Japan Notes - JORDAN SCHNEIDER (China Talk)

 

Japan Notes

Zen, samurai, art deco war criminals and industrial policy. Are we headed for a JapanTalk rebrand? 

JORDAN SCHNEIDER APR 12

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I recently spent two weeks in Japan. I deeply enjoyed again being on the steep part of a regional learning curve like when I first moved to China.

What follows are notes from my travel and reading. We start off with some semis, then get into Kyoto eating, Zen Buddhism, “the way of the samurai,” and even some Shibuya-kei.

Tokyo

You know what’s fun? Visiting an East Asian country where government officials are allowed to talk to you! Emailing everyone with a go.jpaccount who reads ChinaTalk yielded up some fascinating conversations on economic security and US-Japan-China relations.

Speaking of which … METI is back in the game! It’s one thing to follow the global trend of subsidizing fabs from established players like TSMC and Micron. But they’ve also got a true moonshot in Rapidus, a government-incubated logic firm that bagged $4 billion in subsidies. They’re building a fab in the middle of nowhere in Hokkaido and have a partnership with IBM promising 2nm chips by 2027.

How did METI decide this was a good idea? I asked a Nikkei reporter who wrote a book on how semiconductors how METI decides which chip firms get subidies. His answer: “Honestly, it’s a black box. I really have no idea.” Stay tuned for a Rapidus appearance on ChinaTalk to explain themselves!

Kazuto Suzuki, Tokyo University Professor and METI advisor, hit a more wistful tone.

Jordan Schneider: It hasn't been this fun to work at METI in 40 years, right? 

Kazuto Suzuki: I don’t know if Japanese bureaucrats are “excited,” because now they have a whole bunch of really hard work to do. They were happy to do that during 1960s and 70s because they saw their work translate into the growth of Japanese economy. But now, preventing economic coercion from China is going to be expensive, which is necessary, but less exciting. 

The problem is that in Kumamoto, we are paying the checks to the TSMC, not a Japanese company. We are just inviting the TSMC for the better sake of the security of supply. So that's a totally different story.

I wandered into a gorgeous palace built in the 1930s by a prince who, after living in Paris for a few years, fell in love with Art Deco and decided to blend it with Japanese architecture. But who was this Prince Asaka, husband of the Meiji Emperor’s twelfth daughter? No plaque told me anything more than that he served in the Imperial Army. Enters Wikipedia: turns out he was the Japanese commander on the scene during the Nanjing Massacre, the one who issued the order to “kill all captives.” He was saved from prosecution after the war due to MacArthur’s decision to give all Imperial family members immunity. He lived until 1981, spending most of his time playing golf.

nice house for a war criminal

Are batting cages better for stress relief and focusing the mind than zazen meditation?

Non-alcoholic drinks, it seems, are an even bigger trend in Japan than the US — lots of subway ads and prominent supermarket placement. I even tried a non-alcoholic highball which needs more R&D love than the 0% beers.

The US Embassy in Japan has a nicer recording studio than the Pentagon. But unlike the Pentagon, they make you check your laptop at the subway station around the corner.

Said Noah Smith: “Chinese modern culture, once you get past the language barrier, is basically America. For Japan, you get France.”

Kyoto

The “top” temples have lost all their charm from the crowds, but just one tier down and you could completely lose yourself. I would pay the price of an Apple Vision Pro if it had an immersive view letting me spend all day wandering through the Diatoku-ji Temple complex. After all, Zen was Steve Jobs’s thing. Someone even wrote a whole manga about Jobs and Zen.

He reread Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind several times, and made the intersection of elements of Asian spiritualism and his business and commercial life a regular subject of the conversations he and Brilliant enjoyed throughout his life. For years, he arranged for a Zen Buddhist monk by the name of Kobun Chino Otogawa to meet with him once a week at his office to counsel him on how to balance his spiritual sense with his business goals.

Not sure I’ve ever eaten better than this week in Kyoto. To find spots, I went down the top ranked restaurants on Tabelog, Japan’s Yelp, then found reservation-making options on Google Maps, JPNEAZY, or the hotel concierge.

