Books on the topic 'Self-serving'

This chapter explores the nature of the self through an examination of self-representations. Self-representations are very special kinds of representations distinguished from other representations not by what they represent (i.e. selves) but by how they represent it and by the functional roles they play in our mental lives. The chapter argues that self-representations play three distinct but related roles in our cognitive lives. First, they subserve the synchronic integration of current mental states into a (rationally) interconnected whole. Second, they subserve the diachronic integration of past, present, and future states into one enduring and ever unfolding self-consciousness. And, finally, they help define the boundaries of the self by serving to distinguish selves from one another. The central claim is that being a self is nothing but being a creature that deploys such representations in inner thought with reference to itself.

This chapter examines the educational value of becoming a research subject. Scientists in earlier times considered self-experimentation an essential component of their work. They thought that exposing themselves to untested interventions was the most ethical way to gauge the human response to those interventions. The practice was also educational, for it produced useful information that helped researchers plan subsequent human studies. Self-experimentation was eventually replaced by more sophisticated scientific methods and comprehensive ethical codes governing human research. But it is time to bring back the practice of self-experimentation, albeit in modified form. Serving as a study subject can be a valuable form of education for people who conduct and review proposals for human research.

Interpreters, both Spanish and Indian, played a crucial role in the military conquest of Mexico and in the secular and ecclesiastical administration of the viceroyalty of New Spain. Dependence on these linguistic go-betweens made them indispensable and powerful figures in the early colony but distrusted by all sides as disloyal and self-serving. The early missionaries had to rely on Indian interpreters and preachers to convey the gospel message, but the risk of error and deliberate mistranslation, along with the need for confidentiality in the sacrament of confession, led eventually to the decision to pursue evangelization without the aid of intermediaries.

The heady post-revolutionary years saw the formation of canons of ‘Soviet behaviour’ that remained recognizable in later generations, even when some thought them controversial or absurd. The new ideals were not simply imposed ‘from above’; they were created with the enthusiastic participation of individual Soviet citizens and of key ‘collectives’, including schools, workplaces and the Komsomol. Since coherence was meant to be achieved as much throughexclusionas throughinclusion, the strong sense of what was ‘Soviet’ (asceticism—the exercise of an ‘iron will’—self-sacrifice) was meant to be offset by an equally strong sense of what was not (self-indulgence—weakness—self-serving behaviour). Having explored both the reception and transformation of these ideals, the chapter ends by considering attitudes towards them in post-Soviet Russia, when old solidarities had gone and many either sought to escape the past or viewed it with selective nostalgia.

Political behaviors in organizations consist of self-serving actions taken by an individual or group. They are directed toward the goal of furthering one's own self-interest without regard for the wellbeing of others in the organization. Such actions are informal and, as part of an organization's culture, regulate interpersonal relationships. The fact that the politics inherent in organizational behavior affect an employee's appraisal was noted more than a quarter of a century ago by behavioral scientists. Nevertheless, there is a paucity of systematic research on this subject. Thus, the purpose of this article is fourfold. First, the phenomenon of organizational politics is described. Second, studies on the relationship between political behavior and appraising employees are reviewed. Third, steps to minimizing its adverse effects on the appraisal of employees are outlined. Finally, a research agenda is suggested.

Malebranche, in his telling of the Fall of Man, provides the core of his account of our distinctively human perception. At the moment of the Fall, Adam comes to see the apple not simply as something serving his self-preservation, but as an object with particular properties. The key to that shift is the pleasure Adam takes in the apple. This puzzling account sheds light on both Malebranche’s account of the ‘interior sentiment’ that constitutes our phenomenal consciousness of objects and his account of sensation as natural judgments. Malebranche positions pleasure as centrally involved in sensory perception in helping structure our representations. For him, it is neither representational in itself nor epiphenomenal.

Populism and fascism are identified by their foundational ideologies. In the case of “thin” populist ideology the core matrices are: (1) the plain people, (2) self-serving elites, and (3) rule by popular will. In the case of fascism they are the creation of: (1) the holistic nation, (2) a “new man,” and (3) a third way authoritarian state. These are then used to assess contested later manifestations, including Peronism, Donald Trump, and the French Front National. A problem in categorization is that whilst populism and fascism differ notably ideologically, in practice the latter has borrowed aspects of populist discourse and style, and populism can degenerate into leader-oriented authoritarian and exclusionary politics.

