Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis

by Jared Diamond

That outcome is reflected in the Chinese written character translated as “crisis,” which is pronounced “wei-ji” and consists of two characters: the Chinese character “wei,” meaning “danger,” plus the Chinese character “ji,” meaning “crucial occasion, critical point, opportunity.” The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche expressed a similar idea by his quip “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” Winston Churchill’s corresponding quip was “Never let a good crisis go to waste!”

Hence a therapist’s immediate goal in the first session—or else the first step if one is dealing with an acknowledged crisis by oneself or with the help of friends—is to overcome that paralysis by means of what is termed “building a fence.” That means identifying the specific things that really have gone wrong during the crisis, so that one can say, “Here, inside the fence, are the particular problems in my life, but everything else outside the fence is normal and OK.” Often, a person in crisis feels relieved as soon as he or she starts to formulate the problem and to build a fence around it. The therapist can then help the client to explore alternative ways of coping with the specific problem inside the fence. The client thereby embarks on a process of selective change, which is possible, rather than remaining paralyzed by the seeming necessity of total change, which would be impossible.

Numerous concentration camp survivors abandoned their religion, because they found the evil of the camps impossible to reconcile with belief in a god. For example, the great Italian Jewish author Primo Levi, who did survive Auschwitz, said afterwards, “The experience of Auschwitz for me was such as to sweep away whatever legacies of my religious education that I had retained. There is Auschwitz, therefore God cannot exist. I haven’t found a solution to that dilemma.”

Rather than remain in their homes under Soviet occupation, the entire population of Karelia, amounting to 10% of Finland’s population, chose to evacuate Karelia and withdrew into the rest of Finland. There, they were squeezed into rooms in apartments and houses of other Finns, until almost all of them could be provided with their own homes by 1945. Uniquely among the many European countries with large internally displaced populations, Finland never housed its displaced citizens in refugee camps. Nineteen years later, my Finnish hosts during my visit still remembered the huge strain of finding housing and support for all those Karelians.

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.

In order to make productive use of its entire population, Finland’s school system aims to educate everybody well, unlike the U.S. school system, which now educates some people well but more people poorly.

When I visited Finland in 1959, knowing almost nothing about the history of Finland’s two wars with the Soviet Union, I asked my Finnish hosts why Finland deferred to the Soviet Union in so many ways, imported those inferior Moskvich cars, and was so afraid about the possibility of a Soviet attack on Finland. I told my Finnish hosts that the United States would surely defend Finland if the Soviet Union attacked. In retrospect, there was nothing more cruel, ignorant, and tactless that I could have said to a Finn. Finland had bitter memories that, when it actually was attacked by the Soviet Union in 1939, it had not been helped by the U.S., Sweden, Germany, Britain, or France.

Finland has to bow much more to historical inevitabilities than does the U.S. or Germany: Finland is small and borders on Russia, while the U.S. and Germany do not. What do the critics who decry Finlandization think that Finland should instead have been doing?—risk still another Soviet invasion, by not considering Soviet reactions?

Finland illustrates well our theme of selective change and building a fence (factor #3). In its eventual response (after September 1944) to the Soviet attack, Finland reversed its long-standing previous policy of trying to ignore and not deal with the Soviet Union. It adopted a new policy of economic involvement and frequent political discussions with the Soviet Union. But those changes were highly selective, because Finland remained unoccupied, politically self-governing, and a socially liberal democracy. That coexistence of two seemingly contrasting identities, one changed and the other unchanged, has puzzled and angered many non-Finns, who coined the scornful term “Finlandization”

Finland went through a long and almost uninterrupted period of experimentation in order to discover how much economic and political independence it could retain, and what it had to do to satisfy the Soviet Union in return.

both the winners and the losers of the Finnish Civil War shared the same egalitarian tradition, and were unique among the world’s people in speaking the Finnish language, reciting the Kalevala, and being the countrymen of Jean Sibelius and Paavo Nurmi.

Of course, they haven’t replaced everything about traditional Japan, of which much remains. That is, Japan, like Cocoanut Grove’s survivors after the fire, and like Britain after World War Two, is a mosaic of its old self and its new self—

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.

