Category: History

Code-Switching Spotting and Living Korean History

I spent the afternoon in a coffee shop mining footnotes of various secondary accounts of the violence in the autumn of 1946 (it is also known as the Autumn Harvest Uprising, the October People’s Resistance, the October Riot Incident, the October Rebellion, and the Taegu Uprising) to see if I have been missing anything.

I thought to myself, you know, it is kind of depressing to see how little is actually available in Korean sources, as far as I have been able to find out so far, and especially when compared to the wealth of materials of widely varying quality coming out on the various violent uprisings in South Korea in 1948 (Yŏsu, Cheju-do, and so on). Though American military materials abound, in general, I been somewhat underwhelmed by the relative lack of accounts of the 1945-50 period on the Korean side. The explanation I hear everywhere is that the devastation of the Korean War of 1950-3 is much to blame.

Just as I was pondering this problem, two elderly men sat down next to me and carried on a conversation. Although the loud espresso machine in the background made it difficult, I overheard some of their conversation and could recognize my favorite linguistic phenomenon:

わざわざ…followed by some Korean
しがつはつか（四月二十日）완전히…more Korean
근대おれは…more Japanese
すまないな, 지난번…more Korean
あれはね、…followed by Korean sentence.

Some excellent code-switching going on. Sentences seemed to only switch completely into Korean when discussion got fast or emotional, but would switch back to Japanese at the beginning of a new topic with Korean words sprinkled in here and there in the middle of sentences, and the middle of Korean sentences throughout the conversation would get a Japanese word here and there, as if for emphasis.

This is something I have written about here at Muninn on several occasions (A code switching family in Seoul, code-switching in Taiwan, Japanese-Chinese code-switching couple in Taiwan, Chinese-English code switching in a Harvard campus coffee shop). It was something I saw on a number of occasions in Taiwan amongst older Taiwanese though, with the exception of older Koreans speaking to me in Japanese (such the Korean war stories I heard from this gentleman and this retired policeman) I have been looking forward to finding the same thing in Korea, where I know it happens.

After listening for a few minutes, I took advantage of a moment of silence between the two elderly friends and jumped in, using Japanese. A delightful conversation ensued, which eventually ended up in exactly the kind of code-switching between Korean and Japanese that was going on before I joined in, but now with some English thrown in (one of the two had worked 4 years in the US) here and there as well.

Both learnt their Japanese as children, having completed primary school during the colonial period. They were 13 and 14 when the colonial period ended, and were both a small minority in a good quality school made up of mostly Japanese students. “One day, our Japanese friends suddenly told us they had to go to Japan because they lost the war,” said one, “to which I replied, ‘Why do you have to go to Japan? Weren’t you born here?'” One was born and raised in Taegu, but was now living and still working in Japan, while the other grew up in Seoul. I asked the man from Taegu if he remembers anything about the violence in the autumn of 1946, he said someone told him about seeing the corpses of policemen being dragged by ropes through the streets, but he didn’t see anything himself.

I asked them about their Korean war experience. The man from Seoul says that he and his family were kidnapped by North Korean militia and taken to a town north of P’yŏngyang and put into a labor team, and that he was held for 100 days. He said every day was a nightmare there, his mother praying for their survival every day. He says he has almost blocked every memory of the experience out, “When I close my eyes all I can see is an image of the 태극기 flag.” He said that he escaped with his family when the US troops reached the area in the autumn of 1950. He then walked back to South Korea. His friend sitting across the table said, “I have never heard this story! Why do you tell this stranger but you’ve never told me this story?” He replied that this was a really painful (つらい) memory for him and he doesn’t want to recall it (思い出したくない).

I told them the biggest obstacle for people like me studying the period 1945-50 is the lack of materials. Even if the memories are painful, I encouraged them both to write down their stories, and like the boom of Japanese publishing their memoirs and diaries of wartime experiences in Japan in the last few decades has done, give historians and younger generations a chance to hear their stories. One of the guys answered, “いや、韓国は日本じゃない。ここでは、そういうような書く문화がない。” (Korea is not Japan. Here we don’t have that kind of culture of writing) Is that fair? Perhaps that generation just needs a bit more time and a bit more encouragement?

Warsailors Project in the Norwegian Press

My mother, Siri, made a trip to Norway recently to meet various WWII veterans from the Norwegian merchant marine and to attend some of their events as an honorary member. She has many friends and dedicated fans among their surviving members, thanks to her years of hard work creating the the best and most extensive online resource out there about them at her website Warsailors.com (Direct link to ship list here).