This and the next chapter articulate a theory of business ethics that fits with how the book has approached corporate governance and corporate law. It takes the “market failures approach” (MFA) to business ethics as a starting point, a view that takes efficiency to be the primary moral principle for business. The MFA holds that businesses have an ethical duty not to exploit “market failures,” the inefficiencies and misallocations systematically and predictably effected by markets. This view is strong because it provides a robust account of business’s ethical duties within the framework of contemporary economic theory; business ethics is neither a wet blanket draped over the C-suite nor a self-serving rationalization of business’s self-interested activities. Instead, business ethics is shown to fit within a larger scheme of social cooperation, taking seriously businesses’ place within that scheme, particularly within a competitive market characterized by deontic weakening.

Chapter 2 emphasizes the importance of the monastic tenet of stability, showing the methods by which teachers and communities help ground newcomers in their intentions to follow demanding contemplative Christian alternatives while nevertheless allowing for ambiguity and open-mindedness toward people who follow other lifeways. Rather than depending on unreliable belief and emotion, neophytes learn to keep intentions and practices as a way of working toward “contemplative transformation,” a kind of religious conversion. The difficulties they have in learning practices and principles, especially discipline, humility, and detachment, reveal some deep-seated American cultural motifs of self-identity, self-achievement, and acquisition. Ethnographic examples illustrate the critical role of teachers in stabilizing neophytes as they struggle to learn the paradox of focusing their lives while retaining a non-judgmental, pluralistic outlook. Some key practices include keeping a rule of life, practicing silence and Centering Prayer, maintaining a sense of humor, and serving others through social action.

As globalization and integration of national economies continues unabated, an increasing number of people are looking for work outside oftheir home countries. Moreover, rather than waiting to be sent overseas by an employer, as might be the case for corporate expatriate assignees, a growing number of people are independently engaging in international job search. In this chapter, we review the literature on these international job seekers, focusing specifically on immigrants and self-initiated expatriates. First, we consider the diverse motives and contextual factors that drive this international job search; second, we look at the personal and cultural factors serving as antecedents for specific job-search behaviors. We then consider how job-search behaviors—in combination with personal factors and host country contexts—influence international job-search outcomes. Throughout this discussion we identify similarities and differences between immigrants and self-initiated expatriates while acknowledging that the boundaries between different groups of international job seekers are blurred. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of areas for future research.

This chapter delves into the theoretical and empirical literature on gender stereotypes to describe how gender stereotypes are conceptualized and measured, how these group-level stereotypes affect judgments of and behaviors toward individual women and men, and the implications of those judgments and behaviors for equitable policies and social institutions, such as schools and workplaces. It highlights both the assimilative influence of gender stereotypes, whereby perceivers judge individual women and men consistently with gender stereotypes, and their contrastive influence, whereby stereotypes serving as comparative standards of judgment may produce counterstereotypical outcomes. The importance of context in understanding the effects of stereotypes and the importance of considering gender in combination with other demographic categories are emphasized. The chapter ends with some consideration of self-stereotyping effects.

Amongst the loftiest of journalism’s grand claims has been the ideal of “public service,” a term suggesting the antithesis of self-serving mendacity or mean-spirited motivation. To characterize oneself as a public servant is to profess a certain kind of civic virtue: an intention to act for all rather than some. This chapter addresses the question: What does it mean for journalists to provide a public service? The chapter considers the claims of journalists to be providers of a public service and the conditions that allow or inhibit the realization of such a high-minded aspiration. Further discussion explores the grounds upon which journalists have claimed to serve the public and concludes by offering a normative framework for public-service journalism within the contemporary media ecology.

In addition to providing food, companionship, and raw materials for clothing, furniture, tools, and ornaments, animals also played a key role in religious practices in ancient Egypt. Apart from serving as sacrifices, each god had one or more animal as a totem. Certain specially marked exemplars of these species were revered as manifestations of that god that enjoyed all the privileges of being a deity during their lifetime and which were mummified and buried with pomp upon their death. Other animals, which did not bear the distinguishing marks, were mummified and offered to the gods, transmitting the prayers of devotees directly to their divinities. These number in the millions and were a significant feature of Egyptian religious belief and self-identity in the later periods of Egyptian history.

This chapter discusses the use of inferences. The use of inferences means that the tribunal makes a determination of fact that is not premised upon direct evidence. The tribunal thus is convinced of the truth of a fact despite the absence of a document or witness testimony that would establish that fact first hand. Such findings of fact are relatively frequent, especially when documents are scarce and witness testimony is self-serving. An inference refers thus to a conclusion that as a matter of plausibility a fact must be true in light of other relevant and probative record evidence as well as party conduct in the arbitral proceedings. Moreover, the plausibility of an inference is governed by the same standard of proof as the proof of the relevant fact by direct evidence.

