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From Wounds to Graphics: The Representation of Holocaust Trauma in Art Spiegelman’s Maus

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by Mehak Burza

Photo by Majkl Velner on Unsplash

This article analyses the depiction of trauma in Art Spiegelman’s Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale and Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began. Post First World War, the definition of trauma has undergone a significant change. While trauma theorists are still divided in their opinion about a proper medium of traumatic representation, the graphic novels of the Holocaust paved a new way of experimenting with the traumatic form. Interlacing the text with images and conveying the meaning through the architecture of the panels, Maus bears witness to the Holocaust in a unique way.

Ethics of Representation of Holocaust Trauma

The Nazi rule came to an end in 1945 with the liberation of the concentration and death camps. However, the cataclysmic event of the Holocaust continued to re-live through the traumatic memories of the survivors. For this reason, the repercussion of the event was even more horrific as the wounds of the trauma were slow to heal. The recounting of the first-hand information of the event, reconnecting with relatives, restitution of confiscated wealth and property, immigration, and rebuilding of fragmented lives characterized the aftermath paraphernalia of the Holocaust. Following the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, many survivors were forced to live in displaced persons camps, where they had to wait years before being able to emigrate to a new country.

The late 1940s saw a significant increase in the number of exiles, Prisoners Of War (POWs) and other dislodged populaces moving across Europe. In order to prosecute the perpetrators of the Holocaust and deal with the Nazi war criminals, the Allies conducted the Nuremberg Trials in 1945-46, which revealed the Nazi’s horrendous crimes. The Nuremberg Trials were a series of thirteen trials held in Nuremberg, Germany. The litigants, which included Nazi Party authorities and senior military officials alongside German industrialists, legal advisors, and specialists were prosecuted on charges such as crimes against humanity. Increasing tension on the Allied forces to make a separate country for the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust would eventually prompt a mandate for the formation of the separate state of Israel in 1948.

The Holocaust thus remains a major touchstone for trauma, and any response to it inevitably elicits a traumatic response. Trauma has been regarded problematic in its representation. Trauma theorists are divided in their opinion with regard to the propriety of its definition and a medium of representation. It is considered as a state that is dominated by aporia and hence eludes a straitjacketed description and definition. The trajectory of the definition of trauma has indeed been a long one. Reports of the psychological and physiological damage inflicted upon Holocaust victims circulated within a few years after the end of the Second World War; however, it was not until the 1960s that an extensive body of literature began to appear on this subject, and a number of comparative studies were introduced. These findings documented a wide range of physical and psychic impairments suffered by Holocaust survivors. This included severe headaches, fears, anxieties, dependence and indecision, and various forms of social maladjustments. These symptoms were then interpreted as constituting a syndrome characteristic of individuals subjected to the peculiar trauma experienced by Holocaust victims.

Consequently, the notion of trauma has undergone significant change. What was earlier known to be a wound inflicted upon the ‘body’ came to be known as a wound inflicted upon the ‘psyche’. It is this psychic wound which becomes the pivotal force in driving the traumatic Holocaust testimonies. According to Judith Herman, such traumatic memories often lack verbal narrative and context and rather are encoded in the form of vivid sensations and images. Thus, the traumatized people see intrusive images and have recurrent dreams and nightmares - a condition known as post-traumatic stress disorder. The disorder was known by at least a hundred names before its formal recognition, shell shock, combat fatigue, and soldier’s heart being the most common. As late as the 1980s, the term Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was given its formal recognition by the U.S. medical and scientific community, which is central as a concept within Trauma studies.

The paradox of trauma is that it cannot be represented - and yet it should be. Cathy Caruth, in her work, Unclaimed Experience, argues about psychological trauma being the state that is possessed by an image or event. Trauma warrants recognition, and hence testimony of trauma imports a moral obligation for others to bear witness to it and participate in its reconstruction. The narrative of trauma that is provided through testimony generates our knowledge of that trauma, which emerges from the void. With respect to traumatic memory and the reconstruction of events, Dominick La Capra goes beyond the notion of ‘belatedness’ viewed by trauma theorists such as Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman as being essential to trauma. Elaborating on the Freudian discourse of psychoanalysis, La Capra suggests the dual processes of ‘acting out’ and ‘working through’. While in the former, the victim relives the past as if it were fully present; the latter involves gaining a critical distance on the event in order to distinguish between the past and the present. This becomes necessary for the victim as having survived the catastrophe, the victim sees himself as a changed person. The haunting by a traumatic event, La Capra believes, can be countered by narrative, and over the decades post Second World War, there was an increase in the Holocaust memoirs written by the survivors describing the inhuman atrocities and their disquieting experiences.

When looking for representations of the Holocaust’s trauma, one finds numerous examples. On one hand, there are survivor testimonies with a chronological account of the traumatic memories, on the other, literary texts also exist that defy the chronology. One such example is the genre of graphic narratives that breathe life into texts through images. On the Western front, the nineteenth century was the time when the speech balloons evolved as a means of ascribing dialogue and William Hogarth established a set of narratives over a number of images. It was also the era of the mass enlargement of the press and the hitherto satirical drawings, which appeared as individual works of art, were superseded with the advent of lithography and woodblock etching. This paved the way for the regular appearance of caricatures in the newspapers and magazines, which gained the name cartoons around the middle of the nineteenth century Soon after, the sequences of drawings in the cartoons were assigned certain sections of narratives along with it, a form that emerged as comics. They consisted of interrelated panels displaying brief humor with text in speech balloons, with R.F. Outcault being the major driving force of the form. However, unlike the comics, the graphic narratives provide stand-alone stories with a more complex plot, delving into all sorts of social, political, and psychological issues. The first decisive usage of the term ‘graphic novel’ is attributed to Will Eisner, who coined it in his 1978 book entitled A Contract With God and Other Tenement Stories.