While Siri was back in the country a few Norwegian journalists picked up on her story and interviewed her about her online project which is inspired by her father (my grandfather) and his own exploits in the merchant marines during the war both at sea and as a prisoner in German POW camps in North Africa.

2465755Last week a four page article about her and her project in the most well known of the publications to pick up the story came out. The article can be found in the December 17 Christmas issue of the popular women’s magazine Allers (p50-53). and thus on the shelves of supermarkets around Norway. While my mother was more impressed with the quality of the research and writing in some of the other articles published in smaller magazines elsewhere, it is nice to get this historical issue, the often forgotten story of the thousands of sailors who were the logistical lifeline in the oceans of WWII, onto the pages of a well-read popular magazine. The article focuses mostly on my grandfather’s story and the “war sailors” (krigsseilere) but some mention of my mother’s online project and a link to her online archive is found in the first paragraph.

Click on the images if you want to download the large original size:

Dscf2746

Dscf2745

Misc. News

I am back in the US for a few weeks. I’m writing this sitting in my favorite Butler library hangout in Columbia University, where I am visiting friends for a few days.

C. W. Hayford has posted a wonderful collection of links at Asian History Carnival #18.

One of the many things he noted is what looks like an interesting new journal with articles available free online: Taiwan in Comparative Perspective.

He also noted that the Gutenberg-e collection of online dissertations is now Open Access!! This is wonderful news as there are some very interesting dissertations hosted here. If the project was still ongoing I think I would have applied for my own as-yet-unwritten dissertation to be considered. Here is one of hte Gutenberg-e projects pointed to by Professor Hayford: How Taiwan Became Chinese.

Making Choices in Research

I have recently switched to almost full-time reading of early postwar Korean newspapers. I’m avoiding those newspapers (조선일보, 동아일보, 서울신문) from this period that I have easy access to back in my library in the US or through online databases. There are two bound and published collections with copies of early postwar newspapers easily available to me in Yonsei’s central library and in the 국학연구원 that I am affiliated with. I’m sure microfilm or other versions of these newspapers exist in other libraries, including the national library, but these bound volumes serve well for now.

I launched right in without much thought, as I usually do with an exciting new source, beginning somewhat arbitrarily with one of the newspapers I have often seen cited in secondary works from the period which was only around for a few years, 自由新聞. The series with this collections of newspapers is a “mere” two dozen volumes or so with about 550 pages of newspapers (usually 2 pages per issue) in each volume stretching from 1945-1950.

I’ll just cruise through them all, I must have been thinking—you know—get a feel for the lay of the “media” land and the period. I scan through each issue of the newspaper, take pictures of articles directly relevant to my topic for later use noting down their titles, dates and topics, and read some of the more important articles immediately, all while taking a notes on what issues dominate in the newspaper at the time. After just a few days of this I forced myself to make a reality check. At the pace I was going, I calculated, it would take me 23 weeks to go through just the single collection of newspapers I am looking at and this is only one of many kinds of sources I want to look at while I’m Korea. Doubling my daily pace would still take about 11 weeks, which is still too long. While it is very likely my pace will increase naturally as I become more familiar with the materials and improve my reading/scanning skills this will just not do. Clearly I have to change strategies.

This is really a classic research problem, one that all of us face in doing research for even high school or undergraduate history papers (and in many related fields) and as a teaching assistant I have had to advise my own students on this problem in the past. Somehow though, the much larger scale of the project and time available to complete it has a way of making us forget the scarcity of time available.

More experienced historians surely know better than I, but it seems to me that there are a number of approaches one can take to surveying a large quantity of potentially useful primary materials such as this collection of Korean newspapers from 1945-50.

I have an issue, a problem, and certain historical questions I want to answer. I believe that, if approached with care, this particular collection of sources can help me get answers to some of those questions, or at the very least, help point me towards specific places, people, or events that I can explore in other sources that will help me answer some of those questions. Here are a few approaches that come to mind that might be used for a newspaper collection like this:

The lazy scholar approach: Read all the academic work related to your problem, note down all citations from the primary source you are interested in, look up those citations, read the originals, and use them in your own work.