In popular fiction and many scholarly works, courtiers are represented as masters of the art of dissimulation, cynical and self-serving, ready to turn their backs on anyone who has lost royal favour. This chapter challenges those assumptions by looking at the reaction of family groups and wider networks of friendship or clientele to disgrace. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, families rose and fell as a kinship group, and when confronted by the disgrace of one of their members the collective response was to rally in order to save social, financial, and political status. Friendship too proved far more durable than the stereotype of the courtier might lead us to predict, and by examining the conventions, theory, and actual practice of friendship in times of adversity this chapter offers new insight into noble sociability.

This chapter critically examines an important source of conservative skepticism about the possibility of moral progress: the hypothesis that our evolved moral psychology imposes rather narrow and inflexible constraints on our ability to construct and implement “inclusivist” moralities—moralities that reject group-based restrictions on membership in the moral community, such as those based on race, ethnicity, gender, species, or on self-serving cooperative relationships between groups. This “evoconservative” challenge to the liberal cosmopolitan project appeals to contemporary evolutionary theory to support the long-standing but historically under-evidenced conservative assertion that human nature imposes powerful limitations on human other-regard—constraints that make certain attempts at moral reform futile or prohibitively costly. This chapter lays out evoconservative assumptions about the nature of the ancestral environment in which human morality supposedly came to be.

Donald Trump promised to defeat terrorism, but there is no easy way to make sense of his war on terror. Is it a genuine strategic shift from previous administrations? Or is it all bluster, a way to score points with his base? Hamstrung by his administration's weakness, Trump hasn't actually changed much about counterterrorism. What is different is the ideological agenda--excessively militaristic and short-sighted. Foreign alliances have deteriorated, right-wing extremists feel emboldened, and the US no longer seems like a multi-cultural haven. So what is it all for? Peter Neumann compellingly argues that Trump's war on terror looks strong and powerful in the short term, but will cause damage over time. His self-serving approach has failed on its own terms, made the world less safe, and undermined the US' greatest asset--the very idea of America.

The chapter presents a summary of main findings and discusses their implications. The book’s main finding is that extreme power asymmetry on behalf of the Incumbent creates the conditions for institutional change that empowers mostly the executive branch. A large power differential between the Incumbent and the Opposition encourages the Incumbent to seize the advantage to initiate bold, self-serving institutional change, sometimes even a constitutional overhaul. If the latter gets underway, and power asymmetry stays pro-Incumbent, chances are the new constitution will expand the powers of the Executive branch. This outcome, in turn, can spread discontent across Opposition forces and sometimes encourage the Incumbent to govern more unilaterally. This presents a potential threat to democracy. The chapter concludes by discussing the implications of this finding for different literatures: democratization, constitution-making, presidential powers, and government-Opposition relations.

The Federal Reserve, created more than a century ago, is the most powerful central bank in the world. The Fed’s power to alter the money supply, move interest rates, and to intervene to save Wall Street and large corporations helps many Americans, but not equally. Specific industries in finance and large businesses reap lopsided and often concealed benefits while homeowners, workers, and Americans of color slip further behind. The substantial expansion of the Fed’s power circumvents America’s constitutional checks and contributes to economic inequality and racial disparities. The second edition of Lawrence R. Jacobs and Desmond King’s Fed Power extends their decisive account of the Fed’s favoritism toward Wall Street and big business during the 2008–2009 financial crisis to the Fed’s unprecedented responses to the economic collapse sparked by the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. In five chapters, Jacobs and King discuss the origins of the Federal Reserve System, its maneuvering to advance its capacity and autonomy to act independent of Congress and the presidency, and unprecedented support for Wall Street and big business during in the crises in 2008–2009 and 2020. Fed Power analyses how the scale of the Fed’s economic interventions since 2008 is provoking public unease, organized protests and advocacy, and congressional pressure for reform. The deadly coronavirus and the Movement for Black Lives are intensifying the push for democratic accountability, stringent regulation of banks, and new policies to reduce economic inequality and Black-White disparities. Fed Power is a corrective to both the Bank’s self-serving claims of serving the public even as it favors the best-off, and the reluctance of researchers to recognize the Fed’s role in America’s racial and economic inequalities.

