The End of Idi Amin by Andrew Rice

Idi Amin lived in a villa in the Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah, fat and unmolested, under the protection of the Islamic kingdom's monarchy. In 1989, he'd made a desultory attempt to fight his way back to Uganda from Congo, never making it out of the capital, Kinshasa, where he was identified and deported by the immigration authorities, but since then he seemed to have contented himself with living out a leisurely retirement. He studied the Koran and watched satellite television. He visited a masseur at the Intercontinental Hotel. He was sometimes glimpsed driving a white Chevrolet Caprice.

"Do you feel any remorse?" the Italian journalist Riccardo Orizo asked Amin, in a rare post ouster interview published in 2002.

"No," replied. "Only nostalgia"

Amin's lavish impunity provoked remarkably little outrage in Uganda. The majority of the population hadn't even been born in 1979. This generation wasn't even fully aware of the country's past. "Young people now don't know Amin," said one top government minister, a former resistance fighter. "And some can't believe that we could have a government of that deplorable quality. They don't believe."

One Sunday morning in August of 2003, however, Ugandans awoke to the newspaper headline: AMIN IN COMA. Far away, in a Saudi hospital, the exiled dictator was dying of kidney failure.


The news was an abrupt reminder of the past- a disruptive intrusion on the unsettled present. With Amin on his deathbed, his supporters felt emboldened to voice long stifled feelings of affection. Muslim politicians called on the government to allow the dictator to return from exile so he could die at home, or at the very least, to bring his body back for a state funeral once he had expired. Many ordinary Ugandans seemed ready to forgive the dying man or even to deny he had done anything requiring forgiveness. Newspapers canvassed Kampala's bars and street corners. "Every African leader makes mistakes," a salesman told the Monitor. "I would give him my vote if he recovers and wants to run for president," said a taxi driver. "People say he killed so many people, but I think there is no leader who has not killed," said a shop owner. Such sentiments were not universal, or even the majority opinion, but Amin's defenders spoke at a volume that tended to drown out more reasoned views.

The sympathetic response was not simply confined to the dictator's tribesmen or coreligionists. A great many Ugandans still thought of Amin as a nationalist who had kicked out the Asian merchants, proclaiming that he would redistribute economic power to black Africans. He symbolize a vanished era, one that, for all its horrors, still represented the one time in Uganda's history when the country had dared to challenge the world's great powers. President Museveni, who often derided his predecessor's "stupidity", was initially dismissive of valedictory sentiments. "I would not bury Amin", he told the newspapers. "I will never touch him. Never. Not even with a very long spoon." But such remarks sparked an extraordinary public outcry....The outrage was such that Museveni, who seldom conceded any points to his critics, was forced to retreat, calling a defensive press conference to announce that the dictator could be buried in Uganda.

As Amin remained in his coma for several weeks, the national newspapers devoted front-page headlines to the slightest updates on his health condition. He was on life support. His vital organs were failing. Fattened by years of easy living and frequent deliveries of his favorite Ugandan food, he was said to weigh more than four hundred pounds. His wives and children, dispersed around the world, rushed to Saudi Arabia to be by his bedside. Up in West Nile, the New Vision reported, some of the dictators- more distant relatives gathered at the family farm. They had recently completed a modestly scaled home, roofed with blue-tinted sheet metal and surrounded by a barbed-wire fence with money sent by Amin in expectation of his return. They marked out a burial plot and started to make preparations.

One sunny West Nile morning, I paid a visit to the dictator's retirement home. Out in the farmhouse's front yard, dozens of women in colorful finery were sitting in vigil, while a steady stream of well-wishers- the president's former chief of protocol, and ex-bodyguard- came ambling up the dirt path, seeking the latest news from the family spokesman, Captain Amule Amin, one of the dictator's brothers. "He is improving," Amule assured the visitors. "He is a fit and strong man."


When Amin ruled, Ugandans had called his people the mafuta mingi, a Swahili term that translates as "the very fat". The people of West Nile, always desperately poor and treated dismissively by the comparatively wealthy southern tribes, had gorged themselves on all they could acquire, confiscating homes and businesses, forming syndicates to smuggle coffee, cotton and other cash crops, enriching themselves even as the rest of the economy collapsed. Now it was all gone. "Now we survive by digging," Amule said. By digging, he meant farming.

