What Are You Currently Reading? 2015

[omarali50]

Malaysia got rich, in large part thank to their Chinese minority, but the Malays have also become more Islamized over time (they were never as relaxed as their Javenese neighbors to begin with) and they will play the race card as well as the "Islam-in-danger" card very freely. I would predict more trouble, except that the Malays also seem to have a functioning "Hard-British-Raj" administrative system, so they may be able to keep a lid on things for a few more years. Plus overseas Chinese communities tend to be docile and not make trouble, especially if they can keep making money.
But as they say, it's a matter of time.

[Backwards Observer]

Malaysia got rich, in large part thank to their Chinese minority, but the Malays have also become more Islamized over time (they were never as relaxed as their Javenese neighbors to begin with) and they will play the race card as well as the "Islam-in-danger" card very freely. I would predict more trouble, except that the Malays also seem to have a functioning "Hard-British-Raj" administrative system, so they may be able to keep a lid on things for a few more years. Plus overseas Chinese communities tend to be docile and not make trouble, especially if they can keep making money.
But as they say, it's a matter of time.

Hey, that's great info. My Chinese family have been living in Malaysia since our grandfather came over in the 1890's 'cos apparently he was too much of a slacker to make it in bad old China. He did okay until the forties when the kempeitai tortured him and chopped his head off for some reason. I was there for the last Malay/Chinese chopapalooza in 1969...bad vibes, but interesting. Our asses got bailed out because the local Sultan sent the Sabah Rangers, who were mostly Christian-ish former headhunters, to our neighbourhood. I remember them slow-walking silently out of the jungle near our house accompanied by a Saladin armoured car one misty morning. They looked cool but kinda scary. Like all backwards foreigners we really don't understand our own countries. It only makes sense when some, uh, 'objective' outsider with no specific agenda to wiggle explains it to us. It's a local code of silence thing, I guess. Thanks!

[Backwards Observer]

(they were never as relaxed as their Javenese neighbors to begin with)

Maybe I misunderstand, but are you referring to Indonesia where they mellowed out on Konfrontasi and relaxingly killed over half a million people in 1965?

Indonesia - Malaysia confrontation - Wikipedia

50 years since the Indonesian massacre of 1965 - Guardian - Sept 30, 2015

Also:

May 1998 riots of Indonesia - Wikipedia

[omarali50]

I know about 1965, but I just meant that their ISLAM really is a little bit syncretic (mostly East Java), so they are sometimes held up as the poster-boys for how Islam will become all multi-culti thanks to the "tolerant Muslims of South East Asia". Of course, the Javanese are also becoming closer to "classical Islam" thanks to closer links to Saudi Arabia, so the whole story is a bit overblown, but anyway, the thought in my mind was that their mildly syncretic and relaxed Islam is then (casually and carelessly) extended to ALL of SE Asia, which is not true. Malays and Moros used to be more "radical" even in the good old days.
https://news.google.com/newspapers?n...28327041&hl=en

I am sure you know more than me about these things and can enlighten us further

[Backwards Observer]

I know about 1965, but I just meant that their ISLAM really is a little bit syncretic (mostly East Java), so they are sometimes held up as the poster-boys for how Islam will become all multi-culti thanks to the "tolerant Muslims of South East Asia".

Okay then, but it's good to know that people who can kill half a million of their neighbours can still be considered relaxed.

I am sure you know more than me about these things and can enlighten us further

Yeah, I kinda doubt that.

[Backwards Observer]

How are emerging complex situations going to be effectively addressed when there seems to be an insistence that the power of the narrative is derived from its (almost uniformly binary) simplicity?

[Bill Moore]

The Long March
The True History of China's Founding Myth
by Sun Shuyun

http://www.amazon.com/Long-March-His...The+Long+March

This book was enlightening from both a historical perspective and because it provided very personal views of the numerous people the Sun interviewed as she followed the path of the Long March. I have read several books in recent years that put Mao that characterize Mao more honestly than the popular myths spun in the West about him. One of his strongest points was his ability to write, to propagandize and inspire, and he had many U.S. journalists, but especially Edgar Snow helped create the myth of Mao in the West. Once a narrative is established it takes time to change it, now researchers have that opportunity to examine the conflict with less bias. Sun is one of those authors. A few excerpts:

She provided interesting insights on the German Otto Braun who the Comintern put in command of the Red Army (there were German advisors on both sides, but Braun appeared to be mercenary, while the Germans advising Chiang were nurturing an important relationship so Germany could retain access to resources critical to developing their war machine). Despite Braun's apparent incompetence (he is blamed for communists' defeat before the long march) they referred to him as the supreme emperor.

He was Stalin's envoy, and Moscow's support was paramount for the Chinese communists-ideologically, politically, financially, and militarily.

