#burma campaign

[captain-price-unofficially]

A lone B-25H Mitchell from the 12th Bomb Group over Burma in 1944.

[carbone14]

Chasseurs Curtiss P-40 Warhawk des Tigres Volants (1st American Volunteer Group) en formation au-dessus de la rivière Salouen (Salween River) à la frontière sino-birmane – Campagne de Birmanie – Guerre du Pacifique – 28 mai 1942

Photographe : R. T. Smith

©San Diego Air & Space Museum

[gallerycityuniverse]

GoodJadeit Etsy shop wishes you a happy Valentine's Day, filled with love and joy! 🎉💖

#naturalburmajade #burmajadeite #jadeitegradea #jadeitegemstone #jadegemstone #greenjadestone #jadeite #Lithotherapy #crystalhealing #gemstoneshealing #greenjadeite #Lithotherapy #gemstoneshealing #gemstonejewelry #lithothérapie #lithoterrehappy

Link to shop: https://www.etsy.com/shop/goodjadeite

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"THESE ARE THE TROOPS, who'll shoulder a big share of the fighting when the time comes to push the Jap out of occupied areas in the Far East. With oriental war cries on their lips, infantrymen of the Chinese Expeditionary Force hurdle a wall in the obstacle course at American training centre in India. They carry bolt-action rifles. (U.S. Army Air Force photo from NEA)"

Kingston Whig-Standard. June 9, 1943. Page 5.

[bookloversofbath]

Burma 1942: The Japanese Invasion: Both Sides Tell the Story of a Savage Jungle War :: Ian Lyall Grant & Kazou Tamayama

[acoatforamonkey]

Myanmar Diaries - The Myanmar Film Collective

Myanmar Diaries Myanmar Diaries is a hybrid film about life under the regime of terror in Myanmar in the aftermath of its military coup of February 1st, 2021, told through personal stories by a group of anonymous young Burmese filmmakers. It is produced by Netherlands-based ZINDOC and co-produced by Norwegian Ten Thousand Images. Built up of short films by ten young anonymous Burmese filmmakers,…

[daughterofdessalines]

COMMIT TO NEVER STOP TALKING ABOUT “GEN0CIDE CULTURE” IN PALESTINE,CONGO,SUDAN,BURMA & other places in the world 🌎

THEY WANT US TO FORGET ABOUT MASS EXTERMINATION CAMPAIGNS ON THIS PLANET.. THEY WANT US TO IGNORE IT.

[fatehbaz]

hi! SUPER interesting excerpt on ants and empire; adding it to my reading list. have you ever read "mosquito empires," by john mcneill?

Yea, I've read it. (Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914, basically about influence of environment and specifically insect-borne disease on colonial/imperial projects. Kinda brings to mind Centering Animals in Latin American History [Few and Tortorici, 2013] and the exploration of the centrality of ecology/plants to colonialism in Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World [Schiebinger, 2007].)

If you're interested: So, in the article we're discussing, Rohan Deb Roy shows how Victorian/Edwardian British scientists, naturalists, academics, administrators, etc., used language/rhetoric to reinforce colonialism while characterizing insects, especially termites in India and elsewhere in the tropics, as "Goths"; "arch scourge of humanity"; "blight of learning"; "destroying hordes"; and "the foe of civilization". [Rohan Deb Roy. “White ants, empire, and entomo-politics in South Asia.” The Historical Journal. October 2019.] He explores how academic and pop-sci literature in the US and Britain participated in racist dehumanization of non-European people by characterizing them as "uncivilized", as insects/animals. (This sort of stuff is summarized by Neel Ahuja, describing interplay of race, gender, class, imperialism, disease/health, anthropomorphism. See Ahuja's “Postcolonial Critique in a Multispecies World.”)

In a different 2018 article on "decolonizing science," Deb Roy also moves closer to the issue of mosquitoes, disease, hygiene, etc. explored in Mosquito Empires. Deb Roy writes: 'Sir Ronald Ross had just returned from an expedition to Sierra Leone. The British doctor had been leading efforts to tackle the malaria that so often killed English colonists in the country, and in December 1899 he gave a lecture to the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce [...]. [H]e argued that "in the coming century, the success of imperialism will depend largely upon success with the microscope."''