When I met him, Amule had just come in from the fields, where he was erecting fence posts, and his hands and clothes were caked with mud. He offered a tour of the farm, proceeding past fields of corn, sweet potatoes, peanuts and cassava, to a collection of jagged brick pillars assembled around a patch of broken concrete and some skeletal walls flecked with turquoise paint. These were the ruins of President Amin's country estate, which had been looted and leveled long ago by the returned exiles of the liberation army.

"We understand those who talk bad about Amin, especially the authorities," Amule said. "They fear him because he is popular. If he comes back, he may change things upside-down here."

Over the course of my extensive journey's through the West Nile, I was to repeat the same macabre home tour many times. Amin's aged henchmen all wanted me to see the remnants of the fine residences they built during their time in power, not the new, more modest homes they had built close by. The former vice president, General Mustafa Adrisi- a man who had siphoned so much money from state coffers that he earned the nickname "Mr. Foreign Exchange"- sorrowfully recounted how his three-house complex near the Sudanese border had been dynamited by the liberators, and the asked for a donation to help rebuild it. Another general, living in a thatched hut next to a wrecked, weed-covered mansion, said, "This is what life is. Up to down".

The upended sentiment extended far beyond the small circle that benefited most from the dictatorship. Throughout West Nile, people felt that while Amin may have been a tyrant, at least he was their tyrant: a son of the soil, a kinsman. When he ruled they were fat; now they were thin. When he ruled they had jobs; now they had none. When he ruled they were strong; now they were weak. When he ruled they mattered; now they hardly counted at all. Tribe trumped truth, grievance obviated guilt. Nostalgia was all they had.

On August 16, 2003, Idi Amin Dada died. He never knew the exact date of his birth, but the best estimates say he was around eighty years old. Even from the grave, Amin continued to divide Ugandans. The front page of the New Vision newspaper featured a giant, glowering picture of the dictator and, under the stark headline AMIN IS DEAD , a quotation from Isaiah:

Now you are weak as we are! You are one of us! You used to be honored with the music of harps, but now you are in the world of the dead. You lie on a bed of maggots and are covered with a blanket of worms.


"I am not mourning at all," President Museveni said at a public even in Soroti, an eastern town. " What did he achieve? What did he do for Uganda? What will he be remembered for? the president asked the crowd.

"That he killed," his audience responded.

Meanwhile hundreds of mourners gathered at the main mosque in Kampala so say the traditional Muslim prayers for the dead. The weeks of public argument about Amin's funeral turned out to be moot. The Saudi government had swiftly buried the exiled dictator in Mecca, Islam's holiest city, a solution the mourners found appropriate.

"This is a sad moment not only for Muslims worldwide, but for Uganda," a member of Parliament from the West Nile said in an address to the prayer service. "We have lost a loving brother. How the world looks on Amin fulfills the saying that leadership is a dustbin. When you are gone, everything bad is heaped on you."

1688 by Steve Pincus

From the moment James II departed England, the English with almost united voice called for war against France. The majority of English men and women believed that James had not followed the national interest in pursuing alliance with France and war with the Dutch. Few called for a renewal of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century confessional strife. However, it would be a mistake to assume that though there was wide-spread enthusiasm for war, there was a popular consensus. Instead, from 1689 there were two distinct visions of the proper nature of English foreign policy. Both sides deployed passionate nationalist arguments.

The Tories argued for a blue-water foreign policy. Louis XIV needed to be fought only so long as he posed a real and immediate threat to the British Isles and could plausibly undo the events of 1688-89. England had no interest in financing a Continental war against France that would merely benefit weak and unreliable confederates. For the advocates of blue-water policy, England's future lay in overseas empire, not in European engagement.

