There’s a story in every number as Indigenous people contribute to Alberta’s economy
A report released last month by MNP and ATB Financial draws a single conclusion: Indigenous people in Alberta are already valuable contributors to the economy, but with the right support, that contribution could increase.
Clayton Norris, vice president of Indigenous services for the national accounting, tax and business consulting firm of MNP, says he always knew that. But helping to author the report, Opening the Door to Opportunity: Reporting on the Economic Contribution of Indigenous Peoples in Alberta, put it all in perspective.
“I've been doing this for 20 years and I was surprised to find when we aggregated the data it just grew and grew and grew, and we based it in actual financials that were publicly available,” said Norris, who three years ago became a status member with the Cold Lake First Nation.
The data comes from 2019. Sources include the Alberta government, various federal departments, First Nation financial statements published through the First Nations Financial Transparency Act, the Métis Nation of Alberta, the Métis Settlements General Council, Alberta Assembly of First Nations and a number of Indigenous business associations.
Those figures show, among other factors, that the Indigenous economy in Alberta generated $6.74 billion of gross domestic product (GDP), equal to the GDP generated by the province’s agricultural sector.
The Indigenous economy’s GDP accounted for two per cent of the provincial GDP.
This is the first such report done specifically focusing on the Alberta economy.
While the dollar figures and percentages are impressive, Norris wants readers to understand that the report goes beyond the numbers.
“I think when we look at the findings of the report, the diversity of the businesses that are out there, in almost every single industry, there’s almost a story to be told in every single number. When you look at the distribution of income of businesses, it’s really high in one area and really low in another. Why is that? Is there an opportunity there?” said Norris.
He believes the report is “for many purposes… (and) for all Albertans.”
For governments at all levels, he says, it’s to understand the economic impact of Indigenous peoples in Alberta right now.
For industry, it’s to understand the demographics of growing communities and the opportunities this presents.
“For the nations themselves (it’s) knowing there's been some real successes out there,” said Norris.
But just as important, he says, are the gaps the report highlights.
The average income of an Indigenous person in Alberta is $44,232 compared to the $63,853 for the non-Indigenous population. The employment rate for Indigenous people sits at 55 per cent. With approximately 544,000 businesses in the province, fewer than 3,100 are Indigenous-owned.
According to the report, narrowing the gap in income by supporting between 11,500 and 14,000 jobs could generate between $2.5 billion and $3 billion, with more spending per Indigenous household and the majority of that spending done in non-Indigenous communities. This increase in Indigenous revenue would in turn generate annual tax revenues of between $500 million and $600 million.
While the report points out where gaps exist and the significance of those gaps in dollar figures, it doesn’t offer solutions.
“We focused on the economic impact, but I would definitely say additional investments in all those areas—
Because such a wide range of monetary and human resource investments are required, Norris sees narrowing that gap as the responsibility of a wide range of players, including federal, provincial and municipal governments, industry, and Indigenous governments.
“Everybody’s got something to contribute,” he said, including MNP.
According to the report, MNP has a dedicated team of 300 professionals who work with more than 250 Indigenous nations and over 800 clients.
ATB, which partnered on the report, has committed to providing access to capital. It has also created an Indigenous financial services team in meeting Calls to Action 92 from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the legacy of residential schools.
“We look at it from what we do, accounting, tax, and consulting. Let’s support those things but what we do can’t be successful on its own. We need the educators, we need the health, we need the infrastructure in communities in terms of housing and opportunities for businesses to be created. We need the government programs to support it,” said Norris.
“We’re talking about all of the economic impacts, but none of that gets done without healthy, safe, vibrant communities. Until we get further into investments in all of those things … we’re not going to achieve any economic opportunities or any economic reconciliation until the bare needs are met.”
Support is needed even more now. The measures to control the coronavirus pandemic have had a big impact on Indigenous communities, says Norris. With schools going on-line and connectivity poor on many reserves, Indigenous students didn’t fare as well their non-Indigenous counterparts.
“There’s a big asterisk on the 2019 numbers as we wait to see what the true impacts COVID has had,” said Norris.
Read the report at https://www.indigenouseconomicimpact.ca/
Windspeaker.com
By Shari Narine, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Windspeaker.com, Windspeaker.com
Friday, December 03, 2021
Alberta Indigenous delegates to visit Pope in Vatican City this month hope for apology
Lauren Boothby
Lauren Boothby
POSTMEDIA
© Provided by Edmonton Journal Angelina (Angie) Crerar takes part in a news conference on Thursday, Dec. 2, 2021, where she was introduced as one of three Alberta Indigenous delegates who will travel to Vatican City this month to meet with Pope Francis.
Two Alberta Métis delegates slated to meet the Pope later this month say they are hoping for an apology and for acknowledgement of the harms caused by Canada’s residential school system.
Gary Gagnon and Angelina Crerar, both representing the Métis Nation, are set to visit Vatican City with more than two dozen Indigenous elders and leaders from across the country Dec. 17-20. Gagnon and Crerar, speaking at a Thursday news conference in Edmonton, said meeting with Pope Francis on behalf of their communities, and being able to share their stories, is significant to them.
Gagnon, from the St. Albert Métis settlement and a long-time Edmonton Catholic Schools cultural facilitator, said it will be like a “pilgrimage” and he hopes to be a “voice for the voiceless.”
“I can only hope that there will be movement from the words that we share from our hearts,” he said Thursday. “I think there is nothing better for us … to hear those two-and-a-half words ‘we’re sorry’ and then just move on.”
Two Alberta Métis delegates slated to meet the Pope later this month say they are hoping for an apology and for acknowledgement of the harms caused by Canada’s residential school system.
Gary Gagnon and Angelina Crerar, both representing the Métis Nation, are set to visit Vatican City with more than two dozen Indigenous elders and leaders from across the country Dec. 17-20. Gagnon and Crerar, speaking at a Thursday news conference in Edmonton, said meeting with Pope Francis on behalf of their communities, and being able to share their stories, is significant to them.
Gagnon, from the St. Albert Métis settlement and a long-time Edmonton Catholic Schools cultural facilitator, said it will be like a “pilgrimage” and he hopes to be a “voice for the voiceless.”
“I can only hope that there will be movement from the words that we share from our hearts,” he said Thursday. “I think there is nothing better for us … to hear those two-and-a-half words ‘we’re sorry’ and then just move on.”
© David Bloom David Bloom Gary Gagnon takes part in a news conference on Thursday, Dec. 2, 2021, where he was introduced as one of three Alberta Indigenous delegates who will travel to Vatican City this month to meet with Pope Francis. David Bloom/Postmedia
Gagnon said he feels overwhelmed and wants to get the message right when sharing stories from his community in a short window of time.
Video: Member of Indigenous delegation looks ahead to meeting with Pope (cbc.ca)
Pope Francis has scheduled three one-hour meetings, one each with First Nations, Métis and Inuit representatives, as part of reconciliation efforts.
Crerar — a Métis knowledge-keeper, elder from Grande Prairie, and residential school survivor — said an apology coming from the Pope would be meaningful because of her high esteem for him, and it’s something others want.
“He’s the only one that should give us one,” she said after the news conference. “This is our Pope.”
The third Alberta delegate, Chief Wilton Littlechild chosen by the Assembly of First Nations, was unable to attend Thursday’s announcement. In a news release from the Catholic Archdiocese of Edmonton, Littlechild, who is a residential school survivor and advocated for Indigenous peoples with the United Nations for more that 40 years, said Indigenous communities have never given up the need to heal.
“We are going and that should be a message in itself. We are willing to work with this and with you,” he said. “We are putting our hand out, meet halfway and let’s shake hands. It’s really important to show good intent.”
Edmonton Archbishop Richard Smith and Calgary Bishop William McGrattan are among the Canadian bishops set to accompany the delegates.
McGrattan said he hopes the Pope will stand in solidarity with Catholic Bishops of Canada who issued an apology this fall.
lboothby@postmedia.com
@laurby
Gagnon said he feels overwhelmed and wants to get the message right when sharing stories from his community in a short window of time.
Video: Member of Indigenous delegation looks ahead to meeting with Pope (cbc.ca)
Pope Francis has scheduled three one-hour meetings, one each with First Nations, Métis and Inuit representatives, as part of reconciliation efforts.
Crerar — a Métis knowledge-keeper, elder from Grande Prairie, and residential school survivor — said an apology coming from the Pope would be meaningful because of her high esteem for him, and it’s something others want.
“He’s the only one that should give us one,” she said after the news conference. “This is our Pope.”
