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The Uses of History, 33 – Mussolini and Fascism, 5

Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity, quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace.

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(Photo credit – Wikipedia – Italian soldiers march into France June 10, 1040)

In September 1939, Mussolini kept Italy “non-belligerent” at the outbreak of World War II. As our opening quote demonstrates, this was not from any pacifist inclination. It was a decision based on what the Duce considered to be in the best interest of Italy as a Fascist state, as he deemed that interest at that moment. Despite his commitment to stand by Hitler under the terms of the “Pact of Steel” of May 1939, Mussolini felt that the risk of defeat and the end of his regime, and perhaps his personal fate, overruled the impetus to gain a share in the spoils of a potential victory. According to the military analysts of most of the world in the autumn of 1939, the likelihood of Germany’s defeat was rather high. Mussolini was not willing to have Italy dragged to destruction in the coming conflagration.

For the next nine months, Mussolini stood aside, stubbornly persisting in rebuffing all German overtures to honour his commitment of more than benevolent neutrality towards his Fascist ally. Spain too resisted German overtures to put pressure on the British in particular, and Mussolini also hoped that, if and when he judged the time right to jump in propitious, Franco would make the move at the same time. After all, Spain could close the Straits of Gibraltar to the British fleet by capturing the British stronghold and naval base at Gibraltar. This would ensure that British reinforcements could not penetrate to save Malta or reinforce Egypt, which were under British control. The strong Italian fleet based at Taranto on the sole of the Italian “boot” would then truly transform the Mediterranean into “Mare Nostrum” – at least once the French Fleet at Toulon had been neutralized and the British base at Alexandria captured by Italian forces advancing from Libya (an Italian colony since 1911). With such prospectives Mussolini could almost see the return of ancient Roman grandeur in his lifetime.

But first, Mussolini, King Victor Emmanuel, and the Fascist Grand Council needed to be convinced that the lightning swift German conquest of Poland within a month was not a one-off fluke. France and Britain still stood united and, to all appearances, strong. The great French Army which had played the biggest role in humbling the pride of Imperial Germany and ending the “Second Reich” in 1918 was expected to deal the newly reformed German Wehrmacht a resounding defeat once the “real war” started in earnest. The Royal Navy was still mistress of the oceans, and Germany’s new navy was puny in comparison. Only the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force, was reckoned the finest in the world as 1940 began. On the other side stood the greatest and finest navy in the world, and the reputed best army in the world. To jump in with such high stakes stacked against him was contrary to the Duce’s shrewd political judgment.

In April, the “Phony War” suddenly came to an end with a surprise German move north into Scandinavia. Denmark was overrun in a day on April 9, 1940, and simultaneous German moves against Norway turned that country into a major battlefield. The boldness of that move was striking, seeing that it took the British unawares and evaded their fleet patrols in the North Sea to land forces at several major ports as far north as Narvik, the key port for shipping Swedish iron ore to Germany. The Norwegians fought valiantly and the British navy did great damage to the Kriegsmarine after the fact, but the Germans used their control of the air to reinforce and sustain their most forward troops as the major thrust moved through Oslo and began a grinding campaign to join all the bridgeheads together. The Royal Navy suffered serious losses as well, as aircraft proved capable of sinking heavy, well-armored ships. The British also lost one of their fleet aircraft carriers as well – a heavy cost to pay in an eventually futile campaign.

The Allied counterattack into Norway was ill-managed, badly coordinated, and vacillating. Mussolini took careful note. By early May, only Narvik still remained outside Nazi control, and British forces sent to Trondheim had had to withdraw after a fiasco of bad planning, poor execution, and constant Luftwaffe bombardment. On every front, the Germans displayed superior morale, planning, and execution. For a month the Norwegian war held the headlines, but on May 10, that all changed.

May 10 was, for the Germans, “Der Tag” – “The Day” – as June 6, 1944 for the Allies became “D-Day”. It was the great gamble. The forces on each side were about equal on paper, but the governing mindsets were very different. On May 10, the Germans struck simultaneously at the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxemburg. Holland fell after 5 days, and most of the country would henceforth be occupied for almost five years. The Belgian army fought valiantly for eighteen days, but despite the forward advance of the best troops of the French and British armies into the country to stop and help push back the Germans, the Allies rapidly lost control of the campaign. For the German thrust into the Netherlands and Belgium, serious as it was, was actually a gigantic feint. It succeeded in luring the Allied field armies into a trap, for the main German push began on May 12 through the Ardennes Forest, an area thinly defended by a few French reserve divisions because it was considered impassable to armored forces.

The French and British had armored divisions as well, but they were not concentrated into a compact pile-driver spearhead as were the German Panzer divisions. Accompanied by specially trained assault troops and engineering battalions, the Panzer Korps broke the crust of French troops and burst out of the Ardennes virtually unopposed on May 14 and began to race across the open ground of north-east France towards the English Channel. Very clearly, if this could not be halted in short order and in turn cut off by an Allied counterattack, the best French field army plus the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) would be cut off and surrounded with their backs to the sea. It was not.

The Allies began to retreat to the English Channel coast; but on May 28 the Belgians surrendered without giving prior warning to their allies. Almost half a million men were “in the bag” to all appearances. The only port that remained available to pull at least some of the trapped troops out of the pocket was Dunkirk. In what was later described as “the Miracle of Dunkirk”, 338 000 British and French troops were rescued and brought back to England, minus virtually all their weapons and equipment. Equipment could eventually be replaced, but these trained soldiers could not.

Within two weeks, the Germans had beaten much of the remainder of the French Army in a massive, hard-fought battle and were closing in on Paris. Mussolini had a sudden revelation that he needed to stand by Hitler’s side – especially if he hoped to get a seat at the table when the Allies surrendered. With great bombast, speaking in public to an apparently delirious crowd of perhaps 100 000, the Duce declared war on France and Britain on June 10, believing that the time was opportune to gain a piece of France along the Mediterranean Coast, and to have a free hand to pluck some colonies in North Africa – especially Tunisia from France and Egypt from Great Britain, and perhaps even more.

Thus, by June 1940, with Hitler forcing France to sign an armistice on June 22 and taking control of all northern and central France as well as the entire Atlantic coastline, as well as already holding Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and Luxemburg, it seemed clear who had won the war. It would not be a long grinding affair of attrition as in World War I after all. Only Britain, along with its empire, still remained defiantly in the field against the Axis, and the British had to understand that it would be utter folly to keep fighting alone against the Fascist Empires now bestriding Northern, Central, and Western Europe.

“They must make peace,” stated Mussolini. If they did not, they would lose their empire, or perhaps their home islands would actually be invaded and captured by the terrible might of the premier Fascist power in the world, which all could now see wielded the most fearsome war machine ever seen. Italy would then be unopposed in making the Mediterranean “Mare Nostrum” and extending Italian rule across North Africa and into the Balkan Peninsula in south-east Europe.

For a time, big dreams danced in the Duce’s head and, to some extent, in the eyes of the Italian people. Time would tell how well these dreams of a new Roman Empire could be made a reality.

TO BE CONTINUED

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The Uses of History, 32 – Mussolini and Fascism, 4

“Hitler is a big softy, deep down.”

Mussolini to his Mistress, Clara Petacci, on Oct. 1, 1938, a day after the signing of the Munich Pact.

(Photo credit – Alamy – Mussolini speaking in Rome to a mass audience in mid-1930s)

The relationship between Mussolini and Hitler, Europe’s two major Fascist leaders, was never smooth, despite the public parades and spectacles each of them created for public consumption both for their own peoples and for impressing their mutual foreign opponents, especially in the Western democracies.

Within their most intimate entourages, the ambivalence was much clearer. As of late 1937, Mussolini’s overall opinion of Hitler had undergone significant change. The Fuhrer’s support for his Ethiopian conquest had hardened and Mussolini was grateful for increased German financial, commercial, and technical exchange in the face of League of Nations sanctions. In return, Hitler’s bold move into the Rhineland signaled his determination to dismantle the “Wilsonian” (from US President Woodrow Wilson) order of Europe represented by the League of Nations and balance of power lying in the hands of the Western Allies.

Mussolini too sought to undo the Versailles/Wilsonian order. The Italian view had been that Italy had been cheated of the fruits of victory in The Great War when it had not received the promised territorial compensation in the Austrian Tyrol and the Dalmatian Coast. Mussolini believed Italy had a right to be treated as a Great Power, and would take what was rightfully hers when the time was right. To that end, the armed forces would be built strong and the Mediterranean would return to being “Mare Nostrum” (Our Sea), as Imperial Rome had once claimed it.

Fascist rule within Italy could be harsh if you were at the wrong end of the political spectrum. Most of the leaders of the Leftist parties had had the good sense to leave after “Musso” put into place the last major brick of his consolidation of total Fascist control with the signing of the Lateran Accords with Pope Pius XI in 1929. The Duce now had the full support of the King, who approved of his strong, stable rule, and the Pope, who could release Catholics to serve in the government which affirmed the “true Church” as the official faith of the nation. For foolish protesters and active, underground political dissenters, the prisons were made bigger, and the colonies could be made available for their residency – unless they accepted exile. But the rumors of Hitler’s brutal treatment of German troublemakers seemed “barbaric and primitive” to sensitive, civilized, cultivated Italians – even to the Duce.

The Duce retained a sense of what tolerant Italians would willingly accept, and the harsh Germanic brutality that was being bruited about was a step too far. As an indicator of where the boundary might lie within Italy for attempting similar methodology, when Anti-Semitic measures were decreed in Italy after the Anschluss (the unification of Austria with Germany and its incorporation into the Third Reich) in March 1938, the outcry in Italy was so great that Mussolini soon backtracked by stipulating that the measures should be softened and not applied – i.e., to turn a blind eye to enforcement. In other words, it was all a show to simulate solidarity with his German ally, whose troops now stood at Italy’s northern borders, where Austria’s had been. In return, Hitler reconfirmed that he had no intention of reclaiming the South Tyrol for incorporation into the new Greater Germany which he was creating.

While Hitler still valued Mussolini as a sort of mentor in his rise to power, there were/are definite differences in ideology between Fascism à la Musso and Nazism. Nazism was/is virulently racist from its inception, and was oriented towards the conquest of the lands inhabited by “inferior” peoples who, as inferior, were not worthy of it. Fascism was/is aggressively nationalistic and certainly carries the notion of the superiority of one’s own nation over others, but does/has not historically endorse(d) genocide and mass enslavement of whole “races”. The kind of racism and ideological commitment to genocide and mass elimination of whole sectors of populations was never part of Mussolini’s agenda, and within Italy when the Germans later forced its application following their occupation of the north and center of the country, Italian passive resistance to and disgust with it was notable. Naturally, there were segments of the population who participated, as there were in every nation the Nazis subjugated, for the elimination of the Jews opened opportunities for personal enrichment.

Mussolini and Hitler were able to provide spectacle and a strong propaganda image of mutual regard and ideological kinship, but there was always tension and ambiguity in their relationship. All the more among the leadership of their respective parties and governments. As the German power grew and Hitler’s triumphs accumulated, Mussolini felt increasingly threatened by comparison and he was determined to establish the credibility of Italy’s (and his) claim to national greatness by taking an independent course. He supported the Nazi destruction of Czechoslovakia (Sept. 1938 – the Munich Conference, and March 1939 – the annexation of Bohemia [Czechia today] and Moravia, along with the creation of a nominally independent Slovakia). But in April 1939 he unilaterally invaded and took over Albania without consulting Hitler. His goal was to prepare for the eventual conquest of Greece.

As it became clear that Poland was Hitler’s next target, Mussolini began to distance himself from the German leader’s obvious intention to continue expanding the new Germanic Empire to the east. Italy could not afford to be dragged along into such a conflagration. When it became clear that, despite their “Pact of Steel” Alliance, signed in May 1939, an attack on Poland finally meant war with Britain and France, Mussolini made it abundantly clear that Italy was not ready for such a war and would not be until 1942, and, even then, only with massive German help in modernizing and reequipping its armed forces. A frustrated Hitler excused Mussolini and told him that a friendly neutrality would do for the moment.

Despite the bombast and aggressive rhetoric, Mussolini was well aware that fighting against the West would be a far different proposition from overrunning African territories whose powers of resistance were overmatched by Italy’s more technologically advanced forces. However, even there, the Italians had resorted to chemical warfare and brutalities they would not have dared use in Spain[i]. This pattern would be repeated in the Balkans in 1940-43. But in 1939, Mussolini and his Fascist regime greatly feared the power of Britain and France with their powerful navies and reputable armies laying all of Italy’s conquests exposed to attack, as well as Italy itself.

Thus it was that when the Germans invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, Italy declared non-belligerency.

TO BE CONTINUED

[i] The Spanish Civil War had ended in May 1939 with the victory of Franco’s Nationalists. Over 100 000 Italian “volunteers” had fought for Franco, and Italy had furnished hundreds of planes, artillery pieces, and much else. This effort had drained Italy’s arsenal and resources even if it had helped ensure the creation of another Fascist state in Europe.

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The Uses of History, 31 – Mussolini and Fascism, 3

Fascism is a religion. The twentieth century will be known in history as the century of Fascism. – Mussolini

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(Photo credit – The Guardian – Mussolini inspects “Volunteers” going to Spain)

While the 20th Century was not the century of Fascism in the sense Mussolini intended (as the dominant force in world affairs), Fascism certainly left its indelible mark on it. It is a fair question to ask whether World War II would have occurred without powerful, aggressive, militant Fascist dictatorships allied together as “the Axis Powers”. Perhaps a Second World War would eventually have come anyway, but in another form. Perhaps it would have come in a showdown between the Capitalist nations of the liberal (in the old, traditional sense) democratic West and the Soviet Union, along with whatever acolyte states it had been able to recruit as the century wore on.

Communism was and is as inherently aggressive an ideology as Fascism, and perhaps moreso. Here in the West, that truth seems to have been largely obscured by the creeping neo-Communism that many “progressive” Western academics have come to espouse from their intellectual Ivory Towers.  This slow soul-poison morphs like a chameleon to suit whatever slippery new ideological fad seems best suited to insinuate Marxist core doctrines into strategic socio-political locations. At the same time, these ideologues seek to lull regular citizens to sleep by appealing to new doctrines of global and individual morality which all “right-minded people” should adhere to in the name of social justice. However, this is a subject for another time.

In studying Fascism as practiced in actual history, our purpose is to learn what the real thing looks like in the real world rather than the caricature depicted in the ideological rhetorical bombast now used to label ideas, groups, and opponents the Woke want to shame into silence, or at least to convince the populace not to give credence to the “fascists” and reactionaries who are impeding the coming of the latest version of Utopia.

This sort of sophisticated, righteous-sounding tub-thumping would have been laughed out of town for thirty years following World War II. The “Great generation” who had grown up in the Great Depression and fought World War II knew real Fascism from close up and could smell the rot a mile away. The Gulags of real-world Communism were right in everyone’s face. Direct, horrendous experience had shown them both sides of the spectrum. They would know that Donald Trump and other purported neo-Fascists are mere field-mice compared to Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Tojo and their minor partners and imitators. Ivory Tower gradualist soft-Communism would have to wait for the stench of the Gulags (1922-1989) and the spectre of the crushing of Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968) to fade into distant memory and forgetfulness.

In 2023 our failure of memory and will to recognize the real face of both Fascism and Communism as inevitably practised when their proponents gain power makes us purblind. We cannot even recognize that two of the three greatest powers in the 2020s are actually full-blown Fascist dictatorships. We seem unable to admit that Communism has utterly failed whenever and wherever it has been given its big chance in real time and space between 1918 and right until the present.

As we survey the geopolitical landscape, we now find a growing cohort of Fascist states among the nations of the post-colonial world. They identify themselves otherwise, but if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck …. In Orwellian Newspeak fashion, the most powerful among them even retains the moniker of “The People’s Republic …”, pretending it is still somehow faithful to the opposite side of the spectrum it once espoused. The next most powerful fascist state engages in a war of naked aggression against its wealthiest immediate neighbour.

Meanwhile in the West, we hear rival Greek choruses hysterically calling their political opponents “Fascists” and “Communists”. Such puerile tactics only betray the bankruptcy of your case, which you would rather not discuss in a rational, civilized fashion. You might lose the debate after all! If you want to see what real Fascism looks like, you have only to look across the Big Water, or perhaps just a few hundred kilometers down the road. You can also take a trip down memory lane to the time of your grandparents’ youth. We all need a true “woke” experience about both the extreme “solutions” to our undoubted problems of injustice and inequity, but dressing up old demons in angelic costumes and ignoring all the lessons of even recent history is insanity. The record of history echoes with eery familiarity.

In 1936, Benito Mussolini and Fascist Italy were estranged from their erstwhile World War One allies. Italian aggression against Abyssinia (Ethiopia) had led to economic sanctions by the League of Nations against Italy, but Britain and France refused to take these to the make-or-break limit of boycotting oil and coal, without which Italy’s armed forces would have been paralysed and Mussolini would have been forced to either cease his invasion or fight the Western Allies to break their blockade. This was the point at which Hitler shocked everyone by reoccupying the demilitarized Rhineland and declaring that he would remilitarize it. France desperately wanted to keep Italy friendly and all talk of sanctions ended. Italy completed its conquest of Ethiopia.

However, the damage had been done, and Mussolini and Hitler now looked at each other as potential allies. Lower-level trade and economic talks proceeded to warm things up between them with a longer-range target of a future closer relationship. Were they not fellow Fascists encircled by the West and France’s cordon of lesser European allies (Poland and Czechoslovakia in particular)? Mussolini and Hitler shared a hatred of communism as well, although the “Jewish question” was irrelevant to Mussolini at this point.

In July 1936, Spain erupted in Civil War. Rightist Army elements attempted to overthrow the leftist Popular Front government and only partially succeeded. Spain had shed its monarchy in 1931, although by that point the King held no actual power. Since 1921 the government had been under a military dictator who issued decrees in the King’s name.

With growing unrest and social chaos taking hold, the King abdicated and called for elections. The Second Spanish Republic was constituted. The elections brought a broad coalition into power with hopes of modernizing the country and healing the social divisions between revolutionary radicals, traditionalists, and moderate centrists. However, in short order the radical elements of the left began vigilante actions against religious people and institutions, the traditionalists grew alarmed, and the government proved unwilling or unable to reign in the growing unrest. As in Germany prior to Hitler’s accession to power, Spain found militias and mobs creating near anarchy.

New elections confirmed the swing to the radical left in the legislature and executive. The army was officered largely by monarchists and traditionalists, and many of the rank and file shared their views. Thus, in July 1936 several of the top military commanders decided it was time to end the Communist-Socialist-Anarchist alliance that had taken control of government and was dismantling much of Spain’s historical society and institutions. These “actions” were often vicious and violent, including burning churches, pillaging monasteries and convents and other religious centers, and even murder and rape, often preceded by torture and terrible abuse.

With this in mind, we can better understand what now happened. Mussolini, since 1929 an official protector of Roman Catholicism in Italy, declared his support for the “Nationalists”, as the rebels and their supporters on the right had named themselves. The Vatican lauded his policy and it was popular in Italy. The Duce began actively sending arms and “volunteers” to assist the Nationalists.

The Spanish Republicans managed to hold onto the majority of the country at first, but most of the army had defected and the Madrid government appealed to France and Britain to help them “defend democracy” and “uphold the rule of law”. The League of Nations called for all members to stand aside as neutrals, condemning Italian intervention. Mussolini shrugged at the League as if to say, “Are you going to stop me like you did in Abyssinia?” He could and did point to this abysmal failure of the League as evidence of its impotence.

Britain and France were torn. Neither wanted to see Spain become Fascist, but they could not countenance the dreadful atrocities committed against the Catholic Church and many of its clergy in the name of “freedom”, as had been seen in the run-up to the Civil War. France itself was torn internally by some of the same extremism. Its government was struggling to prevent a similar social disintegration. This left Britain as the major voice of the Western democracies, and Britain at this time had an appeasement-minded government which declared for strict neutrality and non-intervention.

Mussolini cared little for Britain`s opinion and continued shipping arms of all kinds and thousands of “volunteers” to fight with General Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces. Following his triumph in the Rhineland, Adolf Hitler also quietly began sending weapons and “technical advisors” and “volunteers” to Franco, although in far fewer numbers than Mussolini. Spain would be a good proving ground for Germany’s rapidly expanding rearmament program where new weapons and tactics could be tried under live combat conditions.

The Spanish Republic appealed to the Soviet Union for help, and Stalin obliged with shipments of weapons and his own “volunteers” – especially pilots for the planes he was sending. Leftist sympathizers in France also smuggled arms and international volunteers into Spain doing an end-run around their own and the British Navies who had begun to enforce a League-sanctioned blockade to keep all international intervention by sea out. Italy backed this up by using submarines to sink Soviet freighters headed for Republican Barcelona or Malaga, officially carrying grain, but almost always with other secret cargo aboard. The Fascist powers sent in their support by air instead, and Italy used its own naval vessels to escort passenger liners carrying “volunteers”. Faced with the possibility of having to actually use force, the blockading ships turned a blind eye.

Hitler admired Mussolini’s willingness to defy the Western democracies and the League and the Duce’s canny judgment that he would get away with it. He was taking notes for his own future plans of expansion in the not-too-distant future. Mussolini was showing up the weakness, which the Fuhrer considered moral failure, of his opponents. This was a lesson definitely not lost on him. Hitler rarely admired anyone else, and respected no other living statesman – with one exception, the Duce!

The “Spanish Affair” thus became another point of contact and recognition between the two Fascist Dictators. They shared a clear mutual interest in cooperating together to strengthen their relationship as a counterbalance to the Franco-British alliance and system of encirclement of the Fascist powers. In October 1936, Mussolini returned Hitler’s initial move of coming to Italy in 1934 to offer friendship by going to Berlin to complete the negotiation of a broad-spectrum treaty of friendship and cooperation. The treaty included many economic, trade, and technological aspects, but most of all put the Germany-Italy relationship, as well as the Mussolini-Hitler relationship, on a new footing, with a definite commitment to act much more in each other’s common interest and support.

