Shantung Compound
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Shantung Compound

Langdon Gilkey

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eBook - ePub

Shantung Compound

Langdon Gilkey

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About This Book

This vivid diary of life in a Japanese internment camp during World War II examines the moral challenges encountered in conditions of confinement and deprivation.

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Publisher
HarperOne
Year
2012
ISBN
9780062272331
Topic
History
Subtopic
World War II
VII - Sugar-and Politics
Politics is seldom dull; in Weihsien camp it was never so. From the day we arrived to the end of our stay, the issues of power, law, and government were the most fascinating and baffling that we faced. Day in and day out we were confronted with many problems that most students of society discuss in the abstract. We, however, had to solve them in practice. How do you form a government? How are leaders best picked? Why is democratic rule preferable—if it is? How does a government generate enough power to rule and yet not be allowed too much power lest it become despotic? How is the moral dimension of life interrelated with the role of law and force in human community?
These were the questions that we had to wrestle with daily. It cannot be said that we ever solved any of these problems. For unlike questions of mathematical theory or engineering, political problems, since they are concerned with people and their relationships and not with things, admit of no final solutions. We did, however, learn a lot at first hand about the kinds of issues with which man’s political capacities must always deal.
Not every camp faced these peculiarly political problems. Many civilian camps were not allowed such freedom by the Japanese in governing themselves. Although this internal freedom was a great boon to us, it did present us with the problem of generating enough authority among ourselves to govern our little society efficiently.
Ours, as a civilian internment camp, was on this question quite unlike a prisoner-of-war camp. The governmental hierarchy of an army camp is assigned to it at the outset in its clearly delineated military ranks; thus its leaders are determined by the presence of the officer corps. All that is needed to make things run well is the officer’s good horse sense and instinct for applying wisely and humanely to a new situation the various set rules of army life. To him belongs the problem of ruling and possibly—when it comes to dealing with the enemy—of diplomacy. But the political problem is not his and never will be while he wears his stripes. As history shows repeatedly, the difference between rule in army life and politics in civilian life is frequently not understood, and even the most successful generals have not always been able to master the art of politics.
The prime concern of politics is not use of power but generation of power, with the achievement and maintenance of authority. The great “political” geniuses also may be able to rule well—as may, indeed, a king or a general. But what makes them so-called “political animals” or “born politicians” is not this capacity to rule, but the ability to draw power to themselves, to assume and keep—by one means or another—the role of leader. This achievement of rule, of legitimate and controlled power, establishes the political problem, both for a man and for a society. This problem must be resolved by every society, if not politically, then by the “man on horseback.” Thus democracy and politics, so often set in opposition to one another as ideal vs. sordid reality, work together—or fall together.
Democracy is that structure of social rule in which authority and power are established by none but political means. Here the ordinary citizen—as opposed to the hereditary ruler—draws to himself through persuasion and/or political pressure (not through the use of force) the consent of others that legitimatizes his rule. As every American president knows, the acquisition and retention of power depend on his political acumen, on his capacity to draw to himself without force the power to get done what he has to get done. If he is not equal to this political task, he cannot long rule in a democracy.
Our camp community faced the political problem in its most elemental form. When we arrived, we did not have even the beginnings of a government. Aside from our common Western origins, we could scarcely have been a more heterogeneous crowd. Usually in such inchoate communities, a rough, preliminary rule is established and maintained by those who hold the force of arms. Later, when a common ethos appears, this authority founded on force can be replaced by one based on consent. With us, however, such an early basis for order was impossible. In an internment camp, enemy soldiers hold all the instruments of force. It is they, therefore, not the fledgling government, who preserve order. We soon discovered that such a government as ours, one with responsibility but no visible means of enforcing its authority—much like the problem of the present United Nations —faces a trying and baffling task.
Through this experience I learned several things. First, that any stable government or system of law must seek to guide itself as best it can by the principles of justice and equality. Secondly, that in the last analysis government can rest only on the united moral strength of the community which it governs. But, thirdly, that the capacity to rule is also dependent upon the possession of force. Force must be available in extreme cases to compel compliance to the will of the government and it must be present to punish serious offenders against the community’s laws. In the creation of legitimate governmental authority, the interplay between these moral and compulsive elements creates the most fascinating of problems. Morality can never replace force, but it must provide the deep basis for the creative use of force.