The third Alberta delegate, Chief Wilton Littlechild chosen by the Assembly of First Nations, was unable to attend Thursday’s announcement. In a news release from the Catholic Archdiocese of Edmonton, Littlechild, who is a residential school survivor and advocated for Indigenous peoples with the United Nations for more that 40 years, said Indigenous communities have never given up the need to heal.
“We are going and that should be a message in itself. We are willing to work with this and with you,” he said. “We are putting our hand out, meet halfway and let’s shake hands. It’s really important to show good intent.”
Edmonton Archbishop Richard Smith and Calgary Bishop William McGrattan are among the Canadian bishops set to accompany the delegates.
McGrattan said he hopes the Pope will stand in solidarity with Catholic Bishops of Canada who issued an apology this fall.
lboothby@postmedia.com
@laurby
Edmonton Archbishop Richard Smith takes part in a news conference on Thursday, Dec. 2, 2021, where Angelina (Angie) Crerar and Gary Gagnon were introduced as Alberta Indigenous delegates who will travel to Vatican City this month to meet with Pope Francis. David Bloom/Postmedia
Calgary Bishop William McGrattan takes part in a news conference on Thursday, Dec. 2, 2021, where Angelina (Angie) Crerar and Gary Gagnon were introduced as Alberta Indigenous delegates who will travel to Vatican City this month to meet with Pope Francis. David Bloom/Postmedia
The labor shortage is permanent, survey suggests
insider@insider.com (Juliana Kaplan)
Labor shortages have persisted for months, as employers scramble to hire and retain workers.
A new survey shows unemployed workers may not return anytime soon, if at all.
It suggests that workers might be driving a more permanent shift in the labor market.
For months, employers have been telling stories of a labor shortage, as they struggle to hire and fill understaffed workplaces.
They may be singing this tune for a long time.
The right-leaning US Chamber of Commerce polled 529 Americans who became unemployed during the pandemic, and haven't returned to work as of early November. Of the respondents, more than half (53%) said they're just somewhat active, or not "very active at all," in their job search. A whopping 65% said that they don't expect to return before 2022, and a third don't expect to return before the April of 2022.
Finally, 8% of respondents said they "never plan to return to work." Goldman Sachs researchers previously estimated that 3.4 million people left the labor force. About 1.5 million were early retirees, and 1 million were on-time retirements. The number of self-employed workers has also ticked up amidst labor shortages.
All of this adds up to one thing: Workers may not be coming back anytime soon. They're demanding higher pay, more safety measures, and better benefits. In many cases, they decided after surviving a pandemic that life was too short to work in a job they don't like.
Now, the Chamber's survey suggests that labor shortages may be more permanent amidst a "Great Realization," as a good chunk of the usual labor force remains on the sidelines — perhaps for forever.
It'll 'remain tough' to get workers in 2022
A note from S&P global economists led by Beth Ann Bovinos said that it will "likely remain tough" to find workers in 2022, and those workers will cost businesses more. Right now, according to S&P, 45% of the people who left the labor force are prime-age workers — people ages 25-54 — and "their return is key to stabilizing the job market." That's 1.4 million workers, 68% of whom are women.
Labor constraints are driven by people who left the labor force, according to S&P, meaning people who aren't actively working or job searching. That means those aren't opting to stay unemployed and receive benefits.
And, while S&P estimates that 58% of the 3 million exits are temporary, it's still unclear when they will return. For those 1.4 million workers, it probably won't be until "pandemic-related issues are resolved." As Omicron, a new coronavirus variant, starts to make its way through the US, it seems likely that "pandemic-related issues" will stick around.
At the same time, employed workers have been increasingly acting with their feet. In September, 4.4 million workers quit their jobs, marking the sixth month of near-record quits. In other words, for half of 2021, workers quit like never before, and showed no signs of slowing.
Anecdotally, businesses have had success retaining and hiring workers by keeping wages and benefits high. Much of this has been attributed to workers yielding more leverage, although some economists have noted that wage gains are still a drop in the bucket, and may not stick around without structural changes like a minimum wage hike.
But as workers begin to reenvision work and what it means to them — and thousands take to the picket line to demand better conditions — labor leaders are hoping to take advantage of a pivotal moment to build worker power and collective action.
insider@insider.com (Juliana Kaplan)
© Provided by Business Insider Rachel Flores
Labor shortages have persisted for months, as employers scramble to hire and retain workers.
A new survey shows unemployed workers may not return anytime soon, if at all.
It suggests that workers might be driving a more permanent shift in the labor market.
For months, employers have been telling stories of a labor shortage, as they struggle to hire and fill understaffed workplaces.
They may be singing this tune for a long time.
The right-leaning US Chamber of Commerce polled 529 Americans who became unemployed during the pandemic, and haven't returned to work as of early November. Of the respondents, more than half (53%) said they're just somewhat active, or not "very active at all," in their job search. A whopping 65% said that they don't expect to return before 2022, and a third don't expect to return before the April of 2022.
Finally, 8% of respondents said they "never plan to return to work." Goldman Sachs researchers previously estimated that 3.4 million people left the labor force. About 1.5 million were early retirees, and 1 million were on-time retirements. The number of self-employed workers has also ticked up amidst labor shortages.
All of this adds up to one thing: Workers may not be coming back anytime soon. They're demanding higher pay, more safety measures, and better benefits. In many cases, they decided after surviving a pandemic that life was too short to work in a job they don't like.
Now, the Chamber's survey suggests that labor shortages may be more permanent amidst a "Great Realization," as a good chunk of the usual labor force remains on the sidelines — perhaps for forever.
It'll 'remain tough' to get workers in 2022
A note from S&P global economists led by Beth Ann Bovinos said that it will "likely remain tough" to find workers in 2022, and those workers will cost businesses more. Right now, according to S&P, 45% of the people who left the labor force are prime-age workers — people ages 25-54 — and "their return is key to stabilizing the job market." That's 1.4 million workers, 68% of whom are women.
Labor constraints are driven by people who left the labor force, according to S&P, meaning people who aren't actively working or job searching. That means those aren't opting to stay unemployed and receive benefits.
And, while S&P estimates that 58% of the 3 million exits are temporary, it's still unclear when they will return. For those 1.4 million workers, it probably won't be until "pandemic-related issues are resolved." As Omicron, a new coronavirus variant, starts to make its way through the US, it seems likely that "pandemic-related issues" will stick around.
At the same time, employed workers have been increasingly acting with their feet. In September, 4.4 million workers quit their jobs, marking the sixth month of near-record quits. In other words, for half of 2021, workers quit like never before, and showed no signs of slowing.
Anecdotally, businesses have had success retaining and hiring workers by keeping wages and benefits high. Much of this has been attributed to workers yielding more leverage, although some economists have noted that wage gains are still a drop in the bucket, and may not stick around without structural changes like a minimum wage hike.
But as workers begin to reenvision work and what it means to them — and thousands take to the picket line to demand better conditions — labor leaders are hoping to take advantage of a pivotal moment to build worker power and collective action.
“The Mystery of the Parsee Lawyer: Arthur Conan Doyle, George Edalji and the Case of the Foreigner in the English Village” by Shrabani Basu
Injustice produces indignation at those responsible for it. Shrabani Basu’s The Mystery of the Parsee Lawyer is filled with indignation as it tells the story of the investigation, prosecution, conviction, and partial pardon of George Edalji, a British lawyer of Indian descent who served three years in prison for crimes (mutilating animals and sending threatening letters) he did not commit. It is a tale of racial prejudice, an inept judge, a biased chief of police, and an obstinate criminal justice bureaucracy. But it is also the tale of men who saw injustice and worked persistently to right a terrible wrong. Included among those men was the creator of the fictional master detective Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Basu, a journalist for the Times of London and the author of Victoria & Abdul and other works of history, writes a vivid factual narrative that is tinged with emotion. The crimes occurred in 1903 in the village of Great Wyrley in Staffordshire, populated mostly by working-class miners and farmers. George Edalji was the son of the Indian vicar of St Mark’s Church, Shapurji Edalji by name, and his British wife, Charlotte. Basu notes that when the Edaljis arrived in Great Wyrley, they found “they were not entirely welcome.” As Conan Doyle would later explain, “The appearance of a coloured clergyman with a half-caste son in a rude, unrefined parish was bound to cause some regrettable situation.”
Francis P Sempa 5 July 2021 Non-Fiction
Francis P Sempa is the author of Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21st Century and America’s Global Role: Essays and Reviews on National Security, Geopolitics and War. His writings appear in The Diplomat, Joint Force Quarterly, the University Bookman and other publications. He is an attorney and an adjunct professor of political science at Wilkes University.