When Mussolini arrived in Berlin, Hitler put on his best charm-offensive, which could be considerable when he willed it. He praised and flattered the Duce as his model and a pioneer. He showed the Duce much of the new developments under way in Germany’s dynamic industrial, infrastructure, and military expansion. The Duce was much impressed, and waxed eloquent. Germany was the new rising star in Europe, and Italy joining with it could bring great reward. A week after this treaty with protocols was signed on October 25-26, 1936, Mussolini extolled its significance as a major shift in the affairs of Europe and the world. He declared that henceforth, Europe would no longer find itself turning around the ineffectual Western democracies, but around the newly established “Rome-Berlin Axis”.

Thus was born the Fascist alliance system called “The Axis” which would fight much of the rest of the world (and lose) in World War II. But in 1936 it began to look like the Fascist powers were indeed rising and democracy was fading. Spain was the proxy war where this could be witnessed on the ground, as well as the superiority of Fascism over the even more hated specter of Bolshevist Communism.

TO BE CONTINUED

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The Uses of History, 30 – Mussolini and Fascism, 2

“Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”

Benito Mussolini’s formulation of the Motto of Fascism.

(Photo credit – Alamy – Italian forces enter Ethiopia, October 1935)

In our last post, we took a look at what historical Fascism is and how its originator, Benito Mussolini, rose to power in Italy in 1922. We then outlined the course of the Fascist regime up until the early 1930s.

Mussolini was Prime Minister of Italy from 1922-25. In 1925 he adopted the title “Il Duce” – the Leader – as encompassing his role in the government and as the embodiment of the principles of Fascism in practice. The role of Prime Minister all but disappeared, although the title remained alongside “Duce”. “Duce” was more suitable for the “New Italy”, whereas “Prime Minister” harkened back to the notion of his position and power being subject to “the King’s pleasure” to whom he was, in theory, accountable within Parliament. A series of laws and constitutional changes transformed Italy into a one-party state, abolishing Parliament and creating in its place “the Fascist Grand Council” which was a rubber-stamp body whose role was to endorse whatever the Duce and his ministers decreed as official policy. The King was left as a figurehead Head of State with a strictly symbolic and ceremonial function. Mussolini had no further accountability to King Victor Immanuel III.

As we have seen, until 1933, Italy was the only Fascist state in the world. In January of that year, Germany fell under the sway of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (the Nazis) – and Germany became the second Fascist state. Mussolini was of two minds about this development. On the one hand, he was glad to see another Fascist government in Europe, but on the other, Italy had to look out for its own strategic interests, and he, and by extension Italy’s Fascist government, really needed to demonstrate that Italy was still strong and vital to Europe’s peace.

When, in early 1934 with German Nazi support, the Nazis in Austria attempted to overthrow the Austrian government and accomplish Hitler’s aim of unifying racially German Austria with Hitler’s Third Reich (the Nazi term for the “New” Germany), Italy (Mussolini) quickly put a stop to it by sending five army divisions (about 75 000 men) to the Austro-Italian border at the Brenner Pass as a warning to Hitler that Italian troops would intervene to maintain Austria’s independence. The Treaty of Versailles forbade the Anschluss– the unification of Germany and Austria – and Italy was still retaining its association with its World War I Allies, Britain and France.

Hitler backed down and Mussolini gained a foreign policy triumph. Hitler now believed that he needed to persuade Mussolini to work with him as a fellow fascist rather than oppose him, and so in May 1934 he flew to Venice to meet Mussolini for the first time. This was but a few months before Hitler consolidated his power as “Fuhrer” (Leader) in Germany upon the death of President von Hindenburg in August 1934. It was also but a month before “the Night of the Long Knives” on June 30, 1934 – the purge of the Nazi movement itself masterminded by Goering and Himmler to end the threat to Hitler’s (and their) control posed by Ernst Röhm and his SA militia.

Publicly at their first meeting, the two Fascist leaders put on a good show of getting along. Privately, Mussolini professed himself unimpressed by Hitler. At this point Hitler was not the senior partner, and, due to the two circumstances alluded to above, his rule was not yet consolidated. He seemed ill at ease and awkward to the more suave and sophisticated Italians. As well, Germany was still struggling mightily to emerge from the desperate economic straits the Depression had caused and to shed its military feebleness. Mussolini enjoyed the feeling of being cultured and a man of superior experience and accomplishment to the Nazi leader. At this point Italy was still the stronger military power.

Gaining a cheap foreign policy victory at Germany’s expense and then having Hitler come calling as a sign of Germany’s need of Italy’s friendship could not long palliate the fundamental weakening of the Fascist regime’s prestige and hold inside Italy, especially with economic and living conditions declining. Mussolini could not readily change that, but he could provide distraction and regain prestige by taking steps to expand the Italian colonial empire and validate his claim that he would restore Italy’s greatness by resurrecting the glory of ancient Rome.

Abyssinia (Ethiopia) would be the first step in that process. Italy had tried to conquer that ancient kingdom in the late 1890s but suffered a humiliating defeat at the hand of the “primitively” equipped Ethiopian army on March 1, 1896 at the Battle of Adwa. Mussolini declared that it was time to erase this blot on modern Italy’s history.  On October 3, 1935, 250 000 Italian troops attacked Abyssinia from Eritrea and Italian Somaliland (Italian colonies in East Africa). This undeclared war would last until February 1937, when the outgunned and technologically inferior Ethiopian forces surrendered.

While Mussolini trumpeted the glories of this “great achievement” of crushing one of the only remaining independent African states after its heroic but futile resistance to the power of modern weapons, airpower, and even chemical warfare (a violation of the Geneva Convention), this war had cost Italy dearly, and ultimately Mussolini and his Fascist regime, in several ways.

  1. Italy became a pariah state and lost its friendly relations with its former World War I Allies, Britain and France.
  2. Italy was condemned as an aggressor nation by the League of Nations (the forerunner of the United Nations) and was subjected to sanctions. Italy then withdrew from the League in defiance.
  3. The Italian armed forces were shown to be not as modern and efficient as Fascist propaganda painted them.
  4. Italy was pushed towards turning to Germany, which was now embarked on a program of rapid rearmament and modernization of its military forces. The subtle German response to Italy’s Ethiopian adventure was two-edged. On the one hand the German Fuhrer voiced modest support and sympathy to his fellow Fascist. On the other hand, German weapons and advisers were secretly being supplied to the Ethiopians in order to prolong the war and further embarrass and isolate Italy, thus making the Italians more ready to turn to Germany as a friend and then remove their protection of Austria’s independence.
  5. The war proved a serious drain on Italy’s economic and military resources, and what could be extracted from Ethiopia in compensation would never make up for this.

In sum, the Ethiopian adventure proved an enormous blunder in the long run and, although unseen at the time, drove the first tangible spike into the coffin of Fascism’s reign in Italy.

Mussolini did not at first see this, and there was no immediate thaw in Italo-German relations. Hitler had his own plans, and with the Western Allies and the League of Nations thoroughly engrossed in the “Ethiopian Question” in March 1936, Hitler decided on a great gamble of his own. On March 7, he sent 7000 German troops into the Rhineland as a symbolic move to accompany his announcement that he would no longer abide by the clause in the Treaty of Versailles which banned German military forces from being garrisoned in an entire region that was sovereign German territory.

Hitler argued, not implausibly, that the Allies (the French) had pledged to reduce their armies and dismantle their own fortresses along the German frontier as a gesture of good will towards a disarmed Germany. The French Army remained huge and never reduced its heavy weapons or its efforts to improve all its arms of every sort. Germany, Hitler said, had a right to protect itself among the family of European states. It was intolerable that small countries like Czechoslovakia and Poland could theoretically easily invade and occupy large areas of Germany and meet little resistance. Hitler’s gamble paid off. The French protested but, without British support, which was not forthcoming, did not move to chase the German troops out of the demilitarized zone, even though they could easily have done so without mobilizing any more forces than those which were on hand along the frontier at the time it happened.

This bold move was not lost on Mussolini. This kind of calculated bravado was something he could understand and relate to. His opinion of Hitler improved, and he sent a message of congratulations to the Fuhrer.

Before long, the ties between the dictators would grow much closer.

TO BE CONTINUED

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The Uses of History, 29 – Mussolini and Fascism, 1

Fascism – 1. Hist. the totalitarian principles and organization of the extreme right-wing nationalist movement in Italy (1922-43). 2. (also fascism) a any similar nationalist and authoritarian movement. esp. German National Socialism [Nazism]. b derogatory any system of extreme right-wing or authoritarian views.

Canadian Oxford Compact Dictionary, 2002

The last few years have witnessed the fast and loose use of the term fascism in both social media and what is supposed to pass these days as serious, public political expression of views. Regrettably, most of the latter comes out as diatribe aimed to dismiss people the speaker doesn’t want to hear and who, it is implied if not actually stated, shouldn’t even have the opportunity to inhabit the public forum. For example, the Prime Minister of Canada’s way of questioning such “misguided souls” having the right of free, public speech is to label them as “unCanadian”, despite being born in Canada, which makes them fully Canadian entitled to all constitutional guarantees, such as freedom of expression and association and equality under the law.

Whether in Canada, the USA, or any number of other venues, most of the loose use of fascism has been in sense 2b of our above definition – derogatory, as an accusation targeting “right-wingers” holding what the accusers view as “extreme right-wing, authoritarian views”. In the present socio-political climate in the West, it is becoming increasingly difficult to have any sort of true public dialogue. Even universities, the original bastions of free speech, have caved into the pressure to censure and exclude people (almost always labelled as “right-wing”) with the wrong views on the current crop of hot-button social engineering issues. As an old friend used to express this fashion of shouting at the other people to drown out any possibility of hearing them and having an actual discussion that does not degenerate into verbal violence, “My mind’s made up; don’t confuse me with the facts.”

Even so, here is some factual (as in real) information about real-life fascism rather than the misinformed accusatory variety which vicious tongues use to silence by shaming people whose opinions they don’t want to hear. Perhaps the reader will be able to better assess the next use of the derogatory, belittling form of the term in comparison.

Benito Mussolini is the ideological “Father of Fascism.” As a socio-economic-political ideology it did not exist until he created it. For most of the 20th Century it was the only original ideology to emerge from those tumultuous 100 years. Unless we want to baptize the Green Movement as another one, Fascism remains the only genuine 20th-Century political ideology. As to what that suggests about the quality of our global community’s political and social evolution since World War I, the reader may formulate her own judgment.

Mussolini and the Fascist Party of Italy (which he founded) seized power in that country in October 1922. Modern revolutions until that point had been “leftist” in orientation. Perhaps Americans would dispute such a description for the events of 1774-83 in their country, but comparatively speaking, it was a move to what we now call “the left”, or the “progressive” side of the socio-political spectrum. The various French Revolutions (1789-99, 1830, 1840, 1870-1) were definitely movements to the left in what was Europe’s leading continental power in those days. The Communist Revolution in Russia was the most radical move to the left yet, at least in intent. (We will leave China and South-East Asia to another time.)

Thus, when we behold the Italian Fascist Revolution of 1922, we are seeing something new. Its goals were very different from those of Socialists or Communists, and its agents fervently hated Communism and Socialism. It was anti-democratic (although so is Communism in all its formulations from Marx to Mao). Unlike the Communist ideology, Mussolini and the Italian Fascists originally had no aim to infiltrate and overthrow neighboring states to convert them to a new ideology and wipe out their national identity in a great new international fraternity of like-minded proletarian egalitarianism.

Mussolini’s ideology was unabashedly nationalistic, militaristic, right-wing populist, anti-socialist, anti-communist, and mucho testosterone-driven. The strong male was dominant and was meant to dominate. Fascism favoured a form of Capitalism Mussolini called the “Corporate State”. He did not mean government ownership of industries and commercial entities. There could be a few exceptions as in the national rail service and state radio. The general economic concept was careful and very close, hands-on regulation of key economic sectors and enterprises to coordinate the economy in order to create a centrally controlled economic plan. In theory, this would better satisfy the needs of ordinary folks while also allowing entrepreneurs and corporations to reap profits from their expertise and opportunities. New talent could rise to the top if they did what was required within the bounds of the “Big Vision”.

It is no longer very popular to suggest that anything positive or of lasting benefit was produced under a Fascist regime that lasted slightly longer than 20 years. At the time, for the first ten years or so, a good many Italians (obviously not of socialist or leftist persuasion) thought that overall conditions in the country really improved. Most people had jobs and could make ends meet, contrary to the unrest and turmoil of the years before “Musso” took power. “The trains actually run on time,” was one famous quip. The Mafia was reigned in, suffering the same brutal treatment from Fascist strong-arms that they were accustomed to use against their opponents. Godfathers going to prison was not unusual.

In 1929, the Roman Catholic Church made a deal to recognize the loss of its former central Italian territory (the Papal States, annexed by Italy in 1870) and Rome as Italy’s capital. In return Roman Catholicism became Italy’s State Religion and Vatican City became the smallest independent State in the world, under Italian protection. While “Il Duce” had no interest in religion, he knew, like Napoleon, that making peace with the Church meant increased loyalty from the large majority of ordinary Italians who were still practising Catholics.

The Great Depression hit Italy hard after it had been churning on for three years. Italy had at first weathered it somewhat better than other European states and even the US. But, as it did for almost all countries, foreign trade withered as protectionism closed markets around the world. Unemployment, hardship, and poverty returned to large numbers of Italians. Similarly to other countries, the Fasicst regime had no significant answers to these problems. Social security measures were very limited by Italy’s increasingly poor balance of payments and steep economic downturn. The government’s unpopularity grew and harsh measures were used to silence dissent.

As noted above, Fascism is strongly nationalistic and militaristic. One of the common methods of diverting attention from domestic social and economic woes is to find a scapegoat outside the country. In World War I Italy had taken the Allied side in May 1915, after having backed out of the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary. The Allies had coaxed the Italians into this by promising significant territorial compensation along the Adriatic Coast and in the Austrian Tyrol. In addition, Italy eyed some of Turkey’s Aegean island possessions. (Turkey had taken Italy’s place as an ally to Germany and A-H in October 1914.)

In 1933 and going forward, deep in the grip of the world-wide depression, Mussolini needed a notable “success” to convince Italians that his regime was still strong and able to fulfill national aspirations. The face of Europe was changing too. On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party took power in Germany, legally and constitutionally. A second major country of Europe now had a Fascist-style government. The German edition called itself “National Socialist”, but most of the characteristics of Fascism as originally defined by Mussolini stamped Germany’s new regime as genuinely “fascist”. It did not take Hitler long to demonstrate this reality with deeds.

The rise of a second fascist nation across the Alps was not originally welcomed by Mussolini, despite Hitler’s having openly expressed his admiration of Il Duce and his achievements. For one thing, the Nazi program was outlined in Mein Kampf, Hitler’s blueprint for Germany and Europe’s future, written from prison in 1924 and available to read for anyone who cared to and managed to wade through its stultified and turgid prose. Hitler was very clear that a revived Germany under National Socialism would annex Austria as one of its first acts. As one of the victorious Allied powers of 1918, Italy had guaranteed the integrity and independence of Austria within its post-war frontiers.

TO BE CONTINUED

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The Uses of History, 28 – What Good Are Revolutions?, 3

The Russian Revolution of 1917 passed through two distinct iterations. The first was a precarious attempt at Social Democracy which was severely handicapped by the effort to keep Russia involved in World War I. Throughout this period, from March to November 1917, the Duma never achieved stable control. It faced constant challenge from the radical parties, but especially the Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin.

In July an attempted coup by the Soviets[i], the chief rival organization to the Duma (Parliament), failed only when Lenin hesitated to give the final order to seize control of Petrograd (St. Petersburg). However, in November, with the Bolsheviks in control of the Soviets in all the major cities, the second revolution was planned and deliberate. Kerensky’s government collapsed as troops refused to take action to stop the overthrow.

The Bolshevik Revolution had a wider and more secure base than the abortive Social Democratic one. It had a national base in the soviet system, and it no longer needed the Duma or an appeal to democratic methods. But this did not assure its success. The rival factions dispersed as they came under oppressive and coercive and even violent attack. But the old order still had its supporters, especially in the provinces farther from the large urban centers of Russia proper.

By the spring of 1918, opposing forces were beginning to coalesce around leaders who were creating armed militias to combat Bolshevism and the radical agenda it had already begun to impose through nationalization of finances and key economic sectors, as well as land and corporate confiscations without compensation.

Most horribly, the deposed Tsar and his whole family and many of the old aristocracy were brutally murdered. There were stories of wide-spread atrocities being committed by Bolshevik groups acting out of pure revenge and hatred while using ideology as a shield for what really amounted to old-fashioned pillage and rapine. Trotsky, the main organizer of the Bolshevik forces being prepared for the civil war which was shaping up, either could not or would not restrain many of these “actions of pacification”, although, eventually, he began insisting that the newly forming “Red Army” adopt more regular military behaviours and discipline. A real and serious Civil War was obviously beginning, and foreign intervention by Russia’s former allies was on the horizon with Germany’s defeat approaching as 1918 wore on.

The Bolshevik Revolution was not secure until 1922. By that point, all the “White Russian” forces had been defeated and hundreds of thousands of refugees had fled to Europe. The foreign interventions had all failed for lack of support and focus, and their troops had been withdrawn from what was now styled “The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” (USSR). To achieve this union, sacrifices had had to be made. Poland had declared its independence as soon as German troops were withdrawn at the conclusion of the Great War. Finland had already done so, with German help, even earlier, and then Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia swiftly followed. Ukraine declared independence in 1919, but by 1921 the now victorious Red Army invaded and put an end to Ukraine’s first brief foray into independence.

The most “successful” foreign intervention had been that of the Japanese, based at Vladivostok. British Empire troops, including a Canadian contingent to which my grandfather was assigned, also participated. The Japanese marched far inland with the idea of hooking up with a White Russian force under Admiral Kolchak, but the White Russian opposition to Bolshevism collapsed. Japan seriously considered annexing the Eastern part of Siberia to its empire, but under vehement Allied opposition eventually withdrew in 1922.

Disunity, huge distances separating the various “White” forces, and lack of supplies and heavy weapons doomed the opposition to the Red Army, which had inherited the arsenal of the Russian Imperial Army. Trotsky also proved to be a formidable War Minister and controlled the Red Army with an iron fist.

The most serious challenge to the new Soviet State actually came from Poland. Extremely reluctant to let Poland go, Lenin refused to recognize its independence, for Poland was a major bridgehead into Europe to spread the new Communist Gospel. Germany seemed ripe for the picking in 1919, as the tremendous turmoil after the collapse of the Kaiser’s regime and the terrible shock of the loss of the war opened up the possibility of Communist Revolution in that nation as well as in the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. For a brief moment, Berlin came under Communist control, but this was ruthlessly crushed by returning army commanders using “demobilized” troops who remained loyal to them. Hungary briefly fell under the sway of Bela Kun, a wannabe Lenin. That too ended by Rumanian army intervention and mob action in Budapest.

The newly independent Polish Republic’s response to the threat of the Red Army invading its territory was to take the offensive. Armed by France and with French officers acting as “advisers”, Poland’s new armies (many veterans of the Russian Imperial Army, and some even of the German and Austrian armies) gave Poland a large number of already trained troops. They invaded Belarus and Ukraine, pushing deep into Soviet territory. The Red Army soon recovered as it consolidated its control and pushed forward to the gates of Warsaw, but, contrary to all expectation, Marshal Pilsudksi’s Polish Army routed the Soviet forces and drove them far back. A peace-treaty followed in March 1921 recognizing Poland’s independence and ceding territory in what is now Belarus and western Ukraine to Poland.

When the Japanese withdrew their troops from Eastern Siberia, the Russian Civil War ended. Lenin lived another two years, and laid much of the groundwork for the brutal, tyrannical Soviet system that followed. His successor, Stalin, would “perfect” the whole monstrous regime that would, over the next almost 70 years, leave tens of millions of dead in its wake through deliberate starvation, work-them-to-death prison camps (really extermination camps without the gas chambers), genocide (the Crimean Tatars were victims of this, as were other smaller groups), and silent disappearance, which took hundreds of thousands.

To this day, admirers of Communism and defenders of what happened under the Soviet regime (which really had nothing to do with communist as Marx preached it, but was the main tool used by the Bolsheviks to gain and maintain their iron, inhuman grip) cite the “amazing achievements” of the Collectivization of agriculture which resulted in the deaths of 1-2 million “kulaks” (prosperous peasant farmers) and the collapse of  Russian grain production for at least three years while the government continued exporting much of what was produced to fund the goverment’s programs – with famine and desperation even in the cities. Perhaps 5 million died of starvation – a truly remarkable achievement for one of the agriculturally most potentially productive regions on the planet!

The other area much admired at the time and since was the breakneck industrialization of the Soviet State, especially Russia, ruthlessly executed under Stalin’s succession of “Five-Year Plans”. Huge steps were taken in hydro-electric production and the construction and improvement of infrastructure, and heavy machinery and the production capacity made great strides. This helped prepare the Soviet Union to absorb the Nazi onslaught of 1941-3, and then drive deep into Europe in 1944-45. Often forgotten were the human costs to the long-suffering populace, and, during World War II, the enormous Western Allied support which did much to enable the Soviets to not just survive, but rebound.

One of the great questions debated to this day is whether Russia would have fared better under a continuation of the Tsarist regime, or perhaps under a Social Democratic successor regime had Kerensky and his like successively navigated the storm of 1918.

One can hardly imagine that either of those two alternatives could have been more monstrous than what ensued under Bolshevist-Communism.