Catholics preached intolerance of other religions, disobeyed Japanese government orders not to preach, and were perceived as loyal to a foreign ruler (the Pope). Hence after crucifying thousands of Japanese Christians, between 1636 and 1639 the shogun cut most ties between Japan and Europe. Christianity was banned. Most Japanese were forbidden to travel or live overseas. Japanese fishermen who drifted to sea, got picked up by European or American ships, and managed to return to Japan were often kept under house arrest or forbidden to talk about their experiences overseas.

Once every four years, those Dutch traders were ordered to bring tribute to the Japanese capital, traveling by a prescribed route under watchful eyes, like dangerous microbes kept inside a sealed container.

Somewhat like medieval Europe, Japan in 1853 was still a feudal hierarchical society divided into domains, each controlled by a lord called a daimyo, whose power exceeded that of a medieval European lord. At the apex of power stood the shogun (Plate 3.1), of the Tokugawa line of shoguns that had ruled Japan since 1603, and that controlled one-quarter of Japan’s rice-growing land.

The background to Western pressure on Japan was Western pressure on China, which produced far more goods desired by the West than did Japan. European consumers especially wanted Chinese tea and silk, but the West produced little that China wanted in return, so Europeans had to make up that trade deficit by shipping silver to China. In order to reduce the hemorrhaging of their silver stocks, British traders got the bright idea of shipping cheap opium from India to sell to China at prices below those of existing Chinese sources. (No, that British opium policy is not an invented anti-Western slander: it really was true, and needs to be remembered when one wants to understand modern Chinese attitudes towards the West.) The Chinese government understandably responded by denouncing opium as a health hazard, banning its importation, and demanding that European smugglers surrender all the opium stored on their ships anchored off China’s coast. Britain objected to that Chinese response as an illegal restraint of trade. The result was the Opium War of 1839–1842 between Britain and China, the first serious test of military strength between China and the West.

U.S. President Millard Fillmore sent Commodore Matthew Perry to Japan with a fleet of four ships, including two gun-bearing steam-powered warships infinitely superior to any Japanese ships at that time. (Japan had neither steamships nor even steam engines.) On July 8, 1853 Perry sailed his fleet uninvited into Edo Bay (now called Tokyo Bay), refused Japanese orders to leave, delivered President Fillmore’s letter of demands, and announced that he expected an answer when he returned the following year.

The 14-year period that began in 1854, when the shogun’s government (called the bakufu) signed Perry’s treaty ending Japan’s centuries of isolation, was a tumultuous period of Japanese history. The bakufu struggled to solve the problems resulting from Japan’s forced opening. Ultimately, the shogun failed, because the opening triggered unstoppable changes in Japanese society and government. Those changes in turn led to the shogun’s overthrow by his Japanese rivals, and then to much more far-reaching changes under the new government that was led by those rivals.

Already around 1859, resentful, hotheaded, naïve young sword-wielding samurai began to pursue a goal of expelling foreigners by a campaign of assassination. They became known as “shishi,” meaning “men of high purpose.”

On January 3, 1868 the conspirators seized the gates of the Imperial Palace in the city of Kyoto, convened a council stripping the shogun of his lands and of his position on the council, and ended the shogunate. The council proclaimed the fiction of “restoring” the responsibility for governing Japan to the emperor, although that responsibility had previously actually been the shogun’s. That event is known as the Meiji Restoration, and it marks the beginning of what is termed the Meiji Era: the period of rule of the new emperor.

In order to make this massive borrowing from the West palatable to Japanese traditionalists, innovations and borrowings in Meiji Japan were often claimed to be not new at all, but just returns to Japan’s traditional ways. For example, when the emperor himself in 1889 promulgated Japan’s first constitution, based heavily on the German constitution, in his speech he invoked his ascent “to the Throne of a lineal succession unbroken for ages eternal,” and “the right of sovereignty of the State [that] we have inherited from Our Ancestors.” Similarly, new rituals invented for the imperial court during the Meiji Era were claimed to be timeless old court rituals. This reframing of innovations as supposedly retained traditions—the phenomenon of “invented traditions” often invoked by innovators in other countries besides Japan—contributed to the success of Meiji leaders in carrying out drastic changes.

