Author: Ophelia Benson

I saw something unsettling (to put it mildly) on tv last night. It’s about the Burma railway, and the horrible conditions under which it was built by forced labour. I knew about it, but not enough; not nearly enough. I especially didn’t know that it was built not only by prisoners of war but also by (as the show called them) Asians – simply conscripted people from South India, Malaya, Thailand and other places. Their death rate was much worse than that of the prisoners, which was bad enough.

There was one memorable segment where the film maker and the Indian engineer who accompanies him hike laboriously through dense jungle to arrive at the top of what is revealed to be a constructed embankment. The FM gets the engineer to climb down the embankment. The engineer takes only a few struggling steps down before saying how difficult it is; the FM says ‘And remember most of them were barefoot.’ ‘They had no boots?’ the engineer says. ‘Most of them had no boots.’ The engineer struggles all the way down; the FM calls down to him ‘Now find a 20 pound rock and carry it up.’ The engineer is very miserable, but finds this heavy rock (which stands for the basket of soil the workers had to carry up) and sets off; he falls down almost at once. With immense effort, panting, grunting, wretched, he finally manages it. The FM calculates the length and volume of the embankment and the number of baskets needed to build the embankment then brightly says ‘Now you need to do that only 12 million more times.’ One trip was a nightmare, and the engineer was fully dressed, rested, well fed, and not ill or injured; furthermore it wasn’t monsoon season. The people who did the work for real were all starving, exhausted, injured, ill, underclothed, and much of the time it was monsoon season. It’s hard to imagine.

Though records are sketchy, approximately 61,000 Allied prisoners of war are believed to have labored on the railway, including 30,000 British, 18,000 Dutch, 13,000 Australian, and 700 American soldiers. An estimated 16,000 of those troops died, many of them from diseases like cholera, beri beri, malaria, and typhoid, most during an intensified period of construction known as “speedo” that commenced in January 1943. Another 200,000 Asian laborers, mostly Thai, were forced to work on the railway. More than 80,000 lost their lives.

First thing today I googled Burma railway.

The construction of the Burma Railway is only one of many major war crimes committed by Japan in Asia during the war. It is regarded as a major event in the “Asian Holocaust”, during which millions of civilians and POWs were killed by Japanese personnel.

I didn’t know there was an Asian Holocaust – at least I didn’t know it was called that, and I didn’t realize how bad it was outside China. Something else I need to know more about. The narrator of the tv show did say the death rate among the Asians is not as well known (presumably in the West) as that of the prisoners of war. Well clearly it should be. And what about those Japanese textbooks…

You did have a look at the work of Carolyn Guertin when I posted the link in News, right? Do rush to have a read if you haven’t – it’s – what shall I say – it’s quantum. That’s what it is, it’s quantum.

Quantum feminist works make no attempt to reconcile this dislocation between networked nodes and their gaps in space-time. Instead, they foreground and use this aspect, highlighting the disjunctures of the subject’s position as she is depicted and as she voyages through the text…In her essay “The Roots of Nonlinearity,” hypertextualist Christie Sheffield Sanford says that modern physics has erased the concept of absolutes in time and space and that this is evident in the texts of the new media as well. She uses indeterminacy theorist Werner Heisenberg to support her theories…

Well of course she does. Who doesn’t? Heisenberg, indeterminacy, quantum, absolutes in time and space and texts of new media; it’s all basically the same thing. Right? Right.

David Thompson comments here. And the author herself comments on this post at the Dawkins site (last comment on the page, number 50). She gives the predictable, and very irritating, defense.

Do I really need to point out that this was a dissertation written for specialists working in my field and not a work for general publication? If it were the latter, it would indeed be a different text and worthy of critique – although not this kind.

Nope. What you need to point out is what ‘quantum feminist works’ might be; what you need to point out is why you use the word ‘quantum’ to mean any old thing you feel like; what you need to point out is why you shelter behind your own specialisthood but don’t scruple to help yourself to the vocabulary of physics; what you need to point out is what is ‘specialist’ about misusing technical language for purposes of ornamenting some uninspiring observations about following hyperlinks.

Guertin has a Teaching Philosophy.