What we are left with is having witnessed Russia suffering under worse tyranny than Tsarism ever devised or was capable of devising, given the influence in Old Russia, however marginal, of a form of Christian conscience and compassion that was woven into the system. The question we are still left with is whether Russia can live under anything but a form of autocratic, elitist regime. We have not yet seen it truly tried there. It was quickly quashed and rejected as unworkable in the two brief interregna when it seemed about to appear (1918, 1991-99). The Soviet system had its own definition of elitism and its own cadres of neo-aristocrats. Stalin was an absolute Tsar in all but name. Other Soviet leaders were Oligarchs who rose to the top. The present regime has come out of that, but has reverted to accepting money and privilege and all the perks of power in the old style.

[i] Soviet – an organized assembly of workers, labourers, ordinary people of various backgrounds claiming to represent their interests. Even military units formed such associations. This had begun in the 1905 quasi-revolution and was resurrected in early 1917. The Bolsheviks did not invent the soviets, but quickly saw them as a way to power without having to go through a democratic and election-based process. The soviets were also seen to be a short-cut or end-run around the standard Communist doctrine of passing through the phase of a bourgeois state in which the working class learned how to wage class-warfare against the capitalist overlords.

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Zealotry

We all have our blind spots. Perhaps there is no one so blind as a zealot, a fanatic. And fanatics are often the most difficult and even dangerous kind of people to deal with. They can be willing and convinced to commit heinous acts to forward the “Cause” and silence “the Enemy”—even permanently.

I have been a zealot, and can still be one. I confess that zealotry has gotten me into hot water more than a time or two. I tend to form and hold strong opinions and views about things that disturb me or about which I am convinced I know significant truth. I suspect that most people share this characteristic during their lives, at least sometimes and about a few things.

It is amazing to consider the reasons people fall into zealotry-fanaticism. For millennia people have become so fanatical about favourite sports teams that they have killed and pillaged the supporters of their main rivals. This became a huge problem in Rome and Constantinople during the heyday of chariot racing. There were times when the supporters of the “Blues” and the “Greens” went on days-long rampages, seeking out their rivals to even kill and maim them, burn their businesses and homes. Only declaring martial law would bring them under control. Perhaps we have not seen quite that level of sports zealotry yet, but the fans of soccer/football teams in Europe, Africa, and Latin America have sometimes given those ancient Romans a run for their money in zealotry.

The two areas that seem to invariably and perennially engender the most fanaticism are religion and politics. We can link these two areas under the heading of “ideology”. Ideology manifests as religion and, in its secular form, as a socio-political movement. These two manifestations are closely linked, and until recently were intimately connected. The birth of secular ideologies which reject any connection to religion was only about two centuries ago, and is a specifically western phenomenon. It is the child of the Enlightenment, whose leading lights saw religion, particularly in its Christian form, as the root of all injustice and inequality.

From the perspective of the late 17th-19th-Century philosophes the intellectual giants of those heady days for the new progressivism, Science and Reason had set humanity free from the chains of ignorance, dogma, and superstition, which is all they attributed to the essence of the forms of Christianity they saw around them during the two centuries which followed after a century of wars of religion which had slaughtered millions in the name of Christ and truth.

This unshakeable conviction of inevitable progress through the agency of Reason and Science eventually led to its own brand of zealotry and fanaticism, and in turn engendered its own reaction. The zealotry and fanaticism which followed on the heels of the Enlightenment liberation of the West from slavery to religious dogma and moral and doctrinal judgmentalism and condemnation was ideology without God as its starting point. Instead there would be “scientific analysis”, rationality and Reason. Hence, there was a whole new area of thought to explore, the “Social Sciences”, dressed up in a facsimile of scientific methodology. The quest was to decode human behaviour and enable the enlightened Gnostics who saw truly and deeply enough into this new mystery to direct society into a coming age of harmony and symbiosis. This new age would be based on the proper ways to not only understand why and how humans behave as they do, but to channel that behaviour into constructive purposes and so reach the “Promised Land” that had so far eluded the Christian version of Western society.

We are still seeking the Promised Land, and, for the most part, still discounting the God-hypothesis as holding any prospect of showing us the way, but, at the same time, watching the more than two-hundred-year-old promise of a secular path to it unravelling. What has been the fruit of all that labour—beyond the accretion of mastery over nature through exploiting its resources for our own benefit and to blast one another to smithereens more and more efficiently?

Socio-political ideologies such as Communism, Fascism, Capitalism, Anarchism, and all their variations have proven themselves and continue to prove themselves to be every bit as capable of begetting mayhem and slaughter as religious-style bigotry, dogma, and hate-filled apocalypticism of the religious variety as any god-based religion ever did. We have only to tally the toll for all the wars of Revolution since 1792, two World Wars, and a host of other conflicts claiming to be bringing liberation or defending freedom. The toll is in the hundreds of millions.

The truth is that human beings are bred to believe. If we remove gods/God, we will nonetheless believe in a substitute, for, as has been said in various ways by different sages over many centuries, “Man is made with a God-shaped vacuum in his soul. If we do not let God fill it, we will find another god to take His place.” (This is my rather free-wheeling paraphrase of French philosophe Blaise Pascal’s formulation of the problem in his masterpiece, Pensées.)

I will not try the reader’s patience by discoursing on my own particular zealotry. Those who know me to some extent will have some idea of what some of it may involve. I will only challenge the thoughtful types among you to do some self-examination in the style of Socrates. He was the greatest of all Western philosophers and would, I believe, be shaking his head in dismay at the path our culture is taking away from its foundations in Reason and Science, set in their proper place. That place is not in God`s place, but alongside the Creator who gave these gifts to us in the first place.

Socrates’ greatest admonition to his contemporaries was “Know yourself.” When asked why the Oracle of Delphi had pronounced him the wisest living human of his time, he replied that the only thing that he knew for sure was that he knew almost nothing for sure, and, because he realized his own ignorance, he was free to inquire and discover truth inasmuch it could be found, because his mind was free from slavery to preconceived dogma. If, during his inquiry, he discovered that some dogmas were true, he was free to affirm them for their truth, but he was not free to compel others to accept them. In the end, only God can judge how truthfully a man (person) lives his life and only God is fit to judge.

I suspect that Socrates would be as controversial today as he was 2400 years ago. We would probably once more persecute him till he was forced to drink poison by some officious court defending some sort of “freedom” which the self-righteous justices of said court judged to be above the kind of examination Socrates advocated. I also suspect that another even greater One who lived four hundred years later would be once more taken out for “liquidation” for telling people that only the truth could set them free and that he himself was/is that truth.

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The Uses of History, 26 – What Good Are Revolutions?, 1

revolution …. Complete change, turning upside down, great reversal of conditions, fundamental reconstruction, esp. forcible substitution by subjects of new ruler or polity for the old ….

The Concise Oxford Dictionary, 1962.

(Image: Simon Bolivar, 1825. Credit – Wikipedia)

What good are revolutions? Do they ever really change anything? Do they actually just shift the exercise of power from one faction or group to another? At the fundamental level, do they just leave the mass of the people under the heal of a new elite?

Apologists for one revolution or other in a nation’s historical self-definition rarely, if ever, consider questions such as those above. There is no doubting that the United States that emerged from the American Revolution is a very different place from what it was before under British rule, and what it would have evolved into had it remained within the British fold. So too, the France that now exists is radically different from the France that once was subject to the Bourbon dynasty, or even the Bonaparte (Napoleonic) dynasty had it succeeded in retaining power. So too, the Russian Republic in 2023 is different from what it was under the Romanovs.

Our dictionary definition cites a “forcible substitution by subjects of new ruler or polity for the old”, and “great reversal of conditions, fundamental reconstruction”.

With regard to the American revolution, one change was certainly fundamental – the exercise of ultimate power passed from the British Parliament and the King to American citizens within a home-grown system of Congress (the Legislative Branch of government) and the Presidency (the Executive Branch of government). Behind both of these stood the Judiciary, embodied in the Supreme Court. Since then, this well-defined and tested model of Enlightenment-style governance has become widely imitated in the liberal-democratic nations.

As justly proud as the Americans may be of the work of their Founding Fathers (setting revisionism regarding the systemic inequities in US history and polity aside for the moment), we do not hear much about the very British roots of this arrangement. With all due respect to the similarities to some indigenous governance traditions which we are told inspired parts of the US Constitution, the great preponderance of the traditions and practices which weighted the work of the Founding Fathers stemmed from the British roots they grew up with and were immersed in. What they did not want was a hereditary monarchy or any hint of dynasticism settling into their Executive Branch. They were thus very careful to deliberately design a system clearly delineating the limits of the prerogatives, rights, powers, and responsibilities of each of the three branches of government. But the three branches of government so clearly delineated in the masterful written document that became the American Constitution were already in clear evidence in Great Britain and had been functioning within increasingly well-defined limitations for a hundred years by 1787.

The French revolutionaries of the early to mid 1790s struggled mightily to come up with a republican system that would firmly establish their new national motto of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. Bitterly opposed by the other European great powers of the era, all except Britain ruled by autocratic monarchies, the quest to define France’s new identity was truncated and mutilated, forced to adopt the most efficient means of defending the Fatherland (la Patrie – as in the national anthem La Marseillaise – “citoyens – enfants de la patrie” – citizens, children of the Fatherland) against the invading hosts of enemies bent on destroying all the gains of the Revolution and reinstating oppressive dynastic, aristocratic tyranny.

The American “Founding Fathers”, before the Revolution, had lived under a relatively tolerant and somewhat benign and distant overseeing monarch and his Parliament and, to a large extent, been allowed autonomous local governance. In contrast, the French revolutionary leaders who emerged from the first fever and fervor of 1789-92 were ideologically driven idealists who were not prepared to temporize or compromise. Nevertheless, the American example and success in throwing off British aristocratic overlordship stood before Revolutionary France as a beacon, a statement that the ancien regime could be overthrown and replaced without creating a new, home-grown monarchy or even a new form of oppression based on hereditary class.

Unfortunately for France, the nation was at war continually from 1792 to 1802 with Britain and more often than not other continental powers being subsidized by and allied to Britain. Thus there was no leisure to pursue peaceful development or time to explore possibilities of different systems of government.

Always on the defensive, always under imminent threat of invasion, and weary of being badgered and bullied (as they saw it), the French finally handed power, perhaps rather reluctantly at first, to their most successful general with a mandate to deal with their inveterate enemies. Napoleon Bonaparte not only repelled their attacks, but took the offensive and battered them into submission, exporting many of the reforms and modernizing and culture-changing ideals that had lately been institutionalized in France as he led the victorious French armies right across Europe from Portugal to Poland. By 1810, only Britain still defied him, and on the continent Britain had for allies only inconsequential Portugal and recalcitrant Spanish guerillas.

As we have seen, Napoleon’s eventual defeat in 1815 did not undo 26 years of revolutionary change in France. While the old Bourbon dynasty returned to power from 1815-30, the revolution’s legacy could not be erased. It burst into new flames in 1830, 1848, and 1870. Since then, France has remained a republic, and the old fire of revolution and the right to march and take to the streets and barricades when government is perceived to be overstepping the bounds of rightful and necessary control is never far below the surface. Recent events are demonstrating this at this moment. Throughout the 20th Century there have been passionate and poignant demonstrations of the legacy and heritage of the revolution’s deep stamp in the very soul of France, and now we see it risen once more to challenge President Macron and his administration.

Incidentally, the current edition of La République de la France is #5. Number One was from 1792-1801. Number Two was from 1848-1852. Number Three was 1870-1940, and fell with the Nazi conquest of France in June 1940. Number Four was 1945-1958, and fell with a massive upheaval that led to the coming of Charles de Gaulle as President of the newly minted Cinquième République, which is now in place.

The lesson that both the United States and France have provided to the world in their very different ways is that a modern state can be organized and governed successfully and effectively without a monarch to give it legitimacy and stability. However, in the place of a monarchy, it seems that the alternative must include some other symbol or institution embodying the nation’s essence and identity. It seems that that embodiment is best found in an actual individual chosen by the people or their representatives. If the nation is democratic, or aspires to be, the individual may well be best chosen by election; at the very least, the representatives choosing the symbolic individual should be elected.

Both the United States and France have had many emulators over the last two centuries, which have seen the number of nation states increase exponentially as the old empires died out or collapsed. When the Spanish American Empire revolted en masse between 1810 and 1825, led by Simon Bolivar, Jose Marti and others, most of the new Latin American countries which emerged, with some brief aberrations from the pattern, chose to imitate the United States and adopt a republican system with separate elected Presidential and Legislative Branches. When the French Empire dissolved in the 1950s and ‘60s, most of the new countries chose to adopt a French-style republican system. That many of these imitators have proved unstable and vulnerable to control by unscrupulous strong-men, with an odd strong-woman in the mix now and again, is beside the point we are illustrating.

That point is that the two Great Powers in our case study have provided a pattern which most nations in the world have chosen to follow and imitate over the last two hundred years or so when they threw off or were released from their imperial and colonial subjugation. There is not much taste for monarchy left in the world in the 21st Century.

We have set Russia aside up to this point in this macro-analysis of the effects of the three great revolutions we have been considering over the last six months or so in The Uses of History Series. That is because the outcome of revolution in Russia has not followed the models established by the other two. In our next episode we will consider why, and what “lessons” or conclusions we may draw from Russia’s special case.

STAY TUNED

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The Uses of History, 25 – Russia the Long-Suffering, 7 – Revolution 1917, 2

(Image Credit – Getty Images)

Russia has never outgrown autocracy and never experienced even moderately successful democracy.

Nicholas II, the last Tsar, fell from power on March 8, 1917, and there was a brief (in terms of historical time) interlude of seven months in which there was a struggle to see what would ensue. This ended in early November when the Bolsheviks, the supreme radicals among the competing factions, overthrew the Provisional Government led by Alexander Kerensky, and, led by Lenin under the slogan “All power to the soviets!”, rapidly began to eliminate all the other factions.

Interestingly, the process is not unlike what happened in Germany just more than fifteen years later in the Nazi Revolution. The social impact of these two totalitarian takeovers in those two nations is also not so dissimilar as might superficially seem to anyone objecting to an ideological comparison of Nazism with Soviet Communism. After all, the Nazis viewed Communism as the of supreme enemy, next to the Jews, of course, whom the Nazis viewed as the authors of Communism. On the other side, Communists viewed, and still view, Nazism and other extreme rightist factions similarly. But all of this is a subject for another time.

The short life of the Provisional Government of the Russian Republic which existed from March to November 1917 was very turbulent. It began with great uncertainty about how power could be re-established after four hundred years of a Tsarism which had become increasingly absolute and utterly bound to the idea of the Tsar’s Divine Right to rule sanctioned by the State Church of Russian Orthodoxy, which had bound itself hand and foot to the Romanov Monarchy.

By February 1917, “the people”, from bourgeoisie to masses of peasants, to working class labourers, and even some of the gentry and a few senior aristocrats, had all joined in rejecting the Tsar—not just the actual Tsar Nicholas II as a weak, gullible, incompetent fool for whom they had lost all respect and veneration, but all tsars. The problem was that no one knew just what to put in the place of the Tsar as a source of authority and sovereignty. Russia had no liberal history or well-developed liberal ideology such as the doctrine of Western liberalism that “power ultimately resides in and comes from the people”, and that rulers are really, in theory, the servants of the people.

Thus, the Duma, the closest thing that Russia had to an elected legislature, but which did not in any real sense have the constitutional authority or mandate of Parliament in Britain, or Congress in the USA, or the Chamber of Deputies in France, or even the Reichstag in wartime Germany, could not simply take charge. In the vacuum a new rival organization had rapidly sprung into being—the Soviet.

The Soviet originated in Petrograd in 1905, during the near-miss revolution, as a loose assembly of delegates chosen from segments of the population such as labourers, unions, industrial workers from different sectors, army units of the Petrograd garrison, and even Women’s groups demanding women’s rights and equality. It quickly reappeared in February 1917 amidst the tumult and unrest, marches and riots that rocked the capital. The Petrograd Soviet was much more a people’s assembly than the Duma, except that it was a local organism, not a national one. Conspicuous by absence from both was any meaningful representation of the rural peasant zemstvos, or communes, and the peasants still constituted the majority of the Empire’s population.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks quickly identified the Soviet as the real road to power, although the Bolsheviks had a respectable number of deputies in the Duma as well. However, the Bolsheviks did not at first control the Soviet. Bolshevik members had infiltrated it and began to take a hand in inspiring its demands and tactics. Gradually they gained the members’ confidence and assumed leadership positions. They also set about sending agents to other major cities which had begun organizing soviets of their own, and repeated the process of infiltration and becoming leaders.

There was no inevitability in an eventual Bolshevik takeover. With more unity and visionary, determined leadership, the Duma might have weathered the storm. But Kerensky pledged to Russia’s allies that Russia would remain in the war to “defend the Revolution” and honourably fulfill its treaty obligations. In June the much-shaken army was ordered to launch an offensive. It lasted three days, then collapsed as hundreds of thousands of troops simply refused to fight any more, sometimes just shooting their officers and walking away. The Germans and Austrians made massive advances and took hundreds of thousands of prisoners. Most of the deserters were peasants wanting to go home and take land from the gentry while the getting was good, and before the harvest season came. Things were desperate everywhere, with shortages of everything. On their way out of the war, many deserters looted and raped and burned whole towns and villages in the western lands, mostly those of Jews and Poles, while bandits roamed freely. In the rural areas, the peasants, now often armed with army rifles, attacked the gentry estates, seized lands, pillaged and burned, and killed any who resisted or objected or who just happened to be in the way.

The Provisional Government had lost credibility. General Kornilov, a hard-line rightist, attempted a coup but his troops melted away when confronted by troops and armed sailors from the Baltic Fleet. With things in desperate straits, the Soviets took to the streets and were on the verge of overthrowing the government in July, but Lenin hesitated to give the order and, when bad weather set in, the mobs faded away.

For all intents and purposes, Russia was out of the war, but Kerensky still refused to negotiate a truce with Germany and Austria-Hungary. By October, Lenin and the Bolsheviks felt ready to act, as they now controlled all the soviets in all the major cities.

In the era of the Soviet Union, these days and those that followed in the Civil War and the failed Western intervention after the conclusion of World War I, assumed the status of legend. The genius of Lenin and Trotsky (whose memory and achievements would later be expunged from the record by a vengeful and paranoid Stalin) in particular became hagiography, a sort of sacred literature. The epic of the heroic struggle of the Red Army, risen as a Titan from the very soil of the people in their will to tear down the evil capitalist order and end the exploitation of the suffering people, was sacred mythology. Kerensky’s name was banished as that of an evil dupe and tool of the exploiting classes and a puppet of the bourgeoisie.

The Provisional Government was swept away in a few short days with only sporadic resistance which ceased by the end of November. In Petrograd the soviets began to act like a national government, constituting the Congress of Soviets. Executive power was delegated to the Council of People’s Commissars, most of whom were Bolsheviks from the Central Committee of the Party. Laws were passed to reinforce their hold – land reform, industrial reform, and other measures were rapidly decreed.

The moderates and conservatives finally began to wake up and realize that they had been completely outmanoeuvred. Gradually, a number of groups around the empire began to organize and coalesce to formulate plans to drive the Bolsheviks and their allies out, as they saw that the Russia that would emerge would have no place for them or for private property and enterprise. Gradually, industries and banks were nationalized, as was transportation. No compensation was offered to the erstwhile proprietors as the nationalization program took hold.

Lenin had always insisted on ending the war. With signs of internal armed resistance beginning to take shape, this became urgent. On March 3, 1918, the Bolshevik government signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany and Austria-Hungary. The terms were extremely harsh to Russia. A huge area of the western provinces was handed over to German occupation as the remnants of the Russian Army were pulled back hundreds of kilometers. Lenin had not wanted to give up territory, but the Germans insisted and began a massive offensive to convince him to sign. He ordered his representatives to accept the independence of Ukraine and Finland, and the loss of Poland and the Baltic States )Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia. German troops penetrated into Belorussia in order to be within striking distance of Moscow if the Bolsheviks proved recalcitrant. They were already in Estonia, in range of Petrograd.

With the peace signed, Lenin shifted his attention to raising and training the Red Army to defend the revolution from what was already forming up to become a civil war as various reactionary leaders began gathering their own forces in various locations from Manchuria to the Caucasus. As to the Germans, they now had 900 000 troops available to move to the Western Front for one last great effort to overpower the French and British before the Americans could become a major force in the battle-lines.

As the ultimate climax and crisis of the Great War developed in the spring of 1918, the Allies had already resolved that, if and when they were victorious, the Bolsheviks would have to pay for betraying them.

TO BE CONTINUED

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The Uses of History, 24 – Russia the Long-Suffering, 6 – Revolution 1917, 1

…. once the Czar was gone, no Russian ever commanded again. It was not until a fearsome set of internationalists and logicians built a sub-human structure upon the ruins of Christian civilization, that any form of order or design again emerged…. All sorts of Russians made the revolution. No sort of Russian reaped its profit.”

Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, Part 5—The Unknown War, The Eastern Front.
(First Published 1923-31, e-Pub edition, Rosetta Books, 2013), pp. 444-5

(Photo credit – Petrograd Soviet, 1917 – Jacobin)

We have now followed the tale of the Russian Empire and its absolutist intransigence from the failed Decembrist Revolt of 1825 to the early days of 1917. In historiography, there has been no lack of analysis about contributing factors and causes leading to the final collapse of the Tsarist system on February 23 (Old Russian Calendar Date, March 8 by modernized dating) and the abdication of the Tsar and the end of the Romanov dynasty and implementation of a Provisional Government in early March.

Churchill’s analysis does not follow the standard sort of treatment of these events. He does not exhaustively list the failures to reform and the lost opportunities to avert catastrophe amid social and governmental collapse. Rather, his account makes for very interesting and possibly disquieting reading to an open-minded student of history, and particularly this history. Lest you, dear reader, be tempted to dismiss Churchill’s work because it was penned by a British politician who, one would think, would not know enough to give an authoritative interpretation but would be offering a mainly ideological and anti-communist perspective without taking into account the “hard facts and details” of the case, I would caution you to reconsider that preconception.

