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Critical China Scholars, Open Letter to Monthly Review

Dear friends at Monthly Review,

As scholars and activists committed to charting a course for an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist left in the midst of rising US-China tensions, we write in response to your recent republication of a “report and resource compilation” by the Qiao Collective on Xinjiang.

We fully acknowledge the need for a critique of America’s cynical and self-interested attacks on China’s domestic policies. We are committed to that task. But the left must draw a line at apologia for the campaign of harsh Islamophobic repression now taking place in Xinjiang.

Qiao’s “report” is written in a style that is sadly all too common in leftist discussions of China today. While the report “recognize[s] that there are aspects of PRC policy in Xinjiang to critique,” it finds no room for any such critique in its 15,000 words. Eschewing serious analysis, it compiles select political and biographical facts to suggestively point at, but not articulate, the intended conclusion – that claims of serious repression in Xinjiang can be dismissed.

We wish it were the case that talk of internment camps was a myth, fabricated by the National Endowment for Democracy and the CIA. But it is not. Problematic links do exist between individual activists and organisations and the American security state, and there have been errors and misattributions in reporting on Xinjiang. The applicability of terms such as “genocide” and “slavery” can be debated. But none of this should permit agnosticism, let alone denialism, towards what is clearly a shocking infringement on the rights of Xinjiang’s native peoples.

Since 2016, Xinjiang has seen a massive expansion of its security infrastructure, featuring a network of camps that mete out a punishing program of political indoctrination, compulsory language drills, and workhouse-style “vocational” training. Internees range from party members deemed disloyal, intellectuals and artists whose work has sustained the distinct non-Chinese cultural identities of the region, through to those thought to display signs of excessive piety. In the same period Xinjiang has seen a surge in incarcerations, with Muslim Uyghurs imprisoned for as a little as encouraging their peers to observe their faith. Others, meanwhile, have been sent to the Chinese interior, as part of non-voluntary labor programs designed to instill factory discipline into Xinjiang’s rural population. In some cases, these workers have been sent to factories linked to the supply chains of Western corporations. 

Families inside Xinjiang have been torn apart, with some 40% of school-age  children now enrolled in boarding schools, and many growing up in state orphanages. Outside China, Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and others live with the trauma of not knowing the fate of their relatives.

While elements of these policies call to mind the excesses of past ideological campaigns in China, they occur today in new conditions of rapid capitalist development in Xinjiang, intended to turn the region into an economic hub of Central Asia. The link here between capitalist expansion and the oppression of indigenous communities is one the left has long been familiar with. To fail to recognise and critique these dynamics in this case is a form of wilful blindness.

There are various ways in which the politics of the Qiao Collective abandons what should be key principles of an internationalist left today, but we wish to highlight one in particular: their treatment of the issue of “counterterrorism.”

Qiao would have us believe that the PRC’s “deradicalization” campaign stands in “stark contrast” to American policies in the War on Terror. On the contrary, China’s deradicalization discourse represents a deliberate appropriation of Western counterterror practices. In his speeches, China’s President Xi Jinping himself encouraged officials to adapt elements of the Western-led War on Terror since 9/11.

The authors of the report are aware of these precedents, citing Western policies to preemptively identify those “at risk” of radicalization and intervene. They make note of France’s highly intrusive deradicalisation policies, as well as Britain’s Desistance and Disengagement Programme, part of the notorious Prevent Strategy. (To this list we could of course add the abuses of counterterror policing in the US, Australia, and elsewhere). Astonishingly, though, they cite these policing techniques not to criticize them, but simply to accuse the West of double standards: China, they complain, has received a level of criticism that these European governments have not.

This is entirely disingenuous on Qiao’s part, a deflection worthy of the Chinese state media that they frequently cite. The left, along with Muslim advocacy groups, have long called for an end to these Islamophobic policies, resting as they do on a bogus association of Islamic piety and/or anti-imperialist views with a proclivity to anti-social violence (see here for a recent example of such a call). Would Qiao then be happy for China to receive only the same level of criticism, and face these same calls?

Judging from their report, they would not. The entire thrust of their report is instead to normalize harmful paradigms of “deradicalisation” and “counter-extremism” as an acceptable basis for a state to engage its Muslim citizenry.

Qiao is evidently impressed by the fact that “Muslim-majority nations and/or nations that have waged campaigns against extremism on their own soil” stand in support of China at the United Nations. We are not so impressed. These local “campaigns against extremism” have replicated the worst violations of America’s War on Terror, and often in collaboration with it.

One example Qiao gives here is Nigeria, whose counterterrorism Joint Task Force was accused by Amnesty International in 2011 of engaging in “unlawful killings, dragnet arrests, arbitrary and unlawful detentions, extortion and intimidation.” Another is Pakistan, which the US commander-in-chief in Afghanistan once praised as a “a great ally on the war on terror,” and whose air and ground forces are responsible for serial abuses against civilian populations.

The incidents of violence against ordinary Chinese citizens that Qiao cites should of course not be dismissed: we must criticize those who engage in terrorism, while at the same time recognizing the social conditions that produce it, and pointing to the need for political solutions.

Qiao, by contrast, directs us toward the murky world of “terror-watching” punditry that has arisen in symbiosis with the two-decade-long Global War on Terror, and has provided justifications for that state violence. One of the authorities they cite on terrorism in Xinjiang is Rohan Gunaratna, a discredited figure who made his name in the 2000s urging America and its allies to invade Muslim-majority countries and enact repressive security laws at home. If Gunaratna and his ilk are our friends, the left will have no need of enemies.

Uncritically invoking China’s “terrorism problem,” and downplaying the severity of Beijing’s response to it, paints a left-wing façade on a global discourse of counterterrorism that poses a threat to Muslim communities everywhere. The struggle against anti-Muslim racism and the devastating effects of the ongoing War on Terror is international, and our solidarity in that struggle must extend to its victims in China.

