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ABSTRACT:

In the eyes of many foreign observers, one of the most puzzling aspects of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or South Vietnam) was the continual in-fighting among anticommunists. Most accounts depict these internal conflicts as simply a struggle for power, but I contend that they also constituted a battle of ideas. Specifically, the presentation examines the debate between Ngô Đình Diệm and rival anticommunist nationalists in the summer and fall of 1955. Virtually all anticommunists agreed that the regime should become a constitutional republic, and they unanimously called for a democracy. Yet the seeming consensus belied starkly different definitions of democratic government. Diệm’s faction and the political parties associated with the southern sects called for a hybrid regime, that is, a regime that combined elements of authoritarianism and democracy. The sect parties demanded greater pluralism than Diệm, though the difference was of degree rather than of kind. The debate took a decidedly more liberal direction under the influence of the émigré politician Phan Quang Đán. Đán advocated for a militant democracy, that is, a full-fledged democracy that minimally limited liberty only to protect itself from extremist forces seeking to subvert democracy. In the end, Diệm prevailed over his rivals because he and his followers controlled the government. By seriously examining the diversity of political ideas in the RVN, the presentation suggests that the regime’s seeming intractable factionalism arose from substantive disagreements rather than factional squabbling.

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LECTURE IN THE ARTS, HISTORIES, LITERATURES, AND RELIGIONS OF BURMA

One of the Buddha Gotama’s numerous epithets was opamma kusalo muni – sage skilled in parables, exemplified in his life as Mahosadha. The remains of an early second millennium Burmese kingdom, named after its ceremonial center, Pagan, preserve several visual narratives of the story. They incorporate a labyrinth image to represent the setting where medicine curing human ailments was dispensed, and riddles and judicial problems were resolved – antecedent of the Bodhimanda – site of Gotama’s Awakening. Sometime in the late 11th century an unknown artisan, guided by a learned though anonymous Buddhist monk, selected the labyrinth image to reference his society’s conception of the human predicament. That monk’s vastly better known Christian counterparts, a millennium earlier and in another part of the world, chose likewise. The lecture speculates on the reasons and significance of the monk’s choice in the Pagan context.

Biography:

Lilian Handlin is a historian. She received her doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she taught until 1977. She is the author and co-author of several books, including the four volume Liberty in America,1600 to the Present (New York, 1986 – 1995) as well as articles and reviews in American history. More recently, she began to publish articles concerned with Myanmar’s early history, grounded in the material culture surviving the kingdom of Pagan. One of her publications compares two Pagan era narratives of the Vessantara with its first Burmese vernacular version composed by an influential 18th century Burmese monk and commentator. The article was published in Steven Collins, ed., Readings in the Vessantara Jataka (New York, Columbia University Press, 2016). An examination of the myth of the Buddha’s eye teeth, in the Pagan context, appeared this summer in Cristophe Munier Gaillard, ed., Mural Art, Studies on Paintings in Asia (Bangkok 2018).

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The independence struggle of East Timor from Indonesia rested on a three-pronged strategy. An aspect of it was to Indonesianize the war that Jakarta had unleashed on the half-island country. Under the overall guidance – and sometimes strict instructions – of their nationalist movement, East Timorese students and activists across Indonesia progressively broke the government’s stranglehold on information about East Timor. They informed the Indonesian public and forged formidable alliances with Indonesian human rights activist and political reformists. These Indonesians rallied against the day-to-day human right violations that the Indonesian military committed in East Timor and gradually came to recognize that the exercise of the right to self-determination in East Timor was a step in the direction of their much-delayed democratic transition. This talk will explore how it was that the East Timorese nationalists marched – and won – in Jakarta while fighting a losing battle in East Timor itself.

Dr. Awet T. Weldemichael is a former refugee goatherd and currently a stateless person. He is an Associate Professor and Queen’s National Scholar in the Department of History at Queen’s University. He holds a Ph.D. in history and LL.M. in public international law. He studied the history and politics of Northeast Africa and Southeast Asia and wrote a dissertation on the East Timorese and Eritrean struggles for independence from Indonesia and Ethiopia, respectively. He is the author of Third World Colonialism and Strategies of Liberation: Eritrea and East Timor Compared (Cambridge, 2013), among others. He has since been researching Northeast African political economy of conflict and his book on the root causes, dynamics and consequences of maritime piracy in Somalia has just been published (Piracy in Somalia: Violence and Development in the Horn of Africa). He has previously held teaching and research positions at African, European and U.S. universities; and has worked for United Nations peacekeeping and The Carter Center election monitoring.