Kaiseki restaurants where you’re served course by course at a counter (think omakase sushi but not all sushi) allow the restaurant to control far more of your experience in a counter-seating where you’re facing the chef than what you get with table service in the West. Your focus is much less on your dining partner, and going with more than three people really doesn’t work if you’re intending to socialize at all. You’re really having dinner with the chef and their assistants, and their vibe will rub off on you. I’ll remember the jolly chubby apprentice slicing sashimi and the serious chef in his sixties wearing Sun Yat Sen–style glasses as long as will any particular bite.

But speaking of bites, pufferfish high is real and it messes you up. A minute after eating it my face was tingling, I felt euphoric, and could barely put a sentence together.

Books

Heian Literature

Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book, A court lady’s daily whims and life observations completed in 1002, is just gold. Let’s take excerpts from her ‘Hateful Things’ chapter, a delightful list of first world Heian court problems:

The closest thing I’ve read to it is Baldassare Castiglione’s sixteenth century The Book of the Courtier, which also gives you a peak into a lost era of court life. But The Pillow Book is better. Shonagon gives fewer fucks and doesn’t have this wistful downer quality to Castiglione, asense that his way of life was coming to a close. It’s such a head trip to read about this completely sexually liberated woman from a millennium ago. The Christian guilt blowback that writing something like this would spin up in the pre-Renaissance era takes a lot of fun out of early memoirs.

I listened to the first 200 pages of Dennis Washburn’s Tale of Genji on Audible. The translation felt dead, as though I was reading some B-rate palace drama fanfic, with the poems and descriptions doing nothing for me. I started on the Royall Tyler version, which felt almost like a Landmark Edition. Arthur Waley, a self-taught British Jew who never went to Asia whom I first came across for his Journey to the West, has a lovely (if not the most literal) translation I’m looking forward to exploring.

These books made me thankful I can at least encounter Shakespeare directly.

Zen

The best intro I found was Zen: The Authentic Gate by Yamada Koun. He did a decent job trying to explain some fundamental concepts and I appreciated how he wove in some poetry and sutras to his narrative. 

I still didn’t really understand after he tried to explain…

Take that Andy from Headspace

Meditating is nice and relaxing, but what turned me off philosophically to Zen was this Dōgen anecdote. From Purifying Zen: Watsuji Tetsuro’s Shamon Dogen:

Sorry not sorry, I think there’s purpose in things!

Another on the same theme.

That said, I really do respect Dōgen. He was a true iconoclast, in Heschel’s words to describe the Hebrew prophets, an “assaulter of the mind” whose words were a “scream in the night.”

While he may not have been trying to redeem all mankind, I don’t buy that he didn’t care about anything. If he really was so enlightened and detached from worldly concerns, why wouldn’t he just have lived as a solo recluse and disappeared from history? Instead, he spent his life beefing with all the other sects about the correct way to be Buddhist. He cared so deeply that monks got it right that he felt compelled to leave us thousands of pages of essays, poems and lectures.

Dōgen painted a gripping vision of a deeply stripped-down practice that centers zazen wall-staring and koan-contemplating. But of course, nothing stays pure. Skipping forward eight hundred years, Zen at War is a deeply damning portrayal of how Buddhism was leveraged over the arc of Imperial Japan as an ideological support to militarism. Koun, who seemed very zenned out in his book at least, had a dark WWII. 

Here’s all Koun said about the war in his book:

It’s hard to take a guy who was adjacent to slave driving too seriously if all he can say about WWII in his core book of philosophy is that it led to a loss of morals in Japan.

I recently reread Frederick Douglass’ first autobiography, and some of the stuff in Zen at War reminded me of this famous excerpt. 

Bushidō

Alongside some Zen reading I spent a little time with Samurai stuff. A decade ago I read Bushidō: Soul of Japan, a 1899 book written by a Japanese Christian that became an international bestseller. It felt a little fishy, as if designed to appeal to a teenager with its rough edges clearly sanded away, but it was intriguing enough to dive deeper in.

