debt to China
⌂ some of the Russian fears border on the irrational, such as the Siberian speculation that the Chinese want to annex Lake Baikal to monopolise all of its precise fresh water reserves exclusively for Chinese consumption (Kruglov)
✠ the dispute and custom leads some Chinese to continue to refer to the RFE capital Vladivostok by its old Chinese name ‘Hâisenhēnwâi’
✪ reforms affecting RFE have been only partially implemented; there is a paucity of enlightened new strategies to revive the region (eg, a genuine trade liberalisation is sadly lacking); and the planning round it is bereft of a clear, overriding vision for the region [Makarov, op.cit.]
❅ in the same year there was Sino-Soviet military clashes on the western border (Xinjiang/Soviet Central Asia) as well