The first time I saw clearly the fundamental need for the element of force in any governmental rule was in my experience on the Housing Committee. In order to do our job of making housing more bearable—i.e., in order to achieve more justice—we had to move people around continually. As I have indicated, I at first believed that people would simply move when such an action had been proved “just” to them. After I was disabused of that fantasy, I thought that probably (here possibly memories of school discipline were responsible) people would comply willingly when those in legitimate authority told them to do so. We were the appointed authority. Yet we were invariably told to go mind our own business.
Thus arose for us the problem of power. If the committee is to do what it thinks just, it must be able to get people to comply with its plans. But if people won’t be persuaded, and if they can’t be compelled, how is the justice to be enacted? For the first time it appeared to me that, contrary to most pacifist and anarchistic theory (to which I had been sympathetic), legitimate force is one of the necessary bases upon which justice can be established in human affairs.
One day after we had been in camp about four months, Mr. Izu casually told us that in ten days’ time forty Belgians were coming to the camp and that we were to clear ten rooms for these families at once. We gasped. Having seen how difficult—not to say dangerous—it had been to get more space for our own overcrowded people, how did he expect us to get all those rooms for strangers on such short notice?
“No, matter,” shrugged the impassive Izu, “the rooms must be found.” With irrefutable logic, he added, “Is it not more just to move other people now than to let the new arrivals sleep out in the cold and wet when they get here?”
He was right: rooms had to be found. This was clearly more important than the delicacy of the way in which they were to be found.
When we scanned our map of the compound, we found only two possibilities. We could move about thirty bachelors out of small rooms into dorms; or we could move about the same number of single women. Since it was clear that families could not be moved into dorms, and since by the same token the Belgian families could not be housed there, this wholesale move of either male or female single people was the only available alternative. But which group should we move?
This was a tormenting question for one intent on doing the “right thing.” It was obvious to anyone with a sense of fairness that it would be more just to move the men than the women. The latter were on the whole older, less robust, and they suffered a great deal more from the rigors of camp life. Every humane consideration led us to decide to leave the women alone and to tackle the thirty bachelors. If governments were run solely on moral grounds, this is what we would have done at once. But, as we discovered, they are not; power is also part of the political equation. The question “Can it be done?” is as relevant as the question “Is it right?”
We talked to the men. I was by now not at all surprised that they refused categorically to move out of their single rooms in spite of the fact that they were crowded three to a small space. Rational argument and moral pressure were useless. The men merely found new reasons why it was most just that others be required to move.
“Didn’t we send our wives home as the government ordered before the war?” protested one. “Haven’t those damn women stayed on in China in spite of the clear command of the Consulate to get out? We had to stay—they didn’t. We’re not moving for them!”
“But many of these women were secretaries and teachers who were as badly needed here as you executives,” I argued.
“That may be, Mac—but we’re not moving. And there are thirty of us who will knock the stuffing out of any committee that tries to get us out.”
What were we to do? This was no case of individual families too disunited to oppose us. These thirty men were well aware of their strength en masse, and they would fight. How could we get them out? We thought briefly of calling out the guards. But just as quickly we gave that one up. It was too dangerous. A free-for-all with the guards might end anywhere, with someone wounded or even killed. Not unmindful of our own image as well, we knew it would be fatal for any internee to be responsible for bringing the guards into a physical tussle with his mates. Only if we were sure there would be no physical resistance could we consider calling on Japanese power for help.
Frustrated, we went to the Internee Discipline Committee to see what they might be able to do for us. Could they conscript enough men from the camp to go and move those recalcitrant bachelors out?
“Not on your life,” said Ian Campbell, the realistic head of discipline. “We would have to get at least fifty to move that crowd. Any group of husky men would sympathize with those bachelors. In fact they would probably help them against you. I have no idea of letting such a fight as that get started here—much less encouraging it. No, brother, the best thing for you to do is to move the gals quietly and forget it.”
“But that isn’t right!” I exploded. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to force those women to move. It’s unjust! I know perfectly well it’s only because we can’t move the men. What will I say to them? How can I convince them it’s right, when I know damn well it isn’t?”
“Well, then, what’s the answer? Are you going to let the Belgians sleep in the cold because you can’t get rooms fairly?” asked Campbell with a smile, knowing he had me. “Is that just, letting them suffer—and much more than the single women will—to ease your conscience? No, my advice is go ahead and move them.”
I didn’t like it a bit, but I had to admit that Campbell was right. In the end I recommended to Shields that we move the women. As always, they were more docile than the men. But we on the committee could hardly rejoice in our action, or even sound convincing to our own ears, when we sought to persuade the skeptical women that moving them was the “right thing to do.”
