East Asia: the World's Stage

Although Vice President Joe Biden still refers to eastern Asia as “the Orient” - he did so in a September 2014 speech - more astute observers of the region are keeping their analyses current. Understanding China’s ambition is one key to understanding the Pacific Rim.

Mainland China does lots of saber-rattling and posing. How much of it should diplomats from other nations take seriously? Although eager to expand its hegemony, China does not want a major war with a major global power: it does not want a war, at least at the present moment, with the United States.

It does, however, want to intimidate its smaller neighbors in the region. In May 2014, Michael Auslin wrote:

Just over six months ago, China set up an air defense identification zone (ADIZ) over a large part of the East China Sea, including in airspace over the Japanese-administered Senkaku Islands. Tokyo had already established its own ADIZ decades earlier that included the Senkakus. Beijing’s move was provocative, destabilizing, and an indicator of its relentless attempts to redefine Asia’s international order for its own interests. The Obama administration’s response was either praised as rightfully downplaying an insignificant action that didn’t really change much in Asia or was derided as a weak attempt to pretend that nothing serious had happened. Washington flew two B-52s through some part of the zone and then let the whole matter slip from public view, even though civilian airliners changed their operating practices to comply with Beijing’s unique demands to identify themselves even when not approaching Chinese airspace.

Developments in the region are shaped largely by maritime considerations. Robert Kaplan concludes from this that the likelihood of a major land war is small. He writes:

East Asia is a vast, yawning expanse, stretching from Arctic to Antarctic reaches — ­from the Kuril Islands southward to New Zealand — ­and characterized by a shattered array of coastlines and archipelagos, themselves separated by great seas and distances. Even accounting for the fact of how technology has compressed distance, with missiles and fighter jets — ­the latter easily refueled in the air — ­rendering any geography closed and claustrophobic, the sea acts as a barrier to aggression, at least to the degree that dry land does not. The sea, unlike land, creates clearly defined borders, and thus has the potential to reduce conflict. Then there is speed to consider. Even the fastest warships travel comparatively slowly, 35 knots, say, reducing the chance of miscalculations and thus giving diplomats more hours — ­and days even — ­to reconsider decisions. Moreover, navies and air forces simply do not occupy territory the way armies do. It is because of the seas around East Asia that the twenty-­first century has a better chance than the twentieth of avoiding great military conflagrations.

Despite Kaplan’s optimism, there is cause for concern. Chinese and Japanese military pilots are playing a complex form of chess - or a supersonic form of “chicken” - with each other. If a misstep occurs, a handful of pilots and millions or billions of dollars of aircraft could wind up at the bottom of the Pacific.

If that happens, the two belligerents might begin trading missiles with each other - first at each other’s navies, then possibly at military installations on land.

Although the United States would probably want to play the role of peacemaking diplomatic intermediary in such a scenario, increasing escalation could force the U.S. to choose a side.

Islam’s War on Archeology and History

Officers in the military sometimes work on unexpected tasks. Major Corine Wegener (U.S. Army) is tasked with rescuing and preserving ancient manuscripts and artifacts.

Major Wegener leads the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield, which she coordinates with the Association of National Committees of the Blue Shield and the International Committee of the Blue Shield. Her task is to save artworks and archaeological finds from the “Islamic State” (ISIS) which is currently terrorizing the region which many historians call the “cradle of civilization.”

Sculptures and clay tablets are the main evidence of the great civilizations which once inhabited that region: Babylonians, Akkadians, Sumerians, and others. The ‘Islamic State’ terrorists are bent on not only tyrannizing the present, but also on destroying much of humanity’s past.

The United States Army, and Major Wegener in particular, is hoping to protect these artifacts so that future generations can study them.

In case this sounds familiar, the 2014 movie The Monuments Men tells a similar story. George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, and John Goodman star in this film which show how the United States Army preserved paintings and sculptures during WWII in the 1940s.

Seventy years later, the same logic is at work. Authors Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra and Gordon Govier report on Major Wegener’s efforts:

“We teach various emergency methods for protection and evacuation,” she said. Last summer, the committee trained 14 Syrian archaeologists and museum professionals who risked their lives both to attend the training and to hide museum artifacts.

In addition to Major Wegener’s activities with the army, other groups are trying to safeguard these ancient finds. Columba Stewart is the executive director of the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library in Minnesota.

Blue Shield isn’t the only organization working on the problem. Stewart’s library has digitized 2,500 manuscripts from Syria since 2005, and about 5,000 more from Iraq since 2009. Manuscripts are small enough to move and hide, so they are relatively easy to protect from looters. But they are also relatively easy to sell on the black market, he said.