I followed it up this trip with Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s Hakagure. This is an early-eighteenth-century collection of aphorisms written by a samurai who was bummed out by the new era of peace. In Tsunetomo’s father’s era, when your daimyō died as a loyal samurai, you committed seppuku to accompany him to the afterlife. In 1662, however, the Shogun outlawed that practice — so, forbidden to commit seppuku, he became a monk and had his collection of sayings whining about how soft Japan had gotten written down by one of his friends. This book was — rightly — forgotten for 200 years before it got rediscovered in the twentieth century by some military personnel who wanted to inculcate a death wish in a new generation of soldiers. It did have this gem, though, which was the most honest thing:

The 2014 academic press book Inventing the Way of the Samurai made all this bushido stuff make sense: it’s a version of industrial era national myth building just like what was happening in the rest of the world! In fact, it’s downstream of idealized knightly virtues that gained steam in England in the 18th and 19th centuries. 

I did read one book by an actual samurai. The Life-Giving Sword, written by the Shogun’s sword-teacher in 1632, has a cool premise but didn’t end up giving me all that much. That said I liked this excerpt.

Over 150 years, Japan was a society went from tolerating this…

To banning samurai carrying around swords during the Meiji Revolution and today banning guns.

Speaking of rudeness-killing, another Frederick Douglass parallel passage:

More to come, I didn’t even get to the breathtaking book Mitsui: Three Centuries of Japanese Business and its fascinating reflections on the nature of capitalism, the interaction between money and power, the interaction between right wing radicals and capital, and how political violence can warp a body politic.

Monroe Doctrine at 200: history - Emily Conroy-Krutz (H-Net LA)

Monroe Doctrine: 200 Years

 

H-Diplo Article Review 1207

11 April 2024

“Forum: The Monroe Doctrine at 200”, Diplomatic History, Vol. 47, Issue 5 (November 2023): 731-870. https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dhad057

https://hdiplo.org/to/AR1207 

Editor: Diane Labrosse | Commissioning Editor: Seth Offenbach | Production Editor: Christopher Ball

Review by Emily Conroy-Krutz, Michigan State University

Two hundred years ago this past December, US President James Monroe delivered his Annual Address to Congress. By 1823, the United States had been watching revolutions unfold in Latin America for nearly a decade and anxiously observing the European creation of the Holy Alliance, which aimed at the containment of republicanism. In the midst of the routine comments, Monroe included a few paragraphs on foreign relations, largely written by his Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams. “Our policy in regard to Europe,” he writes, is “not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers.” At the same time, however, the United States would view any attempt to colonize or re-colonize the Americas as “dangerous to our peace and safety.” The address, in short, asserted the United States’ intention to remain aloof from European affairs and its desire that Europe would stay out of the Americas in turn.[1]

If the address was met without fanfare in its own time—after all, the United States was a weak power with no ability to put force behind Monroe’s words—within a few decades it had been elevated to the status of Doctrine-with-a-capital-D. For the generations that followed, it proved to be a rather flexible doctrine, changing its meaning to reflect the political needs of those who invoked it. The confusion continues today: half of the students in my foreign relations course this fall came into class understanding the Monroe Doctrine to be about isolationism, while the other half saw it as a call for interventionism. That mixed legacy is precisely why the Monroe Doctrine matters today. As the essays in this forum reveal, studying the Monroe Doctrine can not only tell us a great deal about the US in the 1820s, but about ongoing debates about US foreign relations in general (even up to our present moment), about US relations with Latin America in particular, and about Latin American efforts over two centuries to turn the United States into a good neighbor.[2]