Cyberfeminisms writ large are what I call ‘quantum feminisms,’ lived as much in the scientific world as in the literary, personal as much as political. Quantum feminisms are situated knowledges interpolated by experience and embodied presence and, most importantly, are personal philosophies. As a potential pedagogical model, quantum feminisms allow me to use their own theoretical and scientific principles to produce a student-centred environment…

What she calls ‘quantum feminisms’ – why? Why not call them amyotrophic feminisms? Why not call them fermionic condensate feminisms? Why not call them Huey Dewey and Louie feminisms? Why quantum? Because – erm – it impresses the credulous? That’s my guess. My quantum guess.

We got in a discussion in comments on Just the questions, ma’am about whether it is reasonable to demand respect, which entailed a discussion of what respect is and what people mean by it. I agreed that it’s reasonable enough to demand a minimal version of respect, but I pointed out 1) that people often mean something very maximal by the word and 2) that that fact is often disguised because the minimal version is available. So I was pleased, while re-reading Simon Backburn’s ‘Religion and Respect’ to see this:

‘Respect’, of course is a tricky term. I may respect your gardening by just letting you get on with it. Or, I may respect it by admiring it and regarding it as a superior way to garden. The word seems to span a spectrum from simply not interfering, passing by on the other side, through admiration, right up to reverence and deference. This makes it uniquely well-placed for ideological purposes. People may start out by insisting on respect in the minimal sense, and in a generally liberal world they may not find it too difficult to obtain it. But then what we might call respect creep sets in, where the request for minimal toleration turns into a demand for more substantial respect, such as fellow-feeling, or esteem, and finally deference and reverence. In the limit, unless you let me take over your mind and your life, you are not showing proper respect for my religious or ideological convictions. We can respect, in the minimal sense of tolerating, those who hold false beliefs. We can pass by on the other side. We need not be concerned to change them, and in a liberal society we do not seek to suppress them or silence them. But once we are convinced that a belief is false, or even just that it is irrational, we cannot respect in any thicker sense those who hold it—not on account of their holding it. We may respect them for all sorts of other qualities, but not that one.

This is exactly what I was (and am) claiming.

Phrases like ‘equal concern and respect’ trip off the tongue. But in any more than the most minimal sense of ‘deserving equal protection of the law’ or equal toleration, there are, quite properly, gradations of respect. We respect skill, ability, judgement, and experience. The opinion of someone who has demonstrated these qualities is more important to us than the opinion of a newcomer, or someone who is foolish and wild in his reasonings. We defer to some people more than we defer to others, and this deference is a measure of respect.

Same again. And to ‘demand’ the upper level of the gradation is to demand something that can’t be given as a mere act of will or generosity, and that thus is not ‘respect’ in the sense intended; therefore it is futile to demand it. I can’t demand that people respect me as a mountaineer, because I’m not one. If I do demand that and people decide to humour me, what they’re giving me is not respect. Thus my demand falls to the ground like a broken moth, forceless.

Here’s a good juxtaposition which Allen Esterson pointed out to me:

“Our movement is peaceful,” he said. “The government too should stay calm. We’ve warned the government that if it ever tried to suppress us by force, thousands of students of madrassas will retaliate with suicide attacks.”

Peaceful indeed. Quaker-like. Peaceful as a pond on a windless afternoon in August.

How’s that again?

Parents of some of the girls studying at a controversial religious school in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, have voiced concern for their safety. Their fears rose after an ultimatum from madrassa leaders that Sharia law be enforced in the country. The school and adjoining mosque are accused of promoting intolerance and taking the law into their own hands. On Sunday, the chief cleric issued a fatwa against a female minister who had been pictured hugging a man. The madrassa has frequently been in the news in recent months. In February, armed students prevented the authorities from demolishing an illegally constructed mosque, and occupied a nearby children’s library. Last month they abducted a woman they accused of running a brothel, holding her captive for two days.

Kids today eh. But that’s not the ‘say what?’ part. This is:

Parents of some of the girls studying* at the Jamia Hafsa say they are worried by recent events, but do not want to harm their daughters’ education.

Their daughters’ what? Their daughters’ what? What on earth makes the parents think what the daughters are getting at the madrassa is an education? What part of occupying a children’s library or abducting and imprisoning a woman sounds educational to them? What part of going outside in black bags to brandish bamboo poles at enemies looks educational to them? What do they take education to be, exactly? What is it that they don’t want to harm? The aggression? The fanaticism? The stupidity?

*Studying? Studying? What part of kidnapping, threatening, and occupying looks like studying to the BBC?