Injustice produces indignation at those responsible for it. Shrabani Basu’s The Mystery of the Parsee Lawyer is filled with indignation as it tells the story of the investigation, prosecution, conviction, and partial pardon of George Edalji, a British lawyer of Indian descent who served three years in prison for crimes (mutilating animals and sending threatening letters) he did not commit. It is a tale of racial prejudice, an inept judge, a biased chief of police, and an obstinate criminal justice bureaucracy. But it is also the tale of men who saw injustice and worked persistently to right a terrible wrong. Included among those men was the creator of the fictional master detective Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Basu, a journalist for the Times of London and the author of Victoria & Abdul and other works of history, writes a vivid factual narrative that is tinged with emotion. The crimes occurred in 1903 in the village of Great Wyrley in Staffordshire, populated mostly by working-class miners and farmers. George Edalji was the son of the Indian vicar of St Mark’s Church, Shapurji Edalji by name, and his British wife, Charlotte. Basu notes that when the Edaljis arrived in Great Wyrley, they found “they were not entirely welcome.” As Conan Doyle would later explain, “The appearance of a coloured clergyman with a half-caste son in a rude, unrefined parish was bound to cause some regrettable situation.”
The Mystery of the Parsee Lawyer: Arthur Conan Doyle, George Edalji and the Case of the Foreigner in the English Village, Shrabani Basu (Bloomsbury, March 2021)
The “regrettable situation” started in 1888, when the front of the Edaljis’ house was painted with “The Edaljis are wicked.” That incident was followed by a series of threatening letters that caused the Edaljis to contact the police. Others in the village received threatening letters that purported to be from Shapurji. On other occasions, someone left excrement inside an open window and on a door in the Edaljis’ house. The police at first only took what Basu characterizes as a “half-hearted interest” in the family’s troubles. Later, the police began to suspect that George Edalji wrote the letters and placed the excrement inside the house. Soon, Basu writes, the vicarage was under siege, with more threatening letters and a chief of police that seemed intent on proving that young George was the culprit.
Basu describes the police chief, George Anson, as “an imperialist to the core” who believed in the superiority of Western civilization and the British Empire. Anson, she writes, developed a “deep-seated dislike for the Edalji family, and particularly George.” George, meanwhile, had studied law and was working as a solicitor in Birmingham. He appeared to be on the path to success.
George Edalji’s fate took a turn for the worse in 1903 when Great Wyrley suffered a series of brutal animal slayings, including several horses. “Terror gripped the village,” Basu writes, “… as the killings continued in quick succession.
Villagers watched in horror as the bodies of the mutilated horses were put on carts and removed from the fields.
Letters accusing George Edalji of slaying the animals circulated in the village. George was subsequently arrested for killing one horse and sending threatening letters.
The evidence against George, Basu notes, was circumstantial at best; flimsy at worst. The police and prosecutors pointed to horse hairs on one of George’s coats, a footmark near the dead horse that appeared to match one of George’s boots, blood-stained razors found in George’s room, and a handwriting expert who testified that George wrote all of the threatening letters.
The trial was presided over by an inexperienced judge who, legal scholars later argued, allowed the jury to consider inadmissible evidence. The jury deliberated for 50 minutes before returning a guilty verdict. The judge sentenced George to penal servitude for seven years. The killing of animals in the village continued after George was sent to prison, but the police believed that George was a member of a gang that was committing the crimes, so in their minds this did not exonerate him.
Some eminent legal scholars and former jurists took a different view, and the Edalji family enlisted them in a public campaign to free George. Meanwhile, in prison George spent time reading Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels and he wrote the author to seek his assistance in righting the injustice of his conviction.
Conan Doyle readily agreed and spent much of 1907 investigating the case in the manner of his fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. His detective work, Basu writes, “demolished” every argument and weakened every piece of evidence put forth by the prosecution, and he publicized his findings in British newspapers, which later appeared in American newspapers. Conan Doyle compared the Edalji case to France’s notorious Dreyfus case.
Conan Doyle’s logic and perseverance changed media and public opinion to George Edalji’s side. The Home Secretary appointed a committee of inquiry that recommended a “free pardon” for George, declaring that he was innocent of the horse slaying but guilty of writing the threatening letters. After serving three years of his prison sentence, George Edalji was a free man, but he would not be compensated for the injustice.
Conan Doyle now took it upon himself to discover who committed the animal slayings and who wrote the letters. He clashed repeatedly with police chief Anson, who had only disdain for the amateur detective. Conan Doyle provided the police with a few suspects, but nothing came of it. Unlike in his Sherlock Holmes novels, “The mystery of the Wyrley Ripper remained unsolved.”
The “regrettable situation” started in 1888, when the front of the Edaljis’ house was painted with “The Edaljis are wicked.” That incident was followed by a series of threatening letters that caused the Edaljis to contact the police. Others in the village received threatening letters that purported to be from Shapurji. On other occasions, someone left excrement inside an open window and on a door in the Edaljis’ house. The police at first only took what Basu characterizes as a “half-hearted interest” in the family’s troubles. Later, the police began to suspect that George Edalji wrote the letters and placed the excrement inside the house. Soon, Basu writes, the vicarage was under siege, with more threatening letters and a chief of police that seemed intent on proving that young George was the culprit.
Basu describes the police chief, George Anson, as “an imperialist to the core” who believed in the superiority of Western civilization and the British Empire. Anson, she writes, developed a “deep-seated dislike for the Edalji family, and particularly George.” George, meanwhile, had studied law and was working as a solicitor in Birmingham. He appeared to be on the path to success.
George Edalji’s fate took a turn for the worse in 1903 when Great Wyrley suffered a series of brutal animal slayings, including several horses. “Terror gripped the village,” Basu writes, “… as the killings continued in quick succession.
Villagers watched in horror as the bodies of the mutilated horses were put on carts and removed from the fields.
Letters accusing George Edalji of slaying the animals circulated in the village. George was subsequently arrested for killing one horse and sending threatening letters.
The evidence against George, Basu notes, was circumstantial at best; flimsy at worst. The police and prosecutors pointed to horse hairs on one of George’s coats, a footmark near the dead horse that appeared to match one of George’s boots, blood-stained razors found in George’s room, and a handwriting expert who testified that George wrote all of the threatening letters.
The trial was presided over by an inexperienced judge who, legal scholars later argued, allowed the jury to consider inadmissible evidence. The jury deliberated for 50 minutes before returning a guilty verdict. The judge sentenced George to penal servitude for seven years. The killing of animals in the village continued after George was sent to prison, but the police believed that George was a member of a gang that was committing the crimes, so in their minds this did not exonerate him.
Some eminent legal scholars and former jurists took a different view, and the Edalji family enlisted them in a public campaign to free George. Meanwhile, in prison George spent time reading Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels and he wrote the author to seek his assistance in righting the injustice of his conviction.
Conan Doyle readily agreed and spent much of 1907 investigating the case in the manner of his fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. His detective work, Basu writes, “demolished” every argument and weakened every piece of evidence put forth by the prosecution, and he publicized his findings in British newspapers, which later appeared in American newspapers. Conan Doyle compared the Edalji case to France’s notorious Dreyfus case.
Conan Doyle’s logic and perseverance changed media and public opinion to George Edalji’s side. The Home Secretary appointed a committee of inquiry that recommended a “free pardon” for George, declaring that he was innocent of the horse slaying but guilty of writing the threatening letters. After serving three years of his prison sentence, George Edalji was a free man, but he would not be compensated for the injustice.
Conan Doyle now took it upon himself to discover who committed the animal slayings and who wrote the letters. He clashed repeatedly with police chief Anson, who had only disdain for the amateur detective. Conan Doyle provided the police with a few suspects, but nothing came of it. Unlike in his Sherlock Holmes novels, “The mystery of the Wyrley Ripper remained unsolved.”
Francis P Sempa 5 July 2021 Non-Fiction
Francis P Sempa is the author of Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21st Century and America’s Global Role: Essays and Reviews on National Security, Geopolitics and War. His writings appear in The Diplomat, Joint Force Quarterly, the University Bookman and other publications. He is an attorney and an adjunct professor of political science at Wilkes University.
“The City as Anthology: Eroticism and Urbanity in Early Modern Isfahan” by Kathryn Babayan
Reza Abbasi, detail Youth Reading, ca 1625 (Wikimedia Commons)
They gaze at you, the fashionably-attired youths of Esfahan, from a distance of 300 years. Swaying like cypress trees, their tresses floating in the air like clouds, their faces surrounded by peach fuzz, they smile like the Gioconda and with more mystery. Who are these young men and what do they say to the viewers? After the lucidity of the great 16th-century Persian and Mughal painters like Behzad and Sultan Mohammad, who painted kingly battles and hunts, the 17th century brings us the works of Reza Abbasi and Mohammad Qasem, and their ambivalent but sexually-charged portraits of young men and occasionally young women. These 17th-century masters painted not for royal masters and state gifts, but for middle-class collectors of scrap books for paintings, poetry, letters and didactic texts which they shared in more intimate settings. Kathryn Babayan takes us on a tour of 17th-century Esfahan (Isfahan in Babayan’s transcription), the city, its pastimes, its collectors and its memorialists. On this tour we try to understand what the cypress-like youths have to say.