Deb Roy also writes elsewhere about "nonhuman empire" and how Empire/colonialism brutalizes, conscripts, employs, narrates other-than-human creatures. See his book Malarial Subjects: Empire, Medicine and Nonhumans in British India, 1820-1909 (published 2017).

---

Like Rohan Deb Roy, Jonathan Saha is another scholar with a similar focus (relationship of other-than-human creatures with British Empire's projects in Asia). Among his articles: "Accumulations and Cascades: Burmese Elephants and the Ecological Impact of British Imperialism." Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. 2022. /// “Colonizing elephants: animal agency, undead capital and imperial science in British Burma.” BJHS Themes. British Society for the History of Science. 2017. /// "Among the Beasts of Burma: Animals and the Politics of Colonial Sensibilities, c. 1840-1940." Journal of Social History. 2015. /// And his book Colonizing Animals: Interspecies Empire in Myanmar (published 2021).

---

Related spirit/focus. If you liked the termite/India excerpt, you might enjoy checking out this similar exploration of political/imperial imagery of bugs a bit later in the twentieth century: Fahim Amir. “Cloudy Swords” e-flux Journal Issue #115. February 2021.

Amir explores not only insect imagery, specifically caricatures of termites in discourse about civilization (like the Deb Roy article about termites in India), but Amir also explores the mosquito/disease aspect invoked by your message (Mosquito Empires) by discussing racially segregated city planning and anti-mosquito architecture in British West Africa and Belgian Congo, as well as anti-mosquito campaigns of fascist Italy and the ascendant US empire. German cities began experiencing a non-native termite infestation problem shortly after German forces participated in violent suppression of resistance in colonial Africa. Meanwhile, during anti-mosquito campaigns in the Panama Canal zone, US authorities imposed forced medical testing of women suspected of carrying disease. Article features interesting statements like: 'The history of the struggle against the [...] mosquito reads like the history of capitalism in the twentieth century: after imperial, colonial, and nationalistic periods of combatting mosquitoes, we are now in the NGO phase, characterized by shrinking [...] health care budgets, privatization [...].' I've shared/posted excerpts before, which I introduce with my added summary of some of the insect-related imagery: “Thousands of tiny Bakunins”. Insects "colonize the colonizers". The German Empire fights bugs. Fascist ants, communist termites, and the “collectivism of shit-eating”. Insects speak, scream, and “go on rampage”.

---

In that Deb Roy article, there is a section where we see that some Victorian writers pontificated on how "ants have colonies and they're quite hard workers, just like us!" or "bugs have their own imperium/domain, like us!" So that bugs can be both reviled and also admired. On a similar note, in the popular imagination, about anthropomorphism of Victorian bugs, and the "celebrated" "industriousness" and "cleverness" of spiders, there is: Claire Charlotte McKechnie. “Spiders, Horror, and Animal Others in Late Victorian Empire Fiction.” Journal of Victorian Culture. December 2012. She also addresses how Victorian literature uses natural science and science fiction to process anxiety about imperialism. This British/Victorian excitement at encountering "exotic" creatures of Empire, and popular discourse which engaged in anthropormorphism, is explored by Eileen Crist's Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind and O'Connor's The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802-1856.

Related anthologies include a look at other-than-humans in literature and popular discourse: Gothic Animals: Uncanny Otherness and the Animal With-Out (Heholt and Edmunson, 2020). There are a few studies/scholars which look specifically at "monstrous plants" in the Victorian imagination. Anxiety about gender and imperialism produced caricatures of woman as exotic anthropomorphic plants, as in: “Murderous plants: Victorian Gothic, Darwin and modern insights into vegetable carnivory" (Chase et al., Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, 2009). Special mention for the work of Anna Boswell, which explores the British anxiety about imperialism reflected in their relationships with and perceptions of "strange" creatures and "alien" ecosystems, especially in Aotearoa. (Check out her “Anamorphic Ecology, or the Return of the Possum.” Transformations. 2018.)