For these reasons, we find it regrettable that you have chosen to give wider audience to the Qiao Collective’s “report and resource compilation.” In recognition of the existence of alternative perspectives on the left, and in the interest of debate, we hope you will also publish this letter alongside it.

We look forward to future opportunities to collaborate on critical left analysis regarding China and the US-China conflict, and we hope you will contact us whenever we can be of assistance. To find out more about the Critical China Scholars and our activities, please see our website, which includes video recordings of past webinars.  

In solidarity,

Joel Andreas

Angie Baecker 

Tani Barlow

David Brophy

Darren Byler

Harlan Chambers

Tina Mai Chen

Charmaine Chua

Manfred Elfstrom

Christopher Fan

Eli Friedman

Jia-Chen Fu

Daniel Fuchs

Joshua Goldstein

Beatrice Gallelli

Paola Iovene

Fabio Lanza

Soonyi Lee

Promise Li

Kevin Lin

Andrew Liu

Nicholas Loubere

Tim Pringle

Aminda Smith

Sigrid Schmalzer

Alexander Day

Rebecca Karl

Uluğ Kuzuoğlu

Ralph Litzinger

Christian Sorace

Jake Werner

Shan Windscript

Lorraine Wong

David Xu Borgonjon

For the Critical China Scholars

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Emily Jungmin Yoon, Comfort

special issue: critical reflections on "comfort women" 75 years on

From a piercing collection of poems, A Cruelty Special to Our Species, poet Emily Jungmin Yoon explores gender, race, and violence, confronting the histories of sexual violence against women, especially that of “comfort women,” who were forced into sexual labor in Japanese-occupied territories during World War II.

Comfort

On Wednesday, I ate plain yogurt.
    Opened a notebook. Vivaldi 
as I folded my laundry.

It was his birthday. On Wednesday,
    it rained. On the succulents,
on the surviving women.

Tricked or taken, carted to Japanese soldiers.
    The condom said, Attack Number One. 
Rinsed for reuse. On Wednesday,

I listened to The Four Seasons.
    It stopped raining. It never stopped
raining. On Wednesdays, it rains

for the children they bore. For the children
    they could not bear. For the children
they were. Give them this day. Give them 

Vivaldi, violin, give them the all-girls choir.
    L’inverno, come and gone. All four seasons,
come and gone. On Wednesday,

nothing happened. Rain evaporated,
     and so did the concertos.
Wednesdays ago, the women,

the girls, clutched each other. Who will live,
    who will leave, who believes this life.
The world will be better after you and me.

 

“Comfort” from A Cruelty Special to Our Species by Emily Jungmin Yoon. Copyright© 2018 by Emily Jungmin Yoon. Courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.

위안

수요일에, 나는 플레인 요거트를 먹었다.
     공책을 펼쳤다. 빨래를 개는 동안
비발디.

그의 생일이었다. 수요일에,
     비가 내렸다. 다육식물들 위로,
살아남은 여자들 위로.

속거나 납치당해서, 일본군에게 끌려갔다.
     콘돔에 적혀 있는 건, 돌격 1번.
헹궈서 재사용. 수요일마다,

나는 사계를 들었다.
     비가 그쳤다. 비는 그치는 법이
없었다. 수요일에, 비가 내린다

그들이 품었던 아이들을 위해. 그들이 품을 수
     없었던 아이들을 위해. 그들이었던
아이들을 위해. 그들에게 이날을 주어라. 그들에게

비발디를, 바이올린을, 그들에게 소녀 합창단을 주어라.
     겨울, 오고 갔다. 네 계절이 전부,
오고 갔다. 수요일에,

아무 일도 없었다. 비가 증발했고,
     협주곡들도 그랬지.
오래전 수요일들에, 여자들이,

소녀들이 서로를 꼭 붙들었다. 누가 사는가,
     누가 떠나는가, 누가 이 삶을 믿는가.
너와 나 다음 세상은 나아지기를. 

 

Translated by Han Yujoo and reprinted from 우리 종족의 특별한 잔인함 (2020) with permission of publisher Yolimwon.

Emily Jungmin Yoon is the author of A Cruelty Special to Our Species (Ecco, 2018), which was released in Korea as 우리 종족의 특별한 잔인함 (Yolimwon, 2020), and Ordinary Misfortunes (Tupelo Press, 2017). She has also translated and edited a chapbook of poems, Against Healing: Nine Korean Poets (Tilted Axis, 2019). She is the Poetry Editor for The Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and a PhD candidate in Korean literature at the University of Chicago.

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Thomas Burnham reviews Julia Lovell, Maoism: A Global History

Lovell, Julia. Maoism: A Global History. London: The Bodley Head, 2019. 606 pages.

In the West, as popular trust in liberal institutions is eroded, an increasingly unapologetic left is confronting an ascendant right.  In the United States, the word “socialism” has re-entered the popular lexicon through a new generation of voters who, faced with gilded-age levels of income inequality and impending environmental collapse, have gotten over their parents’ Cold War hangover.  As for the People’s Republic of China, once the site of the most radical socialist experiments in the world, socialism seems to be a thing of the past.  At an interview in the Oxford Union, Peking University Fellow Charles Liu grinningly shrugged off journalist Mehdi Hassan’s derision of the income inequality inherent to “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” saying, “We are certainly not as socialist as Norway, Finland, and Sweden.”1 Meanwhile, overzealous public security officers detain Marxist students who, inspired by Mao Zedong’s life and ideas, organize among factory workers and migrant labourers.  Characters and ideas thought to be swept into Fukuyama’s end of history have re-emerged as fields of contention in a post-Cold War context.  In the introduction to her book, Maoism: A Global History, Julia Lovell asks why a book like this had not been published already.  The answer is that the question of Maoism is a living terrain of struggle, both as a set of ideas and as a legacy.  The timeliness of Lovell’s book, and the book’s ability to draw an unbroken link between the history of Maoism to current events, lies in this ongoing competition over Mao and Maoism in China as well as the reinvigorated arguments over how left the Western left should be.

