The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam, Michael G. Vann (1967- ), author, and Liz Clarke (1982- ), illustThe Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam, Michael G. Vann (1967- ), author, and Liz Clarke (1982- ), illustrator, 2019, 263 pages, ISBN 9780190602697, Library-of-Congress DS559.93 .HV36 V38 2019 Memorial Library
This is a "microhistory." He uses the failed 1902 plague-carrying rat eradication to introduce imperialism, globalization, and pandemic disease. The first 122 pages are an engaging history of French imperial domination of Hanoi, in comic-book format. Then after a set of primary sources, mostly from the dawn of the 20th century, Vann gives us 33 pages of what he calls, "historical contexts." These introduce the world history leading to French control of Indochina. Accessible; suitable for kids.
The 1902 rat hunt itself is on pages 89-96. It was ineffective. The plague pandemic eventually subsided; cholera and other diseases became bigger problems.
Maps pp. ii, 21, 31-34, 37-40, 43, 49, 55, 66-67, 73, 75, 78-81, 93, 103, 108, 111, 121, 201, 220
Pages 1-122 history in comic-book format.
Pages 123-195 primary sources, 1887-1996. "Always ask yourself if you can trust these sources." p. 127.
Pages 197-231 historical contexts: The New Imperialism Western Industrial Capitalism The Third Republic (France, 1870-1940) Vietnamese Resistance: Nationalist, Communist, and Everyday The Third Bubonic Plague Pandemic, 1855-1959
Pages 233-243 "the making of this book."
Pages 247-250 discussion questions. If you were going to read this book as a student, you'd want to read these first, and write down their answers as you come to them in the book.
Pages 251-255 timeline of Vietnamese dynasties.
Pages 256-263 annotated bibliography.
541-767 First bubonic-plague pandemic: up to 50 million die. p. 73. 1096-1291 Crusades expose Europe to the riches of Asia. p. 32 1346-1835 Second bubonic-plague pandemic: up to 200 million die. p. 73. by 1820, Indian opium sold in China flows silver to Britain. p. 34. 1839-1842 First Opium War, begins China's century of humiliations. pp. 35, 253. 1855-1959 Third bubonic-plague pandemic: up to 15 million die. pp. xiv, 73, 227-231, 253. 1857-1860 Second Opium War: France enters Indochina. pp. 37, 253. 1869 Suez Canal open. p. 36. 1870-1940 French Third Republic. pp. 217-221. 1871 Germany takes Alsace and Lorraine from France; Germany unifies. p. 202. 1882 French seize Hanoi pp. 13, 39, 253 1901 Plague in Hanoi 1902.04.25-1902.07.10; 1903.04.03-1904.02.22 Bounty on rats in Hanoi. pp. 89-96, 104. 1929-1939 Great Depression disrupts colonial economy; mass unemployment. p. 110. 1930.10 Ho Chi Minh organizes Indochinese Communist Party. p. 110. 1940-1945 Japan captures Indochina and the Dutch East Indies. p. 111. 1941 Ho Chi Minh organizes Viet Minh to fight all foreign occupiers. p. 111. 1946-1954 First (French) Indochina War. p. 254. 1963-1973 Second (American) Indochina War. p. 254. 1995 Diplomatic relations between Vietnam and the U.S. established. p. 255. 1995 Vietnam joins ASEAN. p. 120. 1997, 2014 Michael G. Vann visits Hanoi. pp. 117-122.
Books:
Empires and Colonies in the Modern World: A Global Perspective, Heather E. Streets-Salter, Trevor R. Getz, 2015.
Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, William Cronon, 1991. Shows that no city is an island. Chicago exists because of the Midwest, sending agricultural products to the city, and getting manufactured goods from it. p. 199.