It is appropriate that the essays in this forum do not present a unified vision of the Monroe Doctrine. The Doctrine, after all, was nothing if not multi-faceted. The contributors seem to be concerned with two sets of big questions: how/why did the Monroe Doctrine matter within US policy, and how/when was the Monroe Doctrine used by a variety of political actors to advance particular political goals. To the first set of questions, we have a range of answers here: in 1823, the Monroe Doctrine was a “nothingburger” (Jay Sexton), or it was “the culmination of a series of crucial debates among US policymakers” (Nicholas Guyatt).[3] In the two centuries that followed 1823, however, the Doctrine certainly did matter, if in different ways to different people. The answers to the second set of questions, accordingly, provide a fascinating range of topics for these scholars to consider. One of the greatest contributions of the forum is its inclusion of the Latin Americanist scholarship and Spanish-language archives that too often are not included in the US historiography. Collectively, they help us to reassess the meaning of this document with its various “shape-shifting afterlives,” as Konstantin Dierks phrases it in his introductory essay.[4]

Two of the essays focus on the 1823 moment of the Monroe Doctrine’s creation. Nicholas Guyatt makes the case for us to consider this the “Adams Doctrine,” centering the role of John Quincy Adams in the Monroe Doctrine’s creation and arguing that the Doctrine has a lot to tell us about American priorities in the so-called Era of Good Feelings. Far from being just an unimportant series of comments in the middle of an address that was primarily concerned about other things, the Doctrine was instead the crystallization of a range of questions about how the US republic ought to be in the world in the aftermath of the War of 1812. For over a decade before Monroe delivered his address, American lawmakers had been debating questions about expansion, relations with other American republics, and the balance of power between the US and Europe. In Guyatt’s analysis, we see how Adams attempted to reconcile concerns about territorial acquisitions in Florida and the public enthusiasm for “sister republics” in Latin America. He reminds us that the Doctrine emerged largely out of Adams’s anxiety about American power. Guyatt provides a helpful overview of early republican debates over continentalism, the recognition of Latin American republics, American commercial relations with Europe and Latin America, the Greek Revolution, and British Foreign Secretary George Canning’s proposal of a joint US-British response to the Holy Alliance. The Monroe Doctrine (or the Adams Doctrine, as it were) was designed to encourage two forms of American imperialism in the years to come: one territorial, with its eyes on North America, and the other commercial, with attention to Anglo-American rivalry.

 

If Guyatt notes that a major goal of the Monroe Doctrine was “to secure North America for the extension of the republic,” Caitlin Fitz expands on this important point in her contribution.[5] Fitz’s essay on the Indigenous history of the Monroe Doctrine is a revelation. She reminds us of “a foundational geopolitical fact that scholars of the Monroe Doctrine have seldom if ever made explicit: in 1823, most of the Western Hemisphere was under Indigenous command.”[6] Her essay draws attention to a further contribution of the Monroe Doctrine to American empire: its commitment to settler colonialism, not only advancing US territorial ambitions but also “affirming Latin Americans’ rights to dispossess Native people” within the borders of their new republican borders.[7]Examining the Doctrine “holistically” within the 1823 annual address as a whole allows Fitz to draw out this key function of the text and to further complicate our understanding of its “imperial anticolonialism.”[8] The imperialism of the document, she points out, was not, as has traditionally been understood, a subtext. It was, rather, the text. Indigenous lands and Indigenous relations were at the heart of Monroe’s 1823 address, and Fitz reminds us that the settler colonial expansion of the early republic served to make the United States more respectable and powerful in its relations with Europe. The reason was simple: the US ability to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their lands enhanced American claims to be a “civilized” power, and the Monroe Doctrine and American recognition of the Latin American republics cleared the way for those countries to make similar claims of a civilized status. The important distinction of the Monroe Doctrine is not hemispheric (American vs European), but developmental (civilized vs uncivilized). Read this way, the Monroe Doctrine stands out as a continuation of past US policy—back to US revolutionary leader Henry Knox and the Marshall Court and even to the pre-revolutionary period—rather than the statement of anything particularly new. Its imperial anticolonialism would continue to echo through future generations.

Alongside these fresh perspectives on the text’s meaning in the early republican United States, the forum includes three powerful contributions that reveal its symbolism and utility in Latin American relations with the United States. Collectively, the essays help us to think about the changing meaning of the Monroe Doctrine to these various non-US constituencies as the conditions of US imperialism and hemispheric relations changed. 