For the uninitiated, Maoism begins with a crash course on Maoist tenets through a parallel thematic biography of Mao himself, and it is in this crash course that the book takes a clear side on the question of Maoism today.  Framing Mao’s lecherous womanizing or the thought reform of the Yan’an Rectification Movement with tenets like “women hold up half the sky” or “expose errors and criticize shortcomings,” Lovell selectively contrasts Mao’s thought with his life and practice, portraying him as a brutish hypocrite (albeit a charismatic one) so as to lambaste Maoism’s inherent contradictory impulses.  In having set out to uniformly condemn Mao and Maoism, Lovell casts the Anti-Bolshevik League Incident in the 1930s as a sort of biblical fall defining Maoism for eternity as merely an ideology of indiscriminate purges.  Having introduced the reader to Maoism within China, the book briefly charts Maoism’s earliest vectors out of China and into the world.  Through the example of Clarence Adams’ decision to remain in China after fighting in the Korean War, Lovell recognizes that Western injustices like the U.S. Jim Crow laws and the racialization of the draft led to many in the West to empathize with Maoism. The book also paints a somewhat sympathetic picture of Edgar Snow as a carelessly misinformed eccentric forsaking due journalistic diligence in seeking a name for himself.  However, Lovell derides Red Star over China a “puff piece” and frames such perspectives on China as nothing but sanitized or naive understandings of Mao and his ideas, thus setting the tone for how the book will discuss Maoism globally.

The core of Lovell’s warning against Maoism comes in her summary of “high Maoism,” or the peak of Maoist radicalism as experienced in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.  Hoping her book will inoculate the reader against Maoism, a point Lovell reiterates throughout is that, like Snow, Maoists in China and abroad are either ignorant or misinformed about the disastrous outcomes of Maoism in power and are therefore prone to repeating those outcomes.  Lovell links Vietnamese readings of the Rectification Movement and Great Leap Forward to the excesses of Vietnamese land reform.  She discusses how Cambodia’s iteration of the Cultural Revolution’s radicalism led to the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge.  She argues that the CCP’s class-inflected nationalism fostered competing communist nationalisms among the CCP and its fraternal parties in Southeast Asia, resulting in war between the three countries.  A continent away, Lovell argues that iterations of Maoism in Africa were abject failures in every case but in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.  Lovell observes that China’s revolutionary foreign policy was successful in garnering enough influence in Africa to join the United Nations and that emulating Maoism helped to prop up African dictators, but the book unequivocally judges Maoism as having failed Africans themselves.  Returning to Asia, Lovell considers the Communist Party of Nepal’s ascent to power, beginning with their grassroots agitation, the Nepali Civil War, and finally with their leaders’ buying into the quid pro quo political machinations of Kathmandu.  With Nepali Maoists having muscled their way into power, Lovell frets about their ignorance of China and the actual effects of Maoism there, saying that this was just revolution “by the book,” in the sense that it was completely (mis)informed by propaganda like Red Star Over China.  In a similar vein, Lovell sympathetically portrays the Naxalites’ work fighting for the catastrophically poor Adivasi people of Northern India, noting their lack of awareness and even apathy about China and Chinese history, and yet insisting that their Maoist-inspired violence and “kangaroo courts” are not the answer to the bare existence endured by the Adivasis.

In addition to criticizing Maoism in power and exhorting against historical apathy, Lovell also makes a more abstract point on how Maoism has been weaponized both by self-avowed communists and the very organs of state repression they opposed.  Lovell connects the American fear of Chinese “brainwashing” in the Korean War to America’s dark history with black psyops (see MKUltra) and the “enhanced interrogation” methods of the War on Terror, setting up the recurring theme of Maoist revolutionary tactics engendering their own reflections in what Lovell calls “Maoish” state repression.  In a similar vein, the book depicts Western Maoists as violence-prone kooks only going through a phase before taking their own role in constructing our neoliberal present, a role they took both directly—by selling out or buying in—and indirectly—by provoking repressive organs of power to bring counter-insurgency methods from abroad to the home front, formulating programs like COINTELPRO.  Lovell further illustrates this dynamic through an account of Sendero Luminoso’s accelerationist battle against the Peruvian state.  The Shining Path both carried out atrocities modelled on Maoist ideas and intentionally provoked state violence as a means of fomenting violent rebellion.  Moving like “fish in water,” the Shining Path deliberately implicated the desperately poor and racially discriminated-against Peruvian peasantry in their actions, only to retreat and abandon them to horrific police and military repression.  Peruvian counterterrorism operators got wise and implemented a Maoism of their own, arming the peasantry and rebuilding whatever patriotic attitude the Peruvian people once had to finally encircle and defeat the Shining Path.

Lovell concludes the book by investigating how Maoism fares in its birthplace today.  The final chapter examines the effort of the contemporary CCP to balance between quarantining itself from the populist chaos of Maoism and disavowing the PRC’s founding father altogether, a move which would risk the collapse of its historical legitimacy.  This chapter contains portraits of some of China’s so-called New Left, a problematic moniker considering that these neo-Maoists are more akin to the red-brown alliance of the former Soviet Union than readers of E.P Thompson or Herbert Marcuse.  The portraits include a Cultural Revolution nostalgic, a group of ultra-nationalists using Maoist language to oppose the new order of reform and opening, and a quasi-religious “teacher” with his own rural commune.  Using the example of Bo Xilai’s mobilization of Maoist symbolism before his precipitous fall from grace in 2012, Lovell argues that both post-1976 de-Maoification and the recent reappearances of Maoist populism are symbolic only; that today’s China is “Maoish,” not Maoist.  According to Lovell, Maoism in post-market reform China endures in the elevation of Xi Jinping to “core status” within the CCP.  Lovell concludes remarking on the dynamic ability of Maoism to navigate paradoxes and contradictions such as the CCP’s management of one of the most vibrant players in global capitalism, speculating that this ability will extend the life of Maoism in China and abroad for the foreseeable future.  However, rather frustratingly, the book does not dedicate any real space to the Maoist students who might be just as quick as Lovell to decry China’s so-called New Left, a glaring omission considering the worldwide attention the students have been able to garner for themselves since the 2018 Jasic incident.

