"Upheaval"

[fiefoe]

It's been a long time since "Guns, Germs and Steel", so I don't remember if Jared Diamond always does so much hand-holding with his readers. The earlier chapters are more informative. Finland in particular, is a good counterpoint to "小国无外交".

• Successful coping with either external or internal pressures requires selective change. That’s as true of nations as of individuals. The key word here is “selective.” It’s neither possible nor desirable for individuals or nations to change completely, and to discard everything of their former identities. The challenge, for nations as for individuals in crisis, is to figure out which parts of their identities are already functioning well and don’t need changing, and which parts are no longer working and do need changing.
• 1. Acknowledgment that one is in crisis 2. Acceptance of one’s personal responsibility to do something 3. Building a fence, to delineate one’s individual problems needing to be solved 4. Getting material and emotional help from other individuals and groups 5. Using other individuals as models of how to solve problems 6. Ego strength 7. Honest self-appraisal 8. Experience of previous personal crises 9. Patience 10. Flexible personality 11. Individual core values 12. Freedom from personal constraints

• you’ll be horrified to know that the Finnish language has 15 cases, many of which replace prepositions in English. One of the most delightful hours of my first visit to Finland came when a Finnish soldier, who spoke no English and could communicate with me only in Finnish, taught me the six Finnish locative cases (replacing the English prepositions on, off, onto, in, out of, into) by pointing to a table (“pöytä”) on which (“pöydällä”: vowel harmony!) was a cup and in which (“pöydässä”) was a nail, and by moving the cup onto (“pöydälle”) and off of (“pöydältä”) the table, and driving the nail into (“pöytään”) and out of (“pöydästä”) the table.
• But it’s harder to decide whether to use the accusative case or the partitive case in Finnish when you have an abstract noun. For example, if you have an idea, the Finnish language requires you to decide whether you are having the whole idea or only part of the idea, because that determines whether it is correct to use the accusative case or the partitive case.
• when the Bolshevik Revolution broke out in Russia in late 1917, Finland declared its independence. The result was a bitter Finnish Civil War, in which conservative Finns called Whites, consisting of Finnish troops trained in Germany and assisted by German troops who landed in Finland, fought against communist Finns called Reds, as well as against Russian troops still stationed in Finland.
• As measured by percentage of a national population killed per month, the Finnish Civil War remained the world’s most deadly civil conflict until the Rwandan genocide of 1994. That could have poisoned and divided the new country—except that there was quick reconciliation, the surviving leftists received back their full political rights, and by 1926 a leftist had become Finland’s prime minister.
• Against Soviet tanks attacking the Mannerheim Line, the Finns compensated for their deficiencies in anti-tank guns by inventing so-called “Molotov cocktails,” which were bottles filled with an explosive mixture of gasoline and other chemicals, sufficient to cripple a Soviet tank.
• according to my veteran friend, those old Italian artillery pieces were so poorly designed for absorbing recoil that each gun required two spotters: one, the usual spotter in front of the gun, to watch where the shell landed; plus another spotter behind the gun, to see where the gun landed!
• Hence while the British and French governments offered help to Finland in the form of tens of thousands of troops, it turned out that most of those troops would be stationed at Narvik and along the Narvik railroad and in the Swedish iron fields. Only a tiny fraction of those troops would actually reach Finland. Even those stationings of troops would of course require the permission of the Norwegian and Swedish governments, which were remaining neutral and refused permission.
• Some authors concluded that the harsh March 1940 peace terms demonstrate that the Finns should indeed have accepted the milder terms demanded by Stalin in October 1939. But Russian archives opened in the 1990’s confirmed Finns’ wartime suspicion: the Soviet Union would have taken advantage of those milder territorial gains and the resulting breaching of the Finnish defense line in October 1939 in order to achieve its intent of taking over all of Finland, just as it did to the three Baltic Republics in 1940. It took the Finns’ fierce resistance and willingness to die, and the slowness and cost of the war against Finland, to convince the Soviet Union not to try to conquer all of Finland in March 1940.