For the first time in its history, Japan acquired a national system of education. Compulsory elementary schools were established in 1872, followed by the founding of Japan’s first university in 1877, middle schools in 1881, and high schools in 1886. The school system at first followed the highly centralized French model, shifting in 1879 to the American school model of local control, and then in 1886 to a German model. The end result of that educational reform is that Japan today ties for having the world’s highest percentage of literate citizens (99%), despite also having the world’s most complicated and hard-to-learn writing system.

National education, along with the government’s official abolition of hereditary occupations, undermined Japan’s traditional class divisions, because now higher education rather than birth became the stepping-stone to high government office. Partly as a result, among the world’s 14 large rich democracies today, Japan is the one with the most equal division of wealth, and the one with proportionately the fewest billionaires in its population; the U.S. lies far at the opposite extreme in both respects.

The goal of Meiji leaders was emphatically not to “Westernize” Japan, in the sense of converting it into a European society far from Europe—unlike Australia’s British colonists, whose goal was indeed to convert Australia into a British society far from Britain (Chapter 7). Instead, the Meiji goal was to adopt many Western features, but to modify them to suit Japanese circumstances, and to retain much of traditional Japan. Those adopted and modified Western features were grafted onto a Japanese core retained from Japanese history.

While Meiji leaders were in agreement on their overall goal of strengthening Japan so that it could resist the West, they did not start off with an encompassing blueprint. Instead, Meiji reforms were devised and adopted piecemeal in stages: first, creating a national army, an income stream, and a national system of education, and abolishing feudalism; then, a constitution, and civil and criminal law codes; and even later, overseas expansion by wars (to be discussed in the next pages). Nor were all of these reforms adopted smoothly and unanimously: there was internal conflict in Meiji Japan, such as the already mentioned samurai rebellions and peasant uprisings.

Japan’s 1904–1905 war against Russia enabled Meiji Japan for the first time to test itself against a Western power; both Japan’s navy and its army defeated the Russians (Plates 3.7, 3.8). That was a milestone in world history: the defeat of a major European power by an Asian power in an all-out war.

The most poignant moment of my first visit to Japan, in 1998, came when my dinner table partner one evening turned out to be 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. But Japan’s older leaders with overseas experience in the 1930’s were intimidated and dominated, and several were assassinated, by young hotheads lacking overseas experience—much as shishi hotheads in the late 1850’s and 1860’s had assassinated and intimidated Japan’s leaders then. Of course, the shishi had no more overseas experience of the strength of foreign countries than did Japan’s young officers of the 1930’s.

Thus, part—not all, but part—of the reason for Japan initiating World War Two against such hopeless odds was that young army leaders of the 1930’s lacked the knowledge base and historical experience necessary for honest, realistic, cautious self-appraisal. The result was disastrous for Japan.

educational reforms on the American model. Even the U.S. Declaration of Independence appears to have served as a model for a government reform proposal drafted in 1870 by Itagaki Taisuke and Fukuoka Kotei, who began their proposal with a preamble stating that all men were by rights equal, from which they went on to draw many conclusions. (Think of the second sentence of our Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…,” leading to many conclusions.)

But just six years after my visit, in 1973, Chile was taken over by a military dictatorship that smashed previous world records for government-perpetrated sadistic torture. In the course of a military coup on September 11, Chile’s democratically elected president committed suicide in the presidential palace. Not only did the Chilean junta kill Chileans in large numbers, torture them in larger numbers, devise vile new techniques of psychological and physical torture, and drive still more Chileans into exile. It also directed terrorist political killings outside Chile, including what was, until the World Trade Towers attack of September 11 of 2001 (coincidentally on the anniversary of Chile’s coup), the only terrorist political killing of an American citizen on American soil (in Washington, DC, in 1976).

The U.S. responded with the determination that never again would it tolerate the installation of a communist government in the Western Hemisphere. Any American president who failed to prevent such an installation would have been immediately impeached and removed from office for gross neglect of American interests, just as President Kennedy was warned that he would be impeached if he failed to get Soviet missiles out of Cuba.

Neither his fellow junta members, nor the CIA, nor anyone else anticipated Pinochet’s ruthlessness, his strong leadership, and his ability to cling to power—at the same time as he continued to project an image of himself as a benign old man and devout Catholic, depicted by the state-controlled media with his children and going to church.

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.