Seal off a perimeter approach: Make a list of events or key periods of time when things happened or when you think things might have happened which are relevant to your issue. Then, depending on the quantity of primary materials and your time available, read or scan through issues within a fixed range around that period of time.

Headline lightning scan: Make a very small list of keywords, and blaze through the entire collection in the time period you are working for, stopping only to photo articles with your keywords in the headlines.

Section focus approach: Look through a few issues of each newspaper from across the span of your period of interest in order to get a good understanding of the way the newspaper is organized, what articles appear where, where articles which may be of interest to you are likely to appear in the paper, and take note of specific regular columns or editorial sections which may be relevant to your research. Then look only at only these sections or columns for the whole span of time.

Locked in the tower approach: Go through it all, starting with the most important works and then just keep going until you suddenly run out of time.
Continue reading Making Choices in Research

The Hall of Asian Peoples

Although I lived in New York for two years, I never got around to visiting many of its museums. A few weeks ago I finally paid the Museum of Natural History a visit along with a good friend of mine.

As some of my previous postings indicate, I have become more and more interested in the geographies and narration of museum exhibits. As a student of East Asian history, I was especially interested in how the museum portrayed the cultures of that region.

The museum of natural history is not just home to dinosaur bones and stuffed animals. Between the hall containing the stuffed lions and the one containing the stuffed birds, one can find the “Hall of Asian Peoples.”

In the hall of Asian peoples, with “Asia” defined in the broadest old use of the word, we can find all sorts of exhibits. The hall provides a lot of interesting material for comment, from its exhibit on “the Lure of Asia” to its portrayal of Islamic cultures and China, but I’ll just make a few comments on its portrayal of Korea and Japan. Take a look at this hall plan (click for a larger version):

Hall of Asian Peoples

I was struck by the central location of Japan in the large square room to the right. Surrounding Japan were a number of exhibits, including the “Introduction to Primitive Asia” and others. Among the exhibits on the outside of the Japanese center was one portraying the Ainu peoples.

The Ainu

The Ainu, of course, where almost eradicated by the Japanese. Next to this, also on the outside of the Japanese center, we find the Koreans. The entire mapping of these cultures in the museum closely mirrored the Japanese imperial order of old.

Korea: The Uniqueness

The Korean government, however, has done what it can to spruce up the exhibit a bit, which portrays a Yangban scholar at his studies, with his hanbok-clad wife working nearby. The title of the exhibit is, “KOREA: The Uniqueness.” Ah yes, that familiar claim brought back so many memories. A sign reports that, “This exhibit was made possible through the generous assistance of the Korean Cultural Service.” It saddens me that, far outside of the host countries, the arm of nationalists can reach into the heart of museums. When I was there, a crowd of delighted Korean tourists were snapping pictures. The Ainu next door were less popular with the cameras.

The heart of the square room, with its Japan exhibits, was hardly any better. I could smell the hand of Japanese government influence upon the contents of the exhibit, even if some of the contents showed unmistakable evidence of a non-Japanese hand. See, for example, the kanji characters in this numbered list of photo identifications:

Numbers

Besides the general sloppiness of the handwriting, you may notice the number four (四) shows a little excess creativity. These problems, however, are found in most museums. The element of the Japan exhibit that most showed potential Japanese government or other suspect dabbling was the description of the Japanese emperor system (click for readable version):

Japan Emperor System

This description of the Japanese emperor would not pass muster in a student essay in the most introductory course on Japan. The over-attribution of agency to the emperor in the Meiji period, the description of the “restoration” of Shintô which was more accurately the birth of state Shintô, is bad enough. The most interesting problem with this little snippet is what it leaves out. Notice how the paragraph jumps from the triumphs of the Meiji period, over the decades of Japanese imperialism, directly to Hirohito’s denial of divinity after World War II. How clean this picture looks: no imperial responsibility for the war, no outside pressure of Hirohito to deny his divinity hinted at.

In case the rosy picture of the text failed to persuade, no “Hall of Asian Peoples” could be without a photo of the Japanese imperial couple:

Imperial Couple

Asian History Carnival #13

Welcome to the thirteenth installment of the Asian History Carnival.

Martyrdom in Islam – Gracchi of Westminster Wisdom offers a review and discussion of issues behind Rice University professor David Cook’s new book Martyrdom in Islam.

Happy Birthday – Reb Chaim HaQoton writes about birthdays, Jewish theology, and various historical references to one’s day of birth.