• But Finland’s war aims remained strictly limited, and the Finns described themselves not as “allies” but just as “co-belligerents” with Nazi Germany. In particular, Finland adamantly refused German pleas to do two things: to round up Finland’s Jews (although Finland did turn over a small group of non-Finnish Jews to the Gestapo); and to attack Leningrad from the north while Germans were attacking it from the south. That latter refusal of the Finns saved Leningrad, enabled it to survive the long German siege, and contributed to Stalin’s later decision that it was unnecessary to invade Finland beyond Karelia (see below).
• The Soviet Union’s only additional territorial acquisition was to annex Finland’s port and nickel mines on the Arctic Ocean. Finland did have to agree to drive out the 200,000 German troops stationed in northern Finland, in order to avoid having to admit Soviet troops into Finland to do that. It took Finland many months, in the course of which the retreating Germans destroyed virtually everything of value in the whole Finnish province of Lapland. When I visited Finland in 1959, my Finnish hosts were still bitter that their former German allies had turned on Finland and laid waste to Lapland.
• Finland’s total losses against the Soviets and the Germans in the two wars, the Winter War and the Continuation War, were about 100,000 men killed. In proportion to Finland’s population then, that’s as if 9 million Americans were killed in a war today.
• In addition, in one of the largest child evacuations in history, 80,000 Finnish children were evacuated (mainly to Sweden), with long-lasting traumatic consequences extending to the next generation (Plate 2.7). Today, daughters of those Finnish mothers evacuated as children are twice as likely to be hospitalized for a psychiatric illness as are their female cousins born to non-evacuated mothers.
• The Allied interpretation of “Finnish war criminal” was: the leaders of Finland’s government during Finland’s wars against the Soviet Union. If Finland hadn’t prosecuted its own government leaders, the Soviets would have done so and imposed harsh sentences, probably death sentences. Hence Finland felt compelled to do something that in any other circumstance would have been considered disgraceful: it passed a retroactive law, declaring it illegal for its government leaders to have defended Finland by adopting policies that were legal and widely supported under Finnish law at the time that those policies were adopted. Finnish courts sentenced to prison Finland’s wartime President Ryti, its wartime Prime Ministers Rangell and Linkomies, its wartime foreign minister, and four other ministers plus its ambassador to Berlin. After those leaders had served out their sentences in comfortable special Finnish prisons, most of them were voted or appointed back into high public positions.
• Paradoxically, though, those reparations proved to be an economic stimulus, by forcing Finland to develop heavy industries such as building ships and factories-for-export.
• Particularly for a small state which harbors no illusions that the stances it takes can swing the scales one way or another, it is vitally important to be able in good time to form a correct conception of the strength of those factors on which future development in the military and political sector will depend.… A nation should rely only on itself.
• Experience also taught us that a small country purely and simply cannot afford to mix emotions—be they feelings of sympathy or antipathy—into its foreign policy solutions. A realistic foreign policy should be based on awareness of the essential factors in international politics, namely national interests and the power of relationships between states.”
• For the Soviet Union, Finland was its major source of Western technology and its major window onto the West. The result was that the Soviets no longer had any motivation to take over Finland, because Finland was so much more valuable to the Soviet Union independent and allied with the West than it would have been if conquered or reduced to a communist satellite.
• Finland as a small country has had to face realities: today’s 6 million Finns will never develop the economic advantages of scale enjoyed by 90 million Germans or 330 million Americans. Finland will never succeed in economic spheres dependent on a low standard of living and the resulting ability to pay workers the low wages still widespread outside Europe and North America.