Whigs, by contrast, argued that England needed to be strong both at sea and on land. The French threat was ideological as well as geopolitical. England could be safe only when European liberty was secure. As long as states continued to be seduced or compelled to adopt the absolutist political model, Europe and England would be dragged into a hopeless spiral of massive military expenditures and unending warfare. It was not enough to defend the British Isles; England needed to humble France and thereby halt the spread of absolutism.

Whig frustration with Tory blue-water foreign policy provides the context for the publication of Robert Molesworth's spectacularly successful Account of Denmark, a runaway best-seller from the moment it appeared in late 1693. By 1700 at least thirteen editions of Account had been published in French, Dutch, German and English, and spawned a variety of virulent attacks, and became the talk of diplomats all over Europe.

After taking up arms on the side of the revolutionaries in 1688, Molesworth had been posted to Denmark. He had witnessed first hand that Protestant monarchy's slow drift from active membership in the Grand Alliance into the French sphere of influence.


In Molesworth's view the Kingdom of Denmark provided a case study in the pernicious effects of French political ideology. Before 1660 the Danes had shared in the benefits of the Gothic constitution that had once prevailed "in most, if not all parts of Europe." It was to the Goths that Europe owed "the original of Parliaments," with "frequent meetings" in which "all matter relating to good government were transacted," the right to elect their kings, and the right to depose "cruel, vicious, tyrannical, covetous, or wasteful" rulers. Then, "at one instant the whole face of affairs was changed" in Denmark, and the kings became "absolute and arbitrary" with not the least remnant of liberty remaining to the subject."

Denmark's turn to absolutism was not unique. "The King of Denmark," like many monarchs in Europe, explained Molesworth, had become "a pupil" of Louis XIV.

According to Molesworth's Account, the turn to absolutism in Denmark, as was the case everywhere else, necessitated "frequent and arbitrary taxes" to support the enlarged military machine. This in turn impoverished the country," the value of estates in most parts of the kingdom is fallen by three fourths." The policies of the Danish kings had caused "poverty in the gentry, which necessarily causes extremity of misery in the peasants.. the constant effects of arbitrary rule in this and all other countries where it has prevailed." Those states "that consider soldiers as the only riches, never cease enlarging their numbers, till they are necessitated for their subsistence, either to come to blows with their neighbors, or to create animosities between others" that would necessitate employing their forces as mercenaries. Absolutism breeds endless arms races. No leader dared risk disarmament for fear that his neighbors were only waiting "for the opportunity to fall upon him that is worst provided to make resistance. " This, Molesworth concluded, was "none of the least calamities which the French tyranny has forced upon the world." His analysis generated a clear imperative for English foreign policy. The only way to block the spread of economic depredation and unending warfare was to block the spread of French absolutism. This implied, at a minimum, constant vigilance and involvement in Europe or, most likely, a full-scale invasion of France.

Molesworth's analysis made it clear that the age of confessional (religious) warfare had ended. The threat to the welfare of Europe was absolutism, not Roman Catholicism. Denmark, Molesworth reminded his readers, was a Protestant country. "Whoever takes the pains to visit the Protestant countries abroad will be convinced that it is not Popery as such, but the doctrine of blind obedience in what religion soever be found, that is the destruction of liberty,and consequently of the happiness of any nation." The spread of "slavery" in "most of the Protestant as well as Popish countries" was because "the spirits of the people" had been weakened by clergy who preached "that subjects should obey without reserve". The problem was not priests, but priests who depended on an absolutist state. The danger came not from the spread of the Catholic or Lutheran reformation but from the growing power of the absolutist states.

"I wish every Englishman could read the Account of Denmark, wrote the Lancashire Whig William Phillips to the Somerset Whig Edward Clarke, for then "they'll find a slave is the same thing be he a Papist or a Protestant".

William and Mary, as the king and queen of England, heeded their their subjects call for war against Louis XIV. The war the revolutionaries asked the English nation to fight was not, as some recent historians have claimed, a war of religion, it was and international struggle against Louis XIV, a tyrant and aspiring universal monarch who was equally threatening to Catholic and Protestant; a multi-confessional alliance of European nation against a 'global' dictator who threatened the existence of each and every one of them.

Playthings of the Gods

GLOUSTER...

As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods:
They kill us for their sport.