Marixa Lasso’s stand-out contribution to the forum examines the nineteenth-century debates over the Panama Canal Treaty from the perspective of Colombia as a way to trace the changing meaning of the Monroe Doctrine from its 1823 creation to the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary. The key moments in this story, she reveals, occurred in the 1870s and 1880s. In the first, Colombia rejected a proposed US-Colombian Panama Canal treaty after US supporters invoked the Monroe Doctrine in explaining US rights over the future canal. Then in the 1880s, the United States opposed the proposed construction of the canal by a French company. The debates revealed two things: that Colombians valued the Monroe Doctrine’s purported distinction between monarchial Europe and the republican Americas, and that the United States ultimately did not understand Latin American powers like Colombia to be equally sovereign and free to determine how their land would be used. These late-nineteenth century debates set the stage for the eventual US support of Panamanian independence and the creation of the Roosevelt Corollary in the early twentieth century. That new formulation of the Monroe Doctrine, she writes, “allowed US policymakers to justify taking the territory away from Colombia, and then continue to control both the Panama Canal and the canal zone, rather than allowing either Colombia or the Republic of Panama to do so.”[9] The essay carries the themes of sovereignty and US ideas about racial capacities for self-government that Guyatt and Fitz discuss in the 1820s into the final decades of the century. In the US and Colombia, the proposed canal became the occasion for a debate on how much power the United States and Latin American nations really did (or should) have in the region.

Paolo Riguzzi’s insightful essay explores key moments in Mexico’s reception of the Monroe Doctrine (or Doctrines, as he encourages us to think about it) between the 1860s and 1920. In those decades, the US historiography has long understood, the Monroe Doctrine shifted from its original 1823 creation into an identifiable policy that was increasingly invoked for imperialist intervention in Latin America.[10] Riguzzi traces the shifts in Mexican understandings of the Monroe Doctrine in those same decades. If it was possible in the 1860s to see the Monroe Doctrine as a defense of continental republicanism, by 1920 such an interpretation was no longer possible. By then, in the aftermath of the first world war, the Monroe Doctrine was clearly an instrument of US imperial power. To explain this changing understanding, Riguzzi points to four moments: the attempted French intervention in Mexico during the 1860s, when Mexican political leaders “fully appropriated the Monroe Doctrine as part of a survival strategy.”[11]In 1895, the Olney Corollary forced a new interpretation of the Doctrine. The Mexican government was concerned by US intervention in a British-Venezuelan dispute over borders, and used the occasion of President Porfirio Díaz’s 1896 report to Congress to issue a statement that framed the Monroe Doctrine as a Pan-American policy. Far from justifying US hegemony over the continent, it could support the Americas in a shared project of rejecting European colonizing. The Roosevelt Corollary’s aggressive formulation again demanded a new interpretation; Riguzzi quotes a Mexican newspaper describing President Theodore Roosevelt’s position as “overlordship.” The diplomatic negotiation of the moment was delicate, but set the stage for Mexico’s “rejection” of the League of Nation’s “embrace” of the Monroe Doctrine in 1920.[12]

Juan Pablo Scarfi’s article similarly traces shifting Latin American perspectives on the Doctrine, though his focus is on Pan-Americanist legal discussions between the 1890s and the 1930s. In these decades, he argues, Pan-Americanist diplomats and jurists worked to reinterpret the Doctrine from a statement of US imperialist unilateralism into a “Pan-American multilateral legal principle of non-intervention.”[13] US scholars who are used to thinking about the changing meaning of the Monroe Doctrine in this era primarily in terms of the Roosevelt Corollary will learn much from Scarfi’s discussion of the Drago Doctrine (1902) and the work of Brazilian diplomat Joaquim Nabuco and Chilean jurist Alejandro Alvarez at the Pan-American Conferences of the early twentieth century. A crisis point in this hemispheric intellectual history emerged when the League of Nations recognized the Monroe Doctrine as a “regional understanding” in Article 21 of its Covenant. Such a statement risked canonizing US dominance in the region, prompting Latin American diplomats to work harder to promote multilateralism in the 1920s. In Rio, Havana, and Montevideo, politicians from across the continent debated important issues involving intervention, but as Scarfi argues, these discussions “were inevitably rooted in contrasting versions over the meaning and scope of the Monroe Doctrine in the Americas.”[14] The Doctrine’s meaning was far from settled at its centenary or in the decades that followed.