• In order to make productive use of its entire population, Finland’s school system aims to educate everybody well,
• It could never happen in the U.S. or Germany that a presidential election would be postponed, a presidential candidate would withdraw his or her candidacy, a publisher would cancel a book, or the press would censor itself, just to avoid inflaming Soviet sensitivities. Such actions seem to violate a democracy’s right to freedom of action. But the sensitivities of other countries are a problem for every country. To quote President Kekkonen again, “A country’s independence is not usually absolute… there was not a single state in existence that did not have to bow to historical inevitabilities.”
• The three factors favorable to crisis solution that Finland conspicuously lacked, and for whose lack Finland had to compensate in other ways, were support from allies (factor #4), available models (factor #5), and freedom from geopolitical constraints (factor #12). Of the nations discussed in this book, none received less support from allies than did Finland:

• While Japan and Britain look at a glance similar in area and isolation, Japan is actually five times farther from the continent (110 versus 22 miles), and 50% larger in area and much more fertile. Hence Japan’s population today is more than double Britain’s, and its production of land-grown food and timber and in-shore seafood is higher. Until modern industry required importation of oil and metals, Japan was largely self-sufficient in essential resources and had little need for foreign trade—unlike Britain. That’s the geographic background to the isolation that characterized most of Japanese history, and that merely increased after 1639.
• When the first Portuguese adventurers reaching Japan in 1542 shot ducks with their primitive guns, Japanese observers were so impressed that they avidly developed their own firearms, with the result that by 1600 Japan had more and better guns than any other country in the world.
• The reason why, among Western powers, the U.S. was the one that became motivated to act first against Japan was the U.S.’s conquest of California from Mexico in 1848, accompanied by the discovery there of gold, which caused an explosion of American ship traffic to the Pacific coast. Sailings of American whaling and trading ships around the Pacific also increased. Inevitably, some of those American ships got wrecked,
• Many samurai (the warrior class) and merchants objected to the bakufu’s efforts to monopolize foreign trade. Now that the shogun had asked the daimyo for advice after Perry’s first visit, some daimyo wanted to become further involved in policy and planning, rather than leaving it all to the shogun as before. It was the shogun who had negotiated and signed treaties with Western powers, but the shogun couldn’t control outlying daimyo who violated those treaties. The result was several sets of intersecting conflicts. Western powers were in conflict with Japan about whether to open Japan more (the Western goal) or less (the prevalent Japanese goal) to the West.
• Britain’s foreign secretary, Lord Granville, bluntly told Japanese negotiators that Britain would recognize Japanese “jurisdiction over British subjects [resident in Japan] in precise proportion to their [Japanese] advancement in enlightenment and civilization,” as judged by Britain according to British standards of advancement. It ended up taking 26 years from the Meiji coup until the time when Japan could get the West to revise the unequal treaties.
• Different foreign countries ended up as models in different spheres: for instance, the new Japanese navy and army became modeled on the British navy and the German army, respectively. Conversely, within a given sphere, Japan often tried a succession of different foreign models: for example, in creating a Japanese civil law code, the Justice Ministry relied on a French scholar to produce a first draft, and then turned instead to a German model for the next draft.
• When war broke out between France and Prussia in 1870, Japan even sent two observers with a much narrower purpose: to watch first-hand how Europeans fought.
• Hence in March 1868 four daimyo, including those of Satsuma and Choshu who had instigated the Meiji Restoration, were persuaded to offer their lands and people to the emperor by an ambiguously worded document. When the emperor accepted that offer in July, the other daimyo were commanded to make the same offer, and as a sop they were then appointed as “governors” of their former feudal domains. Finally, in August 1871 the daimyo were told that their domains (and governorships) would now be swept away and replaced with centrally administered prefectures. But the daimyo were allowed to keep 10% of their former domains’ assessed incomes, while being relieved of the burden of all the expenses that they had formerly borne. Thus, within three-and-a-half years, centuries of Japanese feudalism were dismantled.
• There were also many indigenous Japanese models on which to draw: late Tokugawa Japan consisted of 240 separate domains, differing in their tax policies and in other institutions. In addition to those positive models, Meiji Japan profited from an important negative model: China, whose fate of domination by the West made clear what Japan wanted to avoid.