EDGAR

How should this be? Bad is the trade that must play fool to sorrow
Ang'ring itself and others..

(King Lear Act IV Scene 1)



We may imagine that each of us living creatures is a puppet made by the gods, possibly as a plaything, or possibly with some more serious purpose. That, indeed, is more than we can tell, but one thing is certain. These interior states of fear or confidence- the result of the unwise and conflicting counselors of pleasure and pain- are, so to say, the cords, or strings, by which we are worked; they are opposed to one another, and pull us in opposite directions, and therein lies the division of virtue from vice. A man must always yield to one of these tensions without resistance, but pull against all the other strings- ought to yield, that is, to that golden and hallowed drawing of judgment which goes by the name of the public law of the city. The others are hard and iron-like, it soft, as befits gold, whereas they resemble various substances. So a man must always cooperate with the noble drawing of the law, for judgment, though a noble thing, is as gentle and free from violence as noble, whence its drawing needs supporters, if the gold within us is to prevail over the other stuff. In this wise our moral fable of the human puppets will find its fulfillment.

( Plato. Laws 1 644d)



Search, for some thoughts, thine own suggesting mind
And others, dictated by heavenly powers,
Shall rise spontaneous in the needful hour.
For nought unprosperous shall thy ways attend,
Born with good omens, and with heaven thy friend.

(Odyssey, 3.26 sq.)

Beyond Denial by Linda Andre

There are signs that it is possible for professionals to move beyond denial of electro- convulsive therapy's (ECT) permanent adverse effects, toward not only acknowledgment of damage but help for ECT survivors. In 2006 and 2007, the British journal Advances in Psychiatric Treatment published two groundbreaking articles. The first, by Americans Harold Robertson and Robin Pryor, incorporates the voices of survivors (from FDA files and British studies) into a discussion of the different types of memory and cognitive disability caused by shock. The authors further discuss how best to assess these types of deficits with the type of neuropsychological tests used on persons who have experienced other types of brain injury. They criticize the tests commonly used by ECT proponents as much too simple and not relevant to ECT. Finally they propose a model of informed consent that describes rather than denies what we know:

"Patients can be told that permanent amnesia is one of the common or serious/frequently occurring effects of ECT and that it affects at least one third of the patients. Such amnesia may be presented as having multiple dimensions: the amount of life lost, the temporal gradient, the nature of what is lost, and the effect of memory erasure on the individual's life. The amount of life lost to amnesia cannot be predicted; patients should be warned that it has been known to extend to 10-20 years. It should be made clear that amnesia is not limited to information about discrete events or to facts that are easily regained, such as dates and telephone numbers, but that it encompasses all thoughts, feelings, personal interactions and relationships, learning and skills associated with the erased time period, and thus there is no simple or easy way to recapture what is lost. Since the temporal gradient of ECT amnesia is the opposite of normal forgetting, patients should be warned that the most recent months or years will be most effected."

"Patients should be clearly told that ECT may have serious and permanent effects on both memory ability and non-memory cognition. These are best described in everyday terms: 'the ability to plan and organize and get things done', rather than 'executive function'. Intact memory and intelligence are highly prized in our culture. The more valuable a possession, the more important it is to know about even a small chance that it may be permanently lost."


The next year, Maeve Mangaoang and Jim Lucy ( of Ireland) built on Robertson and Pryor's work in the first article ever published to address the issue of how best to help rehabilitate those who suffer memory and cognitive disability:

" Cognitive rehabilitation techniques that are used with brain-injured patients should also be considered for use with patients experiencing memory and/or cognitive disability following ECT."

"What is striking from the literature in this area is the lack of routine, formal assessment of patients' neuropsychological performance following a course of ECT, despite the long-known risk to memory function... All patients should undergo cognitive assessment before their first ECT session... Reassessment should be schedualed after a sufficiently long interval (more than six months after treatment) so that persistent cognitive and memory deficits can be identified... It should be clear that such documentation is not enough; a specific programme of cognitive rehabilitation should be designed and made available to all patients following ECT, and details of this treatment should be included with the information that patients receive prior to treatment..."

