Though we may, with apologies and reparations for past discretions, endeavor to wipe clean the slate of history as a means of creating a better future, we can never begin anew. For the past is always with us. It may well be that those who shaped it have died, thus relinquishing their destructive hold on power, but they inevitably leave behind destabilizing legacies that corrode subsequent generations. It is difficult for stable nations to combat such patterns -- the United States is still suffering the effects of the organized crime networks created during Prohibition. It is infinitely harder for poor nations to subdue these forces. After all, here, state power is invariably fragmented among disparate interests, the chaos of which permits criminal elements to operate largely without constraint in semi-autonomous regions far from the halls of power. Few parts of the world are more painfully aware of these truths than southeast Asia. Mr. Gibson and Mr. Chen explain why.
Thanks to its decades-long status as the world's preeminent opiate producer, the Golden Triangle, that troubled intersection of Burma, Laos and Thailand, was, for much of the 20th century, a zone of concern for many of the world's governments. Dominated by private armies in the pay of drug traffickers, this region has been plagued by well-funded armies who have worked to corrupt and or repel the armies of the neighborhood's sovereign nations in order to maintain a stranglehold over one of the world's most lucrative elicit trades. Time after time, these forces either co-opt or kill their opponents, preventing area governments from asserting control over their own territories. But how did this come about? Was it inevitable, thanks to the curse of geography, that the Golden Triangle would be a zone of conflict, or is the region's turmoil rooted in its history?
In The Secret Army, misters Gibson and Chen contend that the roots of the region's problems lies in the Chinese civil war, a bloody and consequential conflict between nationalists and communists that eventually saw Mao elevated to supreme power, Chiang Kai-shek expelled to Taiwan and collectivism implemented across the world's most populous nation. Kai-shek, backed by American fear of Communism's spread, continued to resist Communist China, resorting to insurgencies and private armies in hopes of destabilizing the regime and opening up an avenue to victory. When these efforts at agitation failed, however, the armies, here-to-for funded by the US via Kai-shek, rather than disband as ostensibly ordered, took up a new banner, profit. This launched 30 years of conflict in the Golden Triangle, 30 years in which the struggling, post-colonial regimes in nearby nations failed to uproot this scourge, allowing it to embed itself so deeply within the region's tapestry that its corrosive effects are felt today.
While The Secret Army is a compelling and provocative history of one of the world's most troubled regions, the authors assume a familiarity with the region and its players that is absent in all but a handful of their readers. Names, dates, and battles blur past in a hazy and confusing march of history that feels as though it was curtailed here for the sake of time and space. Yes, the authors manage to convey the overall picture of the destructive forces that shaped the region, but these details, the nuances, the players, are barely more than pieces on a chessboard. Little illumination is given to the motivations and the personalities that shaped them. Time squandered on developing the American side of the equation could have been used to generate more thorough portraits of the Chinese, Burmese and Thai actors that prevented the Golden Triangle from being pacified and dragged into the 21st century.
The authors have, here, a fascinating history which vividly spells out the extent to which the vital interests of small nations are ignored by the convenient needs of larger nations, no matter how immoral. It appropriately catalogues the many grievances area governments surely have towards the West which was so preoccupied with the hope of defeating Communist China that it allowed southeast Asia to burn. However, The Secret Army needed to be as much a biography as a history. It needed to introduce us to the powers in the region, put faces to the names. And this it spectacularly failed to do.
Thorough work, but it is as troubled as the region it concerns itself with. (2/5 Stars)
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