• a retired Japanese steel executive, at that time in his 90’s, who recalled for me his visits to American steel factories in the 1930’s. He told me that he had been stunned to discover that the U.S.’s manufacturing capacity for high-quality steel was 50 times Japan’s, and that that fact alone had convinced him that it would be insane for Japan to go to war with the U.S.

• As soon as the junta took power, it rounded up leaders of Allende’s Popular Unity Party and other perceived leftists (such as university students and the famous Chilean folk singer Victor Jara; Plate 4.5), with the goal of literally exterminating the Chilean left-wing. Within the first 10 days, thousands of Chilean leftists were taken to two sports stadiums in Santiago, interrogated, tortured, and killed.
• Those Chilean exiles who went to Eastern Europe tended to become depressed upon discovering that intransigent leftist idealists in power didn’t create national happiness.
• They discovered that leftists don’t have to be radical and intransigent, but that they could achieve many of their goals by negotiating and compromising with people who hold different political views. The exiles experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union and of Eastern Europe’s communist governments, and China’s bloody suppression of demonstrations in 1989. All of those observations served to temper extremism and communist sympathies of Chile’s leftists.
• They also realized that Pinochet still enjoyed wide support among Chile’s business community and upper class, and that they couldn’t win, or (if they did win) that they would never be permitted to assume power,
• Chile’s tax authority (the equivalent of the U.S.’s Internal Revenue Service) issued a complaint against Pinochet for filing false tax returns. (Perhaps the authorities were inspired by the example of the notorious American gangster Al Capone,

• As an example of how long much of the archipelago remained unexplored by the Dutch, it wasn’t until that year of 1910 that a Dutch governor discovered that the eastern Indonesian island of Flores and the nearby small island of Komodo are home to the world’s largest lizard, the so-called Komodo dragon. Although it’s up to 10 feet long and weighs up to several hundred pounds,
• A crucial error was that the coup leaders made no attempt to capture the headquarters of the Indonesian Army Strategic Reserve (called Kostrad), located on one side of the central square, although coup troops did capture the other three sides of the square. The coup leaders had neither tanks nor walkie-talkies. Because they closed down the Jakarta telephone system at the time that they occupied the telecom building, coup leaders trying to communicate with one another between different parts of Jakarta were reduced to sending messengers through the streets. Incredibly, the coup leaders failed to provide food and water for their troops stationed on the central square, with the result that a battalion of hungry and thirsty soldiers wandered off.
• The PKI leader who apparently was one of the coup organizers failed to alert and coordinate actions with the rest of the PKI, hence there was no mass communist uprising.
• The coup itself initially killed only 12 people in Jakarta on October 1, plus a few other people in other cities of Java on October 2. But those few killings gave Suharto and the Indonesian military a pretext for mass murder. That response to the coup was so quick, efficient, and massive that it could hardly have been improvised spontaneously within a few days in response to unexpected developments. Instead, it must have involved previous planning that awaited only an excuse,
• Suharto had previously been considered just as an efficient general, and nothing more. But he now proceeded to display political skills exceeding even Sukarno’s.
• Suharto ended Sukarno’s armed “confrontation” with Malaysia over Borneo, rejoined the United Nations, abandoned Sukarno’s ideologically motivated alignment with Communist China,
• Like General Pinochet’s Chicago Boys in Chile, Suharto’s Berkeley mafia instituted economic reforms by balancing the budget, cutting subsidies, adopting a market orientation, and reducing Indonesia’s national debt and inflation.
• Indonesia’s other body of economic planning was the military... In effect, the Indonesian military developed a parallel government with a parallel budget approximately equal to the official government budget. Under Suharto, military officers constituted more than half of Indonesia’s mayors, local administrators, and provincial governors.
• Indonesians gave to Suharto’s wife (Ibu Tien = Madam Tien) a nickname meaning “Madam Ten Percent,” because she was said to extract 10% of the value of government contracts.

