Cultuur & Historie in het Nieuws #9

quote:

CIA erkent rol staatsgreep Iran 1953

maandag 19 augustus 2013 om 19u12

De Amerikaanse inlichtingendienst CIA heeft voor de eerste keer officieel toegegeven betrokken te zijn geweest bij de staatsgreep in Iran in 1953.

quote:

Indrukwekkend 17e-eeuws roer duikt op na 400 jaar

wo 21/08/2013 - 15:05 Yannick Drossaert

Britse archeologen van de universiteit van Bournemouth hebben een rijkelijk versierd roer, dat meer dan 400 jaar lang op de zeebodem van het Kanaal lag, bovengehaald. Het gevaarte is 8,5 meter lang, weegt 3,5 ton en toont het in hout gegraveerde gezicht van een man met een snor. Het roer maakt deel uit van het zogenaamde Swash Channel Wreck, een schip van vermoedelijk Nederlandse origine dat in het begin van de 17e eeuw gezonken is.

quote:

China’s New Cultural Counter-Revolution

In 1956, Chuck Berry, the iconic rock star, first sang his smash hit: “Roll Over Beethoven.” The second verse goes as follows:

You know, my temperature’s risin’
The jukebox’s blowin’ a fuse.
My heart’s beatin’ rhythm
And my soul keeps a-singin’ the blues.
Roll over Beethoven and tell Tchaikowsky the news.

The 1950s were the first decade after the Second World War had ended. The onset of the iconoclastic rock-and-roll music brought a musical-cultural revolution against the schmaltzy melodies of earlier decades. (My sister and I were forbidden to play Elvis Presley records!)

Ten years after Chuck Berry first recorded “Roll Over Beethoven,” in 1966, another cultural revolution broke out. This time, it happened in the People’s Republic of China.

The episode lasted ten years, until Mao Zedong’s death, and was officially known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

The Cultural Revolution was directed principally at urbanites, elites, intellectuals and party cadres who were denounced for having abandoned the “mass line” and forsaken “the people.”

They were forced to engage in humiliating self-criticism and were then “sent down” (xiafang) from urban areas to the countryside. There they would clean pigsties and participate in the backbreaking work of the peasants.

This was also a time when China’s universities were in turmoil, run by the Red Guards. Students were enrolled not because they were expert in any particular discipline, but because they were “red.”

Hence the slogan, “Better Red than Expert.” Being red was to be able to recite the greatest possible number of quotations from Mao’s Little Red Book.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was founded in Shanghai in 1921 and, under the guidance of Moscow, initially followed an orthodox ideological line.

However, in April 1927 the CCP suffered a rout at the hands of the Kuomintang (KMT) under Chiang Kai-shek and consequently was forced to flee the cities for the countryside.

A month earlier, in March 1927, Mao had published his seminal work, “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan.” The document set out the “importance of the peasant problem” and that henceforth the peasantry, not the proletariat, would be the “vanguards” of the Chinese communist revolution.

Another slogan that vociferously emerged during the Cultural Revolution was the “three-anti campaigns.” The first campaign was anti-Lin Biao, Mao’s erstwhile number two, who was accused of seeking to usurp power.

Lin died in 1971 in a plane crash in Mongolia, while — according to the “official” version of events — trying to escape to Moscow, with which Beijing was on bad terms ever since the Sino-Soviet split of 1960.

The second campaign was anti-Confucius. In fact, Confucius and his teachings had been under quite virulent attack by Chinese modernizers, notably in what was called the 1919 May Fourth Movement. It was argued that Confucianism was the cause of China’s backwardness.

Confucianism seeks to achieve social harmony through a rigorous adhesion to the Five Basic Relationships, the first four of which (sovereign-subject, father-son, elder-brother-younger-brother, and husband-wife) are absolute vertical hierarchical relationships, with only the fifth (friend-friend) equal and horizontal.

Respect for elders and especially filial piety feature as absolute cardinal principles.

A key endeavor of the anti-Confucius campaign during the Cultural Revolution was to have sons denounce, indeed often beat and torture, their fathers.

And the third campaign of the Cultural Revolution was anti-Beethoven!

Beethoven was seen as the symbol of decadent bourgeois western culture, in contrast to the great Chinese proletarian revolutionary culture, the champion of which was Mao’s wife, the former actress Jiang Qing.