Maus by Art Spiegelman not only illuminates vivid memories of the Holocaust but also attempts to analyze the trans-generational trauma of the second generation. Representing the second survivor generation, Art Spiegelman makes an effort to recover his father, Vladek’s tale. Maus is a two-volume graphic narrative (Maus I: My Father Bleeds History and Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began) in which Art Spiegelman retells the tale of his father Vladek, a Polish Jew, who endured the Nazi death camps along with his better half and Art’s mother, Anja. Other than recounting an anecdote about the Holocaust totally in the funny cartoon/comic design, Maus’s most salient component is the animal metaphor. Spiegelman draws the characters as humanized creatures and Jews as depicted as mice (German: Maus), the Nazis as felines, the Poles as pigs, Americans as dogs, and the French as frogs.

There exists a dialectical relationship between the images and the text. At the heart of the story is the tortured relationship between Art and his father, an old man who is obsessed with his past, helpless, and totally impossible in his present, and thus can be seen existing in two different worlds: the present - today’s world of his retirement and the past- the world remembered for occupied Poland and extermination camps. The overall impression of both the volumes is in the form of a memoir, in which the author tells of his interviews with his father’s experiences in the concentration camps. As Vladek tells his story, annotations from the perspective of past speaker’s conscience in Art’s voice give way to those in Vladek, so the bulk of the narration is technically in flashbacks. The construction of meaning is done at multiple levels within multiple timeframes. The different temporal planes involving interplay of the past (Holocaust) and present are captured in unique ways, through the architecture of the panels, unlike the linear narration. Lettering plays a significant part in the organization of the graphic novel as it vibrantly represents and marks the voices of the various characters, and includes devices as diverse as spelling, bold, italics, and visual alliterations. Eisner argues that in a graphic narrative, the style of lettering and the emulation of accents are the clues enabling the reader to read it with the emotional nuances the storyteller intended.

A sample from Art Spiegelman’s “MetaMaus”

While the present conversation is shown in a white background, the past is revealed with a greyish background. Bold letters are used to emphasise a point. The different temporal planes of the Holocaust and the present coexist on the same page.

Pictures and sometimes, even words can be either black and white or colored. Both are important techniques and add different connotations to the story. Further, there exists temporal blurring in the narrative as the past narrative sequence is constantly punctured by Vladek’s present interruptions. This is depicted in several instances such as scolding his son for dropping ash on the carpet, returning the half-eaten cornflakes packet, losing count of his pills, and using the burning matchstick to light up another burner. Thus, Vladek does not make any efforts to redeem himself throughout the narrative.

Since Art has no direct experience of the Holocaust, the traumatic incidents are mediated to him through interviews with his father, which he records on tape. During these interviews, Vladek re-enacts his suppressed trauma as brought about by the loss of almost his entire family. Art, the secondary witness, receives the history of the Holocaust and re-interprets it by rewriting Vladek’s testimony in the form of a graphic book. In doing so, he acquires what can correspond to Marianne Hirsch’s concept of post-memory, and thus belongs to the hinge generation that receives broken refrains of trauma from the survivor/first generation. Through the interview, it becomes clear that Art had a brother Richieu, who perished in the death camp. His photograph was in his parents’ bedroom and it is evident from his father’s talk that he values Richieu more than him. Art thus becomes Richieu’s imperfect surrogate and calls him his ghost brother. Art’s traumatic competition with his brother reaches its ironic climax at the end of volume II, when his seriously ill and disoriented father confusing him with Richieu, asks him to stop recording his interview on the tape. Gabriele Schwab argues that the competition with a dead sibling is a classical syndrome of replacement children. It is also a prevalent form in which parental trauma is transmitted to the next generation and often to generations to come. Art’s ‘inheritance’ of his parents’ trauma results in his preoccupation with the Holocaust, although he is in constant denial with it. Vladek’s and Anja’s past experiences form an important part of his identity. His identification with his parents’ affliction becomes so intense that he starts imagining being in Auschwitz. He recalls his aberrant dreams from childhood about Nazi soldiers storming into his classroom and taking away all the Jewish pupils, and he fantasizes about Zyklon B coming out from the shower of their bathroom instead of water. His awareness that he did not live through the Holocaust contributes to his feelings of incompetence. Art’s trauma requires psychotherapy, and this can be seen in Volume II of the book when he consults his Czech psychiatrist, Dr. Pavel, who is also a survivor of Terezin and Auschwitz.

Conclusion

Although there does not exist a perfect way to represent trauma, as each representation has a veracity of its own, the graphic novels provide a new outlook to perceive the trauma of the Holocaust without traumatizing the readers. By approaching history through spatiality, the graphic novel provides an experimental way of representing the trauma, and in turn providing alternative ways of telling stories. In the narrative, the trauma of the Holocaust is also connected to the trauma of everyday events. An instance of the everyday trauma can be seen in the hitchhiker episode in Maus II. In one of his interviews, Spiegelman was asked about his choice of choosing mice to depict the Jews, to which he stated that he wanted to show the events and the memory of the Holocaust without showing them.

Mehak Burza is a doctoral research scholar of Holocaust Studies in the Department of English, Jamia University (New Delhi, India). Her thesis title is Literary Representations of The Holocaust; An Assessment. Her primary interests include Holocaust/Genocide Studies, Gender Studies, Holocaust Trauma and PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). She has presented papers in international conferences in Texas and Gettysburg. Her creative works have been published in Trouvaille Review, Visual Verse and Galaxy International Multidisciplinary Research Journal. She also translates from Hindi/Urdu into English and her translations are published in Purple Ink Magazine, the online magazine of Brown University, Los Angeles. She is also associated with LLIDS Journal as a peer reviewer, as a copy editor (part time) in Journal of International Women’s Studies and is a moderator for The Digital and Computer Games in the discord server. Apart from academics she is trained classical dancer, with Kathak being her forte

Mehak is a External Representative at Strife.

