Heimat

In an article from the 1990s, the sociologist Roland Robertson coined the term "glocalization."  There are massive forces in the world making us the same, he argued -- consumerism is high on the chart -- and the worlds of international organizations, "third way" politics and intense levels of electrified, postmodern communications brings us together.  However, they (at least can) help us lose senses of who we are; "alienation," as so many German philosophers described it, is a common modern experience.  Sometimes we react.  Sometimes, in reaction to globalization, we create nationalisms.  We refer to ancient customs; we seek to make ourselves different from others.  We react to globalization by invoking our small scale provincial mentalities and primitive subconsciences.  Sometimes we bring those mentalities into national and international politics; those can be scary moments -- moments when societies rip themselves into two along lines of left and right.  In any case, the local makes the global more complex.  Bringing the local into the picture means globalizaton concerns heterogenization as much as homogenization.  We pull away from each other as much as we pull together.  That's because globalization's "together" sometimes doesn't feel like our together -- one we own.

Underneath the local and provincial, Robertson argues, is nonetheless an impulse not just representing backwater reactionary mentalities.  The local concerns, he argues, a sense of home -- the attempt to find a place where you belong.  Feelings about that are tough to account for as they are intuitive and learned.  They are real, though, and help give us that last 5% of who we are.  That's as we fight against the anomie, washes of anonymity and senses of disorientation modern life can often provide.  An interesting thought is how to join home and  cosmos; the global metropole and the tribe from which one comes -- to find a love that can flow through both, drawing from the countryside's quiet while using the vibrancy of the global city to spread love's essence and break down the boundary lines between its locales.  As The Circumstance; goes home today, those thoughts are very much in the air.

Ban-zai?

A former kamikaze pilot -- yeah, there are a few left (some guys missed) -- turns out to be in possession of quite a  number of letters written by fellow World War II suicide pilots just before they got in their planes and did their thing.  Their "thing," of course, was a one way trip to oblivion.  Funny; hidden behind the grainy textures of black and white, given enough distance between now and then (seventy years or so) and made part of the mystical experience of a "great generation" (Second World War twenty-somethings), kamikazes don't seem so dangerous.  What's funny about it is that we get the pants scared off of us today when a generation of young men wraps headbands around their foreheads and dictates their last testaments.  Jihad; glory to the Emperor -- where does the difference lie?

Tadamasa Itatsu is in possession of some extremely unique documents:  the writings of young men who knew they were about to die in a fruitless, last ditch attempt to defend Japan from a country (the U.S) to whom it knew it was going to lose (kamikaze flights started in 1944 -- the last year or so of the War).  The letters are remarkable; they are to families, friends and loved ones, expressing last thoughts.  They tell why one chose to do what one was going to do.  They made manifestations of personal philosophy.  Some letters jar -- strident defenses of empire and glory.  Other letters are remarkable in their acknowledgement of the Japanese system as corrupt and outdated.  Some ask for more universal, democratic principles.  The power of the state and culture, though, was such that the few guys taking the last positions got into planes and flew themselves into the sides of boats anyway (well, decks, mostly).

The Japanese city of Minami Kyushu is asking UNESCO -- the UN's educational and cultural organization -- to grant the letters world heritage status.  World heritage status grants a kind of canonized status to cultural, and sometimes natural, artifacts.  World heritage sites and artifacts are protected by the Geneva convention.  No bombing that stuff.  The Chinese don't like the smell of it.  As with almost anything concerning Japan in the Second World War, China feels Japan should keep away from self-celebratory gestures, if not adopt positions of virtually eternal apology.  Westerners can do well to remember that from Chinese perspectives, the Second World War started in 1937 -- not 1939.  What would eventually happen in Poland had been well underway in China for a couple of years before Hitler swung into action, if not before.

Questions of historical memory are sticky.  The Chinese regularly get annoyed with the Japanese in that department -- over school textbooks, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visiting the Yasukuni Shrine; the one that memorializes Japan's war dead, including some ugly characters from the 1930s and '40s.  In relation to the Crimea situation, the Russians are throwing around the word "fascist" like it's summer 1941.  The Simon Wiesenthal Center is still hunting Nazis.  Morally valid actions?  No doubt.  I don't know if there should be a statute of limitations on human rights violations.  Occasionally, however, it can be worth remembering the power of being the ones who won -- you won.  No quarter should be given to the Slobodan Milosevices or Ratko Mladices of the world; they should be tried and jailed (though not put to death; that violates the same principles for which they should be brought to trial -- questions of the right to life).  There is, though, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty years later an invisible line one crosses where the cause of world peace and the best possible conditions for human rights are served by forgetting.  Forgetting not what happened, but the anger that causes one to condemn.  Condemning happens in the present.  As time goes by, historical pictures gets blurred; things become more complicated than they appear.  The letters Mr. Itatsu wants to bring to the world's attention are like that -- the stories of men, some brainwashed by an over-zealous empire, some trembling in fear at what they were about to do, some knowing it was wrong.  I don't know about world heritage artifact.  It seems, though, there is undoubtedly an artifact there to be preserved, and one that could perhaps even be utilized as a site of forgiveness.  Sometimes you have to say "Banzai!" and jump into the letting go.

Look Out, Toronto

The Russians have showed up in the Ukraine.  Well, we think.  No one seems to want to take off their balaclava long enough to answer any questions and let us know for sure.  Yanukovych is broadcasting from inside Russia.  He'll be back, he says.  No he won't; not unless the Russian army brings him back -- and while they were happy enough to take a few extra steps into Georgia in the South Ossetia War (2008), they do risk someone responding if anyone drives a tank the 900 kilometers from Moscow to Kiev.  Kiev is, says Yanukovych, where "bandits" are in charge.

Enough about a leader about whom we'll soon hear no more.  True, it is dangerous for Russia to extend its sabre rattling too far beyond its borders; though a resurgent nationalism seems to be empowering Putin to take distinctly controversial stances on a wide range of domestic and international issues -- controversial from European and North American perspectives anyway (though some issues might not be so controversial in Arizona) -- there still seems to be an expectation that no one will transgress too far over the post-Cold War norm that, in fact, the Cold War is over (in other words, the nuclear guns are put away, and the U.S. and Russia will both show up and shake hands at G8 summits).  Barak Obama is "deeply concerned" about the men in balaclavas.  Not exactly DEFCON 1 -- or even the DEFCON 2 America's Air Force sat at for a few moments during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Putin might win this one.  A few troops in Chechnya, Georgia, the Crimea?  Even more than a few, yet in places many in the West can't quite make sense of?  No problem; the borderlands ("Ukraine" literally means "borderland") are a site of impunity; only regional actors themselves might do something.  Even more disorientingly, it might only be paramilitaries of some kind or another that show up for the fray -- scruffy men in beards doing things in names of ancient blood fueds connected to pasts modern political ideologies try to get rid of.  About to run into a serious financial crisis in the midst of a national unity meltdown, Kiev won't be able to do much either.  The EU is like the UN; it's great at wagging fingers.  Maybe it will sanction someone.

There was a time when, if one superpower grabbed a piece of turf somewhere, the other was ready to ride in somewhere else.  Had the U.S. invaded Cuba when Castro and Khrushchev decided Havana had just the right number of palm trees and sugar cane for nuclear missile launches, there was a good chance the Soviets and their allies would have moved on Berlin.  Putin's going to take the Crimea?  I say America, take Toronto.  The borderlands are, after all, a site of impunity.