17th-century Esfahanis led lives not too dissimilar from our own, hence the “early-modern” tag in the subtitle. They enjoyed majestic public spaces, coffee shops, wine-bars, shopping centers and outdoor spectacles. According to Babayan, the shahs of Iran lavished constructions on Esfahan not only to embody their secular power, but also to provide a foretaste of paradise, with all the pleasures and beauties that the faithful, newly-converted to Twelver Shiism, could expect in the afterlife.
The shahs also gathered in Esfahan, from around their empire, classes of people who could appreciate the finer things: artisans, scribes, theologists and merchants. In place of the courtiers, palace slaves or tribal khans who dominated the social scene under earlier dynasties, 17th-century Esfahan had middle class bons vivants who wrote poetry, collected paintings, and entertained one another with wit and cultivation. This larger, leisured class had access to ample quantities of paper and ink, and left voluminous records of their lives, their pastimes and their loves. As in Iran today, they lived in a society segregated by gender.
Consequently, their love lives give us the most difficulty. Babayan says thinking about sex with the early moderns “involves confronting those moments where the meaning of sexuality and eroticism are far from transparent.” She convincingly demonstrates, through a close examination that the pictural art of Shah Abbas’s age was suffused with eroticism, as in her reading of the great mural painting in the Palace of Forty Pillars, with its besotted pages and tribadic dancing girls. Certainly, the Esfahanis thought about sex.
More difficult is to know what they thought about it. In one case study, Babayan summarizes the rhymed, autobiographical account of a woman who undertakes the pilgrimage to Mecca upon the death of her husband. Along the way she goes to visit a female friend. The text makes it clear that the widow had once had an intimate relationship with this friend, but we don’t know if it was an improper relationship. We don’t really know whether a physical relationship between women provoked anything more than embarrassment in polite society.
They gaze at you, the fashionably-attired youths of Esfahan, from a distance of 300 years. Swaying like cypress trees, their tresses floating in the air like clouds, their faces surrounded by peach fuzz, they smile like the Gioconda and with more mystery. Who are these young men and what do they say to the viewers? After the lucidity of the great 16th-century Persian and Mughal painters like Behzad and Sultan Mohammad, who painted kingly battles and hunts, the 17th century brings us the works of Reza Abbasi and Mohammad Qasem, and their ambivalent but sexually-charged portraits of young men and occasionally young women. These 17th-century masters painted not for royal masters and state gifts, but for middle-class collectors of scrap books for paintings, poetry, letters and didactic texts which they shared in more intimate settings. Kathryn Babayan takes us on a tour of 17th-century Esfahan (Isfahan in Babayan’s transcription), the city, its pastimes, its collectors and its memorialists. On this tour we try to understand what the cypress-like youths have to say.
17th-century Esfahanis led lives not too dissimilar from our own, hence the “early-modern” tag in the subtitle. They enjoyed majestic public spaces, coffee shops, wine-bars, shopping centers and outdoor spectacles. According to Babayan, the shahs of Iran lavished constructions on Esfahan not only to embody their secular power, but also to provide a foretaste of paradise, with all the pleasures and beauties that the faithful, newly-converted to Twelver Shiism, could expect in the afterlife.
The shahs also gathered in Esfahan, from around their empire, classes of people who could appreciate the finer things: artisans, scribes, theologists and merchants. In place of the courtiers, palace slaves or tribal khans who dominated the social scene under earlier dynasties, 17th-century Esfahan had middle class bons vivants who wrote poetry, collected paintings, and entertained one another with wit and cultivation. This larger, leisured class had access to ample quantities of paper and ink, and left voluminous records of their lives, their pastimes and their loves. As in Iran today, they lived in a society segregated by gender.
Consequently, their love lives give us the most difficulty. Babayan says thinking about sex with the early moderns “involves confronting those moments where the meaning of sexuality and eroticism are far from transparent.” She convincingly demonstrates, through a close examination that the pictural art of Shah Abbas’s age was suffused with eroticism, as in her reading of the great mural painting in the Palace of Forty Pillars, with its besotted pages and tribadic dancing girls. Certainly, the Esfahanis thought about sex.
More difficult is to know what they thought about it. In one case study, Babayan summarizes the rhymed, autobiographical account of a woman who undertakes the pilgrimage to Mecca upon the death of her husband. Along the way she goes to visit a female friend. The text makes it clear that the widow had once had an intimate relationship with this friend, but we don’t know if it was an improper relationship. We don’t really know whether a physical relationship between women provoked anything more than embarrassment in polite society.
The City as Anthology: Eroticism and Urbanity in Early Modern Isfahan, Kathryn Babayan (Stanford University Press, April 2021)
Turning to relationships between males, the picture becomes even more complex. Intimate relations between males involving penetration, was considered by the religious authorities, then as now in Iran, as a capital crime. Although the cult of youthful male beauty is a hoary Iranian tradition, Domenico Ingenito demonstrated in his magistral study of Sa’di of Shiraz that the spectacle of male beauty provided ascetic mystics a better appreciation of the divine. In this sense, the album leaves by Reza Abbasi and Mohammad Qasem may have been no more than aids for mystical contemplation. On the other hand, there was an older, antinomian tradition of Sufi devotion involving physical consummation of forbidden love. Twelver Shiism rejected this tradition and began to persecute Sufi orders in Iran. Babayan reaches no definitive conclusions on the extent to which the authorities’ condemnation constituted mere lip service, or how the official position affected private behavior. It would have been helpful to look at legal cases and condemnations in Esfahan to form a firm opinion.
In the absence of data, we should probably not consider the 17th-century Iranians as any more given to same-sex, heterogenerational love than moderns. As Walther G Andrews and Mehmet Kalpakli point out in their Age of the Beloveds (2005) just because the Safavids and Ottomans wrote about love of boys, that doesn’t mean it was more prevalent than in other periods. Going beyond mere sexuality, we see that Iranian culture reveres asymmetrical relationships: slave/master, pupil/teacher, lover/beloved. Babayan’s analysis of Mohammad Qasem’s painting of the teacher punishing a student suggests that out of these asymmetrical, often abusive relationships, comes art, civility, craftmanship and even love.
Babayan’s dense, close reading of family albums and memorials brings to life an Esfahan as lively and as sensual as any Safavid page or cup bearer. Babayan might have left more room in her book to let the protagonists speak for themselves: a translation of some of these texts would be welcome. Meanwhile, while we continue to struggle to understand precisely how 17th-century Iranians saw themselves, the richness of these texts convince us that they were as confused and amused by life as we are.
Turning to relationships between males, the picture becomes even more complex. Intimate relations between males involving penetration, was considered by the religious authorities, then as now in Iran, as a capital crime. Although the cult of youthful male beauty is a hoary Iranian tradition, Domenico Ingenito demonstrated in his magistral study of Sa’di of Shiraz that the spectacle of male beauty provided ascetic mystics a better appreciation of the divine. In this sense, the album leaves by Reza Abbasi and Mohammad Qasem may have been no more than aids for mystical contemplation. On the other hand, there was an older, antinomian tradition of Sufi devotion involving physical consummation of forbidden love. Twelver Shiism rejected this tradition and began to persecute Sufi orders in Iran. Babayan reaches no definitive conclusions on the extent to which the authorities’ condemnation constituted mere lip service, or how the official position affected private behavior. It would have been helpful to look at legal cases and condemnations in Esfahan to form a firm opinion.
In the absence of data, we should probably not consider the 17th-century Iranians as any more given to same-sex, heterogenerational love than moderns. As Walther G Andrews and Mehmet Kalpakli point out in their Age of the Beloveds (2005) just because the Safavids and Ottomans wrote about love of boys, that doesn’t mean it was more prevalent than in other periods. Going beyond mere sexuality, we see that Iranian culture reveres asymmetrical relationships: slave/master, pupil/teacher, lover/beloved. Babayan’s analysis of Mohammad Qasem’s painting of the teacher punishing a student suggests that out of these asymmetrical, often abusive relationships, comes art, civility, craftmanship and even love.