The multiple meanings of the Monroe Doctrines are at the heart of Jay Sexton’s closing essay. His contribution returns to some of the themes he explored in his book The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America.[15]Here, he is particularly interested in thinking about the ways that the Doctrine was—and continues to be—used to make contradictory and competing political claims within the US. In Sexton’s reading, the Doctrine served as a powerful tool in domestic US politics (as well as for non-US observers) through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Imperialists and anti-imperialists alike found support for their positions in Monroe’s words, and both invoked it as evidence that their position reflected a longstanding American tradition that must be continued. For Sexton, the Monroe Doctrine served as a “political football” throughout its history, and he expects it to continue to do so in the coming years. After all, Sexton argues, “there is a distinctly nineteenth-century feel to the emerging geopolitical questions of our era.”[16] In a period of declining US power, we can expect the Monroe Doctrine’s anticolonial imperialism to have renewed political relevance. 

A powerful theme in both Sexton and Dierks’s essays is the crucial role that historians have had in shaping these political understandings of the Monroe Doctrine over time. This is unsurprising, of course: explaining the past is our job, after all. But the historiography of the Monroe Doctrine reveals the political import and potential real-world implications of historical analysis. The Doctrine’s early historians were interested in locating a “true” Monroe Doctrine—and in defining that truth in nationalist terms that described the rise of the United States into a global superpower. More recently, as Sexton points out, historians cluster around an idea of the Doctrine as “an unredeemable manifestation of US imperialism, racism, and exploitative capitalism.”[17] In both cases, they have used these definitions as a lens through which to praise or critique future iterations of American global power. Fitz reminds us of the power of historical narratives, too, when she points out that by focusing on US relations with Latin American and European states as the subject of diplomatic history at the expense of US relations with Indigenous powers, historians replicate the civilized/savage distinction that nineteenth-century diplomacy embraced. 

For Dierks, the essays collected here reveal the importance of the work of contemporary historians to “correct the record” and incorporate more voices and perspectives than before. “The Monroe Doctrine is alive,” he writes, and it needs historians to explain, contextualize, and situate it in its historic moment(s) and space(s).[18] As the essays in the forum make it clear, the third century of the Monroe Doctrine is off to a powerful start.

 

Emily Conroy-Krutz is Associate Professor of history at Michigan State University. She is the author of Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations (Cornell University Press, 2024) and Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic (Cornell University Press, 2015). 

 

Notes:

[1] Monroe Doctrine https://www.oas.org/sap/peacefund/VirtualLibrary/MonroeDoctrine/Treaty/MonroeDoctrine.pdf 

[2] For work that engages with the Monroe Doctrine and US-Latin American relations in the nineteenth century, see Caitlin Fitz, Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions (New York: Norton, 2016); Matthew Karp, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Harvard, 2016), 67-68. On the Monroe Doctrine and the Greek Revolution, see Karine Walther, Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821-1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 44-46.

[3] Jay Sexton, “The Monroe Doctrine in an Age of Global History,” Diplomatic History,47: 5 (November 2023; hereafter DH): 845-870, 845; Nicholas Guyatt, “The Adams Doctrine and an ‘Empire of States,” DH: 823-844, 824

[4] Konstantin Dierks, “The Shape-Shifting Afterlives of the Monroe Doctrine,” DH: 731-737, 731

[5] Guyatt, “The Adams Doctrine and an ‘Empire of States,” 829

[6] Caitlin Fitz, “The Monroe Doctrine and the Indigenous Americas,” DH: 802-822, 802

[7] Fitz, “The Monroe Doctrine and the Indigenous Americas,” 805

[8] The term comes from William Appleman Williams. Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York, 1962).