Here is why:

  1. Winston Churchill was intimately acquainted at first hand with a great deal of what transpired in World War I among the Allied governments, of which Russia was one of utmost importance as an original member of the Entente Powers, or Allies. As a powerful Senior Minister of the British Government through most of that great conflict, he had access to great quantities of inside information. He knew many of the participants personally – on both sides of the battle-lines, but especially among the upper echelons of the Allied Powers.
  2. By 1923, Churchill had already written several works of serious history and knew how it was done. As we have said, he had access to material that many scholars and writers did not have access to until many years later. He was already known to be an excellent writer, matching in his literary achievements his extraordinary oratorical ability.
  3.  Later in his life, Churchill’s historical writings were recognized as worthy of  being recognized among the best of his time. These included his masterful four volume treatment of Marlborough and His Times, the story of his distinguished ancestor, John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough and generalissimo of the British and Allied armies opposing King Louis XIV’s attempt to win mastery of Western Europe between 1701-1714. He had also written a multi-volume History of the English-Speaking Peoples and the six volumes of The Second World War, his personal account of that enormous conflict written largely from his perspective of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953, an extraordinary accomplishment for a statesman, and not based on his exceptional service to his country and humanity but on his literary merit and ability as a serious and recognized historian in his own right.

“The Nobel Prize in Literature 1953 was awarded to Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill “for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values”.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1953. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2023. Fri. 17 Mar 2023. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1953/summary/

Thus, his account of what happened in the Russian Empire in 1917 and previously merits serious consideration.

Churchill does not credit the thesis that the Revolution was inevitable. In his account, he speaks of a number of circumstances which left the door open to a very different outcome if but a few circumstances had changed, or if the Tsarist regime had managed to survive but a few weeks longer. For example, the United States was on the verge of entering the conflict, and did so almost precisely one month after the Tsar fell from power. That alone might have staved off the disaster as a new hope of eventual victory in the war and ample new sources of supply could have reached Russia via the new year-round port of Archangelsk which now had a railroad connection to the south.

Churchill mentions that, as we have previously pointed out, the only sort of government Russia had ever known since its emergence as a definite European entity was absolutist Tsarism. Churchill posits that absolutism was the only form of rule the vast Russian state could feasibly be governed by, even in 1917. The Tsarist variety of absolutism would prove to have been downright benevolent in comparison to what was about to be visited on the longsuffering Russian peoples over the next 70+ years.

No other form of government had ever really been attempted in Russia, and all the traditions were rooted in that. In 1917, there were no plausible leaders who could make anything else work, for no one had any other kind of experience to work with. The reformists and revolutionaries had never ruled anything, and that indeed would engender the only possible outcome, disintegration of all cohesion and orderly rule into anarchy that could only be remedied by imposition of another absolutism. That eventually emerged, as quoted above, in the form of “a fearsome set of internationalists and logicians buil[ding] a sub-human structure upon the ruins of Christian civilization”.

Let us briefly summarize what happened from March to November 1917. Petrograd (St. Petersburg) revolted, beginning on Mar. 8. All attempts to quell the revolt failed after an initial assault by troops loyal to the Tsar dispersed the crowds. Thereafter, troops refused to fire on the citizens. The Duma dilly-dallied while the workers and laborers formed a city “Soviet” – an association unifying all regular people supporters of overthrowing the autocrats and reforming society, including army units. By Mar. 14, the Duma accepted the responsibility of forming a Provisional Government contingent on having the support of the Soviet, which really controlled the city. The Tsar was compelled to abdicate for himself and his son, and his brother Michael refused to take the throne, now rendered very precarious in any case. The Provisional Government now ruled a nascent republic and a constitution was a necessity.

Between March and November, the Provisional Government struggled to gain both legitimacy and a consolidated position and mandate. Russia’s new leaders, such as Kerensky, talked of establishing a western-style liberal democracy, but, as Churchill put it:

“The very rigidity of the system gave it its strength and, once broken, forbade all recovery …. All fell headlong into the depths where Lenin, Trotski, Zinoviev, and other unnatural spirits [Stalin lurked behind Lenin as a personal shadow to him in those days] awaited their prey.”

(Ibid., pp. 444, 447)

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin) had been exiled to Siberia in 1897 as punishment for sedition against the Imperial government. Released in 1900, he went into exile in Western Europe, moving around in a campaign to gain control of the Russian Social Democratic Party from outside the country. When World War One erupted, he moved to neutral Switzerland. In 1916, he was found there by German intelligence agents and encouraged to work, with German backing, for the overthrow of the Tsar. When the February Revolution did that without Lenin, but failed to take Russia out of the war, the Germans offered to transport Lenin to Petrograd with ample funds to organize the overthrow of the Provisional Government by gaining control of the Soviets so as to undermine the Duma and the Cabinet Ministers.

 Lenin accepted, happy to use the Germans as a tool to the greater end of creating the first Communist state in history, a base from which to bring worldwide revolution. The idea of committing treason against his Fatherland did not matter at all. In his mind, Germany would be one of the first targets for revolution once power in Russia had been achieved. Thus, in March Lenin was given a private sealed train to travel across Germany and then across the Baltic Sea to Finland, from whence he could get to Petrograd.

Between April and November Lenin and his henchmen, the main ones being named above by Churchill, worked tirelessly to infiltrate and gain control of the Soviets, first in Petrograd, then in Moscow, and then in other strategic cities. By November, their network was ready for the “real” revolution.

TO BE CONTINUED

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The Uses of History, 23 – Russia the Long-Suffering, 5 – 1914-1917

(Tsar Nicholas II of Russia on the eve of WWI – Photo credit Wikipedia)

Whether or not there was a revolutionary situation in Russia on the eve of the First World War is a matter of debate. But no one doubts that the Russian Revolution was a product of that war in many ways. Military defeats turned society against the ‘German’ court and government, accused of treason and incompetence, so that it was seen as a patriotic act to remove them for the sake of national salvation.

Orlando Piges, Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991, a History. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2014), p.54.

So far in this series, we have looked in some detail at some modern revolutions and their interrelationships, beginning with the American Revolution, then the French Revolutions (for there have been several), and now the Russian Revolution. The tendency of historical scholarship to treat these seminal events more or less in isolation is understandable. The object of the professional historian is to analyze an event, or a closely related series of events, as a single phenomenon in order to keep the subject as a reasonably limited project with a specific focus. The typical analysis begins with deciphering the event’s causes and catalysts, studying the principal persons and events who contributed to its origins. It may then continue into studying the course of events and why things happened the way they did. The final step, should the historian-analyst wish to go so far, is to describe outcomes and their consequences. A monogram may be dedicated to one specific part of this hypothetical treatment of a subject.

In this series, we have been following a more “macro-history” process of relating a number of major historical phenomena together in order to gain a broader picture and, hopefully, create a more generally applicable understanding of how we have come to be where we find ourselves in the 21st Century. Our focus has been mainly on Western Civilization, but has also related this to the global picture when appropriate.

We have now arrived at the enormous, shattering socio-economic-political, cultural, and spiritual cataclysm of World War One and its ensuing tremendous consequences. Russia’s history was as much affected as any other nation’s, and much more in many respects, not the least of which was the end of Imperial Tsarism.

As our opening quote suggests, perhaps by 1914 a revolution of some sort in the Russian Empire had become inevitable. It is certain that Russian society had reached a crisis in which its future direction must change if it was to survive in some way. Consider this statement from a major Russian culture-influencer in 1905, on the heals of the failed revolution of that year, given by Sergei Diaghilev as a toast to Russian high society at a banquet in his honour:

“We are witnesses of the greatest moment of summing-up in history, in the name of a new and unknown culture, which will be created by us, and which will also sweep us away.”

(quoted in Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies. Random House, 2020, pp. 47-8)

Diaghilev assuredly had no idea how true his prophecy was, or in what form it would come true, but his statement, made to the richest and most powerful sophisticates of Russia in that age, is symptomatic of the deep structural and moral rot that had infected the whole Tsarist-aristocratic system. Although very largely in agreement with him, the Russian oligarchs of that dead gilded age, like those of any pre-revolutionary age, had no desire or will to surrender their privileges and upset their decadent comfort and self-indulgence. Much of the rot was spiritual, for the educated classes had very largely abandoned Orthodox Christianity, and Christianity itself, and reveled in their new freedom to flaunt their sexual liberation and ability to defy traditions and customs. Even the Tsar’s family was infected, or about to be, as we saw last episode in the account of the coming into the Tsarina’s intimate circle of the wicked, mad, debauched monk Grigori Rasputin.

It is true that in the twenty years preceding the outbreak of WWI, and especially following the humiliation of the defeat at the hands of Japan in 1904-5, some segments of Russia’s economy had boomed, and industrial development and a degree of modernization in large cities and transportation had taken place. But Russia lagged far behind the pace of expansion and economic and technological development in its Great-Power peer nations, save perhaps Austria-Hungary. Under another extreme trial by war with its European rivals, how Russia would fare was a much debated question. Her sheer size and manpower resources were unmatched, but how much could that compensate for the great industrial, financial, infrastructural, and technological lead of Germany? Lower-echelon government administration had improved, but the upper levels were still rife with nepotism and oligarchic sycophantism. (As we have lately been witnessing, this situation has scarcely changed at all in the intervening century from that time to this.)

Russia declared war on Austria-Hungary on July 28, 1914, in response to Austria’s aggression against Russia’s Balkan protégé, Serbia. Austria’s attack on Serbia was Austria’s response the assassination of Arch-Duke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian terrorist in Sarajevo, Bosnia, then a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

As we have seen in more recent history (9-11), international terrorism can spark enormous international consequences. In this case, those consequences were the most enormous in recorded history. Germany declared war on Russia on August 1, 1914 as an answer to Russia’s declaration of war on Austria, Germany’s ally. On August 3, Germany invaded Belgium as a prelude to invading France, which Germany also declared war on on August 3, with the justification that France, as Russia’s sworn ally, was about to declare war on Germany in any case. To complete the embroilment of all the Great Powers, Great Britain declared war on Germany on August 4 in response to Germany’s refusal to immediately vacate Belgium and not invade it again. Britain had had an informal alliance with France since 1904, and it now became formal.

If the war had been short, as was first predicted, the Tsarist regime might yet have survived and found a way to avoid a massive internal meltdown. However, the pundits and experts, with one or two exceptions, such as Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty (civilian Minister in charge of the Royal [British] Navy), all declared that because of the tremendous destructiveness of modern warfare and the economic interdependency of the world’s empires and nations, any major war must be of short duration. Six months, or a year at most, was the usual prognostication. One is reminded of similar “expert” opinions offered in the 1780s about the likelihood of the early collapse of the newly founded USA, or in the 1790s about the stability and durability of Revolutionary France and its capacity to rule and to wage long-term war.

We will not recap all the military movements of two-and-a-half years on the Eastern Front before Russia “hit the wall” in its ability to carry on what was, by then, a losing struggle with the German Empire and its ally, Austria-Hungary, aided and abetted by Ottoman Turkey, which joined the Central Powers in October 1914. Suffice it to say that all the shortcomings and failures to reform the administration and the infrastructure of the Empire, along with the rampant nepotism and self-absorption of the aristocracy in its management of affairs at the highest level, came home to roost. Massive territorial losses, dreadful casualties, abominable failures of supply that left the armies woefully short of everything essential, accumulated to sap morale in the army and navy, and leave the civilian population in desperate straits. Even then, the Tsar was virtually deaf to appeals to take drastic action and enable capable men to take charge of every aspect of the national war effort. This would include removing all the deadwood appointees who were stifling every slight movement to ameliorate conditions both in the army at the front and in civilian life at home. Chief among these impediments was the stranglehold of Rasputin and his sybaritic coterie on the Tsarina and, through her, the Tsar himself.

In December 1916, with Christmas approaching, a group of patriotic young aristocratic army officers decided that they would take things into their own hands. They invited Rasputin to a party in St. Petersburg and, failing to poison him despite administering enough arsenic to kill several elephants, finally shot him in the head and shoved him under the ice of the Neva River. It was their hope that this would empower the higher-ups to finally force the Tsar’s hand.

Sadly, it was too little too late. Things had gone too far, and, in the midst of a terrible winter in which troops at the front were refusing to fight, starving and deserting in droves, and civilians in the cities taking to the streets and rioting, the Tsar’s government collapsed in February (March in the old Russian calendar).

TO BE CONTINUED

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The Uses of History, 22 – Russia the Long-Suffering, 4 – 1905-1914

(Photo credit – Wikipedia – Rasputin)

Following the abortive Revolution of 1905, catalyzed by the defeat in the war with Japan (1904-1905), the Russian Empire clearly needed to undertake serious reform in virtually every aspect of its society. Mere economic reform and modernization of industry and finances would not suffice. There was no imperial will for democracy, but an elected Duma was created to placate the literate middle-class and gentry who wanted some voice in the Empire’s government and developmental direction.

The dominant figure in the Duma was Pyotr (Peter) Stolypin, a staunch monarchist with reformist ideas regarding the plight of the peasants, and the growth of modern industry, education, and government. Peasants still made up the large majority of the Empire’s population, which in 1914 was estimated at 165 million, no census having taken place since 1897, when it had stood at 124 million. But new territories and a high birthrate had certainly substantially boosted that figure.

The leading political parties were the Social Revolutionaries, the Constitutional Democrats, the Social Democratic Party – Mensheviks, and the Social Democratic Party – Bolsheviks. There were many fringe parties, including some anarchist groups.

The Social Revolutionaries were idealists, believing in the nobility of the peasantry and the simple peasant way of life in communities that cared for their members. They hoped to win the peasants to accept individual private land ownership rather than remaining in traditions and methods of production based on rural communes. Their ideal was a tough sell, especially as the majority of peasants remained illiterate and slow to adopt modern methods of farming and production. The “Socials” believed that before a true revolutionary makeover of Russian society could happen, the peasants had to gain a sense of class and an understanding of modern economics. The deeply entrenched influence of the very conservative Russian clergy militated against the efforts of the SRs.

The Constitutional Democrats were nick-named the “Kadets”. As their name implies, they sought to get Russia to accept an actual written, modern constitution with a liberal, democratic system and defined limitations on the monarchy and the aristocracy. They were largely a middle-class, urban party, and in the first three Dumas after 1905 were relatively numerous.

As we have noted previously in this series, the Social Democrats were a divided party, with two Marxist factions who had strong differences of approach to creating a future Communist society in Russia. The Mensheviks believed that Russia was not ready for an immediate revolution and transition to a Communist system, but needed to become a bourgeois (middle-class, industrial) society first to create the prescribed conditions of class struggle in which a proper revolution could succeed. The Bolsheviks were the opposite – unwilling to wait for such a long interlude of, perhaps, several generations. They believed the urban working masses could be won over and used to overthrow the existing system, and then Russia could be forcibly leap-frogged into a Communist state.

Stolypin wanted to preserve the Tsarist state and a strong authoritarian regime, using the Duma to forward his agenda, and, as needed, using Imperial decrees to deal with serious opposition. He believed in fostering strong and rapid modern industrialization, banking and economic institutions, and professionalism in the bureaucracy, the military, education, and the beginnings of social services. To that end he strove to end nepotism and bring competition for positions in all these sectors.

Unfortunately for the monarchists, Stolypin was assassinated in 1911, leaving no strong monarchist leader to keep things in check in the Duma and provide a measure of sanity to the autocrats holding almost all political and social power. Reforms slowed after 1911, and the 1912 Duma elections demonstrated an alarming increase in radical support for the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and Social Revolutionaries, despite the heavily slanted franchise giving right-wing candidates (nobles, gentry) more favourable voting conditions. The Leftists elected 152 members, the Rightists 153, and the Moderates (mainly the Kadets) 130.

Meanwhile, a sinister figure had emerged and increasingly inserted himself into the Royal Household – Grigori Rasputin. From 1906 on, Rasputin had wheedled his way into royal confidence as a faith-healer by allegedly stopping the Crown Prince’s hemophilia from killing him on several occasions. In 1912, the “mad monk” and “demon-charlatan” as his enemies dubbed him, had made himself indispensable to the Tsarina Alexandra as the only one who could keep her son alive. Rumours of sexual relations between the Empress and even the Imperial Princesses circulated rather freely. Eventually, he was exposed as an insatiable sex addict, but the Tsarina remained very attached to him, even after the Tsar reluctantly banished him from court.

To summarize the situation in 1914: The Tsar failed to embrace reforms which he was repeatedly told must be made to preserve the regime, especially following 1905’s near-miss revolution. His most trusted advisor and cousin, Grand Duke Nicholas, Stolypin, and many lesser advisors increasingly begged the Tsar to heed the voice of the people, grant some liberalization of society, and give a share of real power to the elected Ministers. The Tsar, weak-willed and not terribly intelligent, stood fast on his “Divine Right”, much swayed by the Tsarina, who in turn was under the spell of Rasputin. The legislation guided by Stolypin to disarm the increasingly popular revolutionary factions did not have time to bear fruit, given the assassination of Stolypin by a disgruntled rightist fanatic who thought he was undermining the Tsar’s tyranny rather than strengthening it by modernizing the autocracy.

Thus, the Russian ship of state continued on its erratic, stubborn course, stumbling towards a hurricane the likes of which the world had never seen. Ironically, any observant person following events in those years could see the clouds gathering and the Great Powers feverishly arming themselves for the inevitable showdown of Empires that would engulf them all in a world-scale struggle for supremacy.

The mass of the Russian people, still bound in poverty and with almost no civil rights, did not have the means to understand a great deal about the alarming international situation which blundered from one crisis to another between 1904 and 1914. They did understand that they were poor and living in often dreadful deprivation. They also knew that the rich proprietors and aristocracy would never willingly share their great abundance with them. Anger and desperation and resentment always ran just below the surface. They understood the Duma was but a shadow, and real change would not come from that quarter.

In mid-summer 1914, the Great Tempest slammed into the ship, seemingly very suddenly. This typhoon of typhoons was unlooked for in a year which, internationally, seemed to at last promise a respite from the litany of major European crises which had beset the continent almost continually since 1907.

What would this mean for autocratic Imperial Russia under a weak Tsar and an uncertain administration? Could it weather the storm?

Not if the Bolsheviks had anything to say about it. For them, the tocsin of war was the rallying bell of opportunity!

TO BE CONTINUED

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The Uses of History, 21 – Russia the Long-Suffering, 3 – 1904-1917

(Photo Credit – Imperial Museums Greenwich)

Many historians see 1905 as the last chance of the Tsarist regime in Russia to avoid the coming inevitable catastrophe that had been brewing for almost a century beneath the apparently stable autocratic surface of the immense Russian Empire. That Empire bestrode the whole great stretch of northern Asia from the Urals to the Bering Strait and the Pacific Ocean, and from Finland, then a Russian province, in the West to the farthest tip of Siberia in the East along the Arctic Ocean shore.

As we have seen, the seeds of upheaval had been sown by the Enlightenment’s ripples reaching into the small but gradually growing educated intellectual set, and it was exposure to the actual effects of such ideas taking hold throughout Europe via the great surge of the French Revolution that created a glimmer of hope in Russia that things could change. And, as we also saw, those hopes were quashed by repression and exile administered to those who dared to challenge Tsarist power, aristocratic oligarchy, and the Orthodox Church’s cultural grip.

Nevertheless, things change because it is impossible to block ideas from finding a way to leak into even the most closed societies, and Russia was far from as closed under Tsarism as it would become under Stalinism. Tsarist repression was still restrained by some qualms of conscience that came from the glimmering light of Christianity giving enough people an uneasy conscience to forestall the future horrors of the Gulag system, for example. Foreign travel was not closed off, and contact through trade and education and social intercourse inevitably reinforced the ideas of reform and change percolating elsewhere in Europe and making their way into Russia.

In 1904-5, the greatest shock to Russia’s slipping position among the Great Powers was administered by the least likely source – the Empire of Japan which the Europeans still considered with some disdain as a pretentious upstart nation, despite its recent humbling of China. Since the Europeans had been humbling China too throughout the 19th Century, Japan’s victory over its chief Asian rival was given less weight. But what happened in 1904-5 was of an entirely different order.

Interestingly, the British had better foreseen Japan’s rise to a position of prominence before any other Great Power. After all, the British had coached the Japanese navy in building and equipping a modern fleet. In 1902 Britain had made a twenty-year alliance with the Land of the Rising Sun which guaranteed Japanese naval protection for British outposts in the Far East, while ensuring British cooperation with Japan in questions of mutual interest and in case of war in which both became engaged with another power.

In 1904 Japan’s resentment of Russian interference in its bid to become a major player in China’s affairs came to a head over the railway concession in China’s huge north-eastern province of Manchuria. Japan deeply resented Russia’s (supported by Germany and Britain) humiliation of her in 1895 in forcing Japan to abandon the Liaodong Peninsula. Russia then took over Japan’s newly won conquest by offering China “a deal they could not refuse”. The Russians claimed all rights to railway development in Manchuria, which China also conceded along with the right to station troops there. Russia refused a compromise proposal from Japan in which Russian rights to exploit Manchuria would be accepted if they recognized full Japanese domination of Korea. In short, Japan faced another humiliation by Russia unless she was willing to fight.

The Japanese response was such as would foreshadow a much greater event 37 years later in December 1941. The Imperial Navy sailed in secrecy from its home bases. On February 9, 1904, the Japanese struck, damaging the Russian Pacific Fleet at anchor in Port Arthur. By April, Russia’s Pacific Fleet was completely bottled up in its port, and Japanese troops lay siege to the fortress. Expectations that the Japanese army would lose against a major European army proved delusional. Even though they failed, the Japanese assaults on the fortress demonstrated the fierce combat spirit of Japanese soldiery, trained under the Code of Bushido and organized and tutored by German mentors. Guided by artillery spotters communicating by telephone, Japanese long-range heavy artillery bombarded the battleships in the harbor from a well-protected position behind screening hills and eventually sank all of them.