This chapter emphasizes the role of contingency and questions attempts to explain the French Revolution as the embodiment of natural rights theory. Paine’s understanding of that episode was limited by small knowledge of French and adherence to English preconceptions. This chapter questions the thesis that Paine was influenced by Jefferson, in Paris, to produce a worked-out theory of republican government. Indeed, Paine was not the primary author of the key narrative section of Rights of Man; this was Lafayette’s, and it expressed Lafayette’s self-serving propaganda. Rather, the chapter argues that Paine was in London during the fall of the Bastille and the October days. He did not present a worked-out theory of natural rights; and this chapter offers an outline of the development of rights theory in England in the decade after 1789 to explain the setting within which Paine did not do so.

The present chapter seeks to show just how little is known about Jews and Judaism at the time of Muhammad. Whereas many want to argue that a stable Judaism acted as a “midwife” to the birth of Islam in the seventh century, this chapter argues that there is very little material evidence to support with any degree of certainty just what kind of Jews Muhammad interacted with (if he, in fact did). In addition to this dearth of material evidence, the Islamic sources describing these Jews are later, often much later, than the period upon which they purport to describe. The claim that the Jews gave birth to Islam, then, are both ludicrous and self-serving. The chapter suggests that the later Muslim sources transformed the Jews that Muhammad was believed to have had contact with into what they considered to be normative Jews.

The sensorimotor approach emphasizes the significance of action as a determinant of perception, implicitly assuming an agent who engages in intentional actions serving his own interest. It has yet to concern itself with the origin of the norms guiding the agent’s behavior or with a definition of what an agent even is. The chapter examines how the enactive approach can fill this gap. It promotes a theory of agency grounded in the organizational properties of living systems and identifies three requirements—self-individuation, interactional asymmetry, and normativity—that are individually necessary and jointly sufficient to determine whether a system is an agent. The usefulness of the theory is tested by examining whether different systems satisfy these conditions. The chapter contributes to the conceptual clarification of the sensorimotor approach by showing how the notion of agency leads to an understanding of an organism’s sensors and effectors that goes beyond arbitrary anatomical distinctions.

The essays in this volume present the case for attending to the business aspects of religious activities in American religious history. Individual essays model useful approaches for pursuing these dimensions of religious organizations without neglecting their religious dimensions. Some of the essays are also models for critical inquiry into the sometimes self-serving compromises religious individuals and groups make with market capitalism in contemporary American life. The essay considers why previous theologically inclined scholars have neglected the kind of inquiry represented by the volume and celebrates the Business Turn as a “Big Idea” in the historiography of American religion worthy of emulation by other scholars interested in pursuing the nature of the American religious enterprise. By following flows of funds and bodies, watching who is raising money for what philanthropy, and how religious businessman and philanthropists justify themselves, the volume’s authors upset common assumptions about American religion.

Having examined Horace’s ethical credentials and his positive relationship with Maecenas, which the poet claims is based on virtue alone as opposed to poetic talent, this chapter looks at Horace’s ultimately self-serving portrayal of flatterers, which draws heavily from Philodemus’ treatise On Flattery. This begins with his negative but entertaining character portrait of an opportunistic toady, who accosts Horace in the street and whose methods for gaining Maecenas’ attention provide stark contrast with the disposition and approach of Horace as described previously. Next comes Horace’s exposition of the tactics employed by legacy-hunters, which again serves to promote his own agenda as a true friend of Maecenas. The proof of this relationship is given in the next satire, in which Horace thanks his generous patron for the gift of the Sabine estate, which itself becomes the venue for withdrawal and philosophical discussion as Philodemus recommends in On Property Management.

England, their England, a now forgotten bestseller, was one of a series of travelogues produced by survivors of the First World War during the 1930s in a country recovering its sense of purpose and identity; unusually, in this case it took the form of an autobiographical novel. A. G. MacDonell was an insider/outsider, a Scottish Wykehamist, a journalist and a partisan Liberal writing with astringent wit about the fusion of reactionary, self-serving Toryism and unprincipled Socialism that underpinned the National Government quietly pilloried throughout the book. He also glances disapprovingly at colonialism, both internal and external, as he berates a nation that has lost its sense of diplomatic purpose. A bucolic work, hovering uneasily between sentimentalism and satire, it insists that the real England is that of the shires (and particularly country cricket). But MacDonell’s strongest work was the much less pleasing Autobiography of a Cad, which merits reassessment accordingly.