Lovell’s Maoism is unique in its scope and in the seriousness with which it approaches a critically important topic.  It is a timely, engaging, and succinct intervention in a field of study which is highly contentious and still evolving.  By choosing various episodes from Cold War history and drawing on a wide variety of sources, Lovell’s Maoism offers a globe-trotting and roughly chronological account of Maoism’s influence on history, compacting what might be an unwieldy academic endeavour into an approachable and well-paced narrative with a purpose.  Focused on this task, this book is not a deep dive into the nitty-gritty of Marxist-Leninist Mao Zedong Thought, but a narrative of what Maoism wrought on China and the world.  Lovell characterizes Maoism like “a dormant virus,”2 amorphous and adaptable, spread by all kinds of vectors, enduring and producing catastrophe after catastrophe.  Lovell’s narrative is an unsympathetic portrayal of the man and his ideas which is meant to serve as a warning against forgetting how Maoism actually played out in Great Leap Forward China, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, Peru during the Shining Path insurgency, and elsewhere.  By examining key episodes in the global history of Maoism and connecting them to current issues and events, this book provides an effective introduction to the sphere of Cold War history which resonates most piercingly into the present.

However, this focus on making the story of global Maoism a cautionary tale operates by trivializing and obscuring the repression faced by global left during the Cold War.  The brutal suppression, massacres, and civil war instigated by the Guomindang is set to one side in Lovell’s discussion of concurrent CCP purges in the Soviet areas, and the book’s treatment of the AB League Purge completely glosses over the broader context of the contemporaneous GMD encirclement campaigns or the exigencies of the CCP’s uneven attempts at state building in the Jiangxi Soviet.  Although Lovell mentions the role of Western powers in the genocidal massacres of Indonesian communists and ethnic Chinese in the 1965-66, she somewhat troublingly focuses the blame on the massacre’s victims, arguing that under Mao’s direct influence the Communist Party of Indonesia carelessly adopted an overly militant posture thus polarizing Indonesian society against itself.  This is not the only example of the book seemingly blaming the victim in order to make its overall point.  Framing her discussion of Maoism’s influence in the West with the “secular-religious zeal” of the “extreme millenarian fringe of this scene,”3 Lovell is openly hostile to the idea that Maoism as a set of ideas armed oppressed people with a language of resistance and comes dangerously close to advancing a narrative of “cultural Marxism” reminiscent of the contemporary far right’s hysteria about the permeation of leftist influence in Western academia.  Moreover, recognition of the repurposing of Maoism in Western philosophy and social sciences is so minimal as to do violence to the actual legacy of Maoism in the academy, and the context which may have elicited sympathy for Westerners influenced by Mao, like the story of the Black Panthers and Fred Hampton’s extrajudicial murder, is given short shrift.  Instead, the concept of “Maoish” state repression through organs like COINTELPRO is also blamed on Western Maoists themselves.

Such lack of context makes the book’s orientation towards current events problematic.  For instance, as universally loathed as the Shining Path may be, and as effectively as Lovell depicts the violence set loose against it and those adjacent to it, a key element to understanding Abimael Guzmán’s misguided revolutionary accelerationism, namely the background of U.S.-backed repression faced by Latin America’s left, is left out entirely.  While the people of Peru faced the dual reigns of terror of the Shining Path and the Peruvian state, leftists and their families in the rest of Latin America were being disappeared en masse, thrown out of helicopters, and brutally massacred by roving U.S.-trained and armed death squads.  Although Guzmán is now in prison, many of the architects of the U.S. Cold War policy in Latin America still haunt the halls of power today.  During the 1980s, one of the orchestrators of such suppression, Elliot Abrams, advocated for a style of U.S. accelerationism (accelerating regime collapse and civil war by shipping arms under the guise of humanitarian aid while simultaneously immiserating a target country’s populace through sanctions) in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua.  This effort helped to produce the ongoing transnational humanitarian crisis stretching across Central America to the U.S.-Mexico border.  Abrams is now the U.S. Special Representative for Venezuela where he supports a similar strategy for ousting Nicolás Maduro today.

Lovell’s book depicts Maoism both as a virus against which to inoculate ourselves and also as a weapon that the U.S. government now wields against its enemies.  The October after Nikita Khrushchev initiated de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union, Mao worried that if the socialist camp threw away the sword of Stalin the West would pick it up and kill them with it.4  In foreclosing any potential usefulness for the oppressed and the left by erasing both the wider context in which Maoism arose as well as the post-modernist aspect of Maoism that Zhang Xudong called its “built-in passion for the masses” and “profound disdain for discursive or institutional reifications,”5 Lovell’s warning functionally surrenders Mao to Chinese neo-authoritarians in Beijing and undead Cold Warriors in Washington.

Thomas C. Burnham is a DPhil student at the University of Oxford whose research focuses on Chinese and Soviet development aid to Africa in the 1960s.”

 

Endnotes

1“What is the human cost to China’s economic miracle? | Head to Head,” Al Jazeera English, YouTube video, 27:38, posted March 15, 2019. https://youtu.be/yZs4PqKlph0?t=1658.

2 Lovell, Maoism: 150.

3Lovell, Maoism:  268.

4“Meeting of the Delegations of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party, Moscow, 5-20 July 1963 ,” July 8, 1963, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, SAPMO Barch JIV 2/207 698, pp. 187-330 (in Russian). Obtained by Vladislav Zubok and translated by Benjamin Aldrich-Moodie. https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/111237.

5 Zhang Xudong, “Postmodernism and Post-Socialist Society: Cultural Politics in China After the ‘New Era’,” New Left Review, vol. 237 (September-October 1999) 98.

 

 

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Minju Bae, Demilitarization in the Time of Police Abolition: Korean A-bomb Survivors Demand Justice

The altar at the Hapcheon Atomic Bomb Survivors’ Memorial (photo courtesy of SPARK), 2019.