Denial of, and withholding help, for injuries caused by ECT is not only bad for patients, they argue, but ironically ends up subverting the ECT industry's Public Relations as well. "Failure to attempt to rehabilitate patients may reinforce the negative public image of ECT specifically and psychiatry in general."

Rather than draw the obvious logical conclusion- permanent memory loss and cognitive disability happens when you put electricity through the brain and it cannot be prevented- they borrow a page from the American PR book. The problem, they decided, must be that the ECT just wasn't done right. The solution is to raise standards, and teach everyone to do it correctly, and check up on them to see if they were doing so. It wasn't that ECT causes damage [ and only temporarily relieves the symptoms it tries to address, if at all], only that poorly performed ECT might do so.

The counter argument is quite simple. It's this book; it's history. As we have seen, such a claim has been made over and over since the very early days of ECT seventy years ago. And each so-called refinement or modification of the shock box or electrode placement or the accompanying drugs and anesthesia has failed to eradicate the serious, permanent adverse effects. The simple reality of biology and neuroanatomy won't be fooled.

If any other medical treatment had admittedly been done incorrectly for seventy years (while, at periodic junctures, the manufacturers and users of the equipment had proclaimed "Now we know how to to it!" and had been proven wrong)...

If manufacturers and users had admitted, after seven decades, that the still didn't know how to do it, and meanwhile seven decades of accumulated evidence showed that large numbers of patients had been harmed, permanently disabled, or killed...

What would we, as a society, do?

Would we say to doctors, "OK, keep trying everything that hasn't worked in the past. We'll be your guinea pigs"?

Would we say nothing and look away, betting our lives that the treatment will never be used on us but only on people who don't matter so much?

Would we let it be used for another lifetime?

'China's Destiny' by Chiang Kai-shek

Near the end of 1943, Chiang and his undeclared ghostwriter, Tao Xisheng, completed China's Destiny , which embodied his views on China, its glorious culture and history, and its bright and shining future. It was Chiang's answer to Mao Zedong's major essay on the future of China, On The New Democracy. The book reflects Chiang's distinctly nationalist, highly anti-imperialist, and strictly authoritarian outlook, but on world affairs it struck a liberal, internationalist stance.

China's Destiny asserted that every Chinese had the right and 'the duty" to belong to the Kuomintang. Citizens, Chiang proclaimed, 'must pay special attention to and not neglect for a moment, the duty of obeying the state's policy." Discipline and loyalty were commanded. He quoted Sun Yat-sen's dictum that "we must free ourselves from the idea of 'individual liberty' and unite "into a strong cohesive body, like a solid mass formed by mixing cement with sand." Indeed, the political system that Chiang supported was openly authoritarian. He rejected liberalism as well as Communism and reaffirmed Sun Yat-sen's thesis that an indefinite period of political tutelage "must be followed to attain democracy." Like Sun, he made the disturbing assertion that the principle of nationalism "is the most meritorious of all human conditions," but this is as close to fascism as the book comes. He did make presumptuous but hardly malevolent claims that "the glories and scope of our ancient Chinese learning cannot be equaled in the history of any of the strong Western nations," and that the principles of the Chinese state were propriety, righteousness, modesty, and honor. But he also declared that "theories of superior civilizations and superior races,' must be forever eliminated.

Chiang's second book, Chinese Economic Theory, released about the same time as China's Destiny, was meant to be a textbook in the KMT's Central Political Training Institute. This work calls for a mixed, planned economy; a protectionist trade policy; an emphasis on national (state) ownership of large industries; and "control of private capital." Reflecting the book's strong socialist outlook, it calls on Western economists to abandon materialism and selfish individualism in favor of a "world of great harmony" where "human nature is developed to the highest point...no one will be able to earn a living by sitting idle...no one will be unable to find work." The last paragraph in the first chapter of China's Destiny, after referring to the long struggle of Sun Yat-sen, boasts, "I, Chiang Kai-shek, have from the beginning been identified with restarting the Republic of China on the road to freedom and independence," and then follows with three innocuous uses of the word "I". After that, Chiang does not use the personal pronoun in the book or refer to his own political or historic role.