Terrorists from the “Islamic State” are not only destroying artifacts, papyri, parchments, and other documents, but are sometimes selling texts on as a way to fund their attacks. These “blood antiquities” are sold to private collectors, not to museums or universities, and become unavailable for further research and scholarship. Such manuscripts often degrade and decay, as private collectors do not usually have access to the best preservation methods.

ISIS is violating its own propaganda: it destroys artworks because it claims that orthodox Islam demands such destruction; but it preserves other artworks in order to sell them.

Small items can be smuggled out of Islamic countries to safety. Buildings cannot. For archaeological sites,

taking photographs is the only way to preserve them, said Stewart. “A statue or a carving you might be able to hide, but if somebody is intent on destroying [a building] for ideological reasons, there’s not a lot you can do.”

Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra and Gordon Govier note that “ISIS bulldozed the ancient city of Nimrod,” just as the Taliban had destroyed the Buddha statues of Bamiyan. International cultural treasures are at risk: many of the items destroyed by the Islamic State and by the Taliban were UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

Blood Antiquities: Islam’s War on Art History

The Hill Museum and Manuscript Library in Minnesota is not only a warehouse of priceless historical documents, but also sends out teams of researchers and preservationists to rescue parchments, papyri, and other ancient texts. These manuscripts are endangered because of the activity of the terrorist group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Authors Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra and Gordon Govier write:

“ISIS is very savvy, very alert to economics,” said Columba Stewart, executive director.

Not only texts, but artworks in the forms of paintings and sculptures are being destroyed wholesale by the terrorists. Stewart seeks to save as many historic items as he can. “His team has been taking digital photographs of” those which cannot be brought to safety. The team has been working to preserve “artifacts in the Middle East for 12 years.”

It’s a tale of victory and tragedy. Each piece preserved, snatched from the hands of the terrorists, is a triumph. Every item left behind is loss.

Also known as IS (“Islamic State”) or ISIL (“Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant”), this group is a manifestation of the Muslim antipathy to representative art. While some Muslim scholars permit paintings, drawings, and other images, mainstream Islam condemns any artistic image. For centuries, Muslim artists have specialized in abstract or nonrepresentational art: architecture and calligraphic patterns.

Most of the contents in Syria’s 34 national museums were transported to safe havens, United Nations officials reported last February. Still, the remaining museum pieces — or worse, uncatalogued items in archaeological sites — are at risk.

A few Islamic artists have produced images and representational art over the centuries. They, and their works, find safe havens outside Islamic nations.

In addition to the team from the Hill Museum, there are other scholars seeking to preserve artworks and ancient documents.

Enter the US Committee of the Blue Shield, the subject of George Clooney’s WWII movie The Monuments Men. Along with training the US military on how to protect cultural heritage during armed conflict, the committee also trains and teaches foreign museum staff who are trying to protect endangered artifacts, said member Corine Wegener.

The US Committee of the Blue Shield operates in concert with the Association of National Committees of the Blue Shield and the International Committee of the Blue Shield.

Major Corine Wegener (U.S. Army) was a founder and leader of this effort. It is clear that many nations around the world are eager to see cultural artifacts saved from Islamic terror.

Woodrow Wilson’s War

The more one studies the causes of WWI, and the motivations of the various belligerents, the less one understands them.

Woodrow Wilson’s explanation that America had to enter the war to “make the world safe for democracy” must be understood as mere sloganeering. He was not interested in expanding individual political liberty, domestically or abroad.

Given Wilson’s heavy-handed penchant for social engineering, one might suppose he harbored kind sentiments toward the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. This, however, was not the case.

While Wilson may have admired and emulated a central European doctrine in which the state controls the individual, he found Habsburg empire repugnant because it was a multi-ethnic amalgamation. Wilson was a strong believer in the nation-state, and to fuel Wilsonian nationalism, an ethnic state was needed.

This explains his delight with reassembling a sovereign Poland.

The Austro-Hungarian empire, by contrast, was a potpourri of Czechs, Hungarians, Austrians, Slovaks, and a few other groups. Wilson felt that such an impure mixture could not generate authentic nationalism.

When WWI started, the U.S. Civil War was still a living memory (Wilson was born in 1856). Wilson, trying to reconcile his racist southern roots with the Northern Republican victory of 1865, interpreted the war’s end as a lesson about centralized control. In order to be on the winning side, he felt, one needed to limit the rights and freedoms of individuals.