And then bridging the Victorian anthropomorphism of bugs with twentieth-century hygiene campaigns, exploring "domestic sanitation" there is: David Hollingshead. “Women, insects, modernity: American domestic ecologies in the late nineteenth century.” Feminist Modernist Studies. August 2020. (About the cultural/social pressure to protect "the home" from bugs, disease, and "invasion".)

---

In fields like geography, history of science, etc., much has been said/written about how botany was the key imperial science/field, and there is the classic quintessential tale of the British pursuit of cinchona from Latin America, to treat mosquito-borne disease among its colonial administrators in Africa, India, and Southeast Asia. In other words: Colonialism, insects, plants in the West Indies shaped and influenced Empire and ecosystems in the East Indies, and vice versa. One overview of this issue from Early Modern era through the Edwardian era, focused on Britain and cinchona: Zaheer Baber. "The Plants of Empire: Botanic Gardens, Colonial Power and Botanical Knowledge." May 2016. Elizabeth DeLoughrey and other scholars of the Caribbean, "the postcolonial," revolutionary Black Atlantic, etc. have written about how plantation slavery in the Caribbean provided a sort of bounded laboratory space. (See Britt Rusert's "Plantation Ecologies: The Experiential Plantation [...].") The argument is that plantations were already of course a sort of botanical laboratory for naturalizing and cultivating valuable commodity plants, but they were also laboratories to observe disease spread and to practice containment/surveillance of slaves and laborers. See also Chakrabarti's Bacteriology in British India: laboratory medicine and the tropics (2012). Sharae Deckard looks at natural history in imperial/colonial imagination and discourse (especially involving the Caribbean, plantations, the sea, and the tropics) looking at "the ecogothic/eco-Gothic", Edenic "nature", monstrous creatures, exoticism, etc. Kinda like Grove's discussion of "tropical Edens" in the colonial imagination of Green Imperialism.

Dante Furioso's article "Sanitary Imperialism" (from e-flux's Sick Architecture series) provides a summary of US entomology and anti-mosquito campaigns in the Caribbean, and how "US imperial concepts about the tropics" and racist pathologization helped influence anti-mosquito campaigns that imposed racial segregation in the midst of hard labor, gendered violence, and surveillance in the Panama Canal zone. A similar look at manipulation of mosquito-borne disease in building empire: Gregg Mitman. “Forgotten Paths of Empire: Ecology, Disease, and Commerce in the Making of Liberia’s Plantation Economy.” Environmental History. 2017. (Basically, some prominent medical schools/departments evolved directly out of US military occupation and industrial plantations of fruit/rubber/sugar corporations; faculty were employed sometimes simultaneously by fruit companies, the military, and academic institutions.) This issue is also addressed by Pratik Chakrabarti in Medicine and Empire, 1600-1960 (2014).

---

Meanwhile, there are some other studies that use non-human creatures (like a mosquito) to frame imperialism. Some other stuff that comes to mind about multispecies relationships to empire:

Lawrence H. Kessler. “Entomology and Empire: Settler Colonial Science and the Campaign for Hawaiian Annexation.” Arcadia (Spring 2017)

No Wood, No Kingdom: Political Ecology in the English Atlantic (Keith Pluymers)

Archie Davies. "The racial division of nature: Making land in Recife". Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers Volume 46, Issue 2, pp. 270-283. November 2020.

Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (Urmi Engineer Willoughby, 2017)

Pasteur’s Empire: Bacteriology and Politics in France, Its Colonies, and the World (Aro Velmet, 2022)

Tom Brooking and Eric Pawson. “Silences of Grass: Retrieving the Role of Pasture Plants in the Development of New Zealand and the British Empire.” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. August 2007.