[In that regard, The Penguin Atlas of Medieval History, 1961, shows that, when trade collapses, cities evaporate. Covers Europe, West Asia, and North Africa, 362 CE to 1478 CE. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ]
Whose Millennium? Theirs or Ours?, Daniel Singer (1926-2000), 1998, 282 pages, ISBN 0853459460, Dewey 332.12'2, Library-of-Congress HX73 S557 1999 MemWhose Millennium? Theirs or Ours?, Daniel Singer (1926-2000), 1998, 282 pages, ISBN 0853459460, Dewey 332.12'2, Library-of-Congress HX73 S557 1999 Memorial Library
This is 215 pages of economic and political history (1800s-1998), followed by 67 pages of, I would say, wishful thinking. A good statement of the problem, but no solution.
Tina--There Is No Alternative to a lords-of-capital-and-wage-slaves world--is now the unwritten premise of the whole political debate. pp. 2, 150-151.
Governments worldwide are in thrall to financial capital, whose movement across borders has been unfettered since 1974. The threat of capital flight keeps wages, working conditions, and environmental protections poor. pp. 64-65. The International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, enforce exportation of the American nightmare to the world: unlivable minimum wages, lack of job security, inadequate or no unemployment insurance, inadequate or no medical insurance, inadequate or no pensions. pp. 58, 66-67.
The combined wealth of the 225 richest people in the world nearly equals the annual income of the poorer half of the earth's population. (>2.5 billion, 1998). pp. 6, 181.
Capitalism cannot ensure our ecological survival. The biosphere cannot bear worldwide consumption at current Western levels. [Population is still growing by 1 billion per 12 years. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=... ] p. 215.
At the time of this writing, the Eastern European command economies had been taken over by looter capitalists, creating obscene poverty and obscene wealth, the West salivating for spoils. pp. 36-42. The Asian economic crisis exemplified the destructive excesses of capitalism. The author had hope that the obviousness of capitalism's horrors would prompt people to seek some way other than either party-boss command or aristocracy of wealth.
CAPITAL WINS
By downsizing, outsourcing, and re-engineering, a substantial share of U.S. national income shifted from wages to profits, 1970s-1990s. p. 158. Reagan showed the world how to crush a labor union, 1981-1982. p. 163. Japanese management disguised coercion as consent, and exported management-by-stress to the world. p. 167. Lean production, myriad sweatshop subsubsubcontractors, meant reduced resistance, lower wages, fewer social benefits. p. 169. Armaments, universal debt, planned obsolescence enrich the rich. pp. 170, 179.
DIVIDE, CONQUER
Wealth attacks alternately the public- and private-sector workers. The impudence of tycoons who earn millions or of academics, getting a nice bonus from the media for their mainstream views, describing the postal or railway workers as pampered or privileged is just indecent. p. 141.
The collapse of Bretton Woods in the early 1970s made room for globalization. pp. 188, 192-193.
WWI birthed the Bolshevik Revolution. The Great Depression birthed Nazism. p. 190.
Economically, WWII had a lone victor. Postwar, the U.S. made half of global manufactures, one-third of global exports, and had 61% of global gold. pp. 191-192.
By the 1970s, the U.S. had spent more than the value of its gold; foreign competition was limiting profits. The U.S. lifted all restrictions on movements of capital in 1974. p. 196. The U.S. has been a net debtor since 1986, and is now the world's biggest borrower. p. 202.
After the value of the peso fell in 1994, the U.S. bailed out the Mexican government and the American investors, leaving Mexicans to bear unemployment, inflation, and a sharp drop in living standards. pp. 203-205.
This book is a call to action, but a vague one. p. 280. If we do not quickly offer progressive solutions to the growing popular discontent, there are plenty of dark saviours waiting in the wings. p. 8. Only collective action can prevent the millennium from being /theirs/--apocalypse, or at best barbarism. pp. 282, 176-178. If globalization is the way in which profit conquers the world, internationalism must be the reply of the working people. p. 214.