Babayan’s dense, close reading of family albums and memorials brings to life an Esfahan as lively and as sensual as any Safavid page or cup bearer. Babayan might have left more room in her book to let the protagonists speak for themselves: a translation of some of these texts would be welcome. Meanwhile, while we continue to struggle to understand precisely how 17th-century Iranians saw themselves, the richness of these texts convince us that they were as confused and amused by life as we are.
David Chaffetz is the author of Three Asian Divas: Women, Art and Culture in Shiraz, Delhi and Yangzhou (Abbreviated Press, November 2019). He is working on a new book about the horse in Asian history.
Podcast with Tonio Andrade, author of “The Last Embassy: The Dutch Mission of 1795 and the Forgotten History of Western Encounters with China”
On January 10th, 1795, a very tired caravan arrives in Beijing. The travelers have journeyed from Canton on an accelerated schedule through harsh terrain in order to make it to the capital in time for the Qianlong Emperor’s sixtieth anniversary of his reign. The group is led by two Dutchmen: Isaac Titsingh and Andreas Everardus van Braam Houckgeest, who are there to represent the interests of the Dutch Republic at the imperial court. It’s a momentous occasion, especially after the disastrous British Embassy from George Macartney two years earlier.
Tonio Andrade
On January 10th, 1795, a very tired caravan arrives in Beijing. The travelers have journeyed from Canton on an accelerated schedule through harsh terrain in order to make it to the capital in time for the Qianlong Emperor’s sixtieth anniversary of his reign. The group is led by two Dutchmen: Isaac Titsingh and Andreas Everardus van Braam Houckgeest, who are there to represent the interests of the Dutch Republic at the imperial court. It’s a momentous occasion, especially after the disastrous British Embassy from George Macartney two years earlier.
The Last Embassy: The Dutch Mission of 1795 and the Forgotten History of Western Encounters with China, Tonio Andrade (Princeton University Press, June 2021)
Little did they know that their embassy would be the last by Westerners in the traditional Chinese court. Their journey is the subject of Professor Tonio Andrade’s The Last Embassy: The Dutch Mission of 1795 and the Forgotten History of Western Encounters with China (Princeton University Press), published earlier this year: a rich and readable volume that tells the story of an event long-neglected by history and historians.
In this interview, Tonio and I talk about the Dutch Embassy, its protagonists and the nature of the imperial court. We discuss the perilous and rushed journey the ambassadors made to Beijing, and what their experience tells us about the nature of diplomacy.
Tonio Andrade is professor of Chinese and global history at Emory University. His books include The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History (Princeton University Press), Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China’s First Great Victory over the West (Princeton University Press, 2011), and How Taiwan Became Chinese: Dutch, Spanish, and Han Colonization in the Seventeenth Century (Columbia University Press).
Little did they know that their embassy would be the last by Westerners in the traditional Chinese court. Their journey is the subject of Professor Tonio Andrade’s The Last Embassy: The Dutch Mission of 1795 and the Forgotten History of Western Encounters with China (Princeton University Press), published earlier this year: a rich and readable volume that tells the story of an event long-neglected by history and historians.
In this interview, Tonio and I talk about the Dutch Embassy, its protagonists and the nature of the imperial court. We discuss the perilous and rushed journey the ambassadors made to Beijing, and what their experience tells us about the nature of diplomacy.
Tonio Andrade is professor of Chinese and global history at Emory University. His books include The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History (Princeton University Press), Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China’s First Great Victory over the West (Princeton University Press, 2011), and How Taiwan Became Chinese: Dutch, Spanish, and Han Colonization in the Seventeenth Century (Columbia University Press).
New Book Announcement: “Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization” by Rosalind Galt
Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization, Rosalind Galt (Columbia University Press, November 2021)
The pontianak, a terrifying female vampire ghost, is a powerful figure in Malay cultures, as loved and feared in Southeast Asia as Dracula is in the West. In animist tradition, she is a woman who has died in childbirth, and her vengeful return upsets gender norms and social hierarchies. The pontianak first appeared on screen in late colonial Singapore in a series of popular films that combine indigenous animism and transnational production with the cultural and political force of the horror genre.
In Alluring Monsters, Rosalind Galt explores how and why the pontianak found new life in postcolonial Southeast Asian film and society. She argues that the figure speaks to a series of intersecting anxieties: about femininity and modernity, globalization and indigeneity, racial and national identities, the relationship of Islam to animism, and heritage and environmental destruction.
The pontianak offers abundant feminist potential, but her disruptive gender politics also unsettle queer and feminist film theories by putting them in dialogue with Malay epistemologies. Reading the pontianak as a precolonial figure of disturbance within postcolonial cultures, Galt reveals the importance of cinema to histories and theories of decolonization.
From the horror films made by Cathay Keris and Shaw Studios in the 1950s and 1960s to contemporary film, television, art, and fiction in Malaysia and Singapore, the pontianak in all her media forms sheds light on how postcolonial identities are both developed and contested. In tracing the entanglements of Malay feminist animisms with postcolonial visual cultures, Alluring Monsters reveals how a “pontianak theory” can reshape understandings of anticolonial aesthetics and world cinema.
Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization
by Rosalind Galt
Columbia University Press, November 2021 (ISBN 9780231201339)
The pontianak, a terrifying female vampire ghost, is a powerful figure in Malay cultures, as loved and feared in Southeast Asia as Dracula is in the West. In animist tradition, she is a woman who has died in childbirth, and her vengeful return upsets gender norms and social hierarchies. The pontianak first appeared on screen in late colonial Singapore in a series of popular films that combine indigenous animism and transnational production with the cultural and political force of the horror genre.
In Alluring Monsters, Rosalind Galt explores how and why the pontianak found new life in postcolonial Southeast Asian film and society. She argues that the figure speaks to a series of intersecting anxieties: about femininity and modernity, globalization and indigeneity, racial and national identities, the relationship of Islam to animism, and heritage and environmental destruction.
The pontianak offers abundant feminist potential, but her disruptive gender politics also unsettle queer and feminist film theories by putting them in dialogue with Malay epistemologies. Reading the pontianak as a precolonial figure of disturbance within postcolonial cultures, Galt reveals the importance of cinema to histories and theories of decolonization.
From the horror films made by Cathay Keris and Shaw Studios in the 1950s and 1960s to contemporary film, television, art, and fiction in Malaysia and Singapore, the pontianak in all her media forms sheds light on how postcolonial identities are both developed and contested. In tracing the entanglements of Malay feminist animisms with postcolonial visual cultures, Alluring Monsters reveals how a “pontianak theory” can reshape understandings of anticolonial aesthetics and world cinema.
Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization
by Rosalind Galt
Columbia University Press, November 2021 (ISBN 9780231201339)
New Book Announcement: “Number One Realist: Bernard Fall and Vietnamese Revolutionary Warfare” by Nathaniel L Moir
Number One Realist: Bernard Fall and Vietnamese Revolutionary Warfare, Nathaniel L Moir (Hurst, Oxford University Press, December 2021)
In a 1965 letter to Newsweek, French writer and academic Bernard Fall (1926–67) staked a claim as the ‘Number One Realist’ on the Vietnam War. This is the first book to study the thought of this overlooked figure, one of the most important experts on counterinsurgency warfare in Indochina. Nathaniel L Moir’s intellectual history analyses Fall’s formative experiences: his service in the French underground and army during the Second World War; his father’s execution by the Germans and his mother’s murder in Auschwitz; and his work as a research analyst at the Nuremberg Trials.
Moir demonstrates how these critical events shaped Fall’s trenchant analysis of Viet Minh-led revolutionary warfare during the French-Indochina War and the early Vietnam War. In the years before conventional American intervention in 1965, Fall argued that—far more than anything in the United States’ military arsenal—resolving conflict in Vietnam would require political strength, willpower, integrity and skill.
Number One Realist: Bernard Fall and Vietnamese Revolutionary Warfare
by Nathaniel L Moir
Hurst/Oxford University Press, December 2021 (USBN 9781787384804)
In a 1965 letter to Newsweek, French writer and academic Bernard Fall (1926–67) staked a claim as the ‘Number One Realist’ on the Vietnam War. This is the first book to study the thought of this overlooked figure, one of the most important experts on counterinsurgency warfare in Indochina. Nathaniel L Moir’s intellectual history analyses Fall’s formative experiences: his service in the French underground and army during the Second World War; his father’s execution by the Germans and his mother’s murder in Auschwitz; and his work as a research analyst at the Nuremberg Trials.
Moir demonstrates how these critical events shaped Fall’s trenchant analysis of Viet Minh-led revolutionary warfare during the French-Indochina War and the early Vietnam War. In the years before conventional American intervention in 1965, Fall argued that—far more than anything in the United States’ military arsenal—resolving conflict in Vietnam would require political strength, willpower, integrity and skill.