[9] Marixa Lasso, “Before the Roosevelt Corollary: Colombia and the Nineteenth-Century Panama Canal Treaty Debates,” DH: 764-780, 766

[10] On the changing meaning of the Monroe Doctrine with the Roosevelt Corollary, see Jay Sexton, The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Macmillan, 2012), especially chapter 6; John M. Thompson, Great Power Rising: Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of US Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford, 2019), ch. 4

[11] Paolo Riguzzi, “Mexico and the Monroe Doctrines, 1863–1920: From Appropriation to Rejection,” DH: 781-801, 784

[12] Riguzzi, “Mexico and the Monroe Doctrines, 1863–1920,” 797

[13] Juan Pablo Scarfi, “The Monroe Doctrine in the Americas: Towards a Hemispheric Intellectual History,” DH: 738-763, 740-1

[14] Scarfi, “The Monroe Doctrine in the Americas,” 756

[15] Jay Sexton, The Monroe Doctrine:Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Macmillan, 2012)

[16] Sexton, “The Monroe Doctrine in an Age of Global History,” 869-870

[17] Early historians of the Monroe Doctrine include George F. Tucker, The Monroe Doctrine: A Concise History of Its Origins and Growth (Boston: Published by George E. Reed, 1885); Worthington Chauncey Ford, “John Quincy Adams and the Monroe Doctrine I,” American Historical Review 7, no. 4 (1902): 676-696; Ford, “John Quincy Adams and the Monroe Doctrine, II,” American Historical Review 8, no. 1 (1902): 28-52; Dexter Perkins, A History of The Monroe Doctrine, Rev. Ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1955). For the latter school, Sexton points to Walter Hixon’s The Myth of American Diplomacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008) as emblematic. Sexton, “The Monroe Doctrine in an Age of Global History,” 846

[18] Dierks, 737

 

Existe uma ameaça de uma Internacional fascista? - Ruy Castro e Paulo Roberto de Almeida

O Comintern (1918-1943) tinha um centro diretor: o partido bolchevique em Moscou. A atual “Internacional” da extrema-direita não possui um centro diretor, mas líderes, partidos e movimentos convergentes. Parece ser uma ameaça, mas falta um comando único dotado de uma estratégia unificada. Ainda é um aglomerado de alucinados, que só tem sucesso porque a esquerda e o centro são inoperantes, em alguns casos muito burros.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

A minimização do massacre de Bucha por acadêmicos brasileiros - Diego Pautasso, Rafael Algarte (revista Estudos Internacionais)

 Poucas vezes se tem uma leitura tão enviesada da guerra de agressão da Rússia contra a Ucrânia quanto neste artigo. A tentativa é a de evitar a "vilanização de Moscou", inclusive na tentativa canhestra de colocar dúvidas sobre os crimes de guerra de soldados russos. O NYTimes chegou a identificar os pelotões russos e até o nome do comandante envolvidos naquele massacre de civis indefesos.

O ridículo se torna ainda maior quando se fala da "consequente escalada do conflito como parte da contenção da Rússia pelas forças da OTAN lideradas pelos EUA."

Como diria o ex-chanceler e atual conselheiro presidencial de Lula, Celso Amorim, as fotos de Bucha são "apenas fotos". Os acadêmicos seguiram fielmente a sua dica. Tudo é parte da mídia suspeita do Ocidente...