Minju Bae, Demilitarization in the Time of Police Abolition: Korean A-bomb Survivors Demand Justice

August 6 and 9, 2020 mark seventy-five years since the US dropped atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Despite how long it has been, A-bomb survivors continue to fight for justice, and in particular, Korean A-bomb survivors and their kin demand reparations for colonial intergenerational trauma that continues to deeply affect their lives. 

The stories of Korean A-bomb survivors reveal the interconnected histories of colonial rule and US militarism. In our current moment, as abolitionists and Black liberationists call to defund the police, it is critical that we also take stock of how militarization functions abroad. Recognizing the multiple vectors of power that the US wields, we must follow the lead of abolitionists and defund the military. Bearing witness to the stories of Korean A-bomb survivors requires that the US grant reparations, formally end the Korean War, and further, support survivors’ demand for an international comprehensive ban of nuclear weapons with the Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. As we imagine a post-pandemic world that will repair the traumas and harms of the past, we must listen to Korean A-bomb survivors.

Korean A-bomb survivors with a coalition of organizations in front of the Blue House in Seoul, February 2019.
Korean A-bomb survivors with a coalition of organizations in front of the Blue House in Seoul, February 2019.

Sim Jin-Tae was born in Hiroshima in 1943, just a toddler when the US dropped the atomic bombs. Of the estimated 740,000 victims of the bombs, about 100,000 were from Korea, occupied by Japan since 1910. Like Sim’s father, most of the Koreans were conscripted laborers of imperial Japan. Many forced Korean laborers did not survive colonial rule or make it back to the peninsula; others, like the 43,000 Korean A-bomb survivors, returned to newly-liberated Korea and resettled in towns like Hapcheon, currently home to approximately one hundred living survivors.

The altar at the Hapcheon Atomic Bomb Survivors’ Memorial (photo courtesy of SPARK), 2019.
The altar at the Hapcheon Atomic Bomb Survivors’ Memorial (photo courtesy of SPARK), 2019.

But the survivors encountered a new form of militarism after World War II, where US military occupation in South Korea was made permanent with the unended Korean War that stopped with a temporary ceasefire. Further, despite their radiation illnesses, the Japanese and US governments have refused Korean survivors care and treatment. Korean A-bomb survivors like Sim call for peace and the demilitarization of the Korean peninsula, in their demands for justice.

Sim leads the Korean A-Bomb Victims’ Association, an organization formed in 1967 after the 1965 Treaty on the Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea denied reparations for Korean A-bomb survivors. In 2015, Sim was a member of a delegation from South Korea to the United States, to attend the Review Conference of the Party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). Held every five years at the United Nations, this conference reviews the impacts of nuclear weapons and the path toward non-proliferation.

This year – 2020 – a thirteen-person delegation from Korea had planned to attend this conference at the UN, speak with public officials, attend rallies, hold public events, and raise awareness about Korean A-bomb survivors’ unique position in transpacific geopolitics. Their ongoing demands included reparations and medical treatment for Korean A-bomb survivors and their kin, as well as the denuclearization of the Asia-Pacific and a formal end to the Korean War. That is, this was the delegation’s agenda until COVID-19 swept the globe and starkly exposed US hypocrisies.

****

In the first half of the twentieth century, Japan was Korea’s colonizer. Many Koreans – forced migrant laborers, conscripted farm workers, miners, sexual slaves, and others – worked in Japan, providing cheap labor and sustaining Japan’s economy and “comfort.”

When the US dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US claimed that the bombs were a necessary evil to end World War II, a means to save American lives. But for Korean A-bomb survivors, the bombs revealed the terror of US militarism. After WWII, many of the survivors returned to Korea, but their relationship with warfare did not end. In Korea, they witnessed the brutalities of US intervention. One day after the bombing of Nagasaki, US military personnel took up the task of bifurcating the peninsula, determining the division along the 38th parallel and claiming Seoul for the American zone. During the United States Army Military Government in Korea (1945-1948) and the Korean War (1950-1953), the US installed pro-Japanese colonial collaborators in positions of power, carpet-bombed most of North Korea, and massacred civilians as potential enemies. When active fighting stopped with a temporary ceasefire rather than a permanent peace settlement, US military bases and camptowns proliferated throughout South Korea and Japan, with the latest weapons installed in rural towns in violation of the armistice. Supplanting colonial rule with military occupation, the experiences of Korean A-bomb survivors and their kin reveal the intergenerational harms of militarism and warfare.

Both Japanese and US governments have obscured the experiences of Korean A-bomb survivors. While the Japanese government refuses to provide medical treatment for Korean survivors and their kin, the US also denies responsibility. President Truman hid behind narratives of the “Good War” – that the atomic bombs were regretful but inevitable – in the service of securing an unconditional surrender from Japan and demonstrating US nuclear power. Today, the US still hides its empire behind claims that US armed forces secure global order, safety, and democracy. In the case of South Korea, the US justifies its military presence by pointing to the threat of North Korea. As the Korean War continues, the US’s nuclear stockpile looms large over the peninsula and the Asia-Pacific region.

Korean A-bomb survivors know the US military-imperial capacities first hand. Their 2015 delegation to the UN argued, “The United States, as the first country in the world to use nuclear weapons, must take responsibility for its crimes against the hundreds of thousands of atomic bomb victims, including the Korean victims.” In contrast to the depiction of World War II as the “Good War,” Korean A-bomb survivors emphasized that war was neither good nor did the bombs save lives.

The impact of the bombs spans multiple generations. Kim Bong-Dae – a Hapcheon resident and member of the 2015 delegation – married a survivor of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. Their son developed a rare terminal illness – congenital immunoglobulin deficiency. Together as father and son, they have raised awareness about radiation exposure and its intergenerational effects, in order to hold the US accountable. A 2013 South Korean study of second and third-generation descendants of survivors reported that 20.2 percent of the subjects had congenital deficiencies and hereditary diseases. While the harmful effects of the atomic bombs are intergenerational, the US and Japan refuse to recognize these hereditary conditions, not to mention the lasting trauma.