Number One Realist: Bernard Fall and Vietnamese Revolutionary Warfare
by Nathaniel L Moir
Hurst/Oxford University Press, December 2021 (USBN 9781787384804)
“War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East” by Gershom Gorenberg
The British Eighth Army’s victory at the Second Battle of El Alamein in October-November 1942 is commonly considered one of the turning points of the Second World War—Winston Churchill called it “the end of the beginning” of the war. Historian and journalist Gershom Gorenberg, however, contends that the true turning point in the North African/Middle East campaign was the First Battle of El Alamein fought in July 1942. And the key to success in that battle was the Allied victory in what Gorenberg calls the “War of Shadows”, a war of codebreakers and spies.
Gorenberg, a columnist for the Washington Post and the author of three books on Israeli history, has dived deep into the once-secret archives of Bletchley Park (the home of British codebreakers during World War II), the UK National Archive, and other British institutions, American archives at Fort Meade, the Hoover Institution, the US National Archives at College Park, and the Franklin Roosevelt Presidential Library, and archival sources in Rome and Israel. He also gained access to the personal papers of some of the Allied codebreakers, and interviewed the children and grandchildren of some of the men and women who fought the War of Shadows.
The result of Gorenberg’s extensive research and legwork is a scintillating history of the secret war waged by mathematicians and spies to infiltrate foreign embassies, seize enemy code books, and, most importantly, break enemy codes. In war, the surest way to defeat an enemy on the battlefield is to know their dispositions and plans in advance by intercepting and deciphering their communications. And the enemy the Allies needed to beat was the famed German Panzer commander Erwin Rommel.
The flaw in the machine was the man. The flaw in the machine’s design was forgetting that people—tired people, stressed people, people who don’t think randomly—would use it.
On 24 July 1939, two months before the outbreak of war, British codebreakers met in the village of Pyry (located in a heavily guarded building in a forest clearing) with Major Maksymilian Ciezki, Rejewski’s boss, who told them how Rejewski had cracked Enigma. That meeting at Pyry, Gorenberg notes, “made everything that Bletchley Park did possible.” When Germany and Soviet Russia attacked Poland in September 1939, Rejewski and his two colleagues fled to the French embassy in Romania, and then made their way to Vichy France where they helped the French underground intercept and transmit German communications to London.
Armed with knowledge of Rommel’s plans, the Eighth Army held at El Alamein. British General Claude Auchinleck later acknowledged that the work of the silent warriors at Bletchley Park was a decisive advantage.
Bletchley Park codebreakers—some with names lost to history like Margaret Storey, John Herivel, Russell Dudley-Smith, and Gordon Welchman—working endless hours, sifting through thousands of messages, deciphering numerous codes—fed Britain’s political and military leaders information that helped military commanders and soldiers stop Rommel and end the Nazi threat to the Middle East. As Churchill said about the brave pilots of the Royal Air Force: so much owed by so many to so few.
Gorenberg, though focusing on Bletchley Park, does not neglect the other silent warriors on both sides who fought in the War of Shadows: the Americans Bonner Fellers and William Friedman, France’s Gustav Bertrand, the Hungarian Lazlo Almasy, the Italian spymaster Manfredi Talamo, and many others. And as British and German forces clashed on the desert battlefields, in Egypt future leaders Gamal Nasser and Anwar Sadat sided with the Germans to throw off British imperial rule, while Palestinian Jews fought with the British to avoid the death camps of Hitler’s Final Solution.
Gorenberg writes that “the battle for the Middle East was one of the critical fronts of World War II [and] much of what determined the outcome of that battle, and therefore of the war as a whole, remained secret.” Historians will undoubtedly continue to debate this. But what is not debatable is Gorenberg’s conclusion that “what happened then shaped the Middle East, and continues to shape it today.”
Francis P Sempa is the author of Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21st Century and America’s Global Role: Essays and Reviews on National Security, Geopolitics and War. His writings appear in The Diplomat, Joint Force Quarterly, the University Bookman and other publications. He is an attorney and an adjunct professor of political science at Wilkes University.
The British Eighth Army’s victory at the Second Battle of El Alamein in October-November 1942 is commonly considered one of the turning points of the Second World War—Winston Churchill called it “the end of the beginning” of the war. Historian and journalist Gershom Gorenberg, however, contends that the true turning point in the North African/Middle East campaign was the First Battle of El Alamein fought in July 1942. And the key to success in that battle was the Allied victory in what Gorenberg calls the “War of Shadows”, a war of codebreakers and spies.
Gorenberg, a columnist for the Washington Post and the author of three books on Israeli history, has dived deep into the once-secret archives of Bletchley Park (the home of British codebreakers during World War II), the UK National Archive, and other British institutions, American archives at Fort Meade, the Hoover Institution, the US National Archives at College Park, and the Franklin Roosevelt Presidential Library, and archival sources in Rome and Israel. He also gained access to the personal papers of some of the Allied codebreakers, and interviewed the children and grandchildren of some of the men and women who fought the War of Shadows.
The result of Gorenberg’s extensive research and legwork is a scintillating history of the secret war waged by mathematicians and spies to infiltrate foreign embassies, seize enemy code books, and, most importantly, break enemy codes. In war, the surest way to defeat an enemy on the battlefield is to know their dispositions and plans in advance by intercepting and deciphering their communications. And the enemy the Allies needed to beat was the famed German Panzer commander Erwin Rommel.
War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East, Gershom Gorenberg (PublicAffairs, January 2021)
During the war, many US military and political leaders considered North Africa, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Middle East as a sideshow to the more important theaters of Northwest Europe, the Russian front, and the Far East. But for Britain, Gorenberg writes, Egypt and the Middle East “were the keystone in the long arch of empire.”
But the reasons for defending Egypt were more than emotional or ideological. They were also strategic. The Middle East was what still gave Britain a hold on the Mediterranean and a chance to threaten Italy and Germany from the south. The Suez Canal and the oil fields of Iraq and southern Persia were prizes that had to be kept from the Axis.
Rommel was winning victory after victory in the desert, in part due to German and Italian codebreakers and spies. North Africa was the first long-promised (to Stalin) Allied military effort designed to confront the Axis powers with an unwinnable two-front war.
Gorenberg shows that the seeds of the Allied victory in the Middle East were planted in the 1930s, when Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski and two of his colleagues in Poland’s prewar Cipher Office cracked the codes of the German Enigma machines that were used to send and receive military communications. The Germans believed that their Enigma machines were safe from codebreaking. Rejewski, Gorenberg notes, cracked the codes in less than three months. “Enigma appeared unconquerable,” Gorenberg explains. “Its fundamental flaw was that human beings built it, and other human beings could see it differently.” Codes that one human mind designs, another human mind can break.
During the war, many US military and political leaders considered North Africa, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Middle East as a sideshow to the more important theaters of Northwest Europe, the Russian front, and the Far East. But for Britain, Gorenberg writes, Egypt and the Middle East “were the keystone in the long arch of empire.”
But the reasons for defending Egypt were more than emotional or ideological. They were also strategic. The Middle East was what still gave Britain a hold on the Mediterranean and a chance to threaten Italy and Germany from the south. The Suez Canal and the oil fields of Iraq and southern Persia were prizes that had to be kept from the Axis.
Rommel was winning victory after victory in the desert, in part due to German and Italian codebreakers and spies. North Africa was the first long-promised (to Stalin) Allied military effort designed to confront the Axis powers with an unwinnable two-front war.
Gorenberg shows that the seeds of the Allied victory in the Middle East were planted in the 1930s, when Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski and two of his colleagues in Poland’s prewar Cipher Office cracked the codes of the German Enigma machines that were used to send and receive military communications. The Germans believed that their Enigma machines were safe from codebreaking. Rejewski, Gorenberg notes, cracked the codes in less than three months. “Enigma appeared unconquerable,” Gorenberg explains. “Its fundamental flaw was that human beings built it, and other human beings could see it differently.” Codes that one human mind designs, another human mind can break.
The flaw in the machine was the man. The flaw in the machine’s design was forgetting that people—tired people, stressed people, people who don’t think randomly—would use it.
On 24 July 1939, two months before the outbreak of war, British codebreakers met in the village of Pyry (located in a heavily guarded building in a forest clearing) with Major Maksymilian Ciezki, Rejewski’s boss, who told them how Rejewski had cracked Enigma. That meeting at Pyry, Gorenberg notes, “made everything that Bletchley Park did possible.” When Germany and Soviet Russia attacked Poland in September 1939, Rejewski and his two colleagues fled to the French embassy in Romania, and then made their way to Vichy France where they helped the French underground intercept and transmit German communications to London.