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

O massacre de Butcha, a Guerra na Ucrânia e o poder multimidiático

• Diego Pautasso Colégio Militar de Porto Alegre
• Rafael Algarte

Estudos Internacionais: revista de relações internacionais da PUC Minas:

Link: https://periodicos.pucminas.br/index.php/estudosinternacionais/issue/current

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5752/P.2317-773X.2023v11n1p107-126

Palavras-chave: Bucha, Rússia, Ucrânia

Resumo

O massacre de Bucha, ocorrido em abril de 2022, foi atribuído imediatamente ao exército russo. Esse evento ainda obscuro precisa ser compreendido como parte do conflito russo-ucraniano, cuja origem vai além da chamada Operação Especial iniciada em fevereiro de 2022. Assim, o objetivo do trabalho é analisar como foi tratado pela mídia o massacre de Bucha tomando metodologicamente por base veículos de mídia ocidentais (New York Times, Herold e ANSA) e não-ocidentais (Russia Today, Al Jazeera, CGTN e Xinhua). O argumento central é que o poder multimidiático ocidental produz uma narrativa voltada à vilanização de Moscou e consequente escalada do conflito como parte da contenção da Rússia pelas forças da OTAN lideradas pelos EUA.

===========

PRA: Costumo recomendar leitura dos textos que posto neste meu quilombo de resistência intelectual. Desta vez NÃO recomendo.

Os mandarins da República continuam a mamar nas tetas do Estado, não todos, especialmente os mais graúdos - Ricardo Bergamini

 O Brasil não corre o menor risco de dar certo (Roberto Campos)

 

Prezados Senhores

 

No serviço público existe o crescimento vegetativo dos gastos com pessoal, assim sendo mesmo sem qualquer interferência do governante de plantão, os gastos com pessoal crescem com benefícios imorais existentes (promoções automáticas, quinquênios, licença prêmio, dentre centenas de outras aberrações ainda existentes no Brasil). 

 

Em 2002, os gastos com pessoal consolidado (união, estados e municípios) foi de R$ 198,7 bilhões (13,35% do PIB), representando 41,64% da carga tributária que era de 32,06%. Em 2022 migra para R$ 1.453,5 bilhões (14,66% do PIB), aumento real em relação ao PIB de 9,61%, representado 43,46% da carga tributária de 2022 que foi de 33,71%. Nesse período houve aumento real da carga tributária de 5,15% e do percentual de gastos com pessoal de 4,58% em relação à carga tributária. Uma criminosa excrescência econômica do Brasil.

 

Um grupo de trabalhadores de primeira classe (servidores públicos) composto por 13,5 milhões de brasileiros (ativos, inativos, civis e militares) que representam apenas 6,34% da população brasileira, sendo 2,2 milhões federais, 4,9 milhões estaduais e 6,4 milhões de municipais custaram R$ 1.453,5 bilhões em 2022, correspondentes a 14,66% do PIB. Esse percentual representou 43,46% da carga tributária que foi de 33,71% do PIB em 2022. 

 

Na história do Brasil a nação sempre foi refém dos seus servidores públicos (trabalhadores de primeira classe), com os seus direitos adquiridos intocáveis, estabilidade de emprego, longas greves remuneradas, acionamento judicial sem perda de emprego, regime próprio de aposentadoria (não usam o INSS), planos de saúde (não usam o SUS), dentre muitos outros privilégios impensáveis para os trabalhadores de segunda classe (empresas privadas). Com certeza nenhum desses trabalhadores de primeira classe concedem aos seus empregados os mesmos direitos imorais. 

Sem reforma e sob ameaça de greve, Lula inicia ciclo de expansão do funcionalismo

 

A retomada das contratações ocorre sem uma reforma administrativa e em meio à ameaça de greve por melhores salários e condições de trabalho

 

Redação Jornal de Brasília

 

11/04/2024 

 

FERNANDO CANZIAN

SÃO PAULO, SP (FOLHAPRESS)

 

Após sete anos de enxugamento inédito da máquina de servidores civis federais ativos permanentes do Executivo nos governos Michel Temer (2016-1018) e Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022), o governo Lula (PT) prepara a abertura de 6.640 novas vagas no funcionalismo e anunciou a criação de mais 100 campi dos institutos federais de ensino até 2026.

 

Matéria completa clique abaixo:

 

https://jornaldebrasilia.com.br/noticias/economia/sem-reforma-e-sob-ameaca-de-greve-lula-inicia-ciclo-de-expansao-do-funcionalismo/