The Chinese government did not publish China's Destiny in English. Madame Chiang recommended against it, fearing that its prideful, socialist, anti-imperialist outlook- which did not distinguish among the foreign abusers of China- would antagonize Americans and especially the British. The only English edition of China's Destiny is apparently the one produced in New York by the leftist Amerasia magazine and its pro-Communist editor Philippe Jaffe. It could be argued that the book's extravagant moral tone and idealization of Chinese culture represented a high degree of naivete and self-delusion, but not a will to personal power- much less absolute power, ethnic cleansing, or territorial expansion. Never-the-less, Jaffe, John Service, and others in the so-called intelligence agencies of the American government equated China's Destiny with Hitler's Mein Kampf.

Chiang began is career as a revolutionary officer for Sun Yat-sen's Nationalist Revolution. After Sun's death, he assumed leadership of the movement and, against heavy odds, loosely united the most populous country in the world. He led the new Republic of China during a decade of endless rebellion, civil conflict, and economic depression while building key aspects of a modern civil government. Then, from a refuge above the gorges of the Yangtze, he commanded his army and the country in a prolonged and devastating eight-year war of resistance to Japan, the first half of which China fought virtually alone. With that war's end came four more bloody years, this time as the Nationalists and the Communists clashed in a traumatic civil war. Finally, defeated by Mao- the loyalty and discipline of whose cadres he always admired- he retreated to Taiwan, where he ruled as a dictator for another quarter century.

During all this time, Chiang's deep personal commitment to Chinese unity never wavered. Although he made compromises with the warlords to keep the country together, and he appeased the Japanese for five years while trying to build a modern army, he never surrendered China's sovereignty over any of its territory. His commitment to a unified China was probably one reason, after his defeat in Manchuria in 1948, that he made no real effort to hold on to the southern half of China. Instead, he chose to make his last stand on Taiwan, where he could at last take full dictatorial control, maintain the principle of one China *, and pursue his long-held dream of creating a modern state based on Confusion values.

Chiang stubbornly pursued hopeless defensive battles, but believed that displays of indomitable willpower and sacrifice were critical for rallying the Chinese people behind a long and painful conflict. His own courage in the face of physical danger was well known in China and at times he was widely popular. Once kidnapped, and often under fire at the front, he was also famous for visiting the camps of his enemies to parlay and for leaving besieged cities at the last hour.

At times, Chiang's actions sharply contradicted the Confusion and Christian teachings that he regularly turned to, as well as his belief in his own sincerity and moral virtue. On several occasions, he sanctioned extreme actions that amounted to moral blindness or turpitude. Among those were the killings he ordered or permitted in 1947 in Taiwan and the extensive executions during the first few years after his arrival on the island. These acts were an offense to humanity, and unnecessary even in terms of Chiang's own objectives of mass intimidation and control. The fact that Mao, Deng Xiaoping, and other Communist leaders were responsible for the deaths of innocent millions rather than thousands does not change that judgment.

But Chiang was not ruthless or violent by nature- in fact he was, as Mao thought, a naively earnest and conscientious man. Chiang never sought, in his diaries or elsewhere, to justify himself in regard to the extreme actions he took. If pressed he probably would have pointed to the savagery of the times- a massive war over the direction of world culture in which millions died, hundreds of millions suffered, and the survival of Chinese civilization seemed at stake. He once called himself a "man of war" and suggested that he bore a moral burden, the same burden that Truman and Churchill took on for their decisions on Hiroshima and Dresden. But of course, his most ruthless decisions also served to keep him in power, and to this he would likely argue that, as with his democratic allies, he had the mandate of his people to lead the national struggle for survival and unity and to do whatever was necessary to win.