• As for West Germany just after World War Two, one policy considered by the victorious Western Allies was to prevent it from ever rebuilding its industries, to force its economy to revert just to agriculture under the so-called Morgenthau Plan, and to extract war reparations as the Allies had done after World War One and as the Soviets were now doing in East Germany.
• From that perspective, West Germany, lying in the center of Europe, and bordering on communist East Germany and Czechoslovakia, was crucial to the freedom of Western Europe. The Western Allies needed West Germany to become strong again, as a bulwark against communism. Their other motives for wanting Germany to become strong were to reduce the risk that a weak and frustrated Germany might descend again into political extremism (as had happened after World War One), and to reduce the economic costs to the Allies of having to continue to feed and support an economically weak West Germany.
• However, West Germany’s first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, proved skilled at exploiting American fears of a communist assault, in order to obtain Allied acquiescence to delegate more and more authority to West Germany and less and less to the Allies.
• Further contributing to that failure of the West German government to prosecute Nazis was the widespread presence of former Nazis among post-war government prosecutors themselves: for instance, it turned out that 33 out of 47 officials in the West German federal criminal bureau (Bundeskriminalamt), and many members of the West German intelligence service, had been leaders of the Nazi fanatical SS organization.
• But Germans do begin to explain themselves to one another by saying, for example, “Ich bin Jahrgang 1945,” meaning “My year of birth was 1945.” That’s because all Germans know that their fellow citizens went through very different life experiences, depending on when they were born and were growing up.
• The result was that Germans of Jahrgang around 1945 discredited their parents and their parents’ generation as Nazis. That helps explain why student protests also took a violent form in Italy and Japan, the other two aggressor countries of World War Two. In contrast, in the United States the parents of Americans born in 1945 were not viewed as war criminals for fighting in World War Two, but instead as war heroes. That doesn’t mean that American teenagers of the 1960’s, any more than teenagers elsewhere, refrained from criticizing their parents; it just means that they couldn’t dismiss their parents as war criminals.
• The most dramatic moment of Brandt’s career happened during his visit to Poland’s capital, Warsaw, in 1970. Poland had been the country that had had the highest percentage of its population killed during World War Two. It had been the site of the biggest Nazi extermination camps.
• when my Polish-American wife Marie and I flew from Berlin to Warsaw, Marie, with the black humor that has permitted Poles to retain their sanity throughout their history, looked down from our airplane on the flat plain in which Germany and Poland invisibly merge into each other, and commented: “Excellent terrain for tank warfare!” She was thinking of Hitler’s tanks rolling into Poland in 1939. But a historically minded German would instead have been thinking of all the armies that rolled into northern Germany from the east and from the west, including the Soviet and Allied armies in World War Two, Napoleon’s armies two centuries ago, and other armies before that.
• Bismarck: “One should always try to see where God is striding through world history, and in what direction He is heading. Then, jump in and hold on to His coattails, to get swept along as far as one can go.” That was also Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s strategy in 1989–1990, when political developments in East Germany and the Soviet Union finally, after Willy Brandt’s initiatives of 1969–1974, created the opportunity for German re-unification.
• But self-pity and sense of victimization have not dominated Germans’ view of themselves after World War Two, as they did after World War One.
• The result of this painful reckoning with the past has been to Germany’s advantage today, in the form of much better security and better relations with former enemies than prevailed for Germany after World War One or for Japan today.
• A German counter-example of successful leadership and realistic appraisal is provided by Willy Brandt, whose recognition of East Germany and other Eastern Bloc countries, treaties with Poland and Russia, and acceptance of the loss of German lands beyond the Oder-Neisse Line reversed 20 years of previous West German foreign policies. While West Germany’s subsequent chancellors continued Brandt’s policies, one can argue that his leadership made a difference.