Franchise Jihad: The Role of the Bedouin for ISIL in Sinai

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by Joseph Jarnecki

A snapshot of life for civilians in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula – a region wracked by conflict between Sinai’s ISIL affiliate and Egyptian security forces (Image Credit: 2017 CGTN)

The fall of Baghouz – the last bastion of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) – was meant to mark the end of the US-led coalition’s war. Instead, the battle was yet another milestone in the evolution of the self-appointed Caliphate. Stripped of contiguous territory, the pseudo-state now pursues its global Jihad by franchising its own brand of militancy to those groups it established, supported, or co-opted whilst at its height.[i]

The grouping Wilayat Sinai (WS) – or “Sinai Province” – which operates in Egypt’s easternmost region, the Sinai Peninsula, is an exemplar franchise. Swearing allegiance to ISIL in 2014, the group originally coalesced in 2011 from a diverse array of militant outfits under the name Ansar Bayat al-Maqdis (ABM – “the Partisans of Jerusalem”).[ii] Spearheading Sinai’s militant activity since its founding, WS’s campaign alone has inflicted over 1,200 casualties on security forces since 2014, leading Human Rights Watch (HRW) to classify the Peninsula as host to a Non-Intentional Armed Conflict (NIAC).[iii] Appreciating this context then, a broadened understanding of the enabling factors behind WS is fundamental to tackling both intra-Egypt militancy and the next steps of ISIL.

In this article, I will highlight the harmful nature of regime governance and its targeting of Sinai’s majority Bedouin population. Historic marginalisation of the Bedouin by Cairo, I believe, has been crucial to creating a climate in which WS could emerge and thrive.

Sinai’s Bedouin population: a rough outline of tribal land (Image credit: 2017 Discover Sinai and 2009 Clinton Bailey)

The return of Sinai and the reincorporation of the 15-20 Bedouin tribes whose lands criss-cross the Sinai/Israel/Palestine border in 1982 was a hollow victory for those Bedouin who gathered intelligence and facilitated Egyptian espionage whilst under Israeli occupation.[iv] The Cairo government pushed a narrative that quickly branded the Bedouin as Israeli ‘collaborators’ for taking available economic opportunities whilst under Israeli rule.[v] This perception has since been institutionalised and cements Egyptian nationalist sentiment wherein Bedouin identity is synonymous with primitiveness, criminality, and terrorism.[vi] A comment made by an Egyptian security official operating in Sinai that ‘the only good Bedouin is a dead Bedouin’ typifies this attitude.[vii]

Perceptions of Bedouin as “non-Egyptian” – emphasised by Cairo – then legitimise discriminatory policies which formalise the Bedouin as second-class citizens and Egypt as the Bedouin’s ‘fourth colonizer’.[viii] Strategies reflecting this perception include the confiscation of over 200,000 acres of tribal land since Egyptian reoccupation, stripping the Bedouin of access to an agrarian livelihood.[ix] Meanwhile, this stolen land is given to Nile Valley settlers – as part of government plans to ‘Egyptianise’ Sinai [x] – or sold to state-linked tourism developers in South Sinai, promoting an industry in which Bedouins are barred from participating.[xi] Moreover, beyond the private sector, the Bedouin are excluded from the security forces and until 2007 were unable to vote.[xii] Both these measures exemplify the contempt with which the Bedouin are held by the government. Specific day-to-day governance in Sinai extends this contempt to broader securitisation of the Bedouin (wherein speech acts by the Egyptian government transform Bedouin communities from political constituencies into security threats)[xiii] with arbitrary mass arrests and forcible disappearances becoming ‘part of daily life’.[xiv]

Many Bedouins who are disaffected with government and are cut adrift from legitimate economic opportunities have in desperation turned to clandestine alternatives. Tribes, especially those with strong Gazan links and with lands which straddle the Israeli-Egyptian border now smuggle arms, drugs, and, more infrequently, militants. The 2008 escalation between Hamas and Israel as well as the imposition of an Egyptian supported embargo of Gaza has only increased this activity. Estimates now put the annual revenue from smuggling at $300 to $500 million [xv] and in just 2008 an expansion of smuggling and its related activities shrunk the estimated formal and informal unemployment rate of Rafah – a large North Sinai town – from 50% to 20%.[xvi]

As a result of smuggling, ‘sophisticated and heavily armed gangs’[xvii] have emerged which provide economic opportunities and a chance of retaliation against the security forces. At the same time, because of their inability to provide similar incentives, tribal leaders have lost influence, especially over ‘new generations of disgruntled youth’.[xviii] These gangs smuggle for WS who have used ISIL’s funds and its ideational authority to source sophisticated weaponry and recruit approximately 1,500 combatants.[xix] Some of these fighters are young Bedouins who work the smuggling lanes and are either radicalised or lured by the chance to get back at security forces.[xx] Examples of WS Bedouin are few, however, with the ISIL affiliate being mostly composed of deserters from Egyptian security forces, ‘persistent local insurgents,’ and foreign veteran insurgents.[xxi] The prevalence of the last category within WS means local guides and boltholes, crucial to operating an insurgency that relies on asymmetrical information to combat superior armed forces, are needed and are most easily sourced from amongst the Bedouin.

In the ‘880 attacks between the beginning of 2014 and the end of 2016’ [xxii] carried out by WS, Bedouin assistance has been indispensable, providing local knowledge without which the militant’s hit-and-run tactics would fail in the face of an estimated ‘500:1 [military] power’ imbalance.[xxiii] Their provision of auxiliary support by procuring weapons and personnel whilst also acting as guides and maintaining safe havens demonstrates the true cost of their marginalisation for the Egyptian government.