During twenty-five years on Taiwan, operating in a microcosm of a stable and peaceful China, Chiang had his chance at nation-building, and in terms of social and economic indices ( and the principles outlined in China's Destiny) he laid the groundwork for Taiwan's leap into modernity ( the disparity of incomes in Taiwan is the least of any modern nation on the globe). Three decades after his death, he would be impressed with the island's success, but also with the emergence of the People's Republic as a great and respected nation. He would be especially pleased about the Peking regime's replacement of class struggle and world revolution with the ancient teachings of Confucius, once again drawing on China's great history as the cultural and moral center of Chinese civilization. He would see the new Chinese leaders as modern neo-Confucianists, dedicated to making China a harmonious, stable, and prosperous society, as well as a powerful and avowedly peaceful actor on the world stage. He would also certainly note with irony that both corruption and disparities in income in the new China are extremely high, probably higher than when he led the mainland, but certainly much higher than during his years on Taiwan. Soong Mayling, his wife, who in 2003 passed away in New York at the age of 105, would no doubt also appreciate Peking's efforts to stop spitting in the streets and other unhygienic customs. But most of all, if the Chiangs could see modern Shanghai and Beijing, they might well believe that their long planned "counterattack" had succeeded and their successors had recovered the mainland. Truly, it is their vision of modern China, not Mao's, that guides the People's Republic in the twenty-first century.

The End of Chiang Kai-shek by Jay Taylor

April 5, 1975, was the last night of the Tomb Sweeping (Qing Ming) Festival. Throughout Taiwan and traditionally in all of China, it was believed that on that night the ghosts of the ancestors milled about, preparing to go back into their newly cleaned chambers. Late that evening, Chiang's physician, Xiong Yuan, was in the garden of the Shilin residence admiring the endless scattering of stars in the clear night sky. Shortly after he returned indoors and retired for the night, the doctor on duty called him in a state of alarm. The President's heart had stopped. Xiong threw on a robe and rushed downstairs to Chiang's bedroom. He injected a stimulant into the President's heart and it resumed beating.

Soong Mayling arrived and was at the bedside when her husband's heart stopped again. The doctor administered another injection. Soon afterward, Ching-kuo rushed into the room just as his father suffered another attack. Xiong was preparing a third injection when Mayling touched his hand and sighed. "Just stop," she said. It was a few minutes before midnight, and just then a dramatic rainstorm with thunder and lightning swept over the island from Taipei to Gaoxiong. Even Harvard-educated officials in the city thought this was more than coincidence.

Two hours after the Generalissimo's death, the government released a political testament that he was said to have written a week earlier. "Just at this time when we are getting stronger, my comrades, and my countymen, you should not forget our sorrow and our hope because of my death. My spirit will always be with my comrades and my countrymen to fulfill the three people's principles*, to recover the mainland, and to restore our national culture." A thirty-day mourning period followed. The government required the closure of movie houses, nightclubs, bars, and other places of entertainment. No one was allowed to play golf, tennis, or baseball. Television and radio stations played only tributes and documentaries about the President, or scenes of public mourning with solemn music.

The two Chiang brothers, as required by custom, wrapped the body of their father in white cloth. Following Chiang's requests, his copies of the Bible, Streams in the Desert, and a collection of Tang poetry were placed in the casket. Someone realized the Generalissimo had forgotten to ask also to take along The Three People's Principles, and a copy was put at his side. For five days, the casket lay in state at the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall. Chiang had presided over more than a thousand weekly ceremonies honoring the party founder who had set him on the road to leadership of the Kuomintang and China. Two and a half million people reportedly filed past the casket, including the journalist Lei Zhen, who Chiang had imprisoned for some years.

On April 15, while the Generalissimo was still lying in state, America's South Vietnamese ally collapsed just as he had foreseen. Saigon fell that day and American diplomats and marines at the U.S. Embassy fled ingloriously from the roof in helicopters.


The final service for the Generalissimo was held at Memorial Hall on April 16, 1975, a gray, cloudy Wednesday. The Guanyin Mountains were lost in mist. The open casket was surrounded by lilies of the valley, and at the foot stood a large white cross of chrysanthemums. Madame Chiang, wearing dark glasses, bowed three times before the metal casket, as did her two stepsons and Alex Chiang, who represented the third generation. Then the coffin was closed, the Christian minister Zhou Lianhua gave a Christian eulogy, a military band struck up a funeral march and ten pallbearers carried the coffin out of the building to a waiting float with white and yellow flowers in the shape of a church or chapel. Military cannons thundered a twenty-one-gun salute.