Under Osman's Tree: The Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Environmental History (Alan Mikhail)

The Herds Shot Round the World: Native Breeds and the British Empire, 1800-1900 (Rebecca J.H. Woods, 2017)

Imperial Bodies in London: Empire, Mobility, and the Making of British Medicine, 1880-1914 (Kristen Hussey, 2021)

Red Coats and Wild Birds: How Military Ornithologists and Migrant Birds Shaped Empire (Kirsten Greer, 2020)

Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa: The Human and Nonhuman Creatures of Nigeria (Saheed Aderinto, 2022)

Imperial Creatures: Humans and Other Animals in Colonial Singapore, 1819-1942 (Timothy P. Barnard, 2019)

Biotic Borders: Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890-1950 (Jeannie N. Shinozuka)

[dnickels]

RE: 5x05. I have no idea how much I'm supposed to read into this, but that has never stopped me before:

It's VE Day. Havers is back in England. The post office, telephone system, communication infrastructure etc all still work. So where is Cap's sense of urgency coming from? He knows the full name and regiment of a serving officer, a letter will get where it needs to go, they're very good about that over there. Yes, Cap's been waiting, but its been six years, he can wait a little longer-- hang out in the bushes until he sees Haver's car drive away and bang on the window, if he insists on being an insane person (<3). Figure out where he's billeted. Japan hasn't surrendered yet, so I suppose there's a chance Havers could get shipped to Burma or something and potentially die there, but he's not going to go straight from the cocktail reception to the troop ship, especially if everyone there is about to get "Hitler defeated"-levels of drunk. ("They're all red tabs, surely decency and decorum--" they are going to roll those old soaks out of there in wheelbarrows)

The urgency isn't because Havers might die. I think Cap knew his time was short.

He's a middle aged man in tolerably good shape, all that ration food aside. He make good time on his morning jogs, and his biggest ailment is 'creaky knees'. "Widowmaker heart attack out of nowhere" isn't an unheard of COD for someone who seems otherwise fine, especially someone who has been under a fair amount of stress (six years of wartime, including the fucking Blitz would do a number on my heart) but his sudden relocation makes me pause. It's only been about a year since he got relocated away from Button House, right? What was all that about? It's presumably still requisitioned, given that they're throwing a swanky victory party there and Heather Button is nowhere to be seen, but has the weapons program been disbanded? Or was there some reason to pull the CO out of a high-stress position and send him to the beach to take potshots at seagulls? (I am being glib here-- the coast was NOT a stress-free place when you can see your enemy just across the Channel). I genuinely forget what he said he was doing in season three-- was he even still in the army at all, or did they send his ass to the Home Guard? Even they got a campaign ribbon.

I think Cap made one last push to get to the front, and while its very clear that this dingus should under no circumstances be on the front line (<3) they humored him with a medical-- and found something really troubling. Or maybe he went in of his own accord, the old flutter, or maybe it was just a routine checkup. Either way he got some very serious news, so sorry old boy, just one of those things, could be any day now-- best make sure your affairs are all in order.

Hence the single-minded desire to meet, once last time. Everyone else clearly drove-- did he walk all the way from the train station, down the country lanes? Did he feel a little short of breath scaling all those walls? Did every set-back and stressor make him more determined-- just give me a little more time, just a little more time...

It could also be that he just got yelled at so hard he died of it, which is almost certainly how I will go, but that was my immediate impression and it has not left me, nor have I known peace. I know there's a few holes in my theory but I haven't talked myself out of it yet. For me the kicker is that he experiences at least ten devastating emotions in the last moments of his life, but "surprise at entering cardiac arrest" does not appear to be one of them. It looks more like grim acceptance. Stoic in the face of death-- a soldier to the end.

[barbucomedie]

Jungle Uniform of the Border Regiment from the British Empire dated to 1945 on display at the Cumbria Museum of Military Life in Carlisle, England

This uniform was worn by Private Vernon Cook from Glagate, Lancaster during their time in the 9th Battalion of the Border Regiment. The 9th Battalion was part fo the Burma Campaign 1944 - 1945 that pushed the Empire of Japan out of British occupied Burma.