Despite the generation’s worth of persecution faced by the Bedouin, the current status quo does not have to continue. The relationship between the Bedouin, even those in charge of smuggling operations, and WS is not positive. Replicating ISIL strategies, WS has sought to seize areas and enforce their interpretation of Islam.[xxiv] To this end, they operate ‘multiple detention sites where they interrogate detained civilians,’ including Bedouins.[xxv] Additionally, extensive attacks on Sinai’s Christian population ostracise some Bedouin like the Jebeliya tribe, who has deep-rooted historical links to Sinai’s Christian orthodox population. Moreover, a WS crackdown on cigarette and marijuana smuggling damages relations with those same Bedouin smugglers on whom they rely.[xxvi]

In light of this, the door is not closed for a rapprochement between Bedouin tribal leaders and Egypt’s government, though the intricacies of this process will require careful handling. The first step must be to reincorporate Sinai as an integral part of Egypt’s identity and to acknowledge the Bedouin’s place within the Peninsula. By legitimising their status as citizens and bringing arbitrary arrests to an end, the government may win over those Bedouin who are on the front-line of insurgent violence. Reconciliation with the Bedouin, however, will also require an end to their economic exclusion from agriculture and tourism. As Bedouins integrate within the legitimate economy, WS will be deprived of the auxiliary support on which they must rely to survive. Whilst Sinai only offers a snapshot into the future of ISIL, it is an important one. A central lesson the conflict offers is that when a franchise of ISIL emerges, we must look beyond its links to the self-appointed Caliphate and examine the unique structural conditions which facilitate its existence where it arises.

Joseph is a third-year BA student in International Relations at the King’s War Studies Department. His main areas of focus are conflict and (in)security in the Middle East and North Africa, particularly Egypt, and on theories of subjectivity within International Relations. His dissertation project aims to incorporate these areas of interest when investigating how critical military studies – specifically its reappraisal of militarism – contribute to analyses of formerly colonised spaces. Before joining King’s Joseph interned with the Huffington Post and established a school magazine on a diverse range of subjects. You can follow him on Twitter @Jarnecki.

[i] Michael Hart, ‘The Troubled History of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula’, International Policy Digest, 2016 <https://intpolicydigest.org/2016/05/30/the-troubled-history-of-egypt-s-sinai-peninsula/> [accessed 10 June 2019].

[ii] Iffat Idris, Sinai Conflict Analysis (Britghton: Institute of Development Studies, 2 March 2017), p. 3 <https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/123456789/13052> [accessed 29 May 2019].

[iii] Human Rights Watch, ‘If You Are Afraid for Your Lives, Leave Sinai!’: Egyptian Security Forces and ISIS-Affiliate Abuses in North Sinai (Human Rights Watch, 2019), pp. 2 & 35 <https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/report_pdf/egypt0519_web3_0.pdf>.

[iv] Sahar F. Aziz, ‘Rethinking Counterterrorism in the Age of ISIS: Lessons from Sinai’, Nebraska Law Review, 95.2 (2016), 308–65 (p. 322).

[v] Oliver Walton, Conflict, Exclusion and Livelihoods in the Sinai Region of Egypt (Governance and Social Development Resource Centre, 20 September 2012), p. 7 <http://www.gsdrc.org/docs/open/hdq834.pdf> [accessed 6 November 2019].

[vi] Sahar F Aziz, De-Securitizing Counterterrorism in the Sinai Peninsula (Washington and Doha: Brookings Institution, April 2017), pp. 13–14 <https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/de-securitizing-counterterrorism-in-the-sinai-peninsula_aziz_english.pdf> [accessed 3 June 2019]; Idris, pp. 8–10.

[vii] Wikileaks, Internal Security in Sinai-an Update (Egypt Cairo, 14 March 2005) <https://search.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/05CAIRO1978_a.html> [accessed 1 August 2019].

[viii] Angela Joya and Evrim Gormus, ‘State Power and Radicalization in Egypt’s Sinai’, The Researcher: The Canadian Journal for Middle East Studies, 1.1 (2015), 42–40 (p. 52).

[ix] Sahar F. Aziz, p. 327.

[x] Joya and Gormus, p. 55.

[xi] Idris, p. 10.

[xii] Walton.

[xiii] Ole Wæver, Securitization and Desecuritization (Centre for Peace and Conflict Research Copenhagen, 1993).

[xiv] Human Rights Watch, p. 3.

[xv] Idris, p. 10; Sahar F Aziz, p. 3.

[xvi] Sahar F. Aziz, p. 337.

[xvii] Walton, p. 6.

[xviii] Sahar F. Aziz, p. 328.

[xix] Hart.

[xx] A Batrawy, ‘Egypt’s Most Extreme Hardliners in Sinai Revival’, Associated Press, 2012 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/10392343>.

[xxi] Omar Ashour, ISIS and Wilayat Sinai: Complex Networks of Insurgency under Authoritarian Rule, DGAP Kompakt (Berlin: Forschungsinstitut der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik, 2016), p. 8 (p. 6) <https://www.ssoar.info/ssoar/bitstream/handle/document/54270/ssoar-2016-ashour-ISIS_and_Wilayat_Sinai_Complex.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y&lnkname=ssoar-2016-ashour-ISIS_and_Wilayat_Sinai_Complex.pdf>.

[xxii] Omar Ashour, ‘Sinai’s Insurgency: Implications of Enhanced Guerilla Warfare’, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 42.6 (2019), 541–58 (p. 546) <https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2017.1394653>.

[xxiii] Ashour, ISIS and Wilayat Sinai: Complex Networks of Insurgency under Authoritarian Rule, pp. 5–6.

[xxiv] Human Rights Watch, p. 9.

[xxv] Human Rights Watch, p. 37.

[xxvi] Idris, p. 4.