How about today?

China has been witnessing the greatest rural-urban migration not only that the world has ever witnessed, but could ever have imagined. Already, the urban population in China is greater than the rural population.

The current plan is that by 2025 there should be another 250 million urban migrants, which comes to an average of 21 million moving each year, equivalent to the total population of Australia!

This arises not solely, by any means, from economic forces. It is now also part of the CCP’s ideology — or dream! Its vision is one of a China that is a modern, urban, industrialised country and not one of poor backward peasants!

As to Confucianism, its official revival has been going on for a few years. This can be seen, among other things, in the proliferation of “Confucius Institutes” around the world, through which Beijing hopes to spread its soft power.

But there is no starker example of Confucianist fundamentalism than in the exhortations — backed up by law — that children should look after and regularly visit their aging parents. Patricide is out, filial piety is back.

Filial piety, however, is easier when there are a lot of filii about — but when, as a result of the one child policy and massive landflight, there is a single filius, things are more difficult.

With the rapid aging of the Chinese population, a pension and healthcare crisis could be looming in the form of a major social disaster.

Younger generations, however, do not necessarily see things the Confucianist way.

In any case, with all the internal migrations in China over recent decades visiting parents living in distant provinces is not that easy. Thus, the CCP is now actively promoting urban and Confucianist values.

As to Beethoven, well, he (along with Tchaikovsky) can now roll back. There is a deep love in China for Western classical music that is manifested in many ways.

There is the new opera house in Beijing designed by the French architect Paul Andreu, which was inaugurated in December 2007. There is the Beijing International Music Festival for youth from throughout the world, held annually in the last two weeks in August since 2004.

The Chinese violinist Lang Lang played at the special Bastille Day (July 14th) public concert in front of the Eiffel Tower this year.

While exact figures are hard to come by, estimates are that some 50 million Chinese children study the piano.

For adults, there is the annual Beijing Music Festival held in October, which some compare to Salzburg. The opening concert last year was Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 in E Flat major (aka the “Symphony of a Thousand”), played by the China Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Swiss conductor Charles Dutoit.

And in Qingdao, there is a magnificent, indeed monumental, monument to Ludwig van Beethoven. Qingdao, famous for its production of beer, had been a German sphere of influence during the Western imperialist period.

This is just one more illustration of the fact that no country in the history of humanity has undergone in such a short period such profound topsy-turvy transformations.

quote:

Het pact tussen Hollywood en de nazi's

22/09/2013 om 09:42 - Bijgewerkt om 09:40

Hebben de filmstudio's in Hollywood gecollaboreerd met de nazi's? De Australische filmhistoricus Ben Urwand brengt met zijn omstreden studie een vergeten hoofdstuk uit de Amerikaanse filmgeschiedenis voor het voetlicht.

quote:

"Oorlog zaaide de kiemen van wereldrijken, bureaucratie en godsdienst"

di 24/09/2013 - 15:22 Alexander Verstraete

Het ontstaan en het succes van complexe sociale constructies als godsdienst, bureaucratie en heuse wereldrijken in de oudheid en de middeleeuwen vallen grotendeels toe te schrijven aan oorlogsvoering. Dat blijkt uit een studie uitgevoerd aan de universiteit van Connecticut in de VS. Een theoretisch model bleek voor 65% het verloop van de geschiedenis te voorspellen.

quote:

Myanmar’s Phantom Capital

Why did Myanmar’s generals build a new capital in the middle of nowhere?

By David Logan, September 28, 2013

On February 5, 2005, so the story goes, Myanmar’s ruling generals told the country’s civil servants to pack their bags.

They would have to leave in the morning for their new home and the country’s new capital, Naypyidaw.

Spread over more than 2,700 square miles, Myanmar’s new capital Naypyidaw was built on empty grassland 450 miles north of the old capital of Yangon.

In a country where children can still be seen scavenging in roadside garbage heaps, the new capital is a testament to excess. It features unheard of luxuries such as 24-hour power, landscaped gardens, golf courses, single-family villas and a zoo showcasing penguins.

It’s impossible to know exactly how much the new capital cost, but most estimates put it around $5 billion. At the time of the official move, the country’s per capita income was, by some reports, only $280 a year.