The start of the war in Burma went very poorly for the Allies and many lessons were learnt. One lesson was the uniform as many British army and Commonwealth soldiers wore the Khaki Drill uniform that was useful in the desert campaigns like in North Africa but not so much the jungles of Burma. The more camoflaged green uniform and light weight material proved to be more effective as well as easier to produce as it was made locally.

Photographs taken by myself 2023

[tieflingkisser]

“End the Impunity”: Rohingya Muslims Under Attack by Both Burmese Army and Rebel Group

Up to 200 Rohingya Muslims were killed in drone strikes last week in Burma as they attempted to flee to Bangladesh. This comes amid intensifying conflict between the military junta and the Arakan Army, a rebel armed group. Human Rights Watch says the military and the Arakan Army have both committed extrajudicial killings, unlawful recruitment for combat, and widespread arson against Rohingya civilians. “They are the enemy of each other, but when it comes to the Rohingya issue, they have the same intention,” says Nay San Lwin, co-founder of the Free Rohingya Coalition. Only about 600,000 Rohingya remain in Burma, down from about 1.4 million before a campaign of ethnic cleansing began in 2016, though Nay San Lwin says the Rohingya genocide goes back even further to 1978.

[captain-price-unofficially]

Northern Burma, March 1944: An American soldier lights cigarette for injured Chinese infantryman.

[carbone14]

Le soldat J. George des South Wales Borderers (Howard's Greens) de la 36e Division d'infanterie britannique revient d'une semaine de patrouille – Pinwe – Birmanie – Campagne de Birmanie – Guerre du Pacifique – 19 novembre 1944

Photographe : Lieutenant W. Austin - No. 9 Army Film and Photo Section, Army Film and Photographic Unit

©Imperial War Museums - SE 564

[eretzyisrael]

by Ben Cohen

When Guterres rightly identified calls for Israel’s elimination as antisemitism—a contention that has been proven ad nauseam in the months since the Oct. 7 pogrom—it would have been natural for him, intellectually speaking, to examine how the United Nations has contributed to legitimizing this demand. In 1975, at the behest of the Soviet Union and its Arab allies, the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution decrying Zionism as a form of racism, already established as a staple of Soviet propaganda. In the same year, the United Nations created a Division for Palestinian Rights dedicated to promoting and amplifying the themes in that resolution. Alongside this network is a so-called humanitarian agency, UNRWA, which is solely dedicated to Palestinian refugees and their descendants. No other dispossessed or persecuted people, inside or outside the Middle East, has been handed the same privilege. UNRWA has certainly risen to the occasion, spreading antisemitic ideology in the schools it runs and even employing Palestinians who participated in the Oct. 7 atrocities.

Then you have the U.N. Human Rights Council, which dedicates an entire agenda item to vilifying Israel, and which periodically pushes out ugly, unsubstantiated attacks on Israel through the guise of “independent experts.” One such report was released just last week by a team of three commissioners, one of whom, Miloon Kothari, famously accused the “Jewish Lobby” of controlling social media (if only, eh?)

In an environment like this one, it’s hardly surprising that Israel now finds itself on a blacklist with the Democratic Republic of Congo, Russia, Burma/Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan and Yemen as states whose militaries systemically abuse children. Yet what is noteworthy here is that this list is provided by Guterres’ own office, which produces the annual “Children in Armed Conflict” report.

Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad also made the list, rubbing salt into the wound by equating Israel’s military with a bunch of murderers, rapists and deviants who derive pleasure from mutilating the dead and similarly bestial acts. Again, there is nothing remarkable about the world body drawing such a grotesque comparison. What is noteworthy is that it carries the endorsement of Guterres, who goes out of his way to portray himself as an ally of Jews when he speaks to Jewish audiences, but then doggedly sticks to the anti-Zionist script once he returns to Turtle Bay.

Because if Guterres really did believe in the points he made during his Munich speech, then he would not have assented to Israel’s inclusion on the blacklist. If he really appreciated the centrality of Israel as an anchor of security for Jews the world over, if he really grasped the mass trauma provoked by Oct. 7 for Israelis and Jews around the world alike, if he really knew in every fiber of his being that the Jewish people have only this one country that is currently facing a campaign of deadly violence orchestrated by Iran and its regional proxies, then Israel would not be sharing space with militaries whose sole raison d’être is the murder, torture and wholesale destruction of innocent civilians.