His father had owned slaves, and those slaves served young Wilson as he grew up. Looking back, he asserted that slavery was not a moral crime, but had merely been an economic system which had outlasted its usefulness.

The dynasties of Europe displeased Wilson, not because they limited the political liberties of their subjects, but because they lacked his systematic and scientific approach to managing the lives of citizens. Wilson was an early representatives of what Alexei Marcoux and others have come to call “technocratic authoritarian paternalism.”

The ethnic nation-state was, Wilson felt, better than a multi-ethnic empire for reasons of scientific management. But Wilson was the president of a multi-ethnic country. He hoped to resolve this tension by instituting various racial policies. Historian Eric Foner writes:

Woodrow Wilson, a native of Virginia, could speak without irony of the South’s “genuine representative government” and its exalted “standards of liberty.” His administration imposed full racial segregation in Washington and hounded from office considerable numbers of black federal employees.

Wilson’s racism, however, is only a small part of his broader political vision. This becomes visible in his efforts to redraw the map of the world at Versailles:

Meanwhile, the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 sacrificed the principle of self-determination - ostensibly the Allies’ major war aim - on the altar of imperialism, so far as the world’s nonwhite peoples were concerned. Nation-states were created for Eastern Europe, but not for what Wilson's advisor Colonel Edward House called the “backward countries” of Asia and Africa.

The result was a feeling of deep betrayal that affected everyone from W. E. B. Du Bois, who had traveled to Paris to plead the cause of colonial independence, to ordinary black Americans. Du Bois was forced to conclude that Wilson had “never at any single moment meant to include in his Democracy” black Americans or the nonwhite peoples of the world.

Not a competition between liberty and tyranny, Wilson’s engagement in WWI was a competition between hereditary dynastic authoritarianism and the above-mentioned technocratic authoritarian paternalism.

Wilson rejected royalty’s claim to rule while asserting his own right to rule. In his estimation, he simply knew better, and knew more. He did not oppose authoritarianism. He simply wanted a different type of authoritarianism. As scholar Hans-Hermann Hoppe writes:

World War I began as an old-fashioned territorial dispute. However, with the early involvement and the ultimate official entry into the war by the United States in April 1917, the war took on a new ideological dimension. The United States had been founded as a republic, and the democratic principle, inherent in the idea of a republic, had only recently been carried to victory as the result of the violent defeat and devastation of the secessionist Confederacy by the centralist Union government. At the time of World War I, this triumphant ideology of an expansionist democratic republicanism had found its very personification in then U.S. President Wilson. Under Wilson’s administration, the European war became an ideological mission - to make the world safe for democracy and free of dynastic rulers. When in March 1917 the U.S.-allied Czar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate and a new democratic-republican government was established in Russia under Kerenski, Wilson was elated. With the Czar gone, the war had finally become a purely ideological conflict: of good against evil. Wilson and his closest foreign policy advisors, George D. Herron and Colonel House, disliked the Germany of the Kaiser, the aristocracy, and the military elite. But they hated Austria. As Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn has characterized the views of Wilson and the American left, “Austria was far more wicked than Germany. It existed in contradiction of the Mazzinian principle of the national state, it had inherited many traditions as well as symbols from the Holy Roman Empire (double-headed eagle, black-gold colors, etc.); its dynasty had once ruled over Spain (another bete noire); it had led the Counter-Reformation, headed the Holy Alliance, fought against the Risorgimento, suppressed the Magyar rebellion under Kossuth (who had a monument in New York City), and morally supported the monarchical experiment in Mexico. Habsburg - the very name evoked memories of Roman Catholicism, of the Armada, the Inquisition, Metternich, Lafayette jailed at Olmuetz and Silvio Pellico in Brünn’s Spielberg fortress. Such a state had to be shattered, such a dynasty had to disappear.”

Wilson didn’t care about making the world safe for democracy. He was a racist, but racism is only one dimension of his vision for ruling.

By means of WWI, and especially by means of postwar treaties and arrangements, Wilson hoped to reshape the world along the lines of scientific management. ‘Taylorism’ or ‘scientific management’ was an attempt to rationalize industrial production. Wilson hoped to expand that principle beyond the factory, and to impose it upon the world.

Islam’s War on Art

Islam is generally understood to prohibit the creation of images: representational art in the forms of drawings, paintings, sketches, or sculpture. For this reason, much Muslim art is nonrepresentational: the generation of abstract patterns in calligraphy and architectural ornamentation are examples.

Outside the mainstream of Islamic thought, there are some groups of Muslims who permit the making and displaying of pictures. These marginal factions, however, are few in number and consistently persecuted by majority groups within Islam.