One Russian admiral had been killed when his flagship struck a Japanese mine and sank, and the main Russian fleet sortie to try to reach Vladivostok in August had resulted in a Japanese naval victory in the Battle of the Yellow Sea. The Russian commander had died in the battle, and the idea of once again sortieing to go down fighting had been rejected by the survivors who limped back into Port Arthur. The siege lasted till December, and all Russian attempts to lift the siege from Manchuria had been repulsed. Port Arthur surrendered on January 2, 1905.

Meanwhile, the Japanese army had proven itself formidable in open-field combat in Manchuria, outfighting, outmarching, and outmanoeuvring Russian forces. In March 1905, Mukden fell to them after desperate fighting which resulted in the disintegration of the Russian forces in Manchuria.

The war should have ended at this point, and President Roosevelt of the USA offered to mediate, but Tsar Nicholas II was unwilling to have his nation and imperial reputation humiliated by defeat at the hands of an “inferior race”. The last major Russian naval force was sent from the Baltic Sea to restore some dignity to Russian pride in an attempt to inflict a naval defeat on the so-far invincible Japanese navy. After an epic voyage through the eastern Atlantic, across the Indian Ocean, and into the Pacific to reach the theatre of war, the two fleets met at Tsushima Straits between Korea and Japan. The Japanese had only half as many battleships as the Russians, but Japanese intelligence, aided by their British allies, told them the Russians were coming and when to expect them. A Japanese spotting ship found the Russians at night, communicating with the new-fangled “wireless” with fleet headquarters. On May 27-28, the Japanese fleet under Admiral Togo “crossed the T” in a very Nelsonian tactical fashion and almost all the Russian fleet was sunk. It was an absolutely shattering victory which astonished even the British.  

Russia’s humiliation was complete. President Roosevelt’s offer of mediation was accepted, and a peace was signed in Portsmouth, Maine, on September 9, 1905.

Back in Russia, Revolution had long before broken out in January 1905. The bankruptcy of the Tsarist system seemed obvious, and civil unrest exacerbated by a disastrous and unpopular war underlined how wretched the ordinary people were and how bereft of merit the government had become. Only severe repression, including using troops to massacre citizens, as one Bloody Sunday (Jan. 9, 1905) prevented a takeover in St. Petersburg.

Despite promises to do better and to allow some reforms with an elected Duma (Parliament), it became obvious within a few years that the Tsarist regime did not really intend to share power. Only the military saw significant reforms instituted. The mass of the population remained unheard and struggling in their misery.

For Japan, the victory had been astounding, perhaps less to the Japanese, but most certainly to the leading Western powers. Japan had won the right to be accepted as a modern Great Power, the only non-Western state to own that status. The success of its modernization had been amply demonstrated. It had won its bridgehead into China, now controlling the development of Manchuria, although not outright annexing it. Korea was firmly in the Japanese sphere, and would be annexed to the Empire in 1910. Taiwan was already an Imperial Province since 1895 and the victory over China. Japanese concessions at other points in China, alongside those the Europeans and the US, as in Shanghai, could no longer be denied.

For Russia, the defeat had been beyond shocking. The humiliation opened the door to think the previously almost unthinkable. The need for real and deep reform in the social, political, economic, and military realms was flagrantly obvious. Whether the willpower to accept and do what must be done could be mustered and sustained remained to be seen. Given enough time, perhaps it could happen without another revolutionary outbreak.

However, locked into an anti-German alliance with France since 1894, the threat of a much greater war loomed with every major European political crisis. If, or more likely when, such an event erupted, could the Russian Empire survive it?

TO BE CONTINUED

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The Uses of History, 20 – Russia the Long-Suffering, 2 – 1825 to 1905

The Uses of History, 20 – Russia the Long-Suffering, 2 – 1825-1905

Everybody has always underrated the Russians. They keep their own secrets from foe and friends.

Winston Churchill, 1942

(Image credit – WIkipedia, Lenin at Tempere, 1905)

Churchill called himself a “friend of Russia”, but he was well known for his loathing of Communism. He recognized Stalin as a wily leader, but never trusted him. In that he was a far shrewder judge of the Soviet dictator than President Roosevelt of the USA, the third member of “The Big Three” of the “Grand Alliance” (both Churchillian monikers for the combination of Britain, Russia, and the USA against Hitler). Roosevelt believed in the Soviet leader’s sincere desire for peace and rapprochement once the Second World War was won and over. Nothing Churchill could show or tell him from British intelligence and diplomatic experience, or what Roosevelt’s own foreign policy advisers and intelligence experts could tell him, could sway Roosevelt from this naïve assessment.  As a result, he made serious mistakes in dealing with the Soviet Union while preventing Churchill from playing a greater role in framing the post-war European order.

Churchill admitted that he too had underrated the Russians. His expectation for the Soviet Union’s survival when the Nazi war machine launched Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941 was not much different than Hitler’s. The Nazi Dictator had said to his top henchmen who were having some doubts, “We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come tumbling down.” Churchill’s military experts had told him that Russia would be beaten by the end of the year, and Churchill thought they were probably right. After all, a year before, the modern, much-vaunted French Army had been devastatingly beaten by the German Wehrmacht in a mere six weeks! And the Soviet war machine had looked miserably inept in the “Winter War” of November 1939-March 1940 against little Finland, even if they eventually forced Finland to cede what they demanded. Nevertheless, the British Prime Minister welcomed Stalin as a reluctant ally and pledged British support with all the means they could provide without sacrificing their own survival.

As we have seen before in this series on The Uses of History, Napoleon had seriously underrated the Russians in 1812. After all, he had already defeated them twice in campaigns in Central and Eastern Europe. And Napoleon was not the first. King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in the Great Northern War (1700-1721) had also invaded Russia, won successive battles, but had then seen his forces dwindle away in the terrible winter only to be finally defeated in the Battle of Poltava on July 8, 1709.

The moral of these and other lessons of history regarding Russia seemed to be, “You may beat Russian armies and even win campaigns, but woe to anyone who invades Russia and thinks they can defeat her on her native soil.” In other words, “A limited war where national survival is not at stake may give you some victories, but a full-on invasion will be the end of you.”

(Maybe there is a lesson for NATO here?)

How has Russia come to be the sort of nation it is today? That is the question we are exploring now. As we watch its ineluctable march across northern and central Asia in the 17th-19th Centuries, it seems to represent the essence of an expansive imperialist state with the technology of a modern army and nation behind it. Yet it is riven with internal contradictions, remaining a largely agrarian and semi-feudal society whose popular culture is often dominated by semi-superstitious religious notions and whose ruling elite still invoke Divine Right (God’s mission for the Russian nation) and the anointing of the aristocracy (renamed now as “the Oligarchs”), but still living as they please and controlling and exploiting the vast peasantry (working masses) who work their vast estates (industrial, commercial, financial syndicates).

In the late 19th Century, a free-holding class of more prosperous, independent farmers willing to use modern methods of production was slowly growing, especially in the rich Ukraine and some areas of Western Russia. A still small industrial working class could be found in the largest cities, largely recruited from the landless rural labouring masses. Mass education had created a large, literate element now able to read literature advocating radical change. There was a gradually expanding middle class and a set of nouveaux-riches capitalists, but the old elites remain firmly anchored in the seats of power. An educated set of young idealists was emerging to restlessly question all the old ways and seek liberal, democratic reform, or, more radically, socialism and communism to replace the still semi-feudal society.

For a brief time after Tsar Alexander II took power in 1855, there was hope among the open-minded, pro-reform groups that the young new Tsar would undo many of the restrictions his severely autocratic father had instituted. In 1862, he emancipated the tens of millions of serfs bound to the land of their aristocratic masters by oppressive laws for generations. He promised them lands of their own to farm, but where were such lands to be found except by requiring the 100 000 landlords (mostly “gentry”) to renounce title to them and transfer land to the peasant-labourers?

Almost without fail the aristocrats refused to accept this change, and, generously given the responsibility to implement the reforms by the Tsarist administration, kept 2/3 of the best land for themselves and gave the poorest one third to their former serfs, who had no money to pay for the land as they were required to do. The Imperial Government further betrayed the peasants by generously compensating the rich nobles for their surrendered land. The peasants were loaned 80% of the cost by the government funded banks, and the other 20% was loaned by the gentry. The payment burdens were so onerous that there was small chance any peasant could pay it off in their lifetime and the debts were therefore passed on to their offspring who lived on the land. Thus the huge influx of landless rural labourers into the cities to seek work. Such work as there was unskilled and paid barely starvation wages.

As the 19th Century wore on, the internal restlessness and disillusionment in Russia grew apace, and revolutionary parties, underground societies, literature and publications emerged like weeds, sparking frequent mostly localized revolts. By the first decade of the 1900s, there were significant socialist parties of various stripes active, including the two largest – the Social Revolutionary Party and the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. The latter found itself split into two factions in 1903 after its convention in London: the Mensheviks (“the Minority”) and the Bolsheviks (“the Majority”). The Bolsheviks were led by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, who would become better known as Lenin, his chosen revolutionary name.

According to Wikipedia, citing scholarly sources, Bolshevik membership in 1905 consisted of 62% industrial labourers recruited largely from the ranks of the displaced rural population. In 1897, industry accounted for but 3% of employment in all of Russia. The Mensheviks had a more middle-class flavour. Both had a disproportion of Jewish adherents, which is perhaps not surprising given the endemic oppression and persecution of Jews in the Russian Empire. Anti-Semitism was a deliberate policy of the nefarious Okhrana/MVD, the Imperial Secret State Police (various incarnations of this have existed in Russia/the Soviet Union for two hundred years under various acronyms, the KGB being the best known). Anti-Semitism was officially endorsed to divert blame for the misery of the mass of the population from the repeated utter failure of the national government to follow through on pledges to reform land-holding laws and economic inequality.

All through this period, imperialist Russian expansionism continued across northern Asia, once more as a diversion from the medieval living conditions in the rural areas and the very poorly regulated conditions of the new industrial towns and districts in the major cities. There was always a quasi-religious element in this expansionism, as a sort of crusade to bring the Russian Orthodox true Christian light to the benighted heathens of central and southern Asia.

By the 1890s, Russian encroachment was thrusting south from the newly annexed “guberniya” (government districts) of Turkestan and Uzbekistan and impinging on Afghanistan, edging ever closer to India, where the British were keeping a close and jealous eye on them. Farther East, Russian railway-building brought Manchuria within range.

In the Far East, a new power was rapidly rising and warily watching Russian intentions towards an area it too was eying as a coveted sphere of influence. The Empire of Japan had awakened and, from the 1870s on, was swiftly modernizing and adopting not only Western technology, but Western modes of popular education, commerce and industry, and militarization.

The Japanese had resolved that they would never become a mere vassal-state of any Western nation. Instead, they would be proactive in imitating and even improving upon Western techniques while preserving the essence of their national identity, and carve out for themselves a place among the Great Powers when they had sufficiently prepared. In 1894-5 the arrival of Japan as a major regional East Asian power was signaled in a short, sharp, victorious war with China in which Japan took over domination of Korea as a Protectorate, to be annexed to the Japanese Empire in 1910, and seized the Shantung Peninsula, planning to convert it into a Japanese bridgehead into China for future expansion.

Russian jealousy and the threat of Russian military action imposed on Japan forced the victorious Japanese to surrender Shantung and hand over their newly acquired naval base on the Chinese coast to Russia. Not yet ready for a showdown with Russia, the Japanese retired, but resolved that when the right time came, Russia would deeply regret this affront to Japan’s national honour.

That time would arrive in 1904.

TO BE CONTINUED

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H2O

(Photo: Author’s original)

H2O.  Water.  One of the simplest chemical formulae in the universe.  The only known elixir of life.

Found in abundance on at least one world – Earth, Terra, la Terre, la Tierra, Gaia.  Sought avidly in the astronomical search for life somewhere else in the universe.  Science fiction and fantasy aside, it is extremely improbable that life anywhere could exist without this very simple substance.

To form a molecule of water, two free, unattached hydrogen atoms must marry one free, unattached oxygen atom.  Here on earth, this is such a common occurrence that we never even think about it.  We have vast oceans of the stuff and gigantic underground reservoirs that hold as much more.  Yet, when we survey the wonders of the Cosmos in all its immensity, there is no other certifiable world with any quantity of H2O approaching ours.

However, there appear to be comets, asteroids, and even a moon or two (e.g. Europa around Jupiter) transporting huge blocks of it as ice catapulting around Sol’s (our common yellow star’s official astronomical designation) solar system.  We assume, we speculate, that such must be the case in many other star-planet configurations in our Milky Way Galaxy with its 100 billion or so stars, as well as the possible trillions of other galaxies “out there”.

Speculation aside, we still only know of one water-planet with any certainty.  But, how could this apparently limitless Cosmos be so stingily populated with life and the single substance that appears absolutely essential to generate it and sustain it?  After all, our history teaches us that when a really good, even genius notion, concept, or idea appears, it seems to pop out spontaneously in several locations at once or very closely together in time, as if some kind of subliminal, sub-space (spiritual?) dynamic is at work so that it will not just evaporate in the ether of Never-Never-Land if one of the innovators or progenitors forgets or neglects to record it and try it out. As to who generated the idea of the Cosmos and water being its life-giving foundation, I leave the reader fill in the blanks according to their own lights.

Nature certainly gives evidence of this.  The design of living things testifies to it abundantly.  Semi-autonomously functioning appendages attached to living things is one example.  Plants have limbs, as do almost all land animals and creepy crawlies.  Worms and serpents, who do not have them, are the exception that proves the rule, for they are fashioned in such a way as to compensate for not having them.  Their bodies are so flexible that they can manoeuvre them to do much of what limbs do for almost every other creature – to move, capture food, and attach themselves to places and one another for mating.

All living things we know about, extinct or extant, not only require water to live and thrive, but are largely constituted of water.  The human body, for example, is approximately 70% water.  Other animals are very similarly composed.  This proportion is remarkably close to that of Earth’s surface sheathing.  Fascinating!  Coincidence?

What does good ole H2O do for us?  Why do our bodies need to be made up of so much liquid – despite how it seems to us as we go about our regular business on “dry land”?  The water in our bodies makes us supple, flexible, malleable, “fluid”.  Even bone, the densest part of our physical make-up, needs water both to create more bone (those hard things get worn away but can grow back) and to help produce more blood – an essential part of the actual liquid stuff inside us!  Paradoxically, living bone itself is not “bone dry”!  It is certainly dry compared to other tissue, but if it becomes too dry it becomes brittle and shatters so easily we would fall apart!

Water regulates our body heat – keeping us warm when it’s cold outside our bodies, and cool when it’s hot outside.  It is our body’s thermostatic system.  Those sweat glands which send out all the salty water we wash off in the shower or bath save our lives every day!  At the same time, they also help us get rid of some of the toxic waste we take in – a remarkable display of functional efficiency of design.

Water is the principal element in our digestive, respiratory, nutrient distribution, and waste disposal systems.  Water is the universal solvent.  Given enough time, it will break down and absorb or dilute literally anything.  We add things to it to digest and then use it to slide the remainder of the unused stuff out through the waste-disposal plumbing.

Despite how things appear to us land-bound denizens, the great bulk of earth’s living things lives in water, not outside of it. The health of all Planet Earth is every bit as dependent on the health of its mantle of life-elixir as each of the creatures and species inhabiting it. Therefore, we have every reason to take alarm at our careless negligence in regard to our mistreatment of the oceans, lakes, rivers, and aquifers without which we would perish in as short a time as one week. Yet we continue to deposit 8 million tons of plastic in the oceans every year (cf. plasticoceans.org), not including the immense quantity of toxic waste that is so carelessly poured in from ocean-shore factories, ocean mining operations, accidents, and ocean-going vessels. And this takes no account of the devastation of our freshwater resources.

Perhaps we should not be so surprised (if indeed we really care). After all, we often treat our own bodies with similar nonchalance about our health and well-being. We shoot ourselves full of toxic chemicals like meth, heroin, oxycontin, cocaine, and a host of lesser “recreational” substances to “get high”. We ingest food full of chemical additives without a second (or even first) thought. Whether we take our poison in sold or liquid form, it is all to dull our ennui and existential angst. Humanity is the only species capable of deliberately and rationally (as in rationalizing inherently bad choices) acting against its own best interest, both individually and en masse. If we cannot even rationally and reasonably restrain ourselves from seriously harming ourselves and one another, can we be astonished if we fail to act in a way that respects the rest of the biome?

Why do I poison myself? Why do we kill ourselves and one another, including our most vulnerable members, with such self-justifying abandon? Many of us take better care of our pets and livestock than we do of ourselves and our own offspring. Let us hear no platitudes about morality being a mere social construct and therefore being eminently “plastic” so as to fit whatever the current common view of certain self-destructive behaviours has become. Let the reader decide what those may be, but we all know that such behaviours exist, both in our own lives and in those of others we care for.

In the world of politics and business, this sort of right is manifested by running roughshod, with tacit government approval, over the real needs of consumers in the name of maximum profits and respect for “free market forces”. A disintegrating culture and society which is deeply divided within itself cannot logically be expected to respect the Earth and all the other living things it shelters and nourishes when the dominant species, which supposedly rose to dominion by its very power of reason, no longer cares to live by reason or reason’s primary child, Science.

Humanity is and always has been, as far as we can see into our past with any clarity, a peculiar species with an innate sense of right and wrong, good and bad, justice and injustice. Science did not create this. It precedes Science, and extends beyond it. It comes from the side of reality which is not measurable and subject to experiment. But it is and certainly has been observable as embedded in every human society that we have any accurate knowledge of.

What we have been progressively witnessing over the last several centuries, especially in the West and, from there, now taking over the rest of the world, is a tide towards redefining the fundamental norms of ethics and morality aimed at attaining some mythical vision of “Freedom” which, apparently, no previous generation had the enlightenment and wisdom to perceive. Thus, every value is open to reinterpretation and redefinition to accommodate even the most extreme versions of self-actualization which, based on personal values almost exclusively, have no Scientific authentication.

There is a physical law of entropy; so too there is a law of ethical, moral, and spiritual entropy. For those unsure, according to the Oxford Dictionary, entropy is  

  1. PHYSICS

a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system’s thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system.

e.g. “the second law of thermodynamics says that entropy always increases with time”

2. STATISTICS: lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder.

e.g. “a marketplace where entropy reigns supreme”

It does not take Sir Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein to see the correlation between the physical world and our culture’s present ethical-moral state. (Just to be clear, both of these scientific giants did believe such a correlation existed.) No amount of self-actualization or ferocious piety blaming the other guy from either the right or the left will make a difference as to the very direct correlation.

Only a massive change of behaviour can begin to turn the ship on a new course. Nothing short of a moral-ethical shift can bring such a change. Only a recovery or discovery of a new vision going far beyond the claiming of personal rights at the expense of every other consideration can inspire the abandonment of our now deeply entrenched habits of self-gratification first and last. Such recovery or discovery is foremost an affair of the heart and soul (spirit), not an intellectual exercise, although it may be helped by a recovery of true Reason over its superficial substitute of self-justification through rationalization of what pleases me.

Which brings us back to water. Without water we die. If the well is polluted, it is poison. Physical water must be clean to be healthy. Healthy spiritual water is as necessary, perhaps even moreso. Without that, any amount of symptom-treatment will not eliminate the cause of the soul-death that is driving the Planet (and us, as a species) towards physical death. Even if we succeed for a time in delaying the death-march, if we remain unconverted addicts we will inevitably return to our vomit and grow sick unto death once again.

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The Uses of History, 18 – France, Revolution #4, 1870-1, Part 4

(Image credit – Wikipedia)

“I did not doubt that a Franco-German war must take place before the construction of a United Germany could be realized. France, the victor, would be a danger to everybody—Prussia to nobody. That is our strong point.”

Otto von Bismarck, 1899-1900. Cited in Wikipedia, “Franco-Prussian War”

War broke out between France and the North and South German Confederations on July 16, 1870. Napoleon III’s puppet Parliament declared this war as a question of national honour. The pretext was the renewal of a scheme to put a Hohenzollern (the Prussian royal family) on the throne of Spain.

Once more we ask, “What business was this of France’s?” The balance of power in Europe was shifting, and France’s (Napoleon’s) pre-eminence was in question. German unity was on the near horizon, despite the French antipathy towards it. Such a unification would spell the definite end of France’s two century-old habit and ability of stepping directly into German territory and affairs when it seemed necessary to protect France’s dominance in Western and Central Europe.

Furthermore, Prussia’s rapid rise as both a military and industrial power was already threatening French status as Europe’s most advanced society and economy apart from the as-yet unchallengeable British paragon across the English Channel. Spain’s invitation to King Wilhelm of Prussia to allow one of his cousins to assume the vacant Spanish throne in 1868 had been thwarted by French opposition and a demand by Napoleon that German territory be ceded to France as insurance (and a de facto French bridgehead across the Rhine) that such a scheme of Prussian encirclement of France would not be renewed.

Such Machiavellian manoeuvring may seem strange to our ears now, but royal dynastic politics were still of some import at the international level in Europe in the 19th Century. There are plenty of parallels more recently, but they usually involve dictators and unscrupulous secret intelligence machinations by great powers rather than more public questions of national and royal honour.

In 1870, Spain’s throne was still vacant and the offer to Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Siegmaringen of Swabia was renewed. This time, Napoleon’s advisers suggested he seek a written guarantee from King Wilhelm that the offer would be refused and never considered again. Wilhelm actually drafted a conciliatory reply that did not give Napoleon all he wanted but was not aggressive in tone, but before it was dispatched, Bismarck subtly doctored it to sound imperious and bordering on indignant insolence to sensitive French ears.