• More controversial was the arrival of tens of thousands of Chinese in the 1850’s, drawn (along with many Europeans and Americans) by Australia’s first gold rush. That influx resulted in the last use of the British army in Australia, to quell riots in which a crowd beat, robbed, and even scalped Chinese.
• A third reason for the difference between Australian and American history was that the British colonial government had to station and pay for a large army in its American colonies. That army served to defend the colonies against the French army that was based in Canada and competing for control of North America, and also against less-well-armed but still formidable populous American Indian tribes with centralized government by chiefs. In contrast, no European power competed with Britain to colonize the Australian continent, and Aborigines were few, without guns, and not centrally led. Hence Britain never needed to station a large army in Australia, nor to levy unpopular taxes on Australians to pay for that army;
• When a boatload of workers arrived from the British colony but ethnically mixed Mediterranean island of Malta, with the potential for passing a dictation test in English, they were instead administered a dictation test in Dutch (a language unknown in Malta as well as in Australia) in order to justify expelling them. As for the non-whites already admitted to Australia as laborers, the Commonwealth deported Pacific Islanders, Chinese, and Indians but allowed two small groups of specialists (Afghan camel-drivers and Japanese pearl-divers) to remain.
• What became the best-known Australian involvement in World War One was the attack of ANZAC troops (the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps) on Turkish troops holding the Gallipoli Peninsula (Plate 7.5). The ANZAC troops landed on April 25, 1915, suffered high casualties
• Especially shocking to Australians was the Sandakan Death March, in which 2,700 Australian and British troops captured by the Japanese and imprisoned at Sandakan on the island of Borneo were marched across Borneo, starved, and beaten until most of the few survivors were executed, resulting in the deaths of almost all of those prisoners.
• in 1972, when Australia’s Labour Party under Prime Minister Gough Whitlam came to power for the first time in 23 years. In his first 19 days in office, even before he had appointed a new cabinet, Whitlam and his deputy embarked on a crash program of selective change in Australia, for which there are few parallels in the modern world in its speed and comprehensiveness. The changes introduced in those 19 days included: end of the military draft (national conscription); withdrawal of all Australian troops from Vietnam; recognition of the People’s Republic of China;
• By 2010, the percentage of Australians actually born overseas (more than 25%) was second in the world, trailing only Israel’s percentage. The influence of those Asian immigrants has been far out of proportion to their numbers: Asian students have come to occupy over 70% of the places in Sydney’s top schools,

• Japan’s prison population is far smaller than that of the U.S.: about 80,000, versus nearly 2.5 million, respectively.
• but Japan’s debt-to-GDP ratio is double that of Greece and four times that of Spain
• One might object that the marriage rate is also falling in most other developed countries without causing the catastrophic drop in the birth rate that Japan is experiencing, because so many births are to unwed mothers: 40% of all births in the U.S., 50% in France, and 66% in Iceland. But that mitigation doesn’t apply to Japan, where unwed mothers account for a negligible proportion of births: only 2%.
• but Japan only 0.2%. (For instance, Japan accepted only six and eleven refugees in the years 2013 and 2014, respectively.) Foreign workers constitute 15% of the workforce in the U.S. and 9% in Germany, but only 1.3% in Japan.
• They tell me that their history classes in Japanese schools devoted little time to World War Two (“because that war lasted just a few years in the thousands of years of Japanese history”), said little or nothing about Japan’s role as aggressor, stressed the role of Japanese as victims (of the two atomic bombs that killed about 120,000 Japanese) rather than as responsible for the deaths of millions of other people plus several million Japanese soldiers and civilians, and blamed the U.S. for somehow tricking Japan into launching the war.
• represents an economic loss for Japan, because its whaling industry has to be heavily subsidized by the government in several ways: direct subsidies to the whaling ships themselves; additional costs of more ships to escort and protect the whaling ships; and the hidden costs of so-called “foreign aid” paid to small non-whaling countries that are members of the International Whaling Commission, as a bribe in return for their pro-whaling votes.