Myanmar is not the first modern state to change capitals. In fact, decisions by countries to move capital cities, while often dramatic, are not uncommon.

Shifting capitals

Since World War I, there have been 17 capital moves, roughly one move every five to six years. The countries are diverse in geography, demographics and politics—Russia, Australia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Rwanda, Chile and Kazakhstan among them.

And Naypyidaw is certainly not the only example of an unorthodox capital.

While Pretoria is South Africa’s administrative center and host to foreign embassies, the country actually has three capitals. The executive branch is based in Pretoria, the legislative branch in Cape Town and the judicial branch in Bloemfontein.

When the Finnish president relocates every summer from Helsinki to the summer residence in the city of Naantali, presidential government sessions move as well.

But Myanmar’s Naypyidaw does represent one of the more extreme and, on the surface, inexplicable of all capital movements in modern times.

Sometimes, states will relocate their capitals to forge national unity or calm geographic or ethnic tensions.

In 1865, the capital of New Zealand moved from northern Auckland to Wellington, located at the very southern tip of New Zealand’s northern island. The move was an attempt to forestall a possible bid for independence by the southern island, which contained most of the nation’s gold deposits.

In 1991, Nigeria moved its capital from the coastal Lagos to inland Abuja. The key point was that it is located between the country’s Muslim north and Christian south.

In the case of Naypyidaw, there was a clear attempt at nation-building and shoring up the legitimacy of a military regime that enjoyed little popular support.

One of the best examples of the city’s grandiosity is the Uppatasanti Pagoda, which rises from the northern edge of the city. The pagoda is a replica of Yangon’s famed Shhwedagon Pagoda, the most revered Buddhist site in all of Myanmar.

The allure of white elephants

Visible just below the corner of the Uppatasanti Pagoda is a small enclosure holding perhaps one of Myanmar’s most valuable items – white elephants.

In the summer of 2010, the regime announced the discovery of the two white elephants. Their status historically bordered on the divine and was often treated as a sign of strength and prosperity.

The allure of the white elephant was so great that, in the 16th century, the kingdom of Burma waged war with the kingdom of Siam. The point of contention was which ruler could rightly claim the disputed title “Lord of the White Elephant.”

For an autocratic regime ruling a nation steeped in a tradition of symbolism, the sudden appearance of these fabled creatures was a godsend.

But that did not change some very practical problems In particular. There seems to be no one present in Naypyidaw to witness all the nationalistic excesses. Despite being one of the 10 fastest growing cities in the world, there appear to be no people in Naypyidaw.

The only real sign of life are the sporadic construction crews building roads – by hand.

While Yangon’s famous Shwedagon Pagoda attracts thousands of tourists and pilgrims everyday, Naypyidaw’s cheap imposter seems to attract visitors by the mere dozens.

Why Did They Do It?

There may be a much more prosaic explanation for why some governments, including the one in Myanmar, opt to move their capitals. It is to escape their own people.

Just think of recent bouts of large-scale civic protest across the world, from the Arab Spring to more recent upheaval in Bangladesh, Turkey and Brazil.

Such protests typically erupt in prominent public spaces. The logic seems straightforward: move the seat of government from proximity to large public spaces and you remove – or at least lessen – the threat of a destabilizing demonstration.

In Yangon, the former capital of Myanmar, the Shwedagon Pagoda long served as a focal point for political demonstrations.

In the 1940s, General Aung San, the father of modern-day political activist Aung San Suu Kyi, used it to deliver rousing indictments against British colonial rule, calling for immediate independence.

In 1988, in the midst of civil protests representing the greatest threat to the military regime to date, Aung San Suu Kyi was there to address a throng of nearly half a million.

When nationwide demonstrations broke out in Myanmar in September 2007, tens of thousands of Buddhist monks and nuns marched on the pagoda.

To see whether there is any broader logic to it all, Filipe Campante, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, co-authored a study to examine the relationship between population distribution and governance.

In authoritarian governments, the more isolated a capital was from the country’s population, the worse the country’s quality of governance.

Insecure autocratic regimes will isolate themselves for protection. That, in turn, can make political elites more secure in engaging in rent-seeking behaviors, resulting in a vicious cycle.

In only two of the 17 capital city moves studied was the population of the new capital larger than that of the previous one.