When it was made public in France, there was a hue and cry that France’s and the Emperor’s honour be defended and the upstart Prussians be properly taught a lesson. War was declared, as noted above. Bismarck, the consummate opportunist, had seized the moment to bring his long-held ambition of German unification to final fruition. The North German Confederation dutifully followed Prussia to war with France, and the alliance with the South German Confederation was invoked. All Germany was at war with France.

The vaunted French army quickly found that they had finally met an opponent that was more than its match. A premature French offensive move into the Rhineland (Prussian territory) but was quickly repulsed, and the more rapidly mobilized German forces, using Prussia’s remarkably efficient rail system and centralized command system of the General Staff of the Army supported by telegraph, rapidly counterattacked into Alsace-Lorraine. Napoleon had taken the field himself in what all knew would be the defining confrontation in European power-politics in the 19th Century. Although French rifles were much superior to the Prussian, Prussian artillery proved superior, as did the Prussian strategy, morale, and tactical command. On Sept. 2, Napoleon himself was captured by the Prussians when one of France’s major armies surrendered with 104,000 prisoners after a catastrophic defeat at Sedan. France’s other major force still in the field was encircled and besieged at Metz.

The result in Paris and throughout France was the overthrow of the Imperial Government and the creation of a Provisional Government of National Defense and the founding of the Third French Republic, which would last until June 1940 when France was once more beaten by Germany under Adolf Hitler. The war would drag on till January 28, 1871 as the new Republic sought to mobilize the full strength of France to expel the invaders. Paris was besieged. All French efforts to relieve it failed, and the Republic finally negotiated an armistice.

As the siege had dragged on, on January 18, 1871, the delegates of the German states from both the North and South German Confederations met in Versailles in the famous Hall of Mirrors and proclaimed the establishment of the Second Reich, the German Empire, with King Wilhelm of Prussia as Kaiser (Emperor) Wilhelm I. (The First Reich had been the defunct “Holy Roman Empire” which Napoleon had abolished. Hitler’s Germany was the infamous “Third Reich”.) This action was a deliberate slap to France, symbolizing the end of French dominance in Europe and the rise of a great new nation. By proclaiming the birth of the German Empire in the palace of France’s longest reigning monarch, Louis XIV, the “Sun King”, 1642-1715, who for several decades had projected French power deep into the heart of Germany, Bismarck signaled the utter humiliation of France.

The new reality of a powerful, militarily potent, united Germany emerging in the dead center of Europe was of tremendous import throughout the continent. It destroyed the last vestiges of the Congress of Vienna system, and, in the immediate aftermath, threw France once more into bitter and protracted turmoil, which, taken altogether, constitutes the Fourth French Revolution. The shock was great in Europe, which had generally expected a solid French victory in this war.

The shock of defeat in France was shattering to both the political and social fabric of the nation. Sixty percent of Paris’ population was industrial and labouring working class. For them, the sudden collapse of the central authority and the German siege opened a door of opportunity. Socialists, communists, and anarchists all came out of hiding or exile, sometimes furtively making their way past authorities on both sides to be in Paris in the midst of the semi-chaos.

With the Armistice with Germany in place as January ended, it became a question of the Provisional Government, now led by Thiers, an old opponent of Napoleon III as President, establishing its validity by gaining control of Paris. As long as the German siege forces remained stationed nearby, pending a peace treaty, the city was in a state of suspended animation. The Republican Government convinced the Germans to let the National Guard keep their arms in order to maintain order in the metropolis, but the Guard itself was divided between middle class citizen-soldiers and a large majority of working class citizen-soldiers. In addition, there were 20 000 regular troops in garrison, and the non-middle-class populace felt none to kindly towards these representatives of a central authority which many felt did not represent them.

Two attempts to seize power by the radical factions in the city, assisted by working class National Guard units, failed in October 1870 and January 1871. In March, the Regular Army units were ordered to seize the cannons stationed on the Hill of Montmartre, which the radical National Guard had established as a bastion against the projected return of the Provisional Government. This led to a pitched battle on March 18, 1871. The Army was beaten back, and Paris fell under the sway of the radicals, who were far from united except in their rejection of the Third Republic as a bourgeois state set to reimpose middle class and industrialist tyranny. The Middle-Class units of the National Guard were disarmed and Paris was once more besieged, but this time by the newly reformed Regular Army of the Republic. The “Commune” became the city government, elected by those who dared to vote the right way if they knew what was good for them. The radicals spat on and burned the Tricouleur, the National flag of the first French Revolution and the Bonapartists, and raised the red flag of radical anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist revolution.

The agenda of the radicals in Paris was like a strip of fly-paper which attracts all kinds of winged ideas, from abolishing marriage and family to abolishing capitalism altogether and total decentralization of political and social power, to more moderate ideas that would today be found “normal” in a liberal social democracy – such as free universal education and health care, old-age pensions, disability pensions, the full enfranchisement of both men and women, heavy taxes on wealth, total secularization, the humiliation of representatives of the Roman Catholic Church, and many more. With such a disparate set of goals being fervently forwarded, little practical work could be done by a city council representing the arrondissements. They really had no mandate except the threat of violence and possible assassination from one unhappy group or another on opponents. In the meantime, the city’s finances fell into chaos and relied on confiscations of wealth and property, with the inevitable skimming and rake-offs to ideologues pronouncing one set of principles while giving in to the usual temptations power presents to victors, no matter how transient.

The German occupation force looked on and permitted the French Army to move on the country’s turbulent capital. Most of the trapped citizens tried to lay low as things came to a head and the Army was sent in to reassert national authority. From May 21-28, the “Bloody Week”, Paris became a war zone. By its end, the devastation was terrible in sections of the city, such as Montmartre, where the disparate insurgents had entrenched themselves. After some fierce engagements, the National Guard melted away. The Army was bent on vengeance for the turmoil and rebellion which had, by this point, challenged France’s very national existence while it had lain prostrate at the feet of a conqueror. Detailed studies on the casualties have been wildly at variance, ranging from 7000 communards dead at the low end to 15 000 at the high end. Seven to eight thousand fled into exile. Forty-three thousand five hundred were taken prisoner, of whom

“Trials were held for 15,895 prisoners, of whom 13,500 were found guilty. Ninety-five were sentenced to death; 251 to forced labour; 1,169 to deportation, usually to New Caledonia; 3,147 to simple deportation; 1,257 to solitary confinement; 1,305 to prison for more than a year; and 2,054 to prison for less than a year.”

Wikipedia – “The Paris Commune”

The Communards had also carried out reprisals and executions of their own on as many as 500 prominent representatives of the “forces of order and the Establishment”.

Some view the Commune as a failed Revolution. It has assumed the status of a sacred moment in extreme-leftist mythology. It was elevated to such by Marx, Mao, Lenin, as well as many lesser lights of Marxism and Anarchism, including more recent New Left ideologues such as Herbert Marcuse. Perhaps these exalted names in the pantheon of Leftist Revolutionary hagiography should be a cautionary sign to the soft-totalitarian neo-Marxists of the 21st Century that they are keeping rather dubious company in terms of historical models of true progress to the final social Utopia.

At the least, our reigning social, political, and economic trend-setters who seem so ready to adopt and adapt all the neo-freedom-ideological litanies being showered upon us from the heights of the ultra-Progressive intelligentsia should look at this episode with apprehension as to what can and well may really happen if all the strange new wisdom is given a clear path to implementation with matching authority to deal with dissent. The Commune was a recipe for social anarchy of the worst kind rather than a recipe for reforming a flawed system which had evolved over centuries and building something better while still respecting basic rights.

The Fourth French Revolution is thus a two-part story: (1) the end of the Bonapartist role in French history and France’s displacement as Europe’s premier continental power, along with its permanent adaptation of a democratic Republican constitution, and (2), for the most radical leftist ideologues, the tragedy of the failed, or thwarted, revolution within the Revolution.

The story of France is far from over in our ongoing saga. Her humiliation at the hands of Germany would breed terrible fruit within just more than 40 years, but it is time to shift our attention to Russia for the next few episodes.

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The Uses of History, 17 – France, Revolution #4, 1870-1, Part 3

(Image Credit – Wikipedia – Battle of Koniggratz, July 3, 1866, by Georg Bliebtru)

The wiliest international statesman of the 19th Century was Otto von Bismarck, Minister-President of Prussia (1862-71) and then Chancellor of Imperial Germany from 1871-1890. It is perhaps not too much to say that the unification of Germany in 1871 was almost entirely his doing.

In the 1860’s, France under Emperor Napoleon III was the undisputed leading military power in Europe. Any plan of uniting Germany would have to somehow either render France a neutral observer or include defeating France in battle.

The reader might fairly wonder why the unification of Germany was any of France’s business. The answer is that since the Thirty Years War (1618-48), France had taken a very active interest in German affairs. When the Thirty Years War ended with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, France had established itself as Austria’s main rival in exercising influence in Germany. That influence had been fairly won by direct French intervention in crucial moments on German battlefields.

As confusing as this may seem, let us remember that Germany in the 1600s was not a nation but a geographical region in the middle of Europe, divided into approximately 300 petty-states, with a few larger ones in that mix, such as Brandenburg (later expanded as Brandenburg-Prussia, and then just Prussia) Bavaria, and Saxony. France saw its sphere of influence as including western Germany, chiefly the Rhineland (the area between France and the Rhine River) and Bavaria. The presence or control of any other major power in that area would be interpreted as a threat to France, and counter to King Louis XIV’s, the “Sun King”, (1642-1715) great ambition of eventually annexing all territory between France’s eastern frontier and the Rhine River. That, with the Alps and the Pyrenees in the south, he dubbed France’s “natural frontiers”.

Napoleon the Great had finally done what Louis never completed despite great effort through long long wars in the late 17th and early 18th Centuries. The Great One had annexed all those lands plus much more directly into his French Empire between 1806 and 1810. It had all been lost after Napoleon’s first defeat in 1814. By 1860, Napoleon III had successfully restored France’s pre-eminent military and diplomatic position in Europe as the #1 power to be reckoned with in any further major readjustment of important borders. He had also added two small provinces to France itself in Europe and overseen a considerable expansion of France’s Empire in North Africa and South-East Asia. Once more, a Bonaparte Emperor looked upon South-West Germany as his legitimate zone of influence. However, the Rhineland already belonged to Prussia since the Peace of Vienna in 1815, and Napoleon did not look favourably upon further Prussian ambitions southward.

When Bismarck became Minister-President of Prussia in 1862 at the behest of King Wilhelm I, he was given a mandate to rebuild and modernize Prussia’s army with the aim of being able to face any probable conflict with another major power. Bismarck succeeded over the next eight years. He also told the King that Prussia would unite Germany and he would become the first Kaiser (Emperor) of the united nation of Germany within ten years!

Wilhelm and Bismarck developed a tight working relationship based on mutual respect and trust. Bismarck promised a modern, well-equipped, first-rank army capable of winning any war it might have to engage in. He promised to support it by strong industrial development, including armaments industry and a first-class railway network to facilitate trade and commerce and rapid military deployment. He took strong measures to make these promises a reality. Prussia sent military attaché observers to the United States during the Civil War, and, watching how a modern nation used its railways and industry to manage a tremendous winning war-effort, learned a great deal which would soon be applied to great effect in Europe.

In 1864, Bismarck engaged in a minor war with Denmark to gain control of Schleswig and Holstein, two small Danish provinces on the northern edge of Germany. Still needing to avoid conflict with Austria, Bismarck manoeuvred the Danes into declaring war to defend their claim to the two Duchies. Austria joined Prussia in invading and defeating the Danes. The two great powers split rule of the two Duchies between them.

Two years later, Austria cancelled the agreement about the two formerly Danish Duchies. For Bismarck, the moment had come to remove Austria from direct involvement in Germany. Prussian declared war.

Prussia now used its vastly superior rail network to mass its forces in the south before Austria could fully move its numerically superior army to meet them at full strength. Most of the rest of Germany was taking Austria’s side, but Bismarck’s strategy was to take out Austria quickly and force its surrender before the collected force of the rest of Germany could do any real harm. In the event only Saxony fielded any sizeable force to help Austria. The Prussians brushed them aside. In addition, Bismarck made an alliance with newly united Italy, promising Italy Venetia in return for its aid against Austria. This drew off Austrian forces to the south.

On July 3, 1866, the new, modern Prussian army decisively defeated the main Austrian forces in a hard-fought battle at Koniggratz in Bohemia, now Czechia. The following peace was lenient for Austria, as Bismarck did not want to make Austria a bitter, permanent enemy. The rest of the German Confederation bowed to the result, and was dissolved. Germany, minus Austria, was soon reconfigured as the North German Confederation, under Prussia’s firm domination, and the South German Confederation, with Bavaria as its major component.

Bismarck was a realist and practiced what he dubbed “Realpolitik” – the politics of reality – in both domestic and foreign affairs. In day-to-day concerns, one does what is necessary to move things towards the greater goal one envisions. This requires flexibility in adapting to circumstances and waiting for the right moment to move decisively towards the greater aim.

Meanwhile, Napoleon III had suffered a setback in his foreign adventurism. This involved an ill-advised foray into Mexico from 1861-66. Mexico under Jaurez had defaulted on debt repayment to its European creditors – chiefly Spain, Britain, and France. The three powers sent an occupation force to Veracruz in early 1861. A year later, Britain and Spain withdrew after reaching a provisional arrangement with Juarez’s government, but the French stayed on, sending in substantial reinforcements and hoping to overthrow Juarez and create a new Mexican Empire with Archduke Maximilian of Austria as its Emperor – and a dependent of France.

This was a clear violation of the American Monroe Doctrine (1823) which declared that no European encroachment into the Americas beyond what already existed would be accepted by the United States, which would oppose such encroachment. Napoleon believed that France could get around this because, as of April 1861, the USA was embroiled in the tremendous crisis of the Civil War, and therefore either about to collapse, as many Europeans believed, or would be rather preoccupied until it was resolved.

When the Civil War ended in 1865 with a newly reunited USA now able to tell France to get out or face possible American intervention to restore Juarez as President and overturn the “Empire”, French troops wisely withdrew in 1866 rather than face a USA with the most battle-hardened army in the world equipped with the most modern weapons. By June 1867, Maximilian was dead, along with his key Mexican collaborators, and Napoleon III had egg on his face.

Bismarck and Prussia, on the other hand, were now clearly the masters of most of Germany. Bismarck was biding his time, now confident that the Prussian Army, along with support from much of Germany behind them, would be equal to the task of facing the French Army when the right opportunity presented itself.

In France, the opposition to Napoleon was growing more restive and bolder in its criticism, and there were signs of popular discontent with the restrictions on personal liberties, as well as signs that even the moderates were pushing for more freedoms, especially as they witnessed Britain’s labourers and middle-class gaining more freedoms and greater economic prosperity through hard-won campaigns for Parliamentary and social reform. In Prussia, Bismarck was creating similar conditions, and the Prussian economy, along with that of much of Germany, was booming and advancing rapidly into the industrial era.

Between 1867-70, there were a number of episodes, which we will not go into, that told Bismarck and Germany that French interference in Germany would have to be met with some measure of force in order to achieve final national unity, for which there was a growing pan-German nationalist appetite. Germany was no longer a mere geographical region, but a nation which had awakened to a sense of national destiny to be found among the Great Powers of the world. It was no longer acceptable to be held back by the hubris and sense of historical privilege of interference by France, which for two hundred years had dictated to Germany what degree of nationhood would be permitted within its own borders.

The opportunity Bismarck was sure would come presented itself in the summer of 1870.

TO BE CONTINUED

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The Uses of History, 16 – France, Revolution #4, 1870-1, Part 2

(Image credit – Wikipedia)

Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, reigned from 1852-70. His regime has been called “The Liberal Empire”. As Emperor of the French, he brought France fully into the industrial age, modernizing cities, creating a national transportation network, and promoting a liberal economic system within France and widening international trade outside, including a free trade treaty with Great Britain. He instituted universal male suffrage, although it was used only to rubberstamp his major measures.

His Empire was liberal economically and commercially, but he maintained a tight grip on internal affairs, resurrecting the Imperial State Police to watch for dissident elements who concocted plots to overthrow his regime and even assassinate him. The principal opposition with such intentions came from the socialists, while early supporters among liberals such as Thiers, Lamartine, and Victor Hugo, the great novelist and poet, were bitterly disillusioned. Hugo denounced him and went into exile, publishing a virulent opposition newspaper in Belgium.

Internationally, Napoleon III could not ignore the mantle left by his much more illustrious uncle, Napoleon the Great. From his perspective, he had to prove that he was worthy to own the name Napoleon Bonaparte, having dropped the prénom Louis once he assumed the imperial purple. The weight of the Great One’s legacy never left him and finally led to his downfall.

Napoleon III began his foreign sallies by sending heavy reinforcements to Algeria to ensure France that held to its expanding North African Empire, He set about expediting naval and army forces to Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia today) in 1854 to make sure that France gained a foothold in South Asia to demonstrate her power far overseas, just as the British (in China and Australia) and even the United States (in Japan) had begun to do. The French colonial regime in Indochina ended exactly a century later in 1954 after a stunning defeat of the French forces at the hands of Vietnamese Communist revolutionaries under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh.

In the 1850s, a French naval squadron went into the South Pacific to lay claim to some of the newly discovered island chains in Polynesia and Melanesia. Tahiti remains a French Overseas Department to this day.

But Napoleon III’s most significant efforts were made to impress Europe with France’s newfound recovery of strength. He set out to exert French influence and power across the whole continent. He was careful not to project a plan to overthrow the whole established system put in place since 1815. Rather, his goal was to have France reassume her “proper place” as the continental arbiter of Europe, supplanting Austria, which had taken that place since the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The two areas of special interest to Napoleon were Italy and Germany.

The first sally into these potentially dangerous waters came in 1854 when Turkey went to war with Russia because of Russian encroachment upon Turkey’s Balkan provinces. Turkey was no match for Russia on its own, but Great Britain came to the aid of the Turks, and France, not to be outdone, joined the British. The two western Great Powers jointly attacked the Crimea, Russia’s main stronghold in the Black Sea. Hence the appellation “The Crimean War” in the history books. For 21st Century people, Russia’s seizure of the Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 will perhaps make a little more sense in this retrospective look. Russia has viewed Crimea as its legitimate territory for several centuries. Its inhabitants when Russia first took it over were not Ukrainians, but Tatars.

In 1854, the Franco-British objective was to draw off major Russian forces from advancing against Istanbul. They succeeded, and the Crimean War successfully prevented a Russian seizure of Romania, Bulgaria, and Istanbul, allowing the Turks to hold their ground. Austria, also not wanting a Russian advance deep into the Balkans, remained neutral.

Russia sued for peace in 1856 and withdrew behind its previous frontier in south-east Europe, even giving back some minor territories to the Ottoman Empire in the Caucasus. Thus, Napoleon could claim a major foreign success. Even if he had to share some of the glory with Britain, the bulk of the Western armies involved had been French.[i]

The next important demonstration of the renewed French Empire’s strength came in Italy in 1858-9. In 1815, Italy had been assigned to Austria’s direct tutelage, and Austria had annexed two Italian provinces to ensure that Italy’s incipient unification and liberalization movements were held in check. Here, Napoleon III played a carefully calculated double game. As President of France in 1849, Louis Napoleon had driven back Italian patriot republican forces from Rome and protected the Pope’s hold on Rome and its surrounding Papal State in central Italy. The Italian effort to free Italy from Austria and authoritarian rule in 1848-9 had collapsed, with one exception. The small Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia had held onto its liberalized Constitutional Monarchy and set about creating a modern liberal state to serve as a beacon and model to the rest of Italy.

In 1858, the Austrians decided it was time to put this upstart Kingdom in its place and replace its liberal monarchy with a properly autocratic one. The excuse was its harboring of draft dodgers and dissidents against Austrian rule in Lombardy and Venetia, the two Austrian provinces in north-east Italy. Piedmont appealed to Napoleon III for help, pleading the memory of Napoleon the Great’s creation of a liberal Italy during his hold over Italy (1797-1814). Napoleon, riding the high of France’s recent victory over Russia (revenge for 1812!), agreed to send a French army. But he insisted on a secret quid pro quo: when the war had been won, Piedmont would cede to France the two small provinces of Nice and Savoy on its Western frontier. Cavour, the wily Piedmontese Prime Minister, agreed. After all, he stood to gain the much more rich and fertile provinces of Lombardy and Venetia.

The Franco-Austrian War of 1858-9 was short but bloody. Napoleon went to be on the scene for himself to share in the glory of his victorious army. However, after surveying the terrible carnage of the battlefield at Solferino, a great victory for the French and Piedmontese, a sickened Napoleon broke his accord with Piedmont and negotiated a unilateral peace with Austria that gave Piedmont only Lombardy, while still insisting that Piedmont hand over Nice and Savoy.

Nevertheless, France had now humiliated two of its old Congress enemies in war, re-emerged as Europe’s #1 land power, and become friendly with Great Britain, its old nemesis. At this point, who was to gainsay the will of France in European affairs? Even many of Napoleon’s bitterest critics had to be impressed and admit that France was prospering as never before in modern times and was playing a major role in world affairs once more. The would-be revolutionaries in exile or hiding could only brood and wait.

The next testing ground would be Germany. The last remaining major power of the former autocratic Holy Alliance that had not faced France on the battlefield was Prussia. Napoleon the Great’s abject humiliation of Prussia during his quasi-conquest of Europe had awakened, in fact virtually created, German nationalism. The Great One had also much simplified German affairs in 1807 by abolishing the Medieval political relic called the Holy Roman Empire. It had never been in any sense “Roman”. In fact, it was Frankish (early French), having been founded by Charlemagne in 800 CE.

