Friday, November 28, 2014

Navajo Code Talkers

An obit in The Week last June reported on the death of a "talker", Chester Nez, who along with 28 other male members of the Nahajo tribe created a code that the Japanese never broke.  As a matter of fact, other Navajos could not read it either.  The irony of his story is that as a child on the reservation in New Mexico he was punished with a mouth-washing of soap, for speaking his native language (at about the same time in Ireland, the British punished native Irish for speaking their language as well).  In 1942 the military came to him and wanted him to create the code using that same language he once got punished for speaking.  They used Navajo words and labeled a tank a "tortoise" and a grenade a "potatoes".  At one point during his service in the Pacific an officer mistook him for a Japanese and almost shot him.  When he returned to New Mexico after the war we could not vote till 1948, or discuss the code until it was de-classified in 1968 and got official recognition in 2001 with a Congressional Gold Medal.  (I wonder how many of the talkers were still alive).  Nez said he was always bothered by the irony of being punished for speaking his language and then asked to use it by those who punished him.
(Source:  The Week, June 20, 2014, "The Navajo warrior who baffled the Japanese")

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Antebellum Slavery

David Brion Davis has completed a three volume study of slavery with his book on slavery in the "age of Emancipation" dealing exclusively with slavery in the US.  It is titled The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation.  It is hailed by Eric Foner in a The Nation (Feb 17, 2014) book review, who states it is a "towering achievement of historical scholarship".  He writes that slavery so brutalized its victims as to make them a "menace to the social order if allowed to remain" in the US and for many black leaders, colonization was the only way to "allow former slaves to overcome" the psychological damage done to them.  He notes that the fugitive slave issue was "central in bringing on the Civil War" for it proved the falsehood of southern claims of the contended nature of their slaves.  When the British emancipated their 800,000 slaves (August 1, 1834, a day of national celebration for African Americans) the former owners were paid 20 million pounds in compensation, mostly from taxes raised on the working class (somethings never change).  Davis also claims that if the South had won the war, slavery would have lasted "well into the 20th Century.  While slavery was  diminishing in British Caribbean and Spanish America, "there were more slaves in the Western Hemisphere on the eve of the Civil War than at any point in history".  Davis reports that his interest in the subject began with his WWII service, when shipped overseas in a troop transport, African American troops were "jammed together in the hold" much like the slave ships of he Middle Passage. 
(Source:  "Slavery in the Modern World" by Eric Foner in The Nation on Feb 17, 2014)