VOLUME V, CHAPTER 13
Occupying a Position, the Treaty, and the Turning Over of the Taken
This chapter walks three steps deeper on from the last. It sets the deepest of the five depths, occupying a position, beside the one everyone knows, colonization, to see the watershed between them. It returns to the cord of law to see how, after the taking, a treaty is used to stamp the thing legal. And it turns the ever-passive taken side over, to see that under its feet there are in fact several different stones to stand on.
The first section is occupying a position set against colonization. Colonization means you came but you are still foreign and will one day be shown out. Occupying a position means you came and you became this nation, and were written into its own official history. Once it succeeds it is the hardest of all to reverse, because what it rewrites is who I am. This is the thirty-eighth layer.
The second section is the unequal treaty. From the Treaty of Nanjing to the Charter of the United Nations, all of them at bottom the freezing of a balance of force into words, the law of one household written by the strong and stamped with the signature of the weak nation. This is the thirty-ninth layer.
The third section turns the taken over. It sets out three positions, to accept, to resist, to grow strong, each with its own cost, able to hand off one to the next, all still inside the frame of taking and being taken. This is the fortieth layer.
These three sections build from the thirty-eighth layer to the fortieth. This chapter carries the chessboard between nations, from the deepest, occupying a position, to the legalizing treaty, to the responses of the taken, all the way to the doorstep of the present. One line never breaks. The root of taking is output falling short, all three responses stay inside the cycle, and the real way out waits for the later volume on saving people. This chapter keeps its discipline in particular. Of occupying a position it makes nothing pretty, of resistance it works up no feeling, of growing strong it does no boasting. It lays out the positions and leaves the judgment to you.
Contents
Section One. Occupying a Position and Colonization, the Deepest Stroke in the Study of Positions.
Section Two. The Unequal Treaty, the Legal Dressing After the Taking.
Section Three. The Responses of the Taken, Accept, Resist, Grow Strong.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.