Many of the moves are striking for just how much smaller the new capital city is compared to the old one. In the case of Myanmar, the capital moved from a city of almost 5 million, roughly 10% of the entire population of the country, to a new city built from nothing with 900,000 people – or under 2% of the entire country.

And yet the case of Myanmar may point to the opposite conclusion. The country has actually liberalized its polity. Surprisingly, the move to Naypyidaw and the greater insularity it afforded may have opened a space for Myanmar’s political reforms of recent years.

For some, the lessons of the Arab Spring and the fall of Egypt’s Mubarak, Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Yemen’s Saleh were that there is no middle ground in response to popular protests. Limited reforms, whether hollow or genuine, are seen as only emboldening protesters and accelerating the move toward one’s own overthrow.

But Myanmar’s generals, buoyed by a sense of physical and psychological security offered by the isolated capital, may have seen an opportunity to institute limited reforms. That same liberalization may benefit them economically, while still avoiding the toppling that befell other non-democratic regimes.

The government may have felt more protected by its geographic insulation and therefore more confident in opening up some policy space without the same fear of instability as would have been the case before the capital city move.

quote:

Op zondag 15 september 2013 22:17 schreef Cobra4 het volgende:
Texelse schipper ontdekt onderzeeboot uit WO1

-knip-

quote:

Vikingsamenleving complexer dan gedacht

wo 02/10/2013 - 14:37 Pieterjan Huyghebaert

Vikings hadden volgens nieuw onderzoek een zeer complexe sociale structuur. Vergeet dus het stereotiepe beeld van de gewelddadige wilden die vanuit het noorden kwamen, dorpen plunderden en vrouwen verkrachtten.
Academici van de universiteit van Coventry in Groot-Brittannië hebben ontdekt dat de Vikingsamenleving veel complexer was dan tot nog toe gedacht werd. Wiskundigen van de universiteit hebben eeuwenoude IJslandse manuscripten onderworpen aan een zeer diepgaande mathematische en statistische analyse die een heel nieuw licht werpt op de Vikingsamenleving.

In de studie die is gepubliceerd in het European Physical Journal, vragen de onderzoekers zich af of de ingewikkelde sociale structuren die voorkomen in eeuwenoude IJslandse sagen iets zeggen over de structuur van de Vikingsamenleving van die tijd. In het totaal hebben de vorsers 18 IJslandse sagen onderzocht uit de 9e tot 11e eeuw. In de sagen komen ruim 1.500 personages voor.

De meeste IJslandse sagen (Íslendingasögur) komen uit het zogenoemde Sagen-tijdperk (söguöld). Zo wordt de periode tussen het einde van de 9e eeuw en de vroege 11e eeuw genoemd in IJsland. De interactie tussen de personages onderling toont aan dat de Vikingsamenleving wellicht een pak complexer was dan doorgaans wordt gedacht. De vaststellingen spreken het stereotiepe beeld van de bloeddorstige wilde Viking tegen.

Er zijn overigens wel meer stereotypen over de Vikings die niet kloppen. Zo zijn ook de zogenoemde Vikinghelmen met hoornen een fabeltje. Dergelijke helmen werden wellicht wel gebruikt bij ceremonies, maar zouden te log en te zwaar geweest zijn voor op het slagveld. De meeste foute stereotypen zijn ontstaan door West-Europese geschiedschrijvers die wel eens een loopje namen met de waarheid.

quote:

Chinese investeerder wil Crystal Palace herbouwen

Door Historiek zaterdag 5 oktober 2013

Er zijn plannen om het beroemde Crystal Palace in Londen te herbouwen. Een Chinese investeerder heeft 500 miljoen pond uitgetrokken voor de herbouw van het bijzondere bouwwerk.

quote:

Zeeuws Archief toont tocht van slavenschip op website

MIDDELBURG - Via de website van het Zeeuws Archief is vanaf woensdag te zien hoe de dagen verliepen op een Zeeuws slavenschip, ruim 250 jaar geleden. Het Zeeuws Archief beschikt over een volledig archief van de slavernij.
Daaronder zit ook een reisverslag van de reis ie het schip 'd'Eenigheid' maakte in 1761. Iedere dag krijgt de bezoeker via de website van het Zeeuws Archief inzage in de aantekeningen van bijvoorbeeld de stuurman en de scheepsarts. Nauwkeurig is te volgen waar de slaven werden gekocht en hoeveel er voor ze werd betaald.

quote:

Boeken van Tropeninstituut blijven behouden

De bibliotheekcollectie van het Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen (KIT) in Amsterdam zal niet verdwijnen. Een deel van de stukken komt in beheer bij de Universiteit Leiden. Het overige deel van de collectie gaat naar Urk en het Vredespaleis in Den Haag. .