To be sure, some A-bomb survivors did win their campaign for medical care and recognition. After the 1945 bombings, approximately 3,000 Japanese Americans who had been in Japan during World War II returned to the US. Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki had sent a large number of immigrants to the US prior to the war. Among Japanese immigrants, it had been common to send children to Japan for a few years of education, often to their parents’ hometowns like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These American hibakushas (or survivors of the bombs) faced particular challenges, neglected by both Japan and the US. Doctors were reluctant to treat unfamiliar radiation illnesses, and survivors faced medical discrimination. In the 1970s and 1980s, hibakushas began to demand that the US create designated medical facilities to care for those with radiation illnesses. The leverage that hibakushas had was, in part, thanks to Asian Americans who had been politicized by stories of internment, drawing connections between US militarism at home and abroad. Asian Americans re-narrated histories, centering the human costs of militarism and racism. They provided legal support and recorded A-bomb survivors’ stories, dispelling myths about radiation contagion. American hibakushas eventually gained access to medical and monetary support from the Japanese government. But unfortunately this effort excluded Korean survivors.

Delegation from South Korea at a rally with members of Nodutdol, 2015.
Delegation from South Korea at a rally with members of Nodutdol, 2015.

As in the 1970s transnational campaigns for justice for hibakushas, Korean A-bomb survivors, their kin, and diasporic Koreans have been working together to secure medical treatment and reparations. In May 2020, activists from Nodutdol for Korean Community Development planned to host the delegation from South Korea, organize public events, and join the rallies in and out of the United Nations forum. In the face of the US and Japanese governments’ refusal to acknowledge the impacts of militarism and warfare, community-based organizations are bearing witness to the intergenerational traumas of Korean A-bomb survivors and their kin, demanding recognition and justice from the grassroots.

While the Japanese government provides care for Japanese American hibakushas, the US government has refused to care for any hibakushas – Asian American, Japanese, or Korean. For the US to provide medical care would be to admit wrongdoing; to take responsibility for the tragedies of the atomic bombs, beyond publicity stunts; to admit that nothing can justify the use of nuclear weapons; and to admit that the US needs to abolish its own nuclear arsenal, the largest in the world. But American exceptionalism denies the atrocities of the “Good War.”

While the US’s reputation takes a hit in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the US has tried to compensate with its military might, flexing its muscles both at home and abroad – flying Air Force and Navy flight demonstrations over Northeastern city skies to “honor” frontline and essential workers, encroaching on indigeneous lands such as in the contested RIMPAC war exercises in Hawai’i, and shoring up weapons on bases on stolen lands throughout the Pacific – in spite of the global public health crisis. Under the guise of US peacekeeping, US militarism and interventionism stand in the way of Korean A-bomb survivors’ demands to defund the military.

It has been seventy-five years of medical discrimination, colonial trauma, and the ongoing threat of another nuclear war. It is also seventy years of halting efforts to reunite families, to secure a peace treaty to end the Korean War, and to create the conditions for Korean self-determination. Justice and reparations for Korean A-bomb survivors are impossible under these conditions of war, US militarism, and the shadow cast by the US’s vast nuclear arsenal. Just as Black Lives Matter globally, movements to abolish the police must link up with transnational movements for demilitarization and denuclearization.

Minju Bae is a historian who works at the intersection of Asian American Studies and labor history. She is also a member of Nodutdol for Korean Community Development.

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Kamran Baradaran, Ground Zero, or Why Do We Need Antonio Gramsci in the Times of COVID-19

“Politics is a protracted war. Do not be in a hurry. Try to see things far in advance and know how to wait, today. Don’t live in terms of subjective urgency.” Louis Althusser, letter to Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, 2 April 1968 1

It might seem strange to mention Antonio Gramsci together with COVID-19 in the title of this piece. After all, what could Gramsci possibly have to say about the 2020 epidemic? Furthermore, isn’t his connection to the contemporary left somewhat questionable? Doesn’t he stand as a symbol of Communist wishful thinking, of the unattainability of Leftist ideals? Doesn’t he represent the manifestation of the left’s inability to organize a revolutionary force against the relentless onslaught of the enemy? A plea for a Gramscian politics and the idea of re-actualizing him could appear to be useless, in these times. Yet, I argue that in fact Gramsci still has a great deal to offer, especially in these times.

Today, it seems there is a silent agreement between the radical Left (if there is still such a thing) and liberalism, an agreement to forget Gramsci and abandon his legacy—namely, affirming the importance of class struggle, the organization of the masses, and power struggle. But the COVID-19 pandemic has shown that in today’s tumultuous times, when silence has lost its ability to speak, Gramsci remains our contemporary and can shed a different light on the situation at hand.

The true hateful

As the epidemic continues and fear spreads, long lists of guidelines and explanations are published. All of these, despite their ideological differences, have one thing in common: the emphasis on the need for coordinated action and cooperation to combat the threat of contagion.

The ongoing crisis has also triggered broad ideological interpretations, from paranoid conspiracy theories to the explosion of racism fables. In order to move forward, we need to overcome a whole series of semi-leftist misconceptions. The first and the most disgusting misconception is the paranoid conspiracy theory, harbored by some leftists, that secrete agencies are deliberately responsible for the outbreak. Several “leftists” have gone so far as to claim that China has intentionally designed and spread the virus around the globe to undermine Western economies and establish PRC hegemony. This form of leftist paranoia must be pitilessly discarded. It confirms that, as Jean Baudrillard put it, we always have within us a demand both for a radical event and a total deception. The logic of this conspiracy theory is that it is preferable to believe humans have control and let things get out of hand than to endow obscure and stupid viruses with the power to inflict such horrors on us. In other words, “even if it is a serious matter to admit one’s own shortcomings, it is still preferable to admitting the other party’s power.”2The true “destructive” element which undermines the foundations of our societies is not an external threat, like the current health emergency, but the dynamic of the global capitalism itself which sets the stage for such risks.