Armed with knowledge of Rommel’s plans, the Eighth Army held at El Alamein. British General Claude Auchinleck later acknowledged that the work of the silent warriors at Bletchley Park was a decisive advantage.
Bletchley Park codebreakers—some with names lost to history like Margaret Storey, John Herivel, Russell Dudley-Smith, and Gordon Welchman—working endless hours, sifting through thousands of messages, deciphering numerous codes—fed Britain’s political and military leaders information that helped military commanders and soldiers stop Rommel and end the Nazi threat to the Middle East. As Churchill said about the brave pilots of the Royal Air Force: so much owed by so many to so few.
Gorenberg, though focusing on Bletchley Park, does not neglect the other silent warriors on both sides who fought in the War of Shadows: the Americans Bonner Fellers and William Friedman, France’s Gustav Bertrand, the Hungarian Lazlo Almasy, the Italian spymaster Manfredi Talamo, and many others. And as British and German forces clashed on the desert battlefields, in Egypt future leaders Gamal Nasser and Anwar Sadat sided with the Germans to throw off British imperial rule, while Palestinian Jews fought with the British to avoid the death camps of Hitler’s Final Solution.
Gorenberg writes that “the battle for the Middle East was one of the critical fronts of World War II [and] much of what determined the outcome of that battle, and therefore of the war as a whole, remained secret.” Historians will undoubtedly continue to debate this. But what is not debatable is Gorenberg’s conclusion that “what happened then shaped the Middle East, and continues to shape it today.”
Francis P Sempa is the author of Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21st Century and America’s Global Role: Essays and Reviews on National Security, Geopolitics and War. His writings appear in The Diplomat, Joint Force Quarterly, the University Bookman and other publications. He is an attorney and an adjunct professor of political science at Wilkes University.
Podcast with Gershom Gorenberg, author of “War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East”
Gershom Gorenberg (photo: Yasmin Gorenberg)
Nicholas Gordon 11 November 2021 Podcast
The Second Battle of El-Alamein, alongside Stalingrad and Midway, is taught in schools the world over as one of the turning points of the Second World War—or, depending on who you talk to, the turning point.
The Second Battle of El-Alamein, alongside Stalingrad and Midway, is taught in schools the world over as one of the turning points of the Second World War—or, depending on who you talk to, the turning point.
War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East, Gershom Gorenberg (PublicAffairs, January 2021)
But what led to that battle? How did Rommel’s army push so far across North Africa? And why, perchance, did he push one time too many? What were those in Egypt and the Middle East—and not just their British overseers, thinking about the coming invasion. Gershom Gorenberg’s War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East tells the story leading to the British Army holding off the Nazis at El Alamein: a battle not just of soldiers and tanks, but spies and codebreakers.
In this interview, Gershom and I talk about the years preceding the Battle for Egypt: those who broke Enigma, the spies who unlocked their enemies’ secrets, and the troubled relations between nominal allies.
Gershom Gorenberg’s previous books are The Unmaking of Israel (HarperCollins: 2011), The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (Macmillan: 2007), and The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount (Oxford University Press: 2002). He also co-authored The Jerusalem Report’s 1996 biography of Yitzhak Rabin, Shalom Friend, winner of the National Jewish Book Award. Gershom is a columnist for The Washington Post, and has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and in Hebrew for Ha’aretz. He can be followed on Twitter at @GershomG.
But what led to that battle? How did Rommel’s army push so far across North Africa? And why, perchance, did he push one time too many? What were those in Egypt and the Middle East—and not just their British overseers, thinking about the coming invasion. Gershom Gorenberg’s War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East tells the story leading to the British Army holding off the Nazis at El Alamein: a battle not just of soldiers and tanks, but spies and codebreakers.
In this interview, Gershom and I talk about the years preceding the Battle for Egypt: those who broke Enigma, the spies who unlocked their enemies’ secrets, and the troubled relations between nominal allies.
Gershom Gorenberg’s previous books are The Unmaking of Israel (HarperCollins: 2011), The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (Macmillan: 2007), and The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount (Oxford University Press: 2002). He also co-authored The Jerusalem Report’s 1996 biography of Yitzhak Rabin, Shalom Friend, winner of the National Jewish Book Award. Gershom is a columnist for The Washington Post, and has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and in Hebrew for Ha’aretz. He can be followed on Twitter at @GershomG.
“An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent” by Owen Matthews
All lives ultimately end in failure, but Richard Sorge’s shone brightest at twilight. Sorge simultaneously infiltrated the highest levels of Hitler’s and Tokyo’s wartime establishments penetrating both the Nazi Party and the Japanese Court. He warned Stalin of “Operation Barbarossa”—even its very date, 25 June 1941—when Hitler was to abrogate the Nazi-Soviet Pact and send three million troops sweeping across 2900 km of border.
Few individuals outside of the ranks of international leaders, scientists and religious figure—and precious few of even these—can claim they changed the world in which we live. In retrospect, it is clear that Richard Sorge was one such man. He was hung by the Japanese before this was manifest, but his spectre was already haunting the Third Reich.
Stalin had been deafened by his complacency, dismissing Sorge’s early warnings as “false flags” and, as a result, condemning millions to death on the battlefield, in POW camps and through forced labor. But with hindsight, it made Sorge’s reputation, so when he subsequently signalled that Tokyo had finally chosen the southern strategy over the north—that they would strike toward Southeast Asia rather than into Mongolia and the USSR—Stalin was confident enough to strip Siberia of men and machines and send them west. They arrived in Moscow in September and October as the high tide of battle was joined and were instrumental in exacting a defeat that reversed the course of the war and proved to be the beginning of a long end.
Few individuals can claim they changed the world in which we live. Richard Sorge was one such man.
Glyn Ford is a former Euro-MP and author of North Korea on the Brink. His Talking to North Korea: Ending the Nuclear Standoff was published by Pluto in September.
Glyn Ford 3 June 2019 Non-Fiction, Reviews
All lives ultimately end in failure, but Richard Sorge’s shone brightest at twilight. Sorge simultaneously infiltrated the highest levels of Hitler’s and Tokyo’s wartime establishments penetrating both the Nazi Party and the Japanese Court. He warned Stalin of “Operation Barbarossa”—even its very date, 25 June 1941—when Hitler was to abrogate the Nazi-Soviet Pact and send three million troops sweeping across 2900 km of border.
Few individuals outside of the ranks of international leaders, scientists and religious figure—and precious few of even these—can claim they changed the world in which we live. In retrospect, it is clear that Richard Sorge was one such man. He was hung by the Japanese before this was manifest, but his spectre was already haunting the Third Reich.
Stalin had been deafened by his complacency, dismissing Sorge’s early warnings as “false flags” and, as a result, condemning millions to death on the battlefield, in POW camps and through forced labor. But with hindsight, it made Sorge’s reputation, so when he subsequently signalled that Tokyo had finally chosen the southern strategy over the north—that they would strike toward Southeast Asia rather than into Mongolia and the USSR—Stalin was confident enough to strip Siberia of men and machines and send them west. They arrived in Moscow in September and October as the high tide of battle was joined and were instrumental in exacting a defeat that reversed the course of the war and proved to be the beginning of a long end.
Few individuals can claim they changed the world in which we live. Richard Sorge was one such man.
An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent, Owen Matthews (Bloomsbury, March 2019)
Owen Matthews has rescued Soviet espionage from the prison of the Cambridge Five, and taken it from the tedious and mundane to the intrepid and dauntless with an exhilarating mix of fast women, motorbikes and alcohol.
Sorge was the son of a middle-class Russian mother and German father brought up in Baku. There was a revolutionary peppering in his genes. His great uncle had been Secretary General of the First International and a correspondent of Marx and Engels.
Radicalized by the massacres of innocents on the barbed wire entanglements of the First World War, Sorge spent the early post-war years chasing and failing to find the German revolution. He was lucky enough in 1919 to arrive too late for Berlin’s slaughter of the Spartacists, slipped through the aftermath of the splintered resistance to the Kapp putsch of 1920 and on into the ranks of “M. Apparat”, the armed wing of the German Communist Party.
This led to roles as professional agitator and amateur academic. These, and ancestry, saw him talent-spotted by Comintern and recruited in 1924 to work for the Political Bureau in international communism’s Moscow HQ. He briefly served as Bukharin’s secretary. By 1927 he had switched to Comintern Intelligence covering Western Europe. It was this that may have saved him. When all around were being purged and executed, it looked as if he was about to share their fate. In 1929 he was expelled from Comintern. This was no death sentence, but a diversion to hide his transfer to military intelligence as part of the Fourth Department of the Red Army.