 

Rising Sun? Japanese Politics and the Shifting Nature of the U.S.-Japan Alliance

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by Adam Campbell

The United States and Japan: a strained but mutually beneficial relationship (Image credit: The Japan Times)

‘NATO countries must pay MORE, the United States must pay LESS. Very unfair’. @realDonaldTrump (10/07/2018).

Since the beginning of his presidency, the American President Donald J. Trump has consistently stressed that America’s allies have not been pulling their weight in matters of security. He has repeatedly criticised nations for leaving their own national security up to the U.S., politically and financially, and has hinted numerous times at pulling U.S. interests away from these states. With Japan specifically, Trump has had a personal history of viewing them as a ‘free rider’ of American power. A sentiment dating back to the trade wars of the 80s, during which Trump himself stated on the Oprah Winfrey show that ‘we let Japan come in and dump everything into our markets. It’s not free trade‘. In response to this, a resurgence of scepticism over the reliability of U.S. support in East Asian regional security has occurred amongst both the Japanese media and the public.

Despite this uncertainty, the relationship with current Japanese PM Shinzo Abe has been one of Trump’s most positive since his election; not only was Japan the first country in Asia to receive a presidential visit, Abe has repeatedly stated his admiration for Trump, specifically over North Korea, in which Trump has claimed Abe offered to nominate him for a Nobel Peace Prize. Abe has appeared as a consistent voice of support for Trump’s Asia policy and is now increasingly stating interest in asserting Japan’s independent role in the region. However, Abe has greater reasons for being so attentive to Trump’s more ‘hands-off’ approach to alliances. In fact, it has complemented his most consistent domestic political aim; a reassessment of Article 9 of the Japanese constitution.

Historical Legacy of the Japanese Constitution

Article 9 is perhaps the most notorious passage of the Japanese Constitution. Enshrined within the Constitution that was written by the U.S. forces during the Occupation of Japan following the Second World War, this article states: ‘the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes’. Article 9 cemented the current U.S.- Japanese security relationship, with the U.S. acting as its military guarantor and limiter. Although Japan has possessed a ‘ Japanese Self-Defence Force’ (JSDF) since 1954, under the justification that the clause does not limit the right to self-defence, its status and legal capabilities have long been debated. Much of Abe’s political career has focused on the revision of Article 9, which he argues would remove the ever-present debate over the unconstitutionality of the JSDF and would allow Japan to fully exercise itself as a military power.

With this in mind, Abe is seemingly determined to make a revision of Article 9 his political legacy. Not only has he previously ran office under the banner of economic revival and an increase in defence spending, he has also expanded the term-limits for the post of the Japanese Prime Minister from two consecutive three-year terms to three, a move which resulted in him recently becoming the country’s longest-serving Premier and which drew concerns from Japanese lawmakers. Alongside this, his methods of working towards revision have also drawn criticism. His first attempt came through an amendment proposal in 2012, but after this failed to make it through the Diet, the amendment’s focus shifted towards ‘reinterpreting’ the wording of Article 9 rather than adding or removing anything.

Both Japanese constitutional scholars and former Supreme Court judges publicly denounced this move as unconstitutional, as it seemingly circumvented the legal process for amendment. The amendment aims also attracted widespread opposition by the public, with tens of thousands protesting Abe’s actions in August 2015. This ‘reinterpretation’ has since been described as a ‘Trojan Horse’, designed to avoid controversy while essentially implementing a full revision of Article 9. It is in this context that Abe’s interest and support for Trump makes sense; his emphasis on allies pulling their own weight in terms of security commitments has only boosted Abe’s campaign to revise Article 9, increasing its momentum.

Abe’s determination to revise the Constitution also possesses an ideological root and is part of a broader movement within current Japanese politics. He, and the majority of his current and past cabinets, are members of the ‘Nippon Kaigi’ (the Japanese Conference), an ultranationalist political lobbying group. The association itself focuses on ‘fostering a sense of Japanese unity and social stability, based around the Imperial household and shared history’, along with ‘Contributing to world peace by strengthening national security’. In practice, this movement has mostly taken the form of nostalgia for the Imperial era, including the promotion of a reintroduction of Imperial names, renewing support for the emperor, a dismissal of the Tokyo War tribunals as ‘illegitimate’, and historical revisionism through ‘patriotic education’.

This revisionism has similarly been extended to school textbooks, which have played down Japan’s past aggression in South-East Asia and China, some of which have infamously toned down events like the Nanking massacre. The revisionist mindset has drawn the condemnation of other nations; both China and South Korea have repeatedly criticised numerous former Diet members and Prime Minsters for visiting the Yasukuni Shire, a site which has become infamous for to its continued enshrinement of 1,068 individuals found guilty of war crimes following 1945. Abe himself has recently demonstrated resistance to this criticism, rejecting South Korean demands for an apology for the forced employment of ‘Comfort Women’ during Japan’s occupation of Korea. Beyond their attempts to revise Japan’s actions between 1905 and 1945, ‘Nippon Kaigi’s’ primary goal has been a revision of Article 9, and many of Abe’s supporters view it as a step in allowing Japan to reassert itself within the region as a main player.

A Disjoined ‘Special Relationship’

In light of this growing sentiment towards making Japan ‘great again’, it is easy to see why Abe has taken such an effort to ingratiate himself with Trump. Since 1952, Japanese security has been intrinsically tied to the United States, being a cornerstone of their post Second World War relationship, and relying on it for regional influence. Even during periods of economic tension between the two in the 80s, when Japan was seen as the U.S. main rival and articles warned of an impending ‘economic pearl harbour’, their close security relationship consistently united them over joint concerns in the region. This dynamic has repeated itself recently, as disagreements over trade during the two years of Trump’s office were dwarfed by concerns over North Korea aggression and a potential settlement on the peninsula.