Cogs and Wheels alerts us to a Chinese documentary about Bian Zhongyun – an early casualty of China’s Cultural Revolution. Read more at Danwei and view videos at YouTube.

Samurai Baseball: Off Base or Safe at Home? – C. W. Hayford explores some of the literature on Japanese baseball, and the intriguing debates on its authenticity or originality, or as he poses the issue, “differences within a sysem or between systems.”

Matt at No-sword continues to offer us historical snippets from Japanese publications he comes across. See Advice for new women for some allegorical illustrations by YAGURUMA Ryō from ŌSHIMA Shūichi’s 1950 “Life skills reader for new women”, Matt’s discussion of Edo city lights (the gandō), on dating historical postcards

Where’s my check? – Alan Baumler at Frog in a Well – China chimes in on recent debate about whether China scholars in the U.S. have been “bought off.”

Remixing Tagore – Owen at Frog in a Well – Korea has an interesting discussion of teh connections between Rabrindranath Tagore’s poem “The Lamp of the East” and a Korean remixing of the poem with another passage from his Gitanjali.

What sixth graders [in Taiwan] were reading about fifty years ago – Jonathan Benda of Notes of a former native speaker writes about a different kind of martyrdom discussed in a 1956 Chinese language textbook in Taiwan.

The Dangers of Politically Correct History – Michael Hurt, the Metropolitician, writes about the “messy question” that accompanies the debate over comfort women.

Pluto and the Land of the Morning Calm – Matt of Gusts of Popular Feeling introduces us to Percival Lowell, who built the Lowell observatory where Pluto was discovered. Matt makes some interesting observations about Lowell’s descriptions about Korea, where he spent some time in the late 19th century.

The Aral Sea Disaster (Part 1, Part 2) – The Central Asia web log looks at the connection between large scale irrigation and the the changes in the Aral Sea. See also the article commemorating the 800th birthday of the poet Rumi

A Few Recent Historical Gems at Japan Focus:

Proletarian Arts in East Asia – Heather Bowen-Struyk introduces the proletarians arts movement’s development in East Asia in the 1920s and 1930s.

Korean Memories of the Vietnam and Korean Wars: A Counter-History – Theodore Hughes critiques war memories of the US and Korea, and discusses Hwang Suk-Young’s The Shadow of Arms

Multicultural Japan? Discourse and the ‘Myth’ of Homogeneity – Chris Burgess highlights the discrepancies between the popular discourse of a homogenous Japan and the academic discourse of a multicultural Japan, arguing that there is a strong role in the former in shaping social reality in Japan.

Resources

I’m going to experiment with something new here. In addition to regular postings, I thought it might be useful to introduce some online historical resources and reference material related to Asian history that I have become aware of (they may not be new, but should at least not be mentioned yet by an Asian History Carnival). If this catches on, let me recommend that these resources get added to the appropriate section (there are sections for links, organizations, databases etc.) of the East Asia Libraries and Archives wiki hosted by Frog in a Well when they are related to East Asia.

Japanese War Crimes – The National Archives has recently published a book with a collection of introductory essays and produced a great finding aid to help researchers looking for records related to Japanese war crimes. You can download the PDFs directly online.

Denshô – the Denshô website preserves the testimonies of Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II and includes an archive with interviews and other materials.

NARA on Google Video – Though this link is well known, if you are interested in Asian history, and especially World War II, there are a number of movies found in the national archive that have made their way to Google Video.

Memory and Reconciliation in the Asia Pacific – Weekly Media Update – The George Washington University project on Memory and Reconciliation in the Asia-Pacific has a weblog which lists recent English-langauge media articles related to historical issues in East Asia.

Travelers in the Middle East Archive – The TIMEA archive is “a digital archive that focuses on Western interactions with the Middle East, particularly travels to Egypt during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.” (Creative Commons license)

Chinese Text Initiative – The University of Virginia hosts a large collection of Chinese literature texts.

Hawaii Karate Museum Rare Book Collection – This museum has actually digitized some of their materials related to Karate.

The XXth Century – The University of Hawaii has a digitized collection of the 1941-1945 issues of this fascinating Shanghai magazine.

eScholarship Texts – There are many popular history texts related to Asian history that are fully viewable online, including a number of well known books that can be found on the oral examination book lists of PhD students. Well worth a look.

North Korean Captured Documents – While they are unfortunately not online, I have posted some information at Frog in a Well with a few tips for anyone wanting to look at these documents in the national archives.