The author wants us all to produce according to our ability and consume according to our need. pp. 235-236. He seems to reject pricing and payment as ways to allocate scarce resources, but offers nothing in their stead. p. 233. He thinks people will work out of a sense of duty, or for the satisfaction of it. p. 235. He advocates a world of worker co-ops, but says little of really existing worker co-ops. He thinks workers should "bring the whole system down," without offering a viable replacement. p. 183.
Pascalian wager = If you live as if God exists and God does exist, you get infinite reward in heaven. If you live as if God does not exist and God does exist, you get infinite punishment in hell. If God does not exist, your rewards or punishments are merely finite ones in this life. p. 280. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasca...
/The World Remade: America in World War I/, G.J. Meyer, 2016, 651 pages, ISBN 9780553393323, Dewey 940.3
The author's previous, /A World Undone: The St/The World Remade: America in World War I/, G.J. Meyer, 2016, 651 pages, ISBN 9780553393323, Dewey 940.3
The author's previous, /A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914-1918/, is of the whole war. /The World Remade/ is a political and military history of the U.S. involvement in the war. p. xvi.
Very readable.
The U.S. actually fought during only about the last half-year of the war. At home, Americans became less free. Main changes:
The government's assault on speech, assembly, due process, and fairness.
The widespread public approval of that assault.
The official telling of lies, and the eager embrace of those lies.
The Espionage Act of 1917 is still in force. The government uses it against whistleblowers: people who reveal facts of official misconduct the government wants hidden from the public.
We've lost our sense that our political system is improving. p. 572.
All the countries of Europe were afraid of their neighbors' intentions. Each felt the need to mobilize their military for defensive purposes. Decision-making power flowed away from the politicians, to the generals. pp. 12-22.
Germany, afraid of being crushed between France and Russia, rushed to attack France first, through the softest route: Belgium. pp. 25-26.
Britain, France, and Russia intended to take vast Middle Eastern, African, and Pacific territory from the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and German empires. They bribed Italy, Romania, and Japan to join with promises of territory. They kept their intentions secret, especially from the Americans. All the belligerents inflamed their own people with exaggerated promises of the fruits of victory. pp. 161-162.
There is evidence that British officials deliberately put the Lusitania in danger of German torpedo attack, to try to bring the U.S. into the war. pp. 126-127.
Britain and France were determined to make peace talks impossible, to get the U.S. into the war. p. 160. Wilson's secretary of state, Robert Lansing, treasonously urged Britain and France to make demands that would make peace talks impossible. p. 163. Colonel House also told Britain and France not to take seriously Wilson's call for peace talks. p. 163.
Wilson's "neutrality" so obviously favored the Allies, as by accepting Britain's blockade of Germany to starve her people, that Germany could not trust Wilson as a peacemaker. p. 162.
Britain cut Germany's North Sea communications cables, including those to New York, August 4, 1914, before even declaring war, so that only British-French-Russian propaganda could reach the U.S. p. 27. Britain denied U.S. reporters access to the front, so that only British lies about German atrocities would reach the U.S. p. 175. "Germans are monsters." Irrational hatred is more easily turned on than off: it became an obstacle to postwar peace. p. 180.
William Jennings Bryan had such a following in the Democratic Party that Wilson offered him the post of secretary of state. With their hero in the administration, Bryan's many partisans would be less inclined to criticize. p. 96. Wilson then ignored Bryan's attempts to reach a negotiated end to the European war. pp. 100-103, 105-109. Bryan resigned, rather than support Wilson's march to enter the war. pp. 107-109.
For daring to speak against the draft, or for belonging to labor organizations or progressive or populist political parties, hundreds of people were arrested and prosecuted, subject to decades-long prison sentences and ruinous fines, under the Espionage Act of 1917 and the even-more-unconstitutional Sedition Act. p. 430. Wilson's Justice Department arrested and charged 166 senior officers of the Industrial Workers of the World, of disloyalty under the act. p. 336. The postmaster general was empowered to, and did, shut down antiwar, pacifist, critical, progressive, socialist, labor, Lutheran, Catholic, and foreign-language periodicals. School districts banned the teaching of German. Progressivism as a political force was disintegrating. The Department of Justice recruited 250,000 vigilantes to report their neighbors' inadequate loyalty. pp. 257-258, 274-291, 319-320.