The U.S.-Japanese relationship will persist regardless of what may follow from Trump’s actions in Asia or a change to the Japanese constitution, but its nature may be about to undergo a radical change. If Abe is able to complete his long-held goal of revising the Constitution, it may encourage a renewed interest in increasing Japanese independent involvement in regional security. This, combined with Trump’s current focus on emphasising the necessity of allies to be responsible for their own security, could see Japan acting with more assertion in East Asia, as it attempts to secure its position without clear American support.

Adam Campbell is a current student in MA War Studies. His research interests include current issues in Japanese Security policy, the history of its relations with the U.S following the Second World War, and the history of the Soviet Union.

 

The Road to Oligarchic Peace: Comparing the Nashville Conventions of 1850 and the Severodonetsk Congress of 2004

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by Daria Platonova

During the Orange Revolution, the people of Ukraine spontaneously took to the streets in what would become known as the country’s “first” Maidan (Image credit: WikiMedia/Sirhey).

In March 1850, following a compromise motion on slavery tabled by Henry Clay in the US Congress and the debates that ensued John Calhoun, a statesman from the slave-holding state of South Carolina, threatened the “aggressive” North with southern secession if it continued to encroach upon the rights of the South in relation to slavery. He said: “If you, who represent the stronger portion, cannot agree to settle [the questions] on the broad principle of justice and duty, say so; and let the States we both represent agree to separate and part in peace.” This statement was followed by two Nashville Conventions in Tennessee at which the southern states debated the Compromise and the potential for secession. In the end, moderation prevailed.

Fast forward a century and a half and in a different country, in 2004, regional deputies took a more radical action than their American counterparts in a series of congresses held in eastern Ukraine and proposed the secession of the east, after mass protests erupted in Kyiv in a phenomenon known as the Orange Revolution. Like Calhoun in America, during the Severodonetsk Congress (Luhansk region) on the 28 November 2004, the chairman of the Donetsk regional council, Borys Kolesnikov similarly couched his message to the deputies in the language of rights: the people of the East exercised their constitutional right to elect Yanukovych, and neither the Ukrainian Parliament nor Viktor Yushchenko could violate it.

After a decade, both countries were plunged into war.[1] In this article, I argue that a comparison between the secessionist endeavours in the United States and Ukraine indicates that, to put it very broadly, internal wars are not caused by some primordial animosities and differences between ethnicities (the so-called “ancient hatreds”). Rather it is the breakdown of an “oligarchic” peace that accounts for internal wars. Here, the different sectional, political and economic interests are held more or less in equilibrium. In this regard, it are especially the compromises that are made between elites that accounts for internal wars. Indeed, elite compromise is an essential part of a peace process.

On the surface, Ukraine in the post-Soviet period and the United States in the mid-19th century evolved as quintessential “divided societies”. The South in the US was largely agricultural. Slavery, as an economic system, naturally encompassed nearly every aspect of life, and therefore had an undeniable impact on culture and politics of the South. The North, by contrast, was industrialised, with no toleration for slavery. The historian Kenneth Stampp describes the differences between the two sections of the US in the following terms: these were “Southern farmers and planters… and Northern merchants, manufacturers, bondholders, and speculators.” The historian Lee Benson describes the United States at that time as “bicultural,” although there are debates whether the South was a truly distinctive “civilisation”.

The post-Soviet Ukraine developed along the lines of a divided society as a result of its turbulent history: as in America, similar regional divisions existed between the agriculture and services-dominated West and the industrialised East. In Ukraine, the divisions were reflected not only in the political economy of the different regions but also in voting behaviour, the use of Ukrainian and Russian languages, and opinions on the political situation.

In the US, the vital interests of the South were periodically threatened by the North. The two parts of country therefore existed in an uneasy union. In Ukraine, similarly, there were tensions between the West and the East, with the East often resisting the Ukrainisation campaigns (the introduction of the Ukrainian language), showcasing a higher inclination towards Russia, while the West of the country sought closer ties with the European Union and NATO.

In the United States, the pressure to abolish slavery in the South had been building up for a long time. The North criticised the institution of slavery and issued legislation limiting economic growth there. After the Mexican-American war (1848), the major issue facing the Union was whether slavery should be permitted on the new territories. A Compromise was devised by Clay which allowed certain territories to decide the slavery issue for themselves, while entrenching the existing rights of the South to their property in slaves. Continuous debates were held in the Congress for the next several months, with the aim of averting a simmering crisis. Calhoun and the “fire-eaters” (as the radical group of Southerners were called) however argued that the continuing “Northern aggressions” were threatening the state of the Union. The Nashville Conventions inspired by Calhoun were therefore expected to be radical undertakings to demonstrate the unity of the southern states to the North and put pressure on it to ceased its aggressions.

The two Nashville Conventions held in June 1850 and November 1850, however, were by all means moderate. There were some radical Southerners present but, in the end the delegates adopted a “wait-and-see attitude”. They condemned Clay’s Compromise and also the Compromise that was enacted by the Congress in September 1850, issued calls for an extension of the Missouri Compromise Line to the Pacific Ocean, and agreed to meet again. In essence, the Conventions were held in order to demonstrate to the North that the South could act as a single front. In doing so, conflict was avoided.

It can be argued that the reason why the moderates prevailed in America was because the Compromise did not threaten the prevailing “oligarchic peace.” In other words, the Compromise did not endanger the representation of the South in American politics. As McPherson writes: “California… did not tip the balance in the Senate against the South”. The South still wielded a lot of power in the country. Henry Wilson goes on to write on the power of the South: “They had dictated principles, shaped policies, made Presidents and cabinets, judges of the Supreme Court, Senators, and Representatives”.