The next Asian History Carnival will be hosted in May by 花崗齋之愚公 at Jottings from the Granite Studio.

Five Varieties of Homo sapiens

Carl Linné, who plays an important role in the creation of the nomenclature of the biological world (Linnaeus, W) separated the homo sapiens into a number of subcategories (1758).

1. Wild man. Four-footed, mute, hairy.
2. American. Copper-coloured, choleric, erect. Hair black, straight,
thick; nostrils wide; face harsh; beard, scanty; obstinate, content, free.
Paints himself with fine red lines. Regulated by customs.
3. European. Fair, sanguine, brawny. Hair yellow brown, flowing; eyes
blue; gentle, acute, inventive. Covered with close vestments. Governed
by laws.
4. Asiatic. Sooty, melancholy, rigid. Hair black; eyes dark; severe,
haughty, covetous. Covered with loose garments. Governed by
opinions.
5. African. Black, phlegmatic, relaxed. Hair black, frizzled; skin silky;
nose flat; lips tumid; crafty, indolent, negligent. Anoints himself with
grease. Governed by caprice.

I must say I’m partial to loose garments, but I’m not sure about the rest…
Which would you choose to be?

(Separate from this are “monsters” which include dwarfs and giants and “anthropomorpha” like eunuchs.)

I saw this quoted in Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation p. 32 but you can also find it here and cited as in:

Sir Charles Linne, A General System of Nature through the Three Grand Kingdoms ofAnimals, Vegetables and Minerals, 7 vols, Lackington, Allen and Co., London, 1806, vol. 1, p. 9.

Open Access: Footnote.com and the National Archives

I think students, researchers, and historians especially should become more aware of a disturbing trend in the world of digitized archival materials: contractual licenses replacing copyrights.

I have already been concerned with this in the non-digital world. Many archives I have visited now ask visitors to sign a “license agreement” which, if you read it closely, restricts the freedom of the visiting researcher. Thus, when I go to the Ôya Sôichi bunko in Tokyo and look at old Japanese magazines that are no longer protected by copyright, I might think I have the freedom to reproduce, publish, etc. materials I have photocopied there. No copyright – then no problem, right?

Well, no. Along with the entry fee to the archive, you sign an agreement in which you agree to give up your freedoms to the use of even out-of-copyrighted material. You are now required to get the archive’s permission before you use any of the material.

This is spreading to the online world like wildfire. Examples abound. One recent case, however, has gotten some deserved attention: the deal between the United States National Archives and Footnote.com. Read this article at Dan Cohen’s blog for the details. Footnote.com, which digitizes the materials of the National Archives, which, it should be noted, are NOT protected by copyright, has the following to say in their terms and conditions agreement:

professional researchers, professional historians and others conducting scholarly research may use the Website, provided that they do so within the scope of their professional work, that they obtain written permission from us before using an image obtained from the Website for publication, and that they credit the source. You further agree that (i) you will not copy or distribute any part of the Website or the Service in any medium without Footnote.com’s prior written authorization

You see, the images they have, of non-copyrighted materials, cannot be copyrighted by Footnote.com, because their scans of these documents do not meet the minimum “creative” or “original” work required to establish a copyright. However, by agreeing to this license, you are not bound by copyright, you are bound by contract. Dan Cohen points to a great section of the Digital History guide which suggests that these licenses might still not prevent you from using non-copyrighted materials…but who wants to risk the lawsuit?

Fortunately, the National Archives made a non-exclusive agreement with Footnote.com, just as libraries have made non-exclusive agreements with Google. Despite this, I am concerned that these massive projects, many of them commercial and not freely accessible like Footnote.com will dissuade academic partners, libraries, archives, and governments from being willing to put serious money into creating large, free, and open collections without these restrictions.

Jesuits on Treason

In order to procrastinate a bit on my fellowship applications on this slow Friday evening, I’ve been poking through some old books found on Google Books in search for works on treason trials and definitions of treason (back when it was a crime against the royal person, rather than the nation at large). Lots of great stuff, including downloadable versions of several volumes of Cobbet’s Complete Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason… published in the 1820s.