These speculations tend to ignore the fact that capital-led agriculture produces hotspots in which pathogens can evolve the most virulent and infectious phenotypes. As Rob Wallace puts it, “capital is spearheading land grabs into the last of primary forest and smallholder-held farmland worldwide. These investments drive the deforestation and development leading to disease emergence.” Therefore, if we are to learn anything from our condition, we must focus on what Slavoj Žižek calls “capitalism with Asian values”, a new form of capitalism, which is more productive and functions even better than the usual western one, but which doesn’t generate a long-term demand for democracy.

Thus looking the imaginary “hateful” and creating paranoid narratives certainly illuminates nothing and it further elides the fact that the “state of exception” no longer offers any concrete solution. This crisis has shown once again that the state of exception is not an emergency breakdown or catastrophe, but the current system of capitalism as such. The actual “state of exception” is the normal and evidently unpoliced everyday, the un-freedom we experience as freedom.

The ghost of antagonism past

Our current predicament has given new life to one of the left’s oldest concepts: antagonism. One should note the undeniable fact that in the face of viral infections, it’s easy for many of us, with the means to self-isolate, to accept lockdowns and quarantines, to entertain ourselves with free books, music, and virtual museum tours. But what about those who are not able to do so? What about the “essential workers” and others who are forced to keep working in the current situation just to stay alive and to keep us alive as well? Here there is no better interpretive concept than that of class antagonism.  We must reintroduce that classical category. To do so, we need a new radical form of political action, an intervention that changes the very framework which determines how things work. This intervention enables us to go beyond the “normal order of things”. As Jacques Rancière puts it, “it is this anomaly that is expressed in the nature of political subjects who are not social groups but rather forms of inscription of the (ac)count of the unaccounted-for.”3

It is precisely here that Gramscian politics should come in. Gramsci’s great insight was that in the face of changes that could wipe out the world as we know it, a new form of thinking and political act is needed to abolish the old regime:

“Events are the real dialectics of history. They transcend all arguments, all personal judgments, all vague and irresponsible wishes. Events, with the inexorable logic of their development, give the worker and peasant masses, who are conscious of their destiny, these lessons. The class struggle at a certain moment reaches a stage in which the proletariat no longer finds in bourgeois legality, i.e., in the bourgeois State apparatus (armed forces, courts, administration), the elementary guarantee and defense of its elementary right to life, to freedom, to personal safety, to daily bread. It is then forced to create its own legality, to create its own apparatus of resistance and defense.”4

This contagion has shown that the principal problem of capitalism is not neoliberalism, austerity politics, nor new and varied forms of authoritarianism, apartheid, sexism, homophobia and racism, but rather it is the capitalist form itself, that is, the value-form. Instead of referring to neoliberalism as the cause of our plight, we should return to older critiques and the overcoming of capital as the ultimate goal of our thinking and actions.5

To achieve this goal, there is another misconception that must be set aside. We should brutally dismiss left populism as the way to overcome this predicament. There is no doubt that, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are experiencing a massive increase in unemployment, a severe economic crisis, and widespread social unrest. Of course, from a leftist point of view, it is difficult not to empathize with uprisings against the ruling order. However, this quick judgement in favor of protest, this all-to-easy , should give us pause.

Today, one should shamelessly emphasize that left populism does not provide a feasible alternative to the system. All those who make abstract demands in response to the ongoing conditions secretly know that their demands will never be satisfied. Here we witness the ultimate embodiment of the Hegelian “Beautiful Soul”, which feels superior to the corrupted world while secretly participating in it; they need this corrupted world as the only terrain where they can exert their moral superiority. This means that the left must play a double game here and make governments its main target: controlling the epidemic and providing accurate information is the main task of governments, and the authorities must use all their resources to achieve this! In a Lacanian sense, hysterical subjects are needed here, to take aim at the master’s discourse, to review and question it.

If we don’t do this, worse pandemics than current Coronavirus will await us. A few years ago, BBC portrayed what might be waiting for us as a direct result of the ways we intervene in nature:

“Climate change is melting permafrost soils that have been frozen for thousands of years, and as the soils melt, they are releasing ancient viruses and bacteria that, having lain dormant, are springing back to life.”

According to this report, with the continuation of global warming, and as a consequence of permafrost melt, the vectors of deadly infections from the 18th and 19th centuries may re-emerge and re-infect animal and human populations. These warnings may seem more like an exciting scenario for an apocalyptic movie.  But we must not forget that the environment—and the changes that have taken place in it—are an integral part of our daily lives and can easily disrupt its course.

To return to my initial point about Gramsci, what is interesting in his ideas is that he sought to provide a revolutionary reading of historical materialism. He emphasized that the core of Marxism was based on the rejection of the idea that history was a “natural organism.” According to Gramsci, to get out of a dreadful predicament (in his time, fascism), the left must emphasize mobilizing forces to overthrow the bourgeois dictatorship. Within the framework of Gramsci’s thought, Marxism becomes a revolutionary act that can oppose the hegemony of the bourgeoisie, in various fields and contexts. The greatness of Gramsci lies in the fact that he did not intend to portray the ideal image of the New World but made every effort to portray the path that must be taken to achieve it.

The lesson the left must learn here is that the only realistic solution to the current impasse is to re-introduce the classic concept of antagonistic social relations. It may be true that the virus does not care how much money its host has in their bank account, but the handling of this health crisis is rooted in class antagonism and we must unashamedly place that antagonism at the center of our analysis.

Furthermore, contrary to many assumptions, what we need today is not the easing of pain and the diminishment of suffering. If psychoanalysis has taught us anything, it is that in catastrophic times, we must abandon the vulgar logic of self-knowledge and replace it with the struggle for a greater, external cause. The goal is not to alleviate the pain but to understand that there are things more important than our daily suffering. As Mark Fisher put it brilliantly, “the rebuilding of class consciousness is a formidable task indeed, one that cannot be achieved by calling upon ready-made solutions—but, in spite of what our collective depression tells us, it can be done.”