Five weeks after the coup, Pinochet personally ordered a general to go around Chilean cities in what became known as the “Caravan of Death,” killing political prisoners and Popular Unity politicians whom the army had been too slow at killing.

In 1974 DINA began to operate outside Chile. It started in Argentina by planting a car bomb that killed Chile’s former army commander-in-chief General Carlos Prats and his wife Sofia, because Prats had refused to join the coup and was feared by Pinochet as a potential threat. DINA then launched an international campaign of government terrorism, called Operation Condor, by convening a meeting of the heads of the secret police of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and eventually Brazil, in order to cooperate on cross-border manhunts of exiles, leftists, and political figures. Hundreds of Chileans were tracked down and killed in other South American countries, Europe, and even one in the U.S. The U.S. case occurred in 1976, in Washington, DC, only 14 blocks from the White House, when a car bomb killed the former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier (minister of defense under Allende), plus an American colleague. As I mentioned previously, that was the only known case of a foreign terrorist killing an American citizen on American soil—until the World Trade Towers attack of 2001.

The economic benefits for Chileans were unequally distributed: middle-class and upper-class Chileans prospered, but many other Chileans suffered and found themselves living below the poverty level. In a democracy it would have been difficult to inflict such widespread suffering on poor Chileans, as well as to impose government policies opposed by rich business oligarchs. That was possible only under a repressive dictatorship.

But the “No!” campaigners had consisted of 17 different groups, with 17 different visions for Chile after Pinochet. Hence Chile risked going down the path trodden by the Allied democracies that had defeated Germany and Japan in World War Two, and of whom Winston Churchill had written as the theme of the last volume of his six-volume history of World War Two, Triumph and Tragedy, “How the great democracies triumphed, and so were able to resume the follies which had so nearly cost them their life.”

Already during the “No!” campaign of 1989, “No!” backers of disparate views realized that they couldn’t win unless they learned to cooperate with each other. 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, unless Pinochet supporters could be assured of their personal safety in a post-Pinochet era. Painful as the prospect was, leftists in power would have to practice tolerance towards former enemies whose views they loathed, and whose behavior towards them had been horrible. They had to declare their willingness to build “a Chile for all Chileans”: the goal that Patricio Aylwin, Chile’s first democratically elected president after Pinochet, proclaimed in his inaugural speech of March 12, 1990.

before stepping down as president, Pinochet obtained legislation naming him senator-for-life, permitting him to appoint several new Supreme Court justices, and retaining him as commander-in-chief of the armed forces until he finally retired in 1998 at the age of 83. That meant that Pinochet, and his implicit threat of another military coup, were constantly on the minds of Chile’s democratic leaders. As one Chilean friend explained it to me, “It’s as if, upon Nazi Germany’s surrender on 9 May 1945, Hitler hadn’t committed suicide but remained senator-for-life and the German army’s commander-in-chief!” Further strengthening the Chilean military’s position, Pinochet’s constitution included a provision (still in effect today) specifying that 10% of Chile’s national copper sales revenue (yes: sales, not just profits!) must be spent each year on the military budget. That gives Chile’s armed forces a financial basis far in excess of the money needed to defend Chile against any credible foreign threat—especially considering that Chile’s last (and only its second) war ended over a century ago in 1883, that Chile’s borders are protected by ocean and desert and high mountains, and that Chile’s neighbors (Argentina, Bolivia, Peru) are not dangerous. Instead, the only likely use of Chile’s armed forces is against the Chilean people themselves.

The last provision requires a 5/7ths voter majority to change the constitution—but it’s difficult in a democracy (especially one as fractured as Chile) to get 5/7ths of the electorate to agree to anything. As a result, although decades have passed since Pinochet was voted out of the presidency, Chile still operates under a modified version of his constitution that most Chileans consider illegitimate. It is painful for any country to acknowledge and atone for evil deeds that its officials committed against its own citizens or against citizens of other countries. It’s painful because nothing can undo the past, and often many of the perpetrators are still alive, unrepentant, powerful, and widely supported. Acknowledgment and atonement have been especially difficult for Chile, because Pinochet was supported by such a large minority of Chilean voters even in the 1989 uncoerced plebiscite, because Pinochet remained commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and because the democratic government had good reason to fear another military coup if it proceeded against military perpetrators. On two occasions—when Pinochet’s son was being investigated, and when a human rights commission was beginning its work of investigating the atrocities—soldiers did appear on the streets in full military garb. Their appearance was supposedly just on a “routine exercise”—but the implicit threat was obvious to everyone.