For this reason, art historians consistently report that the vast majority of Islamic artworks are nonrepresentational, especially in the Muslim cultures of northeastern Africa and southwestern Asia. Of the representational pieces created over the centuries, few survive. Those which do survive often do so in hiding, or in non-Muslim nations.

The main source for the prohibition of images is the text of the Hadith, the collected sayings of the prophet Muhammad. Historians Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra and Gordon Govier report:

In 2001 in Kabul, Afghanistan, the Taliban destroyed thousands of artifacts that resembled humans or animals. But museum employees hid statues in obscure storerooms and kept the fragments of pieces smashed by the Taliban. In recent years, 300 have been restored.

The proscription of images centers of God, extending to Muhammad, then to Muhammad’s family and officers, then to humans generally, next to animals, and finally to plants and inanimate objects. While the Sunni are more stringent in the opposition to representational art than the Shia, in practice, any imagery or portraiture is extremely rare in both groups.

It is in fact, relatively easy to find examples of Muslim clerics who have approved the concept of representation art, even up to and including portraits of human beings. It is also easy to find examples of individual Muslim artists who made such artwork, and patrons who’ve funded or bought them. But numerically, these are exceptions. Historically, they are outliers. Geographically, they tend to be found outside historically Islamic nations.

Several early Islamic rulers approved of coinage bearing human images. Some later rulers had their palaces decorated with sculpture and paintings. In the twentieth century, two films were made by Muslim cinematographers the about prophet Muhammad. But the coins were melted down, the paintings and sculptures removed, and the films banned.

Although these exceptions exist, the overriding trend within Islam is against art. As the researchers at the David Collection, an art museum in Copenhagen, write:

The non-figurative character of religious decoration has remained a fundamental principle throughout the history of Islam. At no point have images found their way into the interiors of mosques; as far as we know, no Muslim artist has endeavored to depict God; the Koran has never been illustrated; and depictions of the Prophet Muhammad are rare. With the reform of coinage carried out by the caliph Abd al-Malik in 696, even the portraits of rulers were removed from Islamic coins and replaced by calligraphic decoration.

What do art historians and museum curators do when faced with Islamic attacks on art? The terrorist group known as the “Islamic State” has destroyed artworks, both in museums and elsewhere.

Brave preservationists have accomplished heroic feats, preserving some pieces of art from Muslim attacks. Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra and Gordon Govier write:

“The unsung heroes in these situations are people like librarians or museum directors who do their best to hide things in advance of trouble or as trouble arrives,” Stewart said. One of his colleagues smuggled thousands of manuscripts out of Qaraqosh, Iraq’s “Christian capital,” in advance of ISIS last summer.

The “Islamic State” group seeks to destroy the artistic, historical, anthropological dimensions of culture and civilization. Their efforts are designed to impoverish the human race in every sense possible - intellectually and economically.

Historians and curators around the world are eager to lend assistance in any way possible to those who are trying to preserve bits of art and history inside the Islamic world.

Still, the loss is enormous. “Our understanding of the past is made up of little specks we find and put together,” said Hershel Shanks.

Shanks, who edits an archeological periodical, assess the losses, the pieces which have been totally destroyed: “Much of what we don’t know is gone. It’s heartbreaking.”

Climate and Politics

History is rarely simple, and any easy narrative is suspect. Upon closer examination, an effortless account of some event or process usually contains significant, if hidden, complexities.

Intricacies are not hidden, however, in the task of examining the multidimensional and interdisciplinary phenomena surrounding Maunder Minimum and the Little Ice Age. The former is a documented span of years, approximately 1645 to 1715, during which sunspot activity was significantly lower than average. The latter, which roughly correlates with the former, is a global climate swing, the dating of which is more ambiguous.

Starting points for the Little Ice Age have been proposed around 1300 or 1350, but some scientists argue for a beginning around 1550. The age terminates around 1850 or 1870. In any case, the age was non-anthropogenic. Climatologists are unsure as to the significance of its correlation with the Maunder Minimum.

It is clear that the Little Ice Age and the Maunder Minimum together correlate with a series of economic, social, political, and military instabilities. Kenneth Pomeranz, in his review of Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis, writes:

We can now be sufficiently precise about at least some past weather events that we can tie them to the sorts of political and social events that unfold in months and years, not just the more diffuse patterns of decades or centuries. This allows us to write histories in which both relatively large patterns of climate and specific human decisions matter.