Change on trial

It seems that a demand for change is the new slogan of our times. Almost everyone is talking about change, including former U.S. Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger. “The reality is the world will never be the same after the Coronavirus,” said Kissinger in a Wall Street Journal editorial. “The U.S. must protect its citizens from disease while starting the urgent work of planning for a new epoch.” Today we are bombarded with slogans like “things will change after this epidemic.” Even Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who recently tried once more to blackmail Europe by sending a wave of refugees to Greece, is talking about a new world arising from the remains of the pandemic.

Nevertheless, one of the main problems with change is that it can lead to constant transformation, and continuous transformation can lead to no change at all! This is precisely what we are facing in today’s economy. The main question is how change or innovation can lead to something that is at the same time static, something that offers new principles, but not principles that can be used to maintain the same framework.

There is no doubt that after the dust settles, the world needs radical change and we’ll be facing a new reality. But change for whom and for whose benefit? The present state of affairs is a unique chance for the Left to represent itself as the “true solution.” The biggest triumph of the ruling class has been to present themselves as the only ones who can effect change, while presenting leftists, conversely, as naïve utopians who call for changes that cannot be effected. Now, we have the opportunity to manifest a practical and modest model of the future and show everyone that, on the contrary, the true utopians are those who advocate the same ideological system over and over again!

Referring to Italy’s experience during Risorgimento, Gramsci listed two types of revolution; the active revolution led by Giuseppe Mazzini and the passive revolution led by Camillo Benso di Cavour. The passive revolution entails an attempt to create cultural hegemony and change through a meaningful process that, from Gramsci’s perspective, would be achieved by patiently preparing for radical and revolutionary transformations. Today, there is a need for that same kind of comprehensive, global, and concrete project (to address everything from the political and economic crises to the ecological one).

Nowadays, more and more people realize that they are genuinely disposable, that there is no necessary job, role, or place for them in society. In other words, we are witnessing the emergence of a critical mass of individuals, who are newly conscious of their precarious positions, on the fringes of communities, who were waiting for their moment to cross over, to join their more prosperous neighbors, but for whom that moment never came. This is an excellent example of why we need a Gramscian politics based on intervention that is at once revolutionary and molecular. This micro-politics emphasizes getting our hands dirty and urges us to mobilize and redefine the very idea of the left. As Gramsci said in the early 1920s, “the socialists have never understood the spirit of the period through which we are passing in the class struggle. They have not understood that the class struggle may be converted at any moment, at any provocation, into an open war which can only be concluded with the seizure of power by the proletariat.”6

The present global situation may provide a unique chance to reexamine ideology and ideological state apparatuses. From a scientific perspective, a virus such as COVID-19 is nothing but a micro-mechanism that blindly reproduces itself. Can’t we say the same thing about the dominant global capitalist economy? Is it not just a mindless mechanism that endures on speculation and blindly reproduces itself? The answer to our predicament is not mere enthusiasm for crisis, but hard work to analyze the situation and provide an appropriate and accurate alternative. This is a task that Gramsci emphasized years ago, and now we must take the same path and embrace the hard work ahead.

Crisis at the gates

What should put fear in our hearts is the widespread and frightful sense that capitalism is the only viable political and economic system and that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.

On March 23, Reuters reported that the “Head of International Monetary Fund Kristalina Georgieva has warned that the damage done to the global economy by the COVID-19 pandemic could be as bad or worse than the global financial crisis in 2008 and lead to a recession.” The report continued, “Georgieva said the outlook for global growth was negative and the IMF now expected a recession at least as bad as during the global financial crisis or worse.” Aren’t we once again witnessing the same paradigm that Naomi Klein once described as “shock doctrine”: the exploitation of national or global disasters to establish controversial and questionable policies while citizens are too distracted (emotionally and physically) to engage and develop an adequate response and resist effectively? One should recall that after the 2008 financial meltdown, billions of dollars were hastily poured into the global banking system in a frantic attempt at financial stabilization. And the main victims were those who lost their life savings in the blink of an eye and had no chance to rebuild. It is important to note that capitalism not only faces crises but also feeds on them and, by implementing socialism for the rich and the destruction of the most ordinary types of social services, strengthens itself even more. We should also bear in mind that there should be an agent (or agents) who will give the “final crisis” of capitalism a positive and pragmatic twist and this is the role the Left needs to take in these troubled times.

Isn’t the COVID-19 crisis the best example of what Walter Benjamin described as “Geschichte ist Choc zwischen Tradition und der politischen Ordnung” (history is the shock between tradition and political organization)? If the present system is a train with broken brakes, speeding towards disaster, then the messianic moment is like a stop-chord. Again, as Benjamin put it, history is awakened with a slap born of long-contained frustration, not a kiss! Are current events a slap? Can this slap wake us up?

 

Kamran Baradaran is an Iranian translator, author, and journalist. He has translated works by Slavoj Žižek, Paul Virilio, Jean Baudrillard, Antonio Gramsci, Paul Mason, among many others. He has also published a book about Écriture féminine titled Feminine Writing: Improvisation in the Mist.

 

Notes:

1 Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, 1973, Letters from Inside the Italian Communist Party to Louis Althusser, translated by Stephen M. Hellman, NLB, p. 21.

2 Baudrillard, Jean, 2003, The Spirit of Terrorism, translated by Chris Turner, Verso, p.78.

3 Rancière, Jacques, “Ten Theses on Politics” in Dissensus; On Politics and Aesthetics, Edited and translated by Steven Corcoran, 2010, Continuum International Publishing Group, p.35.

4 Gramsci, Antonio, 1978, “Real Dialectics” in Antonio Gramsci; Selections from Political Writings 1921-1926, translated and edited by Quintin Hoare, Lawrence and Wishart, p. 17.

5 I owe this point to my conversation with Agon Hamza. See: https://www.ilna.news/en/tiny/news-759611

6 Gramsci, Antonio, 1978, p. 25.