In Ukraine, galvanised by the dissatisfaction with the incumbent President Leonid Kuchma’s rule and the outrage at the fraudulent election of his chosen successor Viktor Yanukovych to the Presidency, people in Kyiv and Ukrainian regions took to the streets on that 22 November 2004. These gatherings came to be known as the Orange Revolution. In response to the pickets of the Ukrainian Parliament by the competing candidate from the West Viktor Yushchenko, and the recognition of Yushchenko as president in western Ukraine, the disgruntled deputies in the eastern regions organised a series of congresses attended by delegates from almost all across those regions. They proposed radical actions to tilt the balance back in favour of the East and to force the Parliament and Yushchenko to recognise the unalienable right of eastern Ukrainians to choose their own president. Accordingly, on the 26 November, the deputies of the Kharkiv regional council supported the creation of the South-Eastern Autonomous Republic. The Kharkiv governor Evhen Kushnaryov ruled that no budgetary transfers were to be made to the centre. The regional council deputies proposed to concentrate all power in the regional council and on the 27th of November, the council refused to recognise the central government.

Similar developments took place in other regions. On 28 November 2004, the Donetsk regional council decided to hold a regional referendum in December on granting the Donetsk region a status of an autonomous region within the “Ukrainian federation”. On the same day, the famous “separatist” congress was held in Severodonetsk in the Luhansk region. Following the Congress, a union of all regions was created and the chairman of the Donetsk regional council Borys Kolesnikov was chosen as its head. Kolesnikov proposed to create a “new federal state in the form of a South-Eastern Republic with the capital in Kharkiv,” if Yushchenko won the presidential election.

However, as in America, the conflict was avoided and, in the end, moderation prevailed. Again, the talks between the opposing camps of Yushchenko and Yanukovych carried on through the crisis period. The election results were cancelled, a new election day was agreed, and, most importantly, the two competing sides agreed to a major amendment in the Ukrainian constitution. Like Clay’s compromise, Kuchma’s amendments to the Ukrainian Constitution appeared to save the day. The Constitution was to divide the executive (Hale) and grant more power to the Prime Minister and Parliament. This ensured that Viktor Yanukovych and his Party of Regions, despite now going into opposition, could still wield enormous power in Ukrainian politics. Hence, in the elections of 2006 the Party of Regions won plurality in Parliament and Yanukovych came back as Prime Minister. Yanukovych’s Donetsk clan continued to play an important role in politics.

The historical experience of the US before the Civil War demonstrates that when compromises between elites are made and some deeply entrenched elites are still able to stay in power, a conflict can be avoided. With the election of Abraham Lincoln on the 6 November 1860, it can be argued that the elite compromise ceased to work for the South. In the case of Yanukovych, he fled in February 2014 and left the dominant network of the Party of Regions and its members in disarray. It follows therefore that wars are not caused by primordial ethnic hatreds but by the break down of elite compromises.

[1] This is not a place to discuss whether the war in Ukraine is a civil or any other kind of war. This discussion would merit another article altogether.

Daria is a PhD student at King’s College London. Her research focuses on violence and the unfolding of conflict across several regions in eastern Ukraine, 2013 – 2014. She also leads one of the Causes of War seminars in the War Studies Department. Prior to joining King’s, she worked as a teacher. She graduated with a degree in History from the University of Cambridge in 2011. Her broader interests include European history, war studies, and interdisciplinary methods.

Conflict, Competition and Legitimacy: Holding on to the Memory of Aung San

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by Anna Plunkett

A defaced statue of Aung San in Myitikyna (Photo credit: The Irrawaddy)

 

General Aung San is venerated throughout Burma as the father of the nation. He is remembered as a strong leader and switched on politician, remembered as a man of honour and loyalty that has awarded him the local title of Bogyoke. He was the leader of the Thirty Comrades movement and was set to become the much-loved leader of Myanmar’s first independent government and as such has been memorialised throughout Myanmar with statues, buildings and roads among the most common commemorations. Perhaps the most famous use of his name sits with his own daughter who conflated their names as she is known today – Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. He is a man of great importance in modern day Myanmar, his status only growing since his daughter took up the mantel as state counsellor after the 2015 election. Yet, the growing endorsement of Aung San has proved controversial with students and locals in Karenni state being arrested for their opposition to the erection of a General Aung San statue in the state capital’s local park. This article will analyse the reasoning behind the growing popularity of the General’s iconic image and why such increases in popularity lack uniformity throughout Myanmar.

Legitimacy behind the General’s Image

General Aung San’s image can be found throughout Myanmar and there is no doubt it demands a great level of respect. He is remembered as the father of the nation, the leader of the Thirty Comrades, a Japanese-trained liberation army that fought the allied forces during World War Two. He transcended his military might to show his political prowess as a statesman, leading the Burmese forces to switch allegiance from the Japanese and strike deals with the allied forces toward the end of the war.[1] Then negotiating with British colonial forces to bring Burma its independence soon after the war in 1947. During this time, he also married a nurse, Ma Khin Kyi who would later become one of the country’s first diplomats and had three children. Yet, in the post-war period the Burmese nationalists began to factionalise and on 19 July 1947, he was assassinated during a committee meeting in Central Rangoon. It is suspected to have been an act by his political rivals within the nationalist movement. His death shocked and saddened the new nation, which -now leaderless- suffered from a power vacuum that left the central government scrabbling for control over Myanmar’s expansive territories. It would take General Ne Win’s military coup in 1962 and the famous ‘four cuts’ counter-insurgency strategy to restore the central government’s control over the majority of the country.