Dat meldde minister Jet Bussemaker (Cultuur) donderdag in antwoord op Kamervragen. Het deel van de boeken dat naar Leiden gaat, is volgens haar van bijzondere cultuurhistorische waarde. Volgens de minister heeft ze een publieke zorgplicht voor dit deel van de collectie en handelt ze daar ook naar.

Het medische deel van de collectie gaat naar het Kennis- en Documentatiecentrum voor Medische Geschiedenis in Urk. Nog eens 4000 boeken over vrede en veiligheid gaan naar het Vredespaleis.

quote:

30,000 year old Brazilian artifacts throw wrench in theory humans first arrived in Americas 12,000 years ago

Since the 1970s, Franco-Brazilian archaeologist Niede Guidon has headed a mission to carry out large-scale excavation of Piaui’s interior.

“It’s difficult to think there exists a site anywhere with a higher concentration of cave art,” the 80-year-old Guidon told AFP.

Other traces of the civilization include charcoal remains of structured fires, explained Guidon, who hails from Sao Paulo.

“To date, these are the oldest traces” of human existence in the Americas, she emphasized.

The widely held theory has suggested human beings only reached the Americas some 12,000 years ago from Asia, crossing the Bering Strait to reach Alaska.

Some archeologists contend flaked pebbles at the Brazilian sites are not evidence of a crude, human-made fire hearth made some 40 millennia ago, but are rather geofacts — a natural stone formation, not a man-made one.

But Guidon said she believes the Serra dwellers may have come originally from Africa, and she said the cave art provides compelling evidence of early human activity.

The paintings are estimated to date back some 29,000 years, she said, noting: “When it began in Europe and Africa, it did here too.”

Other sites, including Valsequillo in Mexico and Monte Verde in Chile, also indicate the presence of communities tens of thousands of years ago.

These sites have led archeologists to speculate that peoples traveled various routes to reach the Americas and at different stages, archeologist Gisele Daltrini Felice told AFP.

quote:

Op donderdag 10 oktober 2013 19:52 schreef Perrin het volgende:

[..]

quote:

De prullenbak in
Bibliothecaris Hans van Hartevelt van het KIT liet desgevraagd weten dat hij blij is met de oplossing voor een deel van de collectie. Maar tegelijkertijd zijn er nog wel 700.000 titels die de prullenbak in moeten aan het eind van deze maand. 'We kunnen daar wel een oplossing voor zoeken, maar daar hebben we meer tijd voor nodig.'

quote:

Op vrijdag 11 oktober 2013 11:21 schreef De_Hertog het volgende:

[..]

Niet helemaal zo positief als het eerst leek:

[..]

quote:

Op vrijdag 11 oktober 2013 11:28 schreef Perrin het volgende:

[..]



Ik zou daar graag een middagje tussen grasduinen

Waarom verkopen ze dat niet aan wie wil? Huur een of andere zaal en maak er een grote tweedehandsboekenmarkt van

quote:

19 Tirolers zijn verwant aan Ötzi, de ijsman

do 10/10/2013 - 21:32 Jos De Greef

Oostenrijkse wetenschappers hebben in Tirol 19 mannen gevonden die genetisch verwant zijn aan Ötzi, de man wiens lichaam na 5.300 jaar werd teruggevonden in een gletsjer in de Alpen.

quote:

Israel’s Rommel and Vietnam’s Napoleon

What can the lives and victories of top generals of Israel and Vietnam teach the U.S. Army?

By Martin Sieff, October 13, 2013

The extraordinary lives and military victories of Vo Nguyen Giap in Vietnam and of Moshe Dayan in Israel provide a devastating rebuff of the “bigger is always better” conventional wisdom of the U.S. Army.