An Impeccable Spy tells us that Sorge was assigned to Shanghai with the cover of academic and journalist working for Frankfurter Zeitung. Using the sinologist Karl August Wittfogel—future author of Oriental Despotism—he parlayed friendship for “letters of introduction”. Within weeks of his arrival he was a confidante of Shanghai’s expatriate Nazis, and not long after, via a brief love affair with American communist Agnes Smedley, he had access to the thinking and cadres of the Chinese Communist Party.
When he was summoned back to Moscow in 1933, his had been the only one of serial spy missions in China to have been an unqualified success. No good turn goes unpunished. Sorge’s next assignment was to be Tokyo where no Soviet “illegals” had ever successfully been put in place.
Using his cover of Shanghai Nazis as his launchpad, he quickly cast a spell over Tokyo’s German Ambassador Ott and his retinue. He used some of his Japanese contacts from China to weedle his way into imperial court circles. With his intelligence and breadth of contacts he was soon acting as an adviser to the leaderships in Berlin and Tokyo while delivering their secrets to Moscow, providing insightful analyses in his newspaper columns and drinking his “friends” under the table while sequentially seducing their wives.
Sorge was a flawed individual, but an impeccable spy—brave, brilliant and relentless.
The crux of Sorge’s task was to find out whether Japan was going to attack the Soviet Union again. In 1905, they had seized Port Arthur and destroyed the Russian Fleet at the Battle of Tsushima. In 1910 they took Korea from under the noses of Moscow and in 1918 in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution they, as part of the interventionist alliance along the British and Americans, occupied Siberia as far as Lake Baikal. Most of this territory was eventually surrendered, although they had kept South Sakhalin (Karafuto) as a memento. In Tokyo, the Army wanted to go North and the Navy South. Even after the summer of 1939, when Georgy Zhukov gave the Japanese Kwangtung Army a “bloody nose” at the Battle of Nomonhan they persisted. After “Barbarossa” started to bog down, the Army had Hitler’s support as he urged his Japanese Allies—via the September 1940 Tripartite Pact—to open a second front against the Soviets.
It was Washington that applied the brakes, which sealed the fate of Pearl Harbor. After Japan’s virtual bloodless seizure of French Indo-China in late July, the US imposed an oil embargo on Tokyo and froze their banking assets.
Sorge was able to discover Japan was left with only six months fuel. Now Tokyo had to decide and decide quickly. August 1941 was the most dangerous time for Stalin. In the end however much the Japanese Army wanted to invade the USSR, the US had ensured it didn’t have the petrol. Tokyo was instead to strike south seeking Sumatra’s oil! When Sorge informed Moscow Plan North had been abandoned there was a lurch in history as more than half of Siberia’s military entrained for Moscow.
This was Sorge’s final act. The Japanese had been closing in on the clandestine radio Sorge’s group was using to transmit reports to Moscow, and some of the outer ring of his nest of spies. A routine investigation of Japanese ex-communists saw the walls come tumbling down. Sorge was arrested on 19 October, sentenced to death on 29 September 1943 and on the 7 November—the 34th anniversary of the Great October Revolution—he died proclaiming: “The Red Army! The International Communist Party! The Soviet Communist Party!”
An Impeccable Spy is based on sets of Russian archives previously unavailable but which Matthews has mined. It’s difficult to imagine who could have done more to introduce Sorge to the West. He belatedly became a hero in the late Soviet Union when it was facing extinction in the 1970s and ’80s. Matthews concludes, “Sorge was a flawed individual, but an impeccable spy—brave, brilliant and relentless.” It was his tragedy that his masters were venal cowards who abandoned him to his fate.
Owen Matthews has rescued Soviet espionage from the prison of the Cambridge Five, and taken it from the tedious and mundane to the intrepid and dauntless with an exhilarating mix of fast women, motorbikes and alcohol.
Sorge was the son of a middle-class Russian mother and German father brought up in Baku. There was a revolutionary peppering in his genes. His great uncle had been Secretary General of the First International and a correspondent of Marx and Engels.
Radicalized by the massacres of innocents on the barbed wire entanglements of the First World War, Sorge spent the early post-war years chasing and failing to find the German revolution. He was lucky enough in 1919 to arrive too late for Berlin’s slaughter of the Spartacists, slipped through the aftermath of the splintered resistance to the Kapp putsch of 1920 and on into the ranks of “M. Apparat”, the armed wing of the German Communist Party.
This led to roles as professional agitator and amateur academic. These, and ancestry, saw him talent-spotted by Comintern and recruited in 1924 to work for the Political Bureau in international communism’s Moscow HQ. He briefly served as Bukharin’s secretary. By 1927 he had switched to Comintern Intelligence covering Western Europe. It was this that may have saved him. When all around were being purged and executed, it looked as if he was about to share their fate. In 1929 he was expelled from Comintern. This was no death sentence, but a diversion to hide his transfer to military intelligence as part of the Fourth Department of the Red Army.
An Impeccable Spy tells us that Sorge was assigned to Shanghai with the cover of academic and journalist working for Frankfurter Zeitung. Using the sinologist Karl August Wittfogel—future author of Oriental Despotism—he parlayed friendship for “letters of introduction”. Within weeks of his arrival he was a confidante of Shanghai’s expatriate Nazis, and not long after, via a brief love affair with American communist Agnes Smedley, he had access to the thinking and cadres of the Chinese Communist Party.
When he was summoned back to Moscow in 1933, his had been the only one of serial spy missions in China to have been an unqualified success. No good turn goes unpunished. Sorge’s next assignment was to be Tokyo where no Soviet “illegals” had ever successfully been put in place.
Using his cover of Shanghai Nazis as his launchpad, he quickly cast a spell over Tokyo’s German Ambassador Ott and his retinue. He used some of his Japanese contacts from China to weedle his way into imperial court circles. With his intelligence and breadth of contacts he was soon acting as an adviser to the leaderships in Berlin and Tokyo while delivering their secrets to Moscow, providing insightful analyses in his newspaper columns and drinking his “friends” under the table while sequentially seducing their wives.
Sorge was a flawed individual, but an impeccable spy—brave, brilliant and relentless.
The crux of Sorge’s task was to find out whether Japan was going to attack the Soviet Union again. In 1905, they had seized Port Arthur and destroyed the Russian Fleet at the Battle of Tsushima. In 1910 they took Korea from under the noses of Moscow and in 1918 in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution they, as part of the interventionist alliance along the British and Americans, occupied Siberia as far as Lake Baikal. Most of this territory was eventually surrendered, although they had kept South Sakhalin (Karafuto) as a memento. In Tokyo, the Army wanted to go North and the Navy South. Even after the summer of 1939, when Georgy Zhukov gave the Japanese Kwangtung Army a “bloody nose” at the Battle of Nomonhan they persisted. After “Barbarossa” started to bog down, the Army had Hitler’s support as he urged his Japanese Allies—via the September 1940 Tripartite Pact—to open a second front against the Soviets.
It was Washington that applied the brakes, which sealed the fate of Pearl Harbor. After Japan’s virtual bloodless seizure of French Indo-China in late July, the US imposed an oil embargo on Tokyo and froze their banking assets.
Sorge was able to discover Japan was left with only six months fuel. Now Tokyo had to decide and decide quickly. August 1941 was the most dangerous time for Stalin. In the end however much the Japanese Army wanted to invade the USSR, the US had ensured it didn’t have the petrol. Tokyo was instead to strike south seeking Sumatra’s oil! When Sorge informed Moscow Plan North had been abandoned there was a lurch in history as more than half of Siberia’s military entrained for Moscow.
This was Sorge’s final act. The Japanese had been closing in on the clandestine radio Sorge’s group was using to transmit reports to Moscow, and some of the outer ring of his nest of spies. A routine investigation of Japanese ex-communists saw the walls come tumbling down. Sorge was arrested on 19 October, sentenced to death on 29 September 1943 and on the 7 November—the 34th anniversary of the Great October Revolution—he died proclaiming: “The Red Army! The International Communist Party! The Soviet Communist Party!”
An Impeccable Spy is based on sets of Russian archives previously unavailable but which Matthews has mined. It’s difficult to imagine who could have done more to introduce Sorge to the West. He belatedly became a hero in the late Soviet Union when it was facing extinction in the 1970s and ’80s. Matthews concludes, “Sorge was a flawed individual, but an impeccable spy—brave, brilliant and relentless.” It was his tragedy that his masters were venal cowards who abandoned him to his fate.
Glyn Ford is a former Euro-MP and author of North Korea on the Brink. His Talking to North Korea: Ending the Nuclear Standoff was published by Pluto in September.
Glyn Ford 3 June 2019 Non-Fiction, Reviews
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