Attorney General Palmer, 1919-1921 and his henchman J. Edgar Hoover, unleashed police riots on thousands of unoffending "aliens." The American public applauded. pp. 534-540.
Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge used 6,700 soldiers to crush a labor strike by Boston police, who were working 83-hour weeks for wretched pay. Americans made him president for it. p. 547.
Senator Robert La Follette was early to see what many would understand only later: war sends more power flowing to those Americans who already have most of it.
La Follette by contrast was as tireless and effective a champion of the rights of ordinary citizens as the American political system has ever produced. He fought to take power from Big Money and put it in the hands of voters. He won antitrust laws, direct election of senators, utility and bank regulation, better wages and working conditions, restrictions on child labor, progressive income taxes, protection of Native American woodlands from the predations of timber companies. He opposed discrimination against blacks, Asians, and Jews, and championed voting rights for women. The masters of industry and finance saw him as a serious threat. He interfered with the efforts of banks, railroads, packing companies, mill owners, and trusts, to steal the fruits of working people's labor. "The supreme issue is the encroachment of the powerful few on the rights of the many." pp. 194-199.
William Jennings Bryan likewise spent his life crusading for those on the losing end of the American dream. Bryan believed that the prime duty of pietists was to side with the common man and woman in their perpetual battle with the defenders of privilege, corruption, and big money. p. 81.
For businessmen, to choose fast fat profit, rather than the common good, was a no-brainer. p. 261. War profiteers wallowed in wealth. pp. 267, 332. Most of the spending was of borrowed money, which transferred more wealth to rich financiers. p. 267. Federal spending went up by a factor of 24 during the war; most of it borrowed. p. 353. For ordinary Americans, the cost of living inflated faster than wages. p. 353. Price inflation spiked to 100% per year. After the war, corporations reduced workforces, demanded 12-hour days, cut wages, denied union recognition. pp. 498, 533. "I can hire one-half the working class to kill the other half." --robber baron Jay Gould. p. 293. The U.S. spent $33 billion on the war, 1917-1918. In 1919, 20% of U.S. workers were at some point on strike. p. 533.
"The interests that control steel, oil, shipping, munitions, mines, will dominate; government will be in their hands." --Woodrow Wilson. Having said so, Wilson quickly acted to make it true. pp. 344-345. Four executives of Bethlehem Steel took $2.1 million in personal bonuses in 1918. p. 350.
U.S. private soldiers were paid $30/month in combat. French privates earned $3/month. p. 411.
Some 9 million soldiers died as a result of combat: 2 million German, nearly 2 million Russian, 1.5 million French, 1 million Austrian, .8 million Turkish, .7 million British, .5 million Italian, .25 million Romanian, .25 million Serbian, .053 million American. p. 464.
Maybe 50 million people worldwide died of the war-spread influenza pandemic (including 675,000 Americans). Few civilians knew that in fall 1918, thousands of soldiers were dying of influenza: military authorities censored news as bad for morale. p. 407. Only neutral Spain did not censor news. Hence it was called the "Spanish" flu. The third-worst pandemic in history began in Haskell County, Kansas, January 1918. It spread around the world by U.S. troops and people they infected. By August 1918, it had become quite lethal.
President Woodrow Wilson knew that a decisive defeat of either side would make a stable postwar Europe impossible. p. 163. "Upon a triumph which overwhelms and humiliates, cannot be laid the foundations of peace." --Woodrow Wilson, 1/22/1917. p. 168.
Everywhere except the United States, it could be hard to distinguish the fruits of victory from the price of defeat p. 464.