The climatic instability of the years of the Little Ice Age and the Maunder Minimum correlate to events like the Thirty Years’ War, the overthrow of Charles I in England, and political turmoil in Asia and Africa.

Historians hypothesize that wild non-anthropogenic swings in climate threatened the food supply: both crops and wild game would have been affected. Beyond the agriculture needed for human sustenance, goods produced for trade would have been in short supply, if they relied on weather-dependent components or processes (e.g., tobacco, cotton, silk, spices, leather, etc.).

Competition for the dwindling supply of resources could fuel or trigger political unrest. Yet the ability of humans to adapt and adjust allowed for some level of normalization even during these years of statistically outlying weather. Pomeranz notes that

By the 1680s most major polities had regained some reasonable level of internal stability, though bad climate would persist for another thirty years.

As adaptation, often in terms of technique or technology, allowed humans to acclimate, the political upheaval seemed to subside.

Internal unrest became much less of a problem, even before 18th-century warming took hold, as agricultural improvements spread, market integration advanced, plague and smallpox were much better contained.

Given that “political turmoil ceased well before the climate improved,” it may well be that, even though dramatic climatic instability is non-anthropogenic, the tendency to successfully adapt to climate change is truly human.

Art History under Fire

Islam’s prohibition of images is well-known: drawing, painting, and sculpture are considered idolatrous. The faithful are instructed to purge their environment of such things.

Not only does this belief eliminate the production of any representative art, but it also triggers the destruction of such artworks as Muslims may encounter. Non-representational art is allowed, but only if it is in the service of Islam and only if it cannot be interpreted as arising from an “infidel” worldview.

The fact that artworks can be sold, however, creates an internal tension within Islam: destroy the artworks, or use them to fund the mission? Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra and Gordon Govier write:

ISIS has become one of the world’s best-funded terrorist groups, earning most of its profits by selling seized oil. But details keep emerging of the estimated No. 2 source of its billion-dollar revenue stream: looting.

This question repeatedly confronts Islam: Destroy the cultural artifacts or sell them? If the artifacts are destroyed, a chance to fund the mission is lost. If the artifacts are sold, the seller is open to the charge of hypocrisy on his own terms: he has allowed the “idolatrous” images to continue existing, which for a Muslim is a sin.

The term “ISIS” has become common, along with its variants, “ISIL” and “IS” - referring respectively to the “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria,” the “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant,” and the “Islamic State.”

Under any name, Islam has destroyed archeological treasures wholesale. Scientists and historians from all parts of the world lamented the use of construction equipment and explosives to eliminate all traces of the ancient city of Nimrud, an Assyrian city founded around 1200 BC.

The city’s name is sometimes transliterated as ‘Nimrod.’ It is difficult for non-Muslims to grasp the worldview which demands the destruction of archeological findings from ancient civilizations. Zylstra and Govier continue:

The group often destroys statues and other objects it deems idolatrous. Last month, ISIS bulldozed the ancient city of Nimrod, prompting the senior editor of the New York Review of Books to call for military protection of archeological sites. Italy’s culture minister and Iraq’s tourism and antiquities minister have advanced similar proposals.

In early 2015, ISIS destroyed an ancient architectural feature known as the ‘Nineveh Wall.’ In 2014, ISIS had bulldozed a colossal ancient Assyrian gateway lion sculpture dating to the 8th century BC.

While, on the one hand, Islam is committing these acts of wanton destruction based on intolerance and xenophobia, ISIS paradoxically preserves other artifacts, equally offensive to Muslim sensibilities, in order to sell them.

ISIS cannot avoid the charge of hypocrisy. If it were consistently to apply Islamic values, it would not allow any of these archeological finds to exist. But it violates the worldview it proclaims for the sake of money. ISIS compromises its allegedly Islamic values for the sake of opportunism.

But thousands of potentially lucrative archaeological sites are now under ISIS control. The resulting looting has given rise to the term “blood antiquities.” A parallel to Africa’s “blood diamonds,” where mines in a war zone are looted to finance military operations, ancient artifacts are helping to fund ISIS’s reign of terror.

In a bizarre and nightmarish circumstance, historians and scholars are thankful that ISIS needs cash to continue its terrorist activities: the need for funding is enabling the survival of at least a few of the world’s oldest cultural treasures.

While some of the destroyed items had been catalogued, photographed, and described, other objects had yet to be identified or analyzed. Indiscriminate ruination annihilated both known finds and those which lay undiscovered waiting in vain to be unearthed.

In the blanket destruction caused by bulldozing entire cities, many artifacts have been lost forever.