The death of Vo Nguyen Giap in Hanoi on October 4, 2013 should cause all Americans to reflect on their country’s military effectiveness – and abandon the obsession with pure military prowess. Such prowess says nothing about how well the vast resources made available to the U.S. military are used.

The Republicans, in particular, should think about this hard. After all, in all areas of government spending other than the military, they like to portray themselves as the bang-for-buck crowd.

Giap is rightly remembered as one of the greatest and most successful guerrilla commanders in history. The United States got the full flavor of his talents when it was defeated by North Vietnam in the Vietnam War and eventually had to withdraw.

General Vo Nguyen Giap died peacefully in a military hospital in Hanoi at age 102. No other great captain of history has lived to such an age.

It was an incongruously aged and peaceful departure from such a life filled with violence, killing, revenge and rage. To Americans’ considerable relief, his extraordinarily long life covered a far vaster spectrum than only being instrumental in defeating them.

From 1944 to 1979, over a 35-year period, General Giap won full-scale wars against Imperial Japan, France, the United States, South Vietnam, Cambodia and China. He won three long classic guerrilla insurgency wars, three major land battles against France and a coordinated classic armored war campaign against South Vietnam.

Then there was the rapid conquest of Cambodia (where his forces ended a genocide that the United States and China had ignored) and a defensive campaign against China’s People’s Liberation Army. In that campaign, at the odds of five to one in terms of troop size, his forces inflicted 250% more casualties on their enemies than they suffered.

He reached his apogee as a military leader only during his 60s, uniquely old in the annals of military history. Beyond tackling the United States and South Vietnam, he also led Vietnam’s forces to victory against Cambodia and China – all within a single decade.

A soul mate from Israel

Giap’s years of leadership and triumph eerily paralleled those of another legendary military man, General Moshe Dayan of Israel. He led the forces of an even smaller country to unexpected and apparently miraculous victories in one war after another.

Born in 1915, Dayan was six years younger than Giap, but started his active military career at almost the same time in 1939. They were both jailed early by colonial authorities who found them a threat – the British in Palestine and the French in Vietnam.

Neither planned to be a soldier. Giap studied law, not war, and took a degree in it from the University of Hanoi back in the 1930s. He was a teacher and an outstanding journalist. He launched several journals and newspapers while still in his 20s. He privately became a talented poet. He wanted to be a historian, but history itself got in the way – and he spent 40 years making it instead.

Dayan was raised on a pioneering farm (but not a kibbutz) in the Jezreel Valley, or Emek of northern Israel. He fought to defend his community against terrorist attacks in the late 1930s. After being jailed, he curiously enough found himself fighting against Giap’s sworn enemies, the colonial French, while serving with British forces in Syria in 1941. In June 1941, he lost an eye to shrapnel from a French rifle bullet and wore a signature eye patch the rest of his days.

The French military’s big footprint

Giap’s father, sister and sister-in-law were tortured and executed by French colonial authorities in Hanoi at the same time. His wife, a hauntingly beautiful young woman called Nguyễn Thị Quang Thái, the mother of his daughter Hong Anh (Red Queen of Flowers), was tortured and reportedly driven to commit suicide in her dungeon by choking on her own belt. However, a later investigation by U.S. intelligence analysts concluded that she was hung up in her cell and beaten to death.

Giap did not learn any of this until he returned from exile in 1944. He had written love poetry to her, believing she was still alive. His wife died in the Hao Lo, or Oven, prison. That is the same complex that held American airmen during the Vietnam War and that became known as the “Hanoi Hilton.”

Giap first made his mark during the last year of World War II, when he played a leading role in organizing resistance to Japanese occupation forces. His troops earned an outstanding record of rescuing downed American airmen and transporting them to safety. Then, from 1946 to 1954, he led his impoverished Viet Minh forces to victory against France.

Giap’s troops were so poor they didn’t even have shoes, so they improvised sandals from the rubber of auto tires. They rapidly seized major rural regions from the Red River in the north down to the Mekong Delta and set up a provisional government with Giap as Minister of the Interior.

Eventually, Giap and his forces trapped a French force at an advanced base in Dien Bien Phu and succeeded in bringing up heavy artillery through the jungle to systematically destroy their defenses in 1954.