Beckoned to today's discussion on women in combat, the communist had no qualms about this. There is a lengthy discussion the women cadres and fighting units.

"You could not easily tell us apart on the outside," she said. "We all had our heads shaved so the enemy wouldn't know they fighting women. And we all wore caps."

The Fourth Army formed the "Independent Woman's Regt," led by a beautiful Chinese woman who was a good leader. One example when they ran into a regt of a local warlord.

She organized attacks from several directions to confuse them. Then she told the women to call and plead with the men to turn their weapons on their officers. To their complete surprise, the firing stopped and white flags came up--Five Hundred Peasant Women Defeat Regt-- ran the headlines in the local newspapers.

On the march through Tibet the communists oddly complained about the Tibetan's irregular tactics (also discussed why the Tibetans hated the communists).

We could hear their tribal horns calling them to battle from the cliffs and mountains. More battles than we ever had with the Nationalists. The Tibetans would not fight properly. They attacks us at the rear. Once they isolated a few of our men they pounced on them like vultures on corpses.

Note these are interviews with participants, and of course they only saw the civil war from their perspective, so I doubt the Maoists had more battles with Tibetans than the Nationalists, but they certainly had a hard time marching through that region.

There are several pages on the American journalist Edgar Snow, who wrote the widely popular book "Red Star over China" that put Mao and the communists in a positive light in the West. It also helped shape the Chinese people's view of the communists.

Mao was deeply grateful to Snow and gave him the highest praise a Chinese could. He said Red Star over China had a merit no less than that of the Great Yu, the mythical emperor who was supposed to have brought China's floods under control and saved the people. A genius of propaganda, Mao knew the importance of the pen, but even he did not expect Snow's pen could be so powerful--it profoundly influenced the fate of the Red Army, the Communist Party, and Mao himself.

Throughout the book there were stories of terror and suffering during the long march. Mao's forces killed thousands of Chinese deliberately, but other incidents were simply due basic human instincts.

Mao's Western Legion was largely wiped out by the Mas, who were Muslim warlords. All but 400 of 20,800 men and women were either killed or captured, yet this tragic story has been largely left out Long March History.

She interviewed one of Mao's soldiers who was captured and converted to Islam.

You know, Mao's Little Red Book is not that different from the Koran. Both tell us to do good and no evil, help the poor, and make the world a better place. It is a pity you can't buy the Little Red Book so easily anymore, otherwise I would have my sons read it.
Why did he think the Mas were so cruel to the Red Army then?
Ma Fucai didn't hesitate. You can see the land is too poor to support many people. For their own survival they had to get rid of us. That was why their soldiers were so brave, as if they were on drugs. They were unlike any of thee warlord troops we fought before and we could not get any recruits.

Just a few random quotes from my underlining in the book. Several comments about starving, killing innocents to get food, desertions, and yet a core of dedicated communists endured a very arduous march and then skillfully exploited a weakened Nationalist Army after the Japanese surrendered. The West didn't provide adequate support to Chiang largely because of the narrative Snow and Stilwell created. Certainly Chiang was not a good leader, but based on Taiwan's success compared to massive mass murder of Chinese in Mao's purges it certainly, at least in hindsight, calls into question our decision to limit support to Chiang.

[Bill Moore]

The Wars For Asia 1911-1949, by S.C.M. Paine

http://www.amazon.com/Wars-Asia-1911...asia+1911+1949

Amazon sums up better than I can.

The Wars for Asia, 1911-1949 shows that the Western treatment of World War II, the Second Sino-Japanese War, and the Chinese Civil War as separate events misrepresents their overlapping connections and causes. The long Chinese Civil War precipitated a long regional war between China and Japan that went global in 1941 when the Chinese found themselves fighting a civil war within a regional war within an overarching global war. The global war that consumed Western attentions resulted from Japan's peripheral strategy to cut foreign aid to China by attacking Pearl Harbor and Western interests throughout the Pacific on December 7-8, 1941. S. C. M. Paine emphasizes the fears and ambitions of Japan, China, and Russia, and the pivotal decisions that set them on a collision course in the 1920s and 1930s. The resulting wars - the Chinese Civil War (1911-1949), the Second Sino-Japanese War (1931-1945), and World War II (1939-1945) - together yielded a viscerally anti-Japanese and unified Communist China, the still-angry rising power of the early twenty-first century. While these events are history in the West, they live on in Japan and especially China.

While it is close to 500 pages long, over a hundred pages are endnotes, and quite a few more are the bibliography. The actual narrative is only 300 pages, and it does an excellent job of explaining the strategies and interests of all concerned from the warlords, Chiang, Mao, Russia, Japan, and the U.S. It is a fascinating story that I highly recommend for those interested in China, East history, strategy, and military history.