[thepastisalreadywritten]

Ladies and gentlemen, eighty years ago today, Field Marshal Montgomery – Commander in Chief of the Allied Ground Forces – wrote in his message to all soldiers on the eve of D-Day:

‘To us is given the honour of striking a blow for freedom, which will live in history; and, in the better days that lie ahead, men will speak with pride of our doings’.

Today, we come together to honour those nearly one hundred and sixty thousand British, Commonwealth and Allied troops who, on 5th June 1944, assembled here and along these shores to embark on the mission, which would strike that blow for freedom and be recorded as the greatest amphibious operation in history.

Those who gathered here in Portsmouth would never forget the sight. It was by far the largest military fleet the world has ever known.

Yet all knew that both victory and failure were possible, and none could know their fate.

Aircrew flying overhead, sailors manning warships; or troops in assault craft battering their way through the stormy swell to the shore; whether dropping by parachute, landing in a wooden glider, or taking that terrible leap of faith onto the beaches... all must have questioned whether they would survive and how they would respond when faced with such mortal danger.

The poet Keith Douglas, who was killed in action three days later, wrote of the embarkation:

"Actors waiting in the wings of Europe, we already watch the lights on the stage and listen to the colossal overture begin.

For us entering at the height of the din, it will be hard to hear our thoughts, hard to gauge how much our conduct owes to fear or fury."

At this remove, eight decades later, it is a near impossible task to imagine the emotion of that day:

The pride of being part of so great an enterprise, the anxiety of in some way not coming up to scratch, and the fear of that day being their last.

I recently myself spoke to veterans who, to this day, remember with such heartbreaking clarity the sight of those many soldiers lying on the beach, who drowned before they could even engage in combat.

The stories of courage, resilience and solidarity which we have heard today, and throughout our lives, cannot fail to move us, to inspire us, and to remind us of what we owe to that great wartime generation – now, tragically, dwindling to so few.

It is our privilege to hear their testimony, but our role is not purely passive:

It is our duty to ensure that we, and future generations, do not forget their service and their sacrifice in replacing tyranny with freedom.

Our rights, and the liberty won at such terrible cost, bring with them responsibilities to others in the exercise of that liberty.

The Allied actions of that day ensured the forces of freedom secured, first, a toehold in Normandy, then liberated France, and ultimately, the whole of Europe from the stranglehold of a brutal totalitarianism.

And as we remember, with humility, pride and gratitude, let us never forget that the soldiers who fought in the campaign launched from this place came from thirty nations, from across the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth and Allied countries; while elsewhere in Europe, Allied forces continued to make vital progress in their successful Italian campaign; and while halfway around the world, at that same moment, the critical battles of Imphal and Kohima raged on in what was then Burma.

The 1944 Victoria Cross roll of honour includes Sikh, Muslim and Hindu soldiers – a reminder that events that year shaped our world then, and the society we share today.

While it was the frontline troops who faced the greatest personal dangers, the privations and sacrifices of war were endured by so many more.

The Allied victory was a truly collective effort, born of the fortitude and hard work of those who remained on the Home Front, toiling in factories, under our land in the mines, out in the fields, or working in secret – men and women alike.

Their collective industry, ingenuity and commitment helped our soldiers, sailors and airmen to prevail.

So, as we give thanks for all those who gave so much to win the victory, whose fruits we still enjoy to this day, let us, once again, commit ourselves always to remember, cherish and honour those who served that day and to live up to the freedom they died for by balancing rights with civic responsibilities to our country. For we are all, eternally, in their debt.

Source: Royal UK

A speech by The King at the UK's National Commemorative Event in Portsmouth to mark #DDay80

5 June 2024

The King addresses veterans, serving forces and and members of the public at the UK's National Commemorative Event in Portsmouth to mark the 80th anniversary of the D-Day Landings.