Two hundred years later it had essentially become a Germanic Empire after Charlemagne’s death in 814. His inheritance had been divided among his three sons. Two centuries later, only two realms were left standing. By the late Middle Ages, the eastern realm’s Emperor was almost always of the Hapsburg Dynasty of Austria, while the western realm had evolved into “Francia”, or France. Germany was a mere geographical term for the area where various German-speaking peoples abided under the Emperor’s general authority, while dozens and eventually hundreds of petty states squabbled about lands and rights and privileges.

In 1806 Napoleon I utterly crushed Prussia in a lightning campaign. He considered wiping Prussia right off the map, but thought that would leave too large a vacuum and tempt Russia to move West. Instead, he wiped away the moribund Holy Roman Empire, greatly reduced Prussia in size and made it a subservient ally with a decree reducing Germany to a more manageable region of 39 states. The two largest were Prussia in the North-East, and Bavaria in the South-West. He called this new entity the German Confederation and gave it a constitution that recognized its vassal status under the French Empire.

After Napoleon’s disastrous defeat in Russia in 1812, Prussia remained loyal to Napoleon until Russian troops were on its borders late in the year. Prussia declared itself neutral. In early 1813, the Prussians switched sides, regained control of their territory, and once more raised and trained a formidable army. In Germany itself there was a great upsurge of a new sense of “Germany” needing to throw off the yoke of the Emperor.

The Prussian army played a major royal in Napoleon’s defeat in 1814, and was instrumental in crushing his last major army at Waterloo on June 18, 1815. The reward for that great contribution had been a large expansion of Prussia’s territory in the Peace of Vienna, and a recognized role as a leadership candidate in the emerging sense of a united “German nation” waiting to be born.

The major obstacle to the birth of that nation-in-waiting was Austria, which held itself to be the leading German nation. The Austrian empire was an amalgam of at least a dozen ethnicities, one of which, the Magyars of Hungary, had its own distinguished history to look back on until the mid-16th Century. The Magyars were almost as numerous and certainly as proud as the Germanic Austrians. Nevertheless, the Hapsburg Emperor warned Prussia that if they attempted a unification of Germany, they would have to face determined and even armed opposition from Austria.

The attitude of France in that final showdown, which all could see approaching by 1860, would be crucial. No one could predict which way Napoleon III might choose to lean, or whether he might even directly intervene once an Austro-Prussian War began. He might just take the opportunity to carve out more gains for France at the expense of Germany, whether united without Austria, as Prussia wanted, or still under the thumb of Austria, should the Hapsburgs win. And with the Germans fighting it out among themselves, who could stop the battle-tested and well-armed French Army from doing what they chose?

TO BE CONTINUED

[i] A French general who witnessed the famous but pointless Charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava, immortalized in Tennyson’s great poem of the same name, had quipped at the time, “It is magnificent, but it is not war!” It was slaughter in the name of false gallantry.

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The Uses of History, 15 – Utopian Interlude

(Image credit – Wikipedia)

We humans live with the conviction that somehow, if we will it hard enough and direct our course with sufficient skill and resolution, we can some day create Utopia. We can conceive of almost endless versions of the Perfect World, the Perfect Society, of “Nowhere”, which is what the word “Utopia” actually means in Greek. Sir [Saint] Thomas More borrowed the word when he used it as the title of his version, the first on record, of the perfect society in the early 16th Century.

We persist in believing that it is within our native, inborn power and nature to conquer, once and for all, our demonic side, “the Dark Side” as the modern mythology of Star Wars puts it. When we finally do, we will arrive at an age where we will fully release the “better angels of our nature” so that, by a proper ordering of our minds and hearts, we become perennially benevolent to one another. Utopians believe that the incorrigible rebels and recalcitrant egoists, the potential disrupters of our coming perfect social and economic felicity, will then somehow be restrained and be so isolated in their pariahhood that they will be shamed into conformity to the liberty of total equality and complete freedom of opportunity for all.

Few Utopians of the left, who currently exercise a strong grip on the general development of the West’s culture and society, and a stranglehold on public Western discourse, will openly confess, at least at this moment, to this sort of paradigm. Nevertheless, with some variation, it is the directing vision of their ineluctable machinations to eliminate the old restraints and limit (from their perspective) the nefarious influences of the original ideas of liberal democracy. The old, now “outmoded” notion of democracy characterized by Abraham Lincoln as “government of the people, by the people, for the people” is tainted forever by its latent, if only half-acknowledged, debt to the even more original foundation of the West in Judeo-Christianity.

Part of the political, social, and economic crisis facing the West, and by extension the whole world, is the hard core of the old Judeo-Christian, liberal-democratic culture and social order still deeply embedded in the Western soul. The world outside of the formerly nominally Christian realms does not have the deep roots in Christendom that still torture Europe and its most completely assimilated ex-colonies, but they cannot help feeling and being buffeted by the shock-waves emanating from the disruptive issues washing into their lands through the world-wide web and global socio-economic order.

One of our delusions is that we have come to a place of almost total inclusiveness and openness to every notion of what freedom and rights should include. But fervent Utopians have never really been inclusive and broad-minded. The present crop of Utopian social-engineers à-la-WOKE-ultra-Progressive are as hypocritical in this respect as any of the older versions of the West that they love to condemn and moralize about as having been enslaved by religion, superstition, and blind prejudice.

The former society which is being purposefully and systematically dismantled had at least one superior characteristic in its notion of Utopia compared to the present manifestation: it declared that we humans are really and truly flawed and cannot create Utopia by our own efforts. Utopia really is “Nowhere” to be found, or humanly manufactured. Instead, we are dependent on the Creator to heal our innate brokenness, to redeem us from our sins and forgive us for our perpetual rebellion.

As to a perfect world, a perfect flawless human state, that can only happen through the unmerited goodness and mercy of the Creator Him-/Her/Self. However, humanity will enter perfect being, first following death in being joined to God through God’s own action of adopting us into the “God-family”. God has opened this family to all who will come to Him/Her through the incarnate Son of God. The second way to Utopia will come at a time chosen by the Creator, when He/She will renew and remake the broken creation into an everlasting one from which all evil, suffering, and distortion will be banished forever. It will not be of human construction.

This is the story now so despised and ridiculed by all Utopianists following Thomas More’s conception of such a society. Sir Thomas still put the Creator in his story. But the Enlightenment’s quest to rid Europe of its dependence on religious dogma and superstition required a more rigorously secular humanist response. For those who are interested in this Enlightenment saga of the quest for truth independent of the Creator, it has been recounted now many times. These are variations around the central theme of how the West liberated itself from its medieval tutelage by turning to Reason, Rationalism, Science, and “Natural Philosophy”, but the core narrative remains firmly in place after three hundred years or so.

Our purpose here is not to rehash old news, but to study what has ensued historically. We must note that humans are bred-in-the-bone, gene-driven believers. The laws of physics reflect the nature of reality, and they are not disconnected to the spiritual and psychological truths which are just as real. A physical vacuum is inevitably filled by whatever surrounds it most closely. In the realms of the spirit and mind, which are just as real, the law of the vacuum is just as true. In the spiritual realm, you cannot drive out one form of faith without it being filled by another. We humans are formed for faith as much as we are formed to think and feel. We will inevitably believe in, put our trust in, something or someone as truth-giving. We will construct our paradigm of reality around that essential, central core of “truth”. It is a fallacy to say we can remain undecided, if only because, if we trust in nothing or no one else, we will by default choose ourselves as the ultimate source of truth.

However, for the vast majority of people of whatever ethnic origin, we quickly find ourselves a very fragile and fallible source of truth-knowing and truth-speaking. Narcissists and very arrogant people are actually pathetically deluded in this respect. The rest of us inevitably turn to some other source of paradigm-forming faith, which is really nothing more than choosing whom and what to put ultimate trust in.

As we enter 2023, we find that the formerly accepted, traditional paradigms about truth and its source(s) have been or are in the process of being driven out, more and more forcefully. We are being given a hodge-podge of a fantastic farrago in their stead, despite the blatant self-contradictions of this “mess of pottage” which attempts to include everything and claim the validity of just about anything you can image as some manifestation of universal truth. But such ephemeral clouds cannot really be defined except in the most nebulous language such as “all you need is love; love is all you need”, as per the Beatles early anthem to this wondrous revelation.

Just as a vacuum of the spirit cannot go long unfilled, neither can a vacuum in the human soul, which intuitively seeks Heaven, Paradise, Nirvana, Valhalla, Elysium, the Happy Hunting Grounds, or any other formulation we can come up with to indicate the unfilled hole-in-the-soul, as Blaise Pascal once termed it in his posthumous masterpiece, Pensées.

Many of the later Enlightenment philosophes in the 18th Century, followed by their numerous disciples in the Second Wave Enlightenment in the 19th Century, dogmatically chose to remove the Creator from the equation. They therefore created a spiritual and theological vacuum. As we have noted, a vacuum begs and demands to be filled. It always will be.

What moved in to take the place of the Creator and theology? As Nietzsche declared, “God is dead and we have killed Him”. He predicted that the vacuum created by His death would, had to be filled. He predicted, with deadly accuracy, that ideology would move into the place of theology. Into the place of the “dead” God would step the “Ubermensch”, the Superman, who would form the world in his own image by the exercise of his superior will to power.

Modern revolutions have borne out Nietzsche’s prophecy with a vengeance. The Age of Ideology has moved into the vacuum left by the erasure Judeo-Christianity. Ideology is the dramatic mask (as in ancient Greek theatre) of the will to power, the rationalization of the ubermensch drive to remake the world in the image of the paradigm of truth adopted by the enforcers of the ideology.

The fruits of this reformation are always presented as a promised Utopia – a paradise of sorts based on eliminating the sources of injustice and oppression and equalizing the distribution of resources and opportunity. The problem is always what to do with the dissenters, the incorrigibles who cannot or will not see the light and accept the new truth.

Since the First French Revolution (1789-99), the record is clear. The resisters of the New Order (the Nazi formulation of their promised Utopia) are systematically rooted out and eliminated. Every time we have witnessed one of these socio-political-economic tsunamis attempting to create the latest and greatest plan for Utopia, we have seen a hecatomb of mayhem and slaughter in its wake. The body counts belie every claim that humans can create the Promised Land; the ensuing multi-generational devastation denies every claim of every Utopian vision, whether Marxist, Maoist, Fascist, Nazi, Capitalist, whatever-ist.

But the answer of the next promisers of the coming socially engineered Utopia is to double-down and ignore (or obfuscate) history and soft-sell their own new soft Totalitarianism as per neo-Enlightenment wisdom.

Soft Totalitarianism is in the long run still taking us to the same destination. The chefs chortle, “Perhaps if we just turn up the heat more gradually and gently, the frog in the pot will be lulled to sleep and will not wake up (if ever) until our new world order is in place…”

Remember, Utopia = Nowhere, now and always. The Creator-God alone can fulfill the longing in your soul.

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The Uses of History, 14 – France, Revolution #4, 1870-1, Part 1

(Photo credit – Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, 1849 – Wikimedia Commons)

Until 1871, no one in continental Europe or anywhere in the world with knowledgeable connections to Europe, as in North America or areas under European domination in other continents, questioned that the greatest European power after the United Kingdom was France. Britain, as unchallenged mistress of the world’s oceans and the wealthiest nation on earth, was in a class by itself. Despite all France’s tumultuous peregrinations from one regime to another, France was still the continental power most to be reckoned with in case of conflict or threatened conflict anywhere in Europe.

In 1848, an incredible series of revolutions and near revolutions had shaken Europe’s established order of Kingdoms and Empires, catalyzed once more by the French overthrow of the latest (and last) King and the establishment of The Second French Republic. The effects of that political earthquake shattered the ultra-Conservative control of Europe’s political and social life which had been imposed from on high in 1815 at the Congress of Vienna, and which had been enforced since then by the Holy Trinity of Autocracy, Austria, Russia, and Prussia.

Chinks in the Vienna order had inevitably appeared. When the Belgians revolted against the repressive royal regime of the Netherlands in 1830, the Three Autocrats pressured France’s new “Bourgeois King”, Louis-Philippe, to send in French troops to crush this violation of sanctioned order. Great Britain stepped in and “suggested” to the French that this would be most unwise, for the British intended to support Belgian independence. When Prussia threatened to come to the aid of the Dutch to crush this revolution, Britain and France jointly declared that Belgium would become a recognized neutral state and convened a convention in London to which all the Great Powers were signatories guaranteeing Belgium’s territorial integrity and political neutrality in any future great power disputes.

The Belgian episode was not even the first time the Congress of Vienna’s guarantee of the sacrosanctity of the Old Autocratic Order had been set aside. Greece had revolted against Ottoman tyranny in 1821, and the Turkish repression was so brutal that Western volunteers, filled with sympathy for the birthplace of ancient classic culture, one of the cornerstones of the West’s identity, joined the Greek rebels by the hundreds, as in a modern crusade against heathen Turks of old. The Autocrats at first declared hands off, for if rebels were justified in one place in overthrowing tyranny, how could they consistently repress the incipient liberalization movements within their own borders while encouraging them in another just because they happened to be Greeks. Besides, the ancient Greeks had been too close to democracy at their pinnacle, and they could hardly support that.

However, the British were not bound by “The Holy Alliance” or Austrian Foreign Minister Metternich’s post-Vienna machinations to crush any sign of rebellion and revolution anywhere on European soil. Sympathy for the Greeks in France was high as well. Disgusted and pressured by public opinion to take a hand in ending the genocide and massacres taking place in Greece and among Christian subjects of the Ottomans outside of Greece, in 1827 British and French Mediterranean squadrons were sent to “observe” off the coast of Greece. In the course of its patrols and “observations” near the Isle of Hydra at Navarino, they sank the Turkish-Egyptian Fleet which was carrying large reinforcements to the hard-pressed Turkish forces in the Morea.

Not to be outdone, and confessing a new conscience about allowing their Greek “brothers in the Orthodox faith” to be massacred by Muslim infidels, Russia declared war on Turkey, breaking ranks with Austria and Prussia, which had sworn neutrality. This war lasted till 1829, and one of its peace provisions, once more insisted on by British intervention, as the British were alarmed by Russian ambitions to capture and control Istanbul, was to recognize Greek independence. Austria was also alarmed by Russian expansionism into the Balkans, where Austria had her sights set as well. Russia was warned to scale back its demands on Turkish territory and accept Greece’s independence. The overall effect was the shattering of the Holy Alliance and the isolation of Russia.

With the Holy Alliance now thoroughly broken as of 1830, and the Vienna Congress order badly shaken, the Poles rose against Russia to regain their independence in late 1830. In 1831a full-blown war erupted after initial Polish success.

There was a large Polish émigré community in France, and especially in Paris, as there had been since Napoleon’s time. But in 1831, France was half a continent away and Louis-Philippe was as far as a monarch could be from Napoleon the Great. France sent its sympathy and moral support, and the Poles fought with great gallantry and futility. The King of Prussia sent troops to help the Russians crush the rebellion with great slaughter, for Prussia had its own Polish ethnic regions which it had usurped in the Partition of Poland among Russia, Prussia, and Austria in 1795. The Austrians kept an eye on their own Polish regions, but sent no troops into Poland itself, although asked to by Russia. More Poles emigrated to France, and refugees from terrible Russian oppression flooded even into Prussia and Austria.

But what of 1848? Russia’s liberal elements had gone underground and maintained a very precarious existence within the Tsarist empire after the Decembrist Revolt of 1825. While revolutionary and liberal democratic fervor were sweeping across Western and Central Europe, Tsar Nicholas 1 made sure little news of it leaked into his realm and ruthless police actions snuffed the least glimmer of stirrings out as soon as they appeared.

Meanwhile in France, great things were afoot, much to the envy of the Russian and Polish exiles, who discovered they had some things in common. However, Russian hubris and pan-Slavic Messianism towards all other Slavic peoples has always prevented the formation of any unified action plan. Ultimately, it seems, Russians view the rest of the Slavic world as their rightful sphere of imperial mission, and even the Greeks, who are certainly not Slavs, seem to be annexed to this notion by virtue of their Orthodox faith. For Russia inherited the role of Protector of the true Orthodox Christian Faith following the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453 at the hands of the Turks.

The French abolished their monarchy for the second time in 1848 and wrote themselves yet another constitution. However, finding the turmoil of what began to look like a return to resurgent Jacobinism (now wearing a Socialist costume with newly-minted Marxist credentials licking its heels) too much to stomach, in 1850 the voters elected the Second Republic’s First (and only) President in the person of non other than Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the nephew of the Great One!

Louis-Napoleon was not his uncle, but he was no political dolt either. He had a ready-to-hand playbook. In 1851, with the pretext of maintaining law and order and assuring the security and prosperity of the Republic for the benefit of everyone of all classes, Louis-Napoleon had himself confirmed as “President for Life” by plebiscite. (The plebiscite/referendum had been Napoleon the Great’s favourite tool to claim the sanction of popular approval for his most critical changes to the regime.) This was followed in 1852 by – you guessed it! – Louis-Napoleon assuming the Imperial Crown as Napoleon III (II had been I’s very briefly reigned son in 1814, after I’s first abdication), once more receiving a massive sanction by plebiscite.

Which takes us down the road to 1870-1 and Revolution #4.

TO BE CONTINUED

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The Uses of History, 13 – Christmas, 2

He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future.

George Orwell, 1984

(Image credit – Wikipedia)

In this pithy, punchy statement, Orwell’s insight is extraordinary. For any reader who has not yet read 1984, Orwell’s great masterpiece, one of the greatest works of literature in any language, I can only say emphatically, “YOU SHOULD!” All the more as we watch the current world, including the democratic nations, sliding ever closer to the downward spiral into creeping totalitarianism.

 Although the actual calendar date 1984 is now long past, the book is not about the historical year 1984. Rather, it is an extended parable about living under totalitarianism, whether of the left or the right. As such, it is as relevant today as it was when he first published it in 1949. Along with the rest of the world, Orwell had just watched humanity almost annihilate itself in the hecatomb of World War II. He had first had the idea for the book in the 1930s when he had seen his great hopes of a true revolution liberating the ordinary people dissolve in both the Fascist and Soviet versions of utopia-cum-nightmare. With Nazism and Fascism vanquished, in 1949 the world of East vs West stood on the brink of “Mutually Assured [nuclear] Destruction,” as the sobering phrase of the 1970s put it. Russia now had “the Bomb” and China had been taken over by Mao and the “People’s Liberation [Enslavement] Army”. The West was reluctantly accepting rearmament and forming NATO.

One of the chief characteristics of the 1984 dystopia was “Newspeak” – taking old words and assigning them new meanings, often diametrically opposed to the original signification. Newspeak’s twin was “Newthink”. Ideology was the key component of both these and to inculcate them, education had been completely coopted for indoctrination. Penalties for daring to think or speak differently involved what we would now term erasing the faulty algorithms – brainwashing, which in the novel involved chemical reprogramming.

A close understanding shows us that as a society and culture we have certainly been moving along the Orwellian trajectory with many of the laws, regulations, and policies governments and courts today have been implementing to reform (as in form over) the societies they control so that they conform to (as in line up with) the accepted ideology of the putatively wise people telling the politicians and their closest advisers the proper ways to think and act progressively.

This is not conspiracy theory. It has been and is observable across the whole gamut of culture and society, at least in Western civilization, over the last fifty years and more. It is phrased in language designed to appeal to the voters as “the right way to think; the right way to act; the right way to speak; the right way to educate; the right things to accept”, such as unlimited abortion, unlimited access to euthanasia [now a big push in Canada, the battle over abortion having long since been decisively won by the ultra-progressives], restrictions on unacceptable ideas which right-thinking people should now find objectionable in any form (and therefore they are hate-speech), no-fault criminal behaviour, exclusion of “retrogressives” from positions of influence, elimination of “outmoded” traditions from public life [mainly Christianity and its symbols and vocabulary in the West], and the demonization of just about everything built upon the traditional foundations of what was once called “Christendom” – and we could go on.

Which brings us once more, at this time of year, to Christmas and its irreplaceable place in the West, and the world.

Christmas is primarily about a birth. Not just any birth, but, according to the Christian story, the most important birth, human or of any other sort, in all of history. In fact, the big context of the story declares that this specific and extraordinary birth of a human baby boy had universal, Cosmic significance.

How is such a thing even possible – that a human baby’s birth should be connected to the outworking of something infinitely significant? The majority of modern-post-modern Christians in the 21st Century themselves struggle greatly with this notion, and many are actually embarrassed if asked to explain it, let alone defend it.

I confess to such feelings on occasion, especially around people who clearly message me that I am out of my league among “my betters”. However, in my curmudgeonly aging, I am no longer (much) intimidated by such vacuous pretentions and am willing to take up the challenge that the Apostle Peter put forward almost two thousand years ago: “But in your hearts, set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience…” (New Testament, First Letter of Peter, chapter 3, vss 15-16a, New International Version.)

“Keeping a clear conscience” is perhaps the big sticking point for most of us. After all, who ever has a 100% clear conscience? Especially in a culture which tells us that, individually, right and wrong are personal choices. But the same culture tells us, almost daily, about all the sins of commission and omission which past generations of Westerners have ever perpetrated on an otherwise innocent, defenseless world. Two contradictory standards in clear sight, but who’s noticing? Personally, I decide for myself what is really wrong. But collectively, those nasty ancestors of ours were terrible people because they didn’t adhere to our new morality.

In our individual lives we are well-enough aware of our failings and faults (sins, if you like). Religious or not, everyone haa a conscience to remind them of those, unless they are sociopaths, psychopaths, and narcissists. (The first two on this short list are usually the last one as well.) And, when we scratch deep enough, we discover that even supposed liberated Wokers know pretty clearly that at least some things are just plain wrong. But no absolutism please!?!