Another book I have particularly enjoyed looking through is The Principles of the Jesuits, [translated? edited?] by Henry Handley Norris and published in 1839. As far as I can tell, this is a piece of anti-Jesuit propaganda designed to collect quotes by various Jesuit writers saying objectionable things, conveniently organized into categories of evil acts they condone. An early footnote even mentions that Jesuits have responded with the accusation that the collection of quotes are “studied fabrications” but that the editor has checked, where he could, the citations within. Thus, the contents of the work should be read with great care. I find this kind of work especially interesting though, because the Jesuits, with their Catholic universalism, are portrayed in such works with much of the same condemnatory language that has been directed at Communists (as well as their fellow travelers, or just anyone on the Left) for their treasonous internationalism.

A few passages are below. I especially am interested in the one by the Jesuit historian Juan de Mariana, which is quite famous for the fuss it created. It opens with an interesting appeal to general opinion and a proposal for a common meeting to determine whether a ruler is a tyrant. Also, in everything I have read, eradicating treason in 20th century is frequently described in medical metaphors (and certainly this is not something limited to treason), to cut away a tumor or cancer from the national body. But here we see the opposite, the treasonous act of regicide itself described as severing a putrescent member from an infected body.

Section 17 contains alleged Jesuit writings about High Treason and Regicide. Most of the quotes in this section of the work argue one of the following 1) the power of the pontiff to lawfully rob tyrannical or unfaithful kings of their sovereign powers, and thus absolves all traitors of their crimes against them, 2) the idea that the clergy is not subject to the jurisdiction of the king. 3) tyrants may be justly overthrown, without explicit reference to papal powers.

Here are a few examples, along with a good chunk taken from the Mariana piece that was included:

p218-19 – 1594 John Bridgwater “If [kings] … violate the faith which they have pledged to God and to the people of God; the people are not only permitted, but they are required, and their duty demands, that at the mandate of the vicar of Christ, who is the sovereign pastor over all the nations of the earth, the faith which they had previously made with such princes should not be kept.”

p221-25 – 1603 Francis Tolet “…the language of St. Paul is not opposed to it, who means that all men should be subject to the higher powers, but not to the secular powers: for he does not deny to spiritual ministers the power of exempting all, as many as they shall choose, from teh secular power, whenever they may deem it expedient.”

p248 – 1659 Anthony Escobar “What is sedition? The disagreement of citizens: a special offence against charity. If the state is drawn away from its obedience to the prince, it is a crime of high treason. If it extends but to the deposition of magistracy, it is only sedition. But when it is in opposition to a tyrant, it is not a sin, neither is it properly sedition; because a tyrannical government is not directed to the general good.”

p223-24 – 1640 [1599? 1598?] John Mariana “It is necessary to consider attentively what course should be pursued in deposing a prince, lest sin be added unto sin, and crime be punished by the commission of crime. This is the shortest and safest way: if a public meeting can be held, to deliberate upon what may be determined by the common consent; and to consider as firmly settled and established whatever may be resolved by the general opinion…But what you will ask, what is to be done if a public meeting cannot be held? which may very commonly happen. In my opinion, a similar judgment must be formed; for when the state is oppressed by the tyranny of the prince, and the people are deprived of the power of assembling, the will to abolish the tyranny is not wanting…I shall never consider that man to have done wrong, who, favouring the public wishes, would attempt to kill him…Thus the question of fact which is contested is this, Who may deservedly be considered as a tyrant? The question of right, Whether it is lawful to kill a tyrant? is suffficiently evident…

…Still it is useful that princes should be made to know, that if they oppress the state, and become intolerable by their vices and their pollution, they hold their lives upon this tenure, that to put them to death is not only lawful, but a laudable and a glorious action. The life of a tyrant is evidently wretched which is held upon the tenure, that he who should kill him would be highly esteemed, both in favour and in praise. It is a glorious thing to exterminate this pestilent and mischievous race from the community of men. For putrescent members are cut off lest they infect the rest of the body. So should the cruelty of that beast in the form of man, be removed from the state, as from a body, and be severed from it with the sword.”

Interesting to note that Mariana’s support for tyrannicide is used in this work to portray Jesuit support for treason, since Mariana’s views were condemned by his own order in 1610 (same year Henry IV of France was assassinated). According to this page, his views were later even used to justify excesses in the French Revolution. See the Catholic Encyclopedia’s entry on Tyrannicide for more on Mariana’s condemnation and for more on his life, the same encyclopedia’s entry and of course, wikipedia’s entry. The Austrian school of libertarian radicals also appear to look up to him as a hero for his works on political economy and taxation.