For his leadership role as a military general and as a politician General Aung San has historically been dubbed the father of the Burmese nation. He has also been titled as the father of the army. Though the relationship between the two has been turbulent over the successive military governments in Myanmar, he was a great source of legitimacy throughout the Ne Win period (1962-1988) as Ne Win himself was a member of the Thirty Comrades led by Aung San. This close relationship to General Aung San provided Ne Win with personal legitimacy as ruler and caretaker of both the military and the Burmese state. As such, during this period the imagery and promotion of General Aung San was profligate. Yet the bond between the father of the nation and his armed forces, which controlled the state lost favour after the 8888 uprising when his daughter rose to popularity on the back of the pro-democracy movement.

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and her Father’s Image

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi returned to Myanmar to care for her dying mother in 1988. Having studied at Oxford, she had married an academic there and settled down in her university town with their two children. Her father died when Suu Kyi was only two years old, she found herself witness to a growing uprising against Myanmar’s autocratic state. Approached by leaders of the movement Aung San Suu Kyi joined and lead the pro-democracy activists, appealing for non-violent and peaceful protest against the state. Support for the pro-democracy movement and the soon to be founded National League of Democracy blossomed under her leadership. Much like her military opponents in government she claimed her right to speak and lead the people of Myanmar through her relationship to her father, giving her first speech to the masses in-front of a poster of the General. She reclaimed the icon of the father of the nation for the opposition, using it to build her own support and support for the NLD. The importance of familial connections and networks in Myanmar can be evidenced through the success of this manoeuvre. After the brutal repression of the 8888 uprising which ended with widespread bloodshed in the capital, images of both ‘the lady’ and Aung San plummeted in popularity with the former being officially being banned under the new military government[2].

An Aung San Statue in Bogyoke Park Taunggyi (Photo credit: author)

Since 2015 the military and the National League for Democracy have become uncooperative partners in the halls of government in Myanmar. Daw Suu’s party have taken over the parliamentary houses with landslide victories in both, yet the military’s grip on power remains. Their twenty-five per cent seat allocation in those same houses and control of central department have solidified their role as overseers of Myanmar’s political arenas[3]. It is therefore, perhaps surprising to see the increasing propagation of an image over which these two political forces have competed over in the past. General Aung San and his memory have become something of a myth tied to the legitimacy of the political forces within Myanmar’s political arena. His period of dis-favour is over, with the seventieth anniversary of Martyrs Day receiving special commemoration in Yangon in 2017. He is both the father of the army and nation and the father of the democracy movement (or at least its leader) and now this image of fatherly support is not in competition but rather represents the rightness of such cooperation between the two sides. As these two competing political forces, the military and the NLD attempt to navigate the spaces of co-existence they have found a common ground, or at least common imagery for legitimacy within General Aung San.

Aung San’s Image: Divisive Locally

Whilst the institutional support and favour has returned to General Aung San and his sacrifices to the establishment of the Burmese State, support at the local level has not followed. With the centenary of the Bogyoke’s birth in 2015 and the seventieth anniversary of his death in 2017 the unveiling of a new set of statues may not be that surprising, particularly given the changing political arena. Nevertheless, such celebrations have been far from uniform. Protests in Karenni and Mon against the dedication and commemoration of new statues and bridges respectively have highlighted underlying tensions within Myanmar’s memory of the Bogyoke. Despite rising tensions the erection of such statues has continued including the unveiling of the largest General Aung San Statue in Mandalay in June 2017 prior to the July commemoration.

For whilst the memory and iconic image of General Aung San may legitimise the current governmental institutional establishment it has left many minority groups dissatisfied. General Aung San may have been the father of the nation that delivered Myanmar its independence, however many minorities felt betrayed by the independence negotiations which left them without a right to an independent state or secession. The infamous Panglong Agreement the General Aung San brokered with the ethnic minorities in 1947 provided some vague commitments to equality with few specifics on minority rights or protections.

The failure of the successive governments to protect minorities or recognise their independence from the state has left most with a sense of betrayal in relation to the father of the nation. The image and icon which is now appearing in their capitals, on their road signs, in relation to the infrastructure projects being developed throughout the borderlands. Rather then promoting the cooperation between the two major political forces within Myanmar, Aung San imagery is becoming the face of an encroaching hostile state within minority regions. Rather then unifying or celebrating the diversity of Myanmar through the promotion of a diverse set of icons the focus on the first nationalist leader is being perceived as at best centrist arrogance and at worst forced domination by the ethnic majority.

Conclusion

The manipulation of such imagery and historic icons within any state’s history is an important part of building a state narrative and sense of homeland. It is a history and discourse that will always be built by the victor of the struggle. Yet if Myanmar’s wishes to increase the inclusion of its ethnic minorities rather then lengthen the already extensive civil war in Myanmar they may do well to tread lightly with the establishment of such a uniform and state centric narrative in its borderlands. Myanmar is an ethnically and politically diverse state, it is also a community waiting for change and development away from the historical state domination. The commemoration of those from outside of the government-military institution even just within these localities could be an effective tool to build cooperation and goodwill over the hostility that is being entrenched through the dominance of majority narratives in minority and historically weak state regions.

Anna is a doctoral researcher in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. She received her BA in Politics and Economics from the University of York, before receiving a scholarship to continue her studies at York with an MA in Post-War Recovery. She was the recipient of the Guido Galli Award for her MA dissertation. Her primary interests include conflict and democracy at the sub-national level, understanding how minor conflicts impact democratic realisation within quasi-post conflict states. Her main area of focus is Burma’s ethnic borderlands and ongoing conflicts within the region. She has previously worked as a human rights researcher focusing on military impunity in Burma and has conducted work on evaluating Bosnia’s post-war recovery twenty years after the Dayton Peace Accords. You can follow her on Twitter @AnnaBPlunkett.

[1] See Seekins(2000) for an in-depth analysis of the special Burman-Sino relationship and the role of Aung San as a political and military leader.

[2] Testimony from authors in field interviews with activists from the 8888 student protests

[3] For further analysis on the role of the military in Myanmar’s parliament see Than (2018)