• Japanese people cherish a self-image of living in harmony with nature, and they did traditionally manage their own forests sustainably—but not the overseas forests and fisheries that they now exploit.

• Temperate-zone soils are in general more fertile than tropical soils, due in part to the legacies of high-latitude Ice Age glaciers that repeatedly advanced and retreated over the landscape, grinding rocks and generating or exposing fresh soils.
• Because of North America’s tapering wedge shape, large volumes of ice forming in the broad expanse at high latitudes were funneled into a narrower band and became heavier glaciers as they advanced towards lower latitudes.
• Hence creation of fertile young soils by the advance and retreat of glaciers originating in high latitudes was most effective in North America, less effective in Eurasia, and slight or non-existent in the three southern continents.
• All three U.S. coasts have big indentations within which lie sheltered deep-water ports (Plate 9.3), such as Long Island Sound, Chesapeake Bay, Galveston Bay, San Francisco Bay, and Puget Sound. As a result, the U.S. is blessed with many excellent protected natural harbors: more on our East Coast alone than in all the rest of the Americas south of the Mexican border.
• When one adds the intra-coastal waterway to the Mississippi / Great Lakes system, the U.S. ends up with more navigable internal waterways than all the rest of the world combined.
• them as a sub-ideal way to deliver troops. The reason, of course, is that it’s cheaper and safer to make deliveries from a ship off the coast than from a vehicle on land only if the people awaiting you on land welcome your planned delivery. Delivery by sea is expensive and unsafe if the people awaiting you are shooting at you. Amphibious landings have always ranked among the most dangerous forms of warfare:
• Knowledge that peaceful outlets for expression exist reduces the risk of civil violence. A cynical but politically astute friend remarked to me, “What counts in democracy is the semblance of democracy.”
• exemplified by Eli Whitney’s mass production of interchangeable parts for muskets;
• Many decades ago, American diplomats used to play a game of debating which of the world’s countries were most irrelevant to U.S. national interests. Popular answers were “Afghanistan” and “Somalia”: those two countries were so poor, and so remote, that it seemed that they could never do anything to create problems for us. Ironically, those two countries then became perceived as such threats to us that we sent troops into both of them,

• Such collisions had been a leading cause of fatal plane accidents in Lebanon and Israel. That stimulated bird-watchers of those two countries to establish a mutual warning system. In the autumn Lebanese bird-watchers warn their Israeli counterparts and Israeli air traffic controllers when they see a flock of large birds over Lebanon heading south towards Israel, and in the spring Israeli bird-watchers warn of birds heading north.
• Those events really do constitute a random perturbation: a leader’s economic policies don’t affect the likelihood that that leader will accidentally drown. It turned out that economic growth rates were much more likely to change following a leader’s natural death than following random moments when a leader didn’t die.
• In their second paper, Jones and Olken ask: what happens when a leader is assassinated, instead of dying of natural causes? Of course, assassinations are not at all random events: they are more likely to be attempted under some conditions (e.g., if citizens are dissatisfied with low economic growth) than under other conditions. Hence Jones and Olken compared successful assassination attempts with unsuccessful attempts, when the bullet missed. That really is a random difference: It turned out that successful attempts were more likely than unsuccessful attempts to be followed by a change in national political institutions.
• Nevertheless, there is a universal lesson: small countries threatened by large countries should remain alert, consider alternative options, and appraise those options realistically. While this lesson may seem so embarrassingly obvious as to be not worth mentioning, sadly it has often been ignored. It was ignored by the Melians; it was ignored by the Paraguayans, who waged a disastrous war against the combined forces of the much larger Brazil and Argentina plus Uruguay from 1865 to 1870, resulting in the deaths of 60% of Paraguay’s population; it was ignored by Finland in 1939; it was ignored by Japan in 1941, when Japan simultaneously attacked the United States, Britain, the Netherlands, Australia, and China while Russia was hostile;