The questioning of witnesses, which generally falls into three stages known as examination-in-chief, cross-examination, and re-examination, is central to the English adversary system of justice. This chapter focuses on the first stage, examination-in-chief. In this stage the party calling a witness, or counsel on his behalf, will seek to elicit evidence that supports his version of the facts in issue. The discussions cover young and vulnerable witnesses; the rule against leading questions and the exceptions to the rule; refreshing the memory in court and out of court; the rule against previous consistent or self-serving statements and the common law exceptions to the rule (complaints in sexual cases, statements admissible to rebut allegations of recent fabrication, statements made on accusation, previous identification, statements admissible as part of the res gestae and statements in documents used to refresh the memory and received in evidence); and unfavourable and hostile witnesses.

Physicians confront situations in which there is a risk that their professional judgment or actions concerning the treatment of their patients will be unduly influenced by self-serving financial interests. These situations predominantly derive from physicians’ relationships with industry and their payment method. The chapter begins with the definition of conflicts of interest in clinical practice accompanied by an explanation of the difference between conflicts of interest and other moral dilemmas that physicians encounter in their clinical practice. The different approaches toward the conflicts of interest problem are presented, including the underlying philosophical–ideological aspects that relate to opposing views concerning medical professionalism. A discussion pertaining to the merits and disadvantages of the four main types of solutions to the conflicts of interest problem follows. Finally, I outline suggestions for several future directions that could deepen our understanding concerning the conflicts of interest problem and in turn lead to new practical solutions.

This book is an ethnographic study of controversial sounds and noise control debates in Latin America’s most populous city. It discusses the politics of collective living by following several threads linking sound-making practices to governance issues. Rather than discussing sound within a self-enclosed “cultural” field, I examine it as a point of entry for analyzing the state. At the same time, rather than portraying the state as a self-enclosed “apparatus” with seemingly inexhaustible homogeneous power, I describe it as a collection of unstable (and often contradictory) sectors, personnel, strategies, discourses, documents, and agencies. My goal is to approach sound as an analytical category that allows us to access citizenship issues. As I show, environmental noise in São Paulo has been entangled in a wide range of debates, including public health, religious intolerance, crime control, urban planning, cultural rights, and economic growth. The book’s guiding question can be summarized as follows: how do sounds enter and leave the sphere of state control? I answer this question by examining a multifaceted process I define as “sound-politics.” The term refers to sounds as objects that are susceptible to state intervention through specific regulatory, disciplinary, and punishment mechanisms. Both “sound” and “politics” in “sound-politics” are nouns, with the hyphen serving as a bridge that expresses the instability that each concept inserts into the other.

In the early 1950s, Kuwait underwent rapid urbanization during which first-generation Hadramis were swiftly absorbed into Kuwaiti urban houses assuming domestic service roles. It is argued that the socioeconomic path of house-serving shaped the Hadrami character and experience of the “model immigrant” as we know it today. However, the study also demonstrates how a Hadrami migratory practice of dependency on the local family and sponsor was inspired by a Kuwaiti cultural and official categorization process of different immigrant groups in which the Hadramis were depicted as loyal, easily satisfied, and non-subversive. While dependency was valued by old Hadramis as a resource and as a form of social capital, it also continued to inform the perceptions, expectations, and actions of the second-generation Hadramis. This chapter analyzes the ways in which the whole experience was conceptualized and contested in daily interaction of the two generations. This study reveals that young Hadramis’ daily activities in Kuwait, and their aspirations for individual self-sufficiency and mobility, can only be carried out by maintaining a difficult balance between the social-triad, and by managing, or perhaps preserving, the legacy of “good reputation.”

This book is the fascinating and dramatic story behind New York City's struggle to build a new subway line under Second Avenue and improve transit services all across the city. The book reveals why the city's subway system, once the best in the world, is now too often unreliable, overcrowded, and uncomfortable. It explains how a series of uninformed and self-serving elected officials have fostered false expectations about the city's ability to adequately maintain and significantly expand its transit system. Since the 1920s, New Yorkers have been promised a Second Avenue subway. When the first of four planned phases opened on Manhattan's Upper East Side in 2017, subway service improved for tens of thousands of people. Riders have been delighted with the clean, quiet, and spacious new stations. Yet these types of accomplishments will not be repeated unless New Yorkers learn from their century-long struggle. The book offers valuable lessons in how governments can overcome political gridlock and enormous obstacles to build grand projects. However, it is also a cautionary tale for cities. It reveals how false promises, redirected funds, and political ambitions have derailed subway improvements. Given the ridiculously high cost of building new subways in New York and their lengthy construction period, the Second Avenue subway (if it is ever completed) will be the last subway built in New York for generations to come.