The man who invented Israeli-style warmaking

Dayan was a successful combat commander in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. In 1953, he became Chief of Staff, or Ramat-Kal of the Israel Defense Force. Dayan transformed it into the tough, informal, flexible and uniquely victorious blitzkrieg force that made it world famous. In 1956, Dayan and his IDF swept numerically far vaster Egyptian forces from the Sinai Peninsula.

In 1967, as Giap’s war with the United States approached its climax in Vietnam, Dayan was recalled from political exile by popular demand. The immediate cause was Egyptian President Gamal Nasser’s move into the Sinai again with an army of 100,000 and his pledge to annihilate the State of Israel.

Dayan struck preemptively first and destroyed hostile armies and air forces on every side. The war was effectively won within its first six hours of air operations. It was all over in only six days.

Asymmetric warfare, Vietnamese-style

“No other wars for national liberation were as fierce or caused as many losses as this war,” Giap recalled in a late interview with The Associated Press in 2005. “But we still fought because for Vietnam, nothing is more precious than independence and freedom.”

In a revealing comment, Giap told the AP, “We had to use the small against the big. Backward weapons to defeat modern weapons. At the end, it was the human factor that determined the victory.”

Israel’s Dayan would have agreed. In his writings, he uses the Biblical hero David as the model for adopting modern tactics that allow a small, elite force like the IDF to defeat far larger and better-equipped armies.

Giap enjoys the rare honor among military leaders of having ended a genocide. In 1978, the Vietnamese Army occupied Cambodia and ended the maniacal mass slaughter by Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge (“Red Cambodia”) forces that killed three million of the country’s seven million people.

Dayan led the military forces of the infant Jewish state less than a decade after the Jewish people had suffered the most notorious genocide in history, the industrialized slaughter of six million Jews by Hitler’s Nazis and their allies. He arguably prevented a second Holocaust of millions by saving the state of Israel from extermination in 1967.

In 1973, still defense minister, Dayan was part of an Israeli government led by Golda Meir that was taken by surprise when the Egyptian and Syrian armies attacked it on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur. But they fought back and totally defeated their enemies again on both fronts.

Great generals don’t attend war colleges

Neither man ever formally studied war. Both learned most from their nation’s foremost enemies. Dayan’s great victories were fought using the frontline leadership, armored tank or panzer blitzkrieg tactics and radio communications command and control of World War II Germany’s greatest generals Heinz Guderian and Erwin Rommel.

Giap used the campaigns of France’s greatest general Napoleon Bonaparte and the military axioms of China’s Sun Tzu to get his mojo for military superiority. He defeated the armies of both nations.

Ever the learned man and interested in making his country whole at long last, Giap became an enthusiastic supporter of economic liberalization in Vietnam. He also advocated warm relations with the United States and even took up environmental causes. His poetry was always filled with a passionate appreciation of the beauties of nature.

Dayan died much earlier than his Vietnamese counterpart. In the years before his death in 1981, he was a primary architect of the Israel-Arab peace process, serving as Israel’s foreign minister from 1977 to 1979. He played a crucial role in brokering the 1979 Israel-Egypt peace treaty and established the guidelines and policy initiatives that led to the Oslo Peace Process, which started 12 years after his death from cancer in 1981.

Relying on the “balance of fervor”

Writing in 1994, Giap’s biographer Cecil B. Currey recalled hearing the general recite his own poetry on a trip they took together in 1980. Currey said Giap recalled the long, terrible wars for independence with the lines,

Talents were like leaves in the autumn, 
and heroes appeared like the dawn.

“Literature,” Currey reported Giap as saying, “can and must elevate a man’s soul.”

Dayan would have agreed. He wrote an acclaimed autobiography and a series of other books. His popular work on Biblical archaeology, “Living with the Bible,” remains a classic of its kind.

Giap’s broader legacy to Asia and the wider world was that size, strength and number of troops were not the decisive factors in waging war. Charles W. Freeman, Jr. co-chair of the U.S. China Policy Foundation and a leading U.S. expert on Asian affairs, said, “A little country can beat a big one, if the balance of fervor is with it. General Giap was the little guy who drove this point home to all concerned.”

Dayan taught exactly the same lesson in his parallel military career in Israel. For all the war and violence in their lives, both men ultimately shared and expressed the same humanitarian values.