Mayling, assisted on either side by Ching-kuo and Wei-kuo, walked behind the float for a few hundred yards as it moved down the road. The family then boarded limousines, and the cortege moved slowly through the warm, humid city and then onto the highway and through smaller towns. Hundreds of thousands of people lined he way, Boy and Girl Scouts, mailmen, nurses, reservists, people in sack cloth, Buddhist monks wearing saffron, a group of women in yellow Confusian gowns with mortar boards on their heads, and musicians playing ancient string instruments. Many were wailing softly in the Chinese fashion. High school and military bands played dirges and occasionally "Auld Lang Syne."

In the countryside, the procession passed by hundreds of small workshops and in between green fields sprouting the first rice crop of the year. The motorcade wound through mountain passes and some sixty miles from Taipei turned into a small encalve by a quiet lake nestled among bamboo-covered hills. This was Chiang's favorite retreat, a place that reminded him of his home in the mountains of Zhejiang, where he hoped someday his body would be reburied- on Hole in the Snow Mountain near his mother's grave, just above the little town of Xikou.


On the day of Chiang's funeral, Mao, who knew his time was limited, spent the day in bed listening over and over to the same stirring funeral music set to a twelfth-century poem. The poet was bidding farewell to a patriotic high mandarin whose career, like that of Chiang Kai-shek, had ended tragically and unfulfilled, and who had been exiled to a remote part of China.


*San min zhu yi: nationalism, democracy and the people's livelihood.

Michel Houellebecq

He won the 1998 Prix Novembre for his second novel Les Particules Élémentaires (translated by Frank Wynne) and published as Atomised (Heinemann, UK) or, The Elementary Particles (Knopf, US). The novel became an instant "nihilistic classic". The New York Times, however, described it as "a deeply repugnant read." The novel won Houellebecq—along with his translator, Frank Wynne—the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2002.

His subsequent novel, Plateforme (2001), earned him a wider reputation. It is a romance, told mostly in the first-person by an aging male arts administrator, with many sex scenes and an approbation of prostitution and sex tourism. The novel's depiction of life and its explicit criticism of Islam, together with an interview its author gave to the magazine Lire, led to accusations against Houellebecq by several organisations, including France's Human Rights League, the Mecca-based World Islamic League and the mosques of Paris and Lyon. Charges were brought to trial, but a panel of three judges, delivering their verdict to a packed Paris courtroom, acquitted the author of having provoked 'racial' hatred, ascribing Houellebecq's opinions to the legitimate right of criticizing religions.

A recurrent theme in Houellebecq's novels is the intrusion of free-market economics into human relationships and sexuality. Whatever (Original title, Extension du domaine de la lutte), which literally translates as "extension of the domain of the struggle") alludes to economic competition extending into the search for relationships. As the book says, a free market has winners and losers, and the same applies to relationships in a society that does not enforce monogamy. Westerners of both sexes already seek exotic locations and climates by visiting developing countries in organized trips. In Platform, the logical conclusion is that they would respond positively to sex tourism organized and sold in a corporate and professional fashion.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/may/07/fiction.familyandrelationships:


Michel Houellebecq, France's most shocking novelist, made his name with tales of dysfunctional, estranged relationships. Now his own mother, portrayed as a sex-obsessed hippy in one of his books, has launched a devastating counter-attack in a new memoir. Here the foul-mouthed Lucie Ceccaldi, 83, grants her first British interview to Angelique Chrisafis:

"She calls her son an "evil, stupid little bastard" adding that "this individual, who alas came from my womb, is a liar, an imposter, a parasite and above all - above all - a petit arriviste ready to do absolutely anything for money and fame."

Here's his 1999 'Manifesto", To Stay Alive: A Method" : "Have no fear of happiness; it does not exist." etc.

http://www.houellebecq.info/popdivers.php3?id=13

I am wondering if he wrote "The Coming Insurrection" rather than "a Committee of Anonymous Academics."

http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/texts/the-coming-insurrection/