1919: From the Rhine to the Pacific, Finland to Arabia, scarcely a border was not in dispute. p. 463. Many civil wars erupted. pp. 470-472.
Sometimes with the best intentions and sometimes not, the Supreme Council (Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George) gradually turned Europe into a mass of festering geopolitical wounds. p. 478.
Why did President Wilson take the United States into the war in 1917? He feared that the United States, and he as president, would have no major part in the postwar settlement. p. 209. For Wilson, the thought of being on the outside while other men decided the fate of the world would have been unbearable. p. 212.
President Woodrow Wilson could find it impossible to imagine that those who disagreed with him might sometimes be right. Those who don't see what's real, collide with it. pp. 6-7. Europeans weren't particularly grateful for his lofty postwar preachments. p. 8. Wilson's Democratic Party lost both houses of Congress, November 5, 1918. p. 10. It was necessary to never disagree with Wilson on any subject about which he appeared to have made up his mind; the president would reject not only the contrary opinion but the person who offered it, and the rejection could prove permanent. Wilson needed unqualified praise. He hungered to be considered great. pp. 31-32. Wilson's one friend and adviser, "Colonel" House, likewise mistook his, House's, own prejudices for facts. p. 35. Wilson cut off close friends when they displayed independence of thought or action, and denounced anyone who declined to do as he demanded. p. 46. After William Jennings Bryan resigned as secretary of state in 1915, Wilson heard no voices to question his decisions. p. 109. "Wilson is a man of high ideals and no principles." --Lindsey M. Garrison, onetime secretary of war. p. 130. Wilson is "a ruthless hypocrite, who has no convictions that he would not barter at once for votes." --former president Taft. p. 155. Wilson is "unscrupulous and dishonest." --former Republican senator Elihu Root. pp. 284, 492-493. President Wilson condemned German-Americans, Irish-Americans, and other "hyphenates." p. 156.
Wilson nearly brought the U.S. to war with Mexico in 1913. A U.S. gunboat prowling the Mexican coast put ashore for water, without asking permission. U.S. sailors were arrested, then released with apology. Wilson demanded that Mexico give the U.S. flag a 21-gun salute. The Mexican president offered a mutual salute of each others' flags. Miffed, Wilson ordered U.S. marines to capture the port of Veracruz. Many men died on both sides. pp. 97-98.
The 53,000 U.S. soldiers who died of combat wounds, plus the 51,000 who died of illness, composed .1%, not .01%, of the 103-million U.S. population of 1917. p. 464.
Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism, Vijay Prashad, Frank Barat, ed., 2022, 162 pages, Dewey 335, ISBN 9781642596908
Lots abStruggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism, Vijay Prashad, Frank Barat, ed., 2022, 162 pages, Dewey 335, ISBN 9781642596908
Lots about how the wealthy powerful few have plundered the rest of us. With attempts at optimism.
Victories:
Hugo Chávez won the presidency of Venezuela in 1998, established a new constitution, and fended off a coup in 2002. Lula won in Brazil in 2003. Bolivians voted Socialists in, in 2019. Hondurans voted out the U.S.-sponsored coup regime in 2021. pp. 2-3. Indian farmers won repeal of anti-farmer laws in 2021. p. 4. The USSR pioneered public medical care, guaranteed housing and education. Producer cooperatives in Kerala have millions of members. Brazil's Landless Workers' Movements are building socialism through education and cooperative farming. The future is here. pp. 116, 153. Cuba's literacy rate is 99%; the U.S. adult literacy rate is 79%. p. 154.
I thank the trade union movement for the weekend. p. 47.
A better future is possible. p. 71.
If the iPhone were made entirely in the U.S., it would sell for $30,000. Who pays for the discount to $699? The people of the copperbelt, in very low wages and barely any social wages for schools and hospitals. p. 104.
Debt cancellation is the #1 issue. Cancel the $11 trillion debt of the global victims of imperialism to the northern banks. p. 117.
Thomas Ray
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