I thought about this case a great deal because it seemed to me both utterly outrageous and vastly significant. Political action did involve compromise. To my surprise, I saw that our action-uncomfortable as it was for everyone—was in fact more moral than if we had taken the less practical idealistic route. For no program in the life of a community is really just if that program cannot be enacted. Ideal solutions can always be conceived by liberal onlookers, and they may appeal to our minds when we contemplate them. But they are politically useless and of little moral value if they can in nowise be put into effect. Such solutions cannot claim the word “just,” for they are never either relevant or real. To refuse to move the women on idealistic grounds would not have been just; it would merely have resulted in the irresponsible—and much more unjust—political act of leaving the Belgians homeless. In this case, compromise of one’s moral principles appeared to me to be morally necessary.
The reason behind this surprising irrelevance of “pure” justice was, I decided, this strange factor of power. Politics is essentially the art of the possible—not of the ideal. Fundamentally it involves enacting solutions to community problems in actual life, rather than thinking out solutions to intellectual problems in the realm of thought—although the enacting should be well thought out too! For this reason, political action is limited by the amount of power available to put the solution into effect. Here our ability to be just is directly proportional to our ability to perform. Thus, I came to believe, are power and social justice not opposed, as pacifists often contend, but are interrelated.
That neither the course of events nor even we ourselves could easily be molded according to our best ideals and standards was a new thought for me. Every political decision, I was learning, must take place within the given context of its situation, within the balance of social forces operating at the moment. Each decision can only choose the best among the possibilities that that particular situation makes available. We do not act in political life because our act is just. We act because the pressures of the moment force us to resolve in one way or another some vital problem in the community. Then we hope, and strive, that the resolution which we can effect is in the measure possible to that occasion, the most just solution available. But the main thing is that the act resolve the given problem creatively, and that life go on-in this case, I concluded ruefully, that the Belgians can at least get in out of the wet.
Those of us who were on committees at the beginning had been appointed to our posts rather than elected. Although I was a convinced believer in democracy, the fact that I was appointed had hardly bothered me. Nor did it at first occur to me that a more democratic way of choosing our camp government might be preferable. I liked my job; I was delighted to be a “big shot.” The thought of a possible election probably signaled more of a threat than a promise to the average committeeman.
I soon noticed, however, that my own attitude was changing, as was that of the other men in similar work. The remarks people made to us when we sought to deal with them did the most to effect this change. When we tried to move anyone, or change anybody’s status for the worse, we were met by suspicious questions about ourselves:
“Where do you get the authority to come in here and tell me to move?” someone would say. “Why aren’t you moving, too, if it’s so all-fired important that we move? And why aren’t your friends being moved? Incidentally, I notice those other committeemen aren’t moving either!”
Such a fog of suspicion could never be dispelled so long as we held office by appointment. Then the question “How did you get your authority?” was not answerable. Our authority derived merely from the other committeemen and not from the persons with whom we had to deal; in the most concrete sense, it was an illegitimate authority.
One reason that democracy is essential as a form of government suddenly dawned on me: under it, authority is derived from the very people who suffer from its exercise, and a rational answer can be given to the question of its legitimacy. If I had been elected, I could have said, “How did I get this authority? From you! And if you do not feel we are doing an honest job, pick someone else at the next election.”
Amusingly, therefore, the very men who at first basked in the security of having been appointed found they preferred the risk of elected status. This was not because of “faith in democracy,” though most of us had that, but because of the need to compel the carping public to share in part with us some of the onus for the unpopular actions we must take. As the supplies man remarked: “Then the people who always complain will have helped to put me here in this post. I can more easily overlook their carping at what they call my inefficiency and dishonesty!—because they have elected me, and so it’s their fault as much as mine!”
For these reasons, after six months in camp, it became a regular practice, twice a year, to elect the nine chairmen of the committees. Gradually, the same process of “democratization” took place in all those positions of responsibility where conflicts could occur, where complaints were common and suspicions likely.
Being the manager of a kitchen was, for example, a post of real responsibility. All the kitchen’s supplies and the appointment of its laboring force were in the manager’s hands. Naturally, with the supplies meager at best, diners wondered—sometimes silently and sometimes aloud—whether all the supplies were reaching the diners’ menus. The political result of these suspicions was, as in the other cases, the establishment of a full-blown democracy in our kitchen.
The unintended founder of our kitchen’s democracy and the “heroine” of the tale I am about to relate, was the weightier half of a most extraordinary couple, the Witherspoons. Mrs. Witherspoon’s husband, a lawyer, was a small, seedy man with a tiny mustache; and he was, apparently, a born pilferer. It was well known in North China society that he had been ejected from the club for stealing soap. No Old China Hand would play cards or golf with him because, so the rep...

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