Chileans are still wrestling with the moral dilemma of how to weigh the positive and the negative sides of their country’s former military government: especially, the dilemma of how to balance its economic benefits against its crimes. The dilemma is insoluble. A simple answer would be: Why even try to weigh the benefits against the crimes? Why not just acknowledge that the military government did both beneficial things and horrible things? But Chileans did have to weigh them in the 1989 plebiscite, when they were offered only the choice between voting “yes” or “no” to keeping Pinochet as president for eight more years, and when they couldn’t vote “yes but…” or “no but…” Faced with that choice, 42% of Chileans voted “yes,” despite the sickening deeds that eventually went on display at the Villa Grimaldi Museum.

The opposition of the U.S. played a role in Allende’s downfall, and the prompt restoration of U.S. economic aid following the 1973 coup played a role in the military government’s long survival.

Chilean friends tell me that Chile’s growing polarization in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s made it likely that the resolution of that polarization would be violent. Even before the coup of September 11, 1973, violence had been increasing for six years.

In May 1945 Nazi Germany was militarily completely defeated, many of its Nazi leaders committed suicide, and the whole country was occupied by its enemies. After World War Two, there were still plenty of ex-Nazis in German government, but they could not openly defend Nazi crimes. Thus, Germany did eventually deal publicly with Nazi crimes. At the opposite extreme, when the Indonesian army killed or arranged the killings of over half-a-million Indonesians in 1965, the Indonesian government behind those mass killings remained in power, and it is still in power today. Not surprisingly, even today, more than 50 years after the mass killings, Indonesians hesitate to talk about them. Chile is an intermediate case. The Chilean military government that ordered killings yielded peacefully to a democratic government. But the military leaders remained alive and retained much power. Chile’s new democratic government initially didn’t dare proceed against military criminals. Today, it is still proceeding cautiously. Why is it cautious? Because the army might come back. Because there are still lots of Chileans who defend Pinochet. Because “a Chile for all Chileans” means, unfortunately, a Chile that includes former war criminals.

Geographically, Indonesia is the most splintered country in the world, with thousands of inhabited islands scattered over an expanse of 3,400 miles from west to east. For most of the last 2,000 years, there were indigenous states on some Indonesian islands. But none of them came to control most of the Indonesian archipelago, nor was there a name or a concept for what we know today as Indonesia. Linguistically, Indonesia is one of the world’s most diverse countries, with more than 700 different languages. It is also religiously diverse: while most Indonesians are Muslims, there are also large Christian and Hindu minorities, as well as Buddhists, Confucians, and followers of local traditional religions.

It should be emphasized that the word “Indonesia” didn’t even exist until it was coined by a European around 1850. The Dutch called their colony the “Indies,” the “Netherlands Indies,” or the “Dutch East Indies.” The archipelago’s inhabitants themselves did not share a national identity, nor a national language, nor a sense of unity in opposition to the Dutch. For example, Javanese troops joined Dutch troops to conquer the leading state on the island of Sumatra, a traditional rival of Javanese states.

In the early 1900’s the Dutch colonial government began efforts to switch from a purely exploitative policy for their colony to what they termed an “ethical policy”—i.e., finally trying to do some good for Indonesians.

Indonesians today consider the negative effects of Dutch colonialism far to have outweighed the positive effects.

By around 1910, increasing numbers of inhabitants of the Dutch East Indies were developing the beginnings of a “national consciousness.” That is, they began to feel that they were not just inhabitants of their particular Dutch-governed sultanate in some part of Java or Sumatra, but that they belonged to a larger entity called “Indonesia.” Indonesians with those beginnings of a wider identity formed many distinct but often overlapping groups: a Javanese group that felt culturally superior, an Islamic movement seeking an Islamic identity for Indonesia, labor unions, a communist party, Indonesian students sent to the Netherlands for education, and others. That is, the Indonesian independence movement was fragmented along ideological and geographic and religious lines, presaging problems that continued to plague Indonesia after independence.