This book is about the political events and decisions in the 1980s and 1990s that established the global economy we have today. Different social scientists and other commentators have described the foundations of globalization very differently. Some have linked the rise of free trade and multinational enterprises to the democratic expression of ordinary people’s hopes and desires; others have said they were a top-down project requiring, if anything, the circumvention of democracy. This book shows that politicians did not decide to embrace globalization because of the preferences of the mass public. Instead, using comparative-historical case studies of Canada, Mexico, and the United States, this book shows that politicians’ decisions reflected the agendas and outlooks of various kinds of elites. On the basis of more than a hundred interviews, and analyses of materials from archives in all three countries, the book tells the story of how the three countries negotiated and ratified two agreements that substantially opened and integrated their economies: the 1989 Canada-US and trilateral 1994 North American Free Trade Agreements. Contrary to what many people believe, these agreements (like free trade elsewhere) were based less on mainstream, neoclassical economics than on the informal, self-serving economic ideas of businesspeople. This folk economics shaped the contents of the agreements, and helped bind together the elite coalitions whose support made them politically possible. These same ideas, however, have reinforced some harmful economic misunderstandings, and have even contributed to the recent backlash against globalization in some countries.

This biography examines the long career of Lt. Gen. Edward M. Almond, who was born to a family of modest means in rural Virginia. His early education at the Virginia Military Institute, steeped him in Confederate lore and nurtured his “can do” attitude, natural aggressiveness, demanding personality and sometimes self-serving nature. These qualities later earned him the sobriquet “Sic’em, Ned,” which stuck with him for the remainder of his career. Almond commanded the African-American 92nd Infantry Division during World War II. The division failed in combat and was re-organized, after which it contained one white, one black, and the Army’s only Japanese-American (Nisei) regiment. The years since that war have seen the glorification of the “Greatest Generation,” with all racist notions and ideas “whitewashed” with a veneer of honor. When war came to Korea, Almond commanded X Corps in the Inchon invasion, liberation of Seoul, race to the Yalu. When the Chinese entered the war and sent the US Army into retreat, Almond mounted one of the largest evacuations in history at Hungnam -- but not before the disaster at Chosin claimed the lives of hundreds of soldiers and marines. This book reveals Almond as a man who stubbornly held onto bigoted attitudes about race, but also exhibited an unfaltering commitment to the military profession. Often viewed as the “Army’s racist,” Almond reflected the attitudes of the Army and society. This book places Almond in a broader context and presents a more complete picture of this flawed man yet gifted officer.

Stirring the Pot of Haitian History is an original translation of Ti difé boulé sou istoua Ayiti (1977), the first book written by Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot. Challenging understandings of Haitian history, Trouillot analyzes the pivotal role of self-emancipated revolutionaries in the Haitian Revolution and War of Independence (1791-1804), a generation of people who founded the modern Haitian state and advanced Haiti’s vibrant contemporary cultures. This book confronts the problems of self-serving politicians and the racial mythologizing of historical figures like Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Toussaint Louverture and André Rigaud. The author denounces corruption and racism as hereditary maladies received from the hyper-racist slave society of the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Trouillot also examines the socio-economic and political contradictions and inequalities of Saint-Domingue, traces the unravelling of the colony’s racist economic system after the revolts of 1791, and argues that Haitian Creole language and Haitian Vodou religion provided the bedrock cultural cohesion needed to fuel the resistance, revolt and warfare that led to Haitian independence on January 1, 1804. Trouillot blends Marxist criticism, deep readings in Haitian historiography, anthropological insights, and skilful handling of Haiti's rich oral traditions of storytelling, proverbs and wisdom sayings to provide a sharp and earthy account of Haitian social and political thought rooted in the style and culture of Haitian Creole speakers. Each chapter opens with a line of verse, song or a proverb that pulls readers into a historical oral performance. Haitian oral tradition from popular culture and Vodou religion mingle with explorations of complex social and political realities and historical hypotheses. Although the Haitian Creole majority language still plays second fiddle to French in government and education, Ti difé boulé sou istoua Ayiti is a major contribution in the effort to demonstrate the power of Haitian Creole scholarship. Stirring the Pot of Haitian History holds a preeminent place in the expanding canon of Haitian Creole and Caribbean literature, especially as it shows how historical problems continue to insinuate themselves within the contemporary moment.

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.