For our individual sins/faults/failings, the remedy is straight forward enough – repentance, confession, asking for forgiveness from God and anyone we have offended against (cf. the Jesus strategy in “The Lord’s Prayer”), then making restitution where possible. Agnostics and Atheists may leave God out, but the formula remains the same otherwise.

But how can we be absolved of all that Christians and nominal Christians and Western oppressors have supposedly, and too often really, done against so many others, both Christian and non-Christian, over the last millennium and more?

In the powerful Civil War film “Glory”, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw has a conversation with Trip, one of his ex-slave recruits in the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, the first all-black regiment, albeit officered by whites, in the United States Army. The setting is July 1863, the decisive month in the war. The conversation is fictionalized but probable.

Trip: “We’s all in it up to our necks, Kuhnel. Ain’t nobody clean.”

Shaw: “How do we get clean?”

Trip, pausing: “Ah reckon we ante up and kick in like men.”

When we refuse to “ante up and kick in like men” the denigrators and deconstructionists win by default. Meekness does not mean weakness. It is possible to accept that great injustice and even horrors are part of our ancestors’ sins. It is necessary to denounce them and abhor them, dedicating ourselves not to repeat them and to make right what can be made right.

But the great fake-out, the enormous fallacy that paralyses the present generation, and will keep paralyzing future generations, is that everything that has come down to us from our Christian forebears and our two-millennial old roots and traditions is invalid and hence just mythological bunk by association, by some sort of collective contamination.

That would be a correct inference, if it were actually true. But it is patently and blatantly false. It is so false that it is a lie of Goebbelsian proportions (as in Josef Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda and master manipulator of truth, public sentiment, and opinion in Nazi Germany). Goebbels: “Tell the biggest lie possible as loudly as possible and as often as possible and people will believe it.” Hitler had written the same thing in Mein Kampf. Goebbels learned the lesson and the technique from its true master.

If the anti-Christian mythology is true, let us also give up the pursuit of reason, science, and higher learning. Let us forsake the quest to shed our ignorance and find the right path to truth, justice, real equality, real liberty, peace, and the very notion that some things are absolutely, not just relatively, right or wrong. Let us make mercy and compassion dependent on the whim of the present coterie of intellectual sages, rulers, law-makers and administrators. Let us renounce the supposed great leap forward in understanding and applying fair standards in human rights of the last two hundred years.

“But”, you say, “these things are our inheritance from the Enlightenment and are inherently opposite to the dogmas and superstition of the “Old-Time Religion” that kept people in darkness and fear for centuries.”

Ignorance is indeed a great enemy. It is now born of our collective amnesia and modern myth-making about the superstition and blind dogmatism of those presumably benighted forebears who had supposedly been duped and deceived by religion (Christianity).

When you study at a university or any institution of higher learning, you study at an institution which was born in and emerged out of the Christian culture of medieval and early modern Europe. When you enjoy the benefits of universal public education, you are reaping the benefits of the foundational work of many generations of churchmen and churchwomen who believed in the right of ordinary people to know how to read, write, and do basic mathematics – then extended that to the right of all who could and would seek it to pursue the knowledge and skills God had created them to understand and be able to develop.

When you go to a hospital and receive medical care dedicated to “doing no harm” and treating you with the respect you deserve whether young or old, rich or poor, male or female, of any religion or ethnicity, you are benefitting from the Christian view of human beings as being made in God’s image and worthy of all care and consideration because all lives are of equal and infinite value in God’s eyes. That is the whole basis of universal public health care, of universal public education, of universal human rights.

If you don’t believe it, do the hard research to trace the origins of all these wonderful modern benefits we enjoy but which are once more being threatened, eroded, and devalued by outrageous claims and arbitrary limitations being imposed by truly ignorant, or perhaps willfully ignorant, people who “know better” and, we are to believe, are wiser than all the predecessors who fought for these things and discovered what they meant.

The very notion of modern science as an ordered, disciplined, verifiable pursuit of knowledge about the natural world is based on the order and beauty and wondrous complexity that demonstrates the nature of the Creator. And because the Creator made the Cosmos with order and design, it can be discovered and explored to reliably enrich human life and the very quality of existence for both humans and all creatures.

It is only later that unscrupulous exploiters of the new science and technology sought to justify their rampaging and ever-expanding pillaging of the creation. They used decontextualized Scriptures to say that God had given humankind dominion over all the world to use it as they wished. Humans, they claimed, have carte blanche to do with it what we will. Leaders of all kinds, in government or business, and even in religion, are always tempted away from the true order and proper boundaries the Creator intends for all His works. They are bewitched by the allure of more wealth, more influence, and more control at their disposal, and therefore more power and luxury to display their prowess.

The fallacy of blaming this exploitation on the corrupting influence of Christianity in particular is, or should be, virtually transparent to any fair-minded person with the most rudimentary understanding of history and human nature. It is not a peculiar failing of professing (or nominal) Christians to give in to greed, to seize control, to exploit people and the planet for selfish gain, fame, wealth, power, and prestige. Pagans did it extensively in antiquity. People in power and authority have done it and still do it in China, India, Africa, Asia, among the indigenous in every continent, since time immemorial. If “Christians” have done it and still do, so too Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Shintoists, Animists, Agnostics, and Atheists.

Injustice and oppression are, sadly, a universal condition of human societies, whether in huge empires or in tiny enclaves. While religion can play into this is as a tool to control and exploit, it is certainly not the cause. That is in the heart of humankind as it is, as far back as we can see, and as far-wide as we can look, regardless of time or place or social structure, regardless of believing in God or any number of divinities or demi-gods.

The birth of Jesus is not a myth. It is historical fact. The events and meaning of his life and his legacy are the exact opposite and the only antidote to all of the preposterous myths which have more and more captivated the public discourse about Christianity since the later 18th Century. This same Jesus is the only real hope that the human race has of staving off its growing danger of destroying itself.

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A Good Tale

(copyright V. Marquis, Dec. 13, 2022)

(Image credit – Wikimedia Commons)

Let me hear a good tale

a tale of hope and ordinary folk

doing good things for one another

reaching out in others’ need

helping a stranger no questions asked

not passing by on the other side

with eyes averted and ears stoppered

to avoid the appeal and meeting those eyes

full of pain and need.

Let me hear a good tale

like when you gave up your time

inconvenient and all

effort, energy, dollars

not wanting or expecting any return

doing the needed and beyond

then quietly moving on to take no credit

just a blessing left behind.

Let me hear a good tale

of heroism offered quietly

to save those who could not save themselves

daring and risking full knowing

what might result

but understanding it must be done

and no one else went in but you.

Let me hear a good tale

that brings light and hope

in the dark and gloom

as if there is yet an angel

bringing good tidings of great joy

meant for every girl and boy

every woman and man

every creature high and low

that the Creator has not forgotten

these little folk so low-esteemed

while high and mighty gloat and preen.

Let me hear a good tale

of babies born,

tiny lives full of possibility

hope, joy, light in little eyes

innocent yet of any wrong

having not yet learned to be mean

to demean, to put down and shove aside.

Let me hear a good tale

of that tiny life all lying ahead

eagerly awaiting the Maker’s grace

eagerly expecting to see the Holy face

not yearning for shrewd conniving

and self-indulgent striving

which all too readily will invade his course.

Let me hear the great good tale

of the Bethlehem baby

born in all humility

hidden away in obscurity

to no-account parents in poverty

not even a crib to lay him in

not even a warm blanket to wrap him in

but only swaddling rags in a stable manger.

Let me hear once more this great good tale

of how this meek babe’s lowly estate

inspired hosts of angels to celebrate

brought poor shepherds to investigate

drew distant sages to congregate

confounding all we humans elevate

as what we consider great.

So you, tiny babe in your mother’s arms

surrounded by hope and love

may you soon know that Other Child

who brings to all who seek Him out

the greatest peace and answer of all –

you are loved by Infinite Love

and you belong to that One first and last.

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The Uses of History, 11 – USA Meltdown, 2 – Revolutionary Reset

““A house divided against itself cannot stand.” I believe this government cannot endure half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”

Abraham Lincoln, June 16, 1858, speech to Republican Illinois State Convention delegates at 8PM.

This quote is drawn from one of Lincoln’s most famous speeches, surpassed only by the Gettysburg Address in November 1863 and the Second Inaugural in March 1865. It is also the most prophetic pronouncement ever given by America’s greatest President, perhaps by any American President. As he predicted, the “House” of America could not continue so divided as it had become since 1783, when it had won its independence. Not until the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified on December 6, 1865, after Lincoln’s assassination, did the official division of the House end.

However, the course of American history since 1865 demonstrates that the political, social, and economic roots of division are still deeply embedded in the fabric of American culture and society. Racism and class divisions cannot be erased by any law or whole gaggle of laws, such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act or any subsequent legislation.

From its beginning, the United States institutionalized racism in its constitution. For the next 76 years it remained there with the official acceptance of African slavery within the very fabric of the nation’s foundation. The agitation and bitterness and roiling dissension it gradually caused among the regions, North and South, East and West, as the nation overran the southern half of North America was never far below the surface. The North resented it and proceeded to eliminate slavery from its states, while the South became more and more anchored in its dependence on its “peculiar institution”.

As new territories and states were added, the rivalry to maintain a precarious balance between “free soil” and “slave soil” became increasingly ideological and theological. The outworking of this animosity became more and more hostile and violent until, in 1854, Kansas Territory erupted in a full-blown rehearsal for the coming Civil War. The hatred spilled over into Congress on May 22, 1856, when hate- and rage-filled South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks almost killed Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate by caning him as the Senator was giving a speech denouncing South Carolina Senator Butler’s role in the violence in Kansas. Sumner was in critical condition before Brooks was disarmed and forcibly dragged out. He was fully six months in convalescence.

The 1860 Presidential race was focused on one issue – slavery and its spread throughout the country. The Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1854 had opened the door for slavery to infiltrate the hitherto Free States. For a majority of northern voters, this was a bridge too far. The Republican Presidential nominee, Abraham Lincoln, was the only candidate clearly committed to ending the spread of slavery. So far gone were things that the Southern State electoral authorities refused to even put Lincoln’s name on the ballot, falsely labeling him a flaming abolitionist.

Many of the slave states said that if Lincoln were elected they would secede. Despite all the anti-democratic actions, the hate-language, and the hand-wringing and dire warnings of northern Democrats over Lincoln’s “radicalism” threatening to dismantle the country, northern voters, thoroughly disgusted with the Southern domination of the Executive and the Courts, elected Lincoln in every free state, giving him victory in the Electoral College despite his illegal exclusion from the ballot in the South.

Lincoln was sworn in on March 4, 1861 in Washington, after having had to travel through slave-state Maryland incognito under multiple death threats. By that point, seven slave-states had seceded and formed the Confederate States of America on February 8, 1861. By April, the “Confederacy” would encompass eleven states.

The Civil War which erupted with the Confederate bombardment on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor on April 12, 1861 would last until May 26, 1865. In human terms, there were 750 000 military deaths, more than all American military deaths in the War of 1812, the Indian Wars, the Spanish-American War, World Wars 1 and 2, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Iraq, and Afghanistan combined. There is no reliable number given for civilian deaths by “collateral damage”, but we can be sure that the total dead, military and civilian, were well over a million in four years of horrendous carnage. The total population of the US in 1861 was 18.5 million in the North, 5.5 million whites and 3.5 million slaves in the South, and 2.5 million 0.5 million slaves in the border states for a total of about 31 million.

As the war dragged on with an every higher “butcher’s bill” piling up, Lincoln became morally convinced and religiously convicted that it would not end until “every drop of blood shed by the (slave-plantation and workshop) Overseer’s lash” had been paid for by the blood of the free population of both North and South. He had come to see the war as an expiation for all the unresolved sins and failures of the Founding Fathers in not dealing with the most glaring violations of the solemnly affirmed foundational values right at the start.

Who’s to say that Lincoln was not right? His plan for the post-war was framed around justice and reconciliation to ensure the South would not be driven to desperation and into further retrenchment in resentment and bitterness by a vengeful and triumphant North. Tragically for his family and his country, his noble life was cut short by a southern-sympathizing big-name actor and ideological fanatic named John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865 as the President was relaxing with his wife taking in a light comedy at Ford’s Theatre in Washington. His vision for national reconciliation and the cleansing of the nation’s racist sins so it could move into the future in a new and more generous spirit died with him.

The administration which ensued was governed by the revenge-minded Republican-controlled Congress. The South was treated like a beaten foe. When “Reconstruction” ended in 1877 and northern troops withdrew, the North’s financiers, industrialists, and commercial exploiters were happy to reap huge fiscal benefits from the South and ignore the violations of human and constitutional rights as the old white dominance by white supremacists returned to power. The newly emancipated Blacks were reduced to virtual serfdom as the northern business plutocrats quickly reverted to “business as usual”, choosing to look the other way as African Americans were systematically cheated and deprived of the rights that had been recognized as theirs by law and Constitution.[i]

Thus, while Lincoln had sought to set right the failures of the Revolution and had understood that the war had been the result of those failures, he believed that, at the same time, it had given the country a second chance, an opportunity for “a new birth of freedom” as he put it in his Gettysburg Address, one of the greatest political speeches of all time. With his assassination, the dead President’s charitable magnanimity evaporated in the red-fury which followed. The opportunity was wasted and the Revolutionary reset of the Civil War failed to take.

Thus we are left with the long, suffering road to today. The American Revolution remains incomplete. The bitter fruit of the Sins of the Fathers are still being visited on a nation still embroiled at its tortured heart. The original racist infection festers and has metastasized in numerous tendrils of intolerance. Unhappily, some of the most ardent and bitter rival factions claim that they stand for the true values of the God Lincoln had come to believe was intimately concerned with bringing America through its great crisis. Lincoln had aimed to guide America into a true and final understanding of its place in the world as a beacon of hope and liberty and true equality among all its peoples from all their origins. It would be fair to say that Mr. Lincoln would be very hard-pressed to recognize much of his vision still living among significant portions of the zealots now calling themselves “true American patriots”.

[i] One might be forgiven for seeing similarities with how whole global regions have been treated by American and Western capitalists since World War 2.

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The Uses of History, 10 – USA Meltdown, 1

History is a dance with the past, with a phantom or ghost – sometimes well-defined, sometimes mere outline, always mysterious.

VJM, 2022

The infant United States of America emerged from its successful Revolution in 1783 far from unified. The Treaty of Paris brought peace with Great Britain and an enormous addition of territory between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River. But it did not bring internal unity. The former colonies had ended the struggle as a loose affiliation of autonomous entities called the Confederation of the United States of America. The poorly funded central government had little power to sway the internal conditions or politics of the thirteen individual state governments.

South of Virginia, there was serious division and social turmoil. In the North, New York had more or less reluctantly accepted the result of the war, with much of its population, especially in the east, having maintained close ties with the British, who had occupied New York City and most of the Hudson Valley since 1776. The British did not leave until 1784 under an agreement to allow those wishing to leave the USA for British territory in Canada or elsewhere to exit via New York aboard British ships. For all who chose this, including some thousands of African-Americans who had fought for the British on the promise of freedom from slavery, the trek to New York was through thoroughly unfriendly country and filled with perils from vengefully-minded Americans.

We will not rehearse the early internal vicissitudes of the newly-minted independent nation on the eastern seaboard of North America. Suffice it to say that it became quickly apparent that the first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, in force since 1777, proved woefully inadequate to knit together such a disparate group of semi-independent states all jealous of their newly-won autonomy, and quite unwilling to surrender any significant part of their freedom to determine their own future. It was also already becoming clear that north of Maryland the states were moving towards eliminating slavery, while from Maryland south slavery was deeply anchored in the economic and social fabric.

A group of zealous patriots could see that unless they found a way to really create unity, the new country would disintegrate. A gaggle of thirteen petty countries would fall prey to European predators, and particularly Great Britain which, with its immense naval and commercial power, was expecting and waiting for its old provinces to collapse in chaos. Mother could then woo some of them, at least, to rejoin the imperial fold.

In 1787, the zealots of unity met in Philadelphia to draft a new constitution. What emerged is the current basic foundational law of the United States. In 1789 it came into effect after all thirteen states ratified it. Many amendments have been added to it since then to deal with critical issues needing resolution over the last 232 years.

Some historians have seen the Constitution as the effective end of the American Revolution. Others have said that the Revolution was unfinished until the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery after the Civil War (1861-65). Some say that it has never been finished; the deepest issues that have divided the American psyche ever since 1789 have never been truly resolved.

When the Constitution took effect in 1789 it had glaring omissions from its provisions. In seeking to strike a balance between democratic freedom and restrictions on freedoms that would prevent the new experiment in equality from blowing up in their faces, the “Fathers” could not or would not tackle such questions head-on. Here are the three most significant: (1) the acceptance of slavery as a sort of normal human condition for the great mass of African-Americans; (2) the exclusion of women from the very notion of equality with men; (3) the complete absence of consideration for Native Americans in any capacity. The consequences of these omissions over the long term would be and remain devastating. In all three cases, only males of European descent were actually considered as being “created equal” as far as the actions of the “Founding Fathers” are concerned.

It is easy to excuse these exclusions as due to the normal conceptions and conditions of society in the 18th and 19th Centuries. But, when we look more closely, we find that awareness of the blatant injustice of these assumptions was certainly circulating. The Quakers, who still had a strong voice and influence in Pennsylvania, certainly made such views (their own) known. As did others. Abigail Adams, now considered a proto-feminist, wife of John Quincy Adams, one of the Founding Fathers and a future President from Massachusetts, gave strong voice to the injustices, as did some other persons. Some of the Constitution’s signatories had private reservations, recognizing that their work was incomplete. But it seemed as if they had taken things as far as they could then go, and resolution of these great questions would have to wait for a more propitious time. Even Thomas Jefferson, a slave-owner and principal author of much of the document, knew that there were glaring insufficiencies in it. But the goal was a compromise of unity, not moral perfection or absolute justice. Even he was not willing to part with his estates and slaves for the sake of moral purity or racial justice.

We cannot retell all the wheeling and dealing that took place to get the thing done and accepted. Numerous sources and studies have shown all this in great detail. But, when it all shakes down, the basic mindset of white male supremacy and right to govern was set in virtual stone. What’s more, the right to dominate and exploit the “inferior races” (African and Native) and “weaker gender” (female) were firmly entrenched, sanctified by a pseudo-religious sanction as being the order of things ordained by the Deity who had blessed the American cause with victory and set America up as a light in the world to proclaim democratic freedom to amazed humanity.

The acceptance of such “preordained” conditions was not universal. A strong and increasingly vocal minority of people, especially in the north, began almost immediately to declare that the preconditions for a future explosion had been laid down – especially on the slavery and race question. People of conscience were also already denouncing the terrible injustices being perpetrated on the Natives as they were being systematically forced out of their ancestral lands with no compensation and no regard for the atrocities being inflicted on them. Greed for access to the unlimited resources of the West, for opportunities to exploit and become rich regardless of the human cost or the impact on the land, became a burning drive and continuous theme in America’s “Manifest Destiny” to win hegemony over all the Americas. Progress and development of the vast “empty wilderness were their own justification, and the right of conquest was the order of things as God had made them.

In the short term, the race to subdue, dominate, and exploit a whole continent rapidly made the United States an economic and territorial phenomenon which all could quickly recognize would transform the “land of the free” into a global great power and a regional superpower. However, the innate internal contradictions which lay in its foundations because of the “Unfinished Revolution” would one day rise to the surface. Many predicted just such an outcome. But as long as the rush to gain the continent’s enormous potential for development could keep them buried, one way or another the problems could be brushed aside and postponed for the sake of power, money, and personal fulfillment.

TO BE CONTINUED

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The Uses of History, 9 – From France, 1812 to Russia, 1917, 6

Politics is war without bloodshed, while war is politics with bloodshed.

Mao (quoted in Metaphors Be with You, 2016)

Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.

Ronald Reagan (quoted in Metaphors Be with You, 2016)

The garb of religion is the best cloak for power.

William Hazlitt, 1819

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

– Aldous Huxley (quoted in Metaphors Be with You, 2016)

(Image credit – Wikipedia)

Mao’s dictum from The Little Red Book, which launched the horror of the Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960s, is easily and just as truthfully applied to Revolution. For Revolution is the ultimate form of political warfare practiced on the political revolutionary’s own people. In a sense, while professing great love and desire to serve and save his/her people, the revolutionary leader is willing to subject that same beloved people to all sorts of atrocities and contraventions of basic human rights and decencies in the name of freeing them. “It’s for their own good,” say they, just as an angry parent says while preparing to use the rod or the belt or the fist on a recalcitrant child.

This is not to suggest that there is not sometimes a case of such desperation where armed resistance to tyranny and murderous despotism is not justified. The problem is that, if the armed resistance succeeds, as fallible and fallen humans, the victors are just as prone to and capable of coercion and injustice to all their opponents, former or more newly minted, as the old oppressors were.

In modern liberal democracies built largely with either the example of the British or American models in mind, a system of checks and balances is supposed to rectify and hold in check the innate human tendency to, eventually, enjoy the hard-won power too much and begin to see it as the right of the power-wielder to use their position to gain both personal and group advantage for their preferred adherents and supporters.

Since the birth of modern Revolutions in England in the 17th Century, we see this principle in action. One of its most masterful and original exemplars is Oliver Cromwell, England’s Lord Protector from 1650-1658, when England was, momentarily, actually a Republic called the Commonwealth (of Great Britain and Ireland). Just to be clear, the modern “Commonwealth of Nations” has no relationship to it. Cromwell openly used religion as the chief bulwark of his ideology – in his case the most extreme interpretation of the religious ideology called Puritanism. Having been victorious he could claim to “rule by God’s will”.

Victory was the only proof needed. All 50 000 of his elite shock-troops, called the “Ironsides”, were required to unreservedly subscribe to the official theology and to swear loyalty to the Lord Protector (Cromwell). However, it was not their fanaticism which made them invincible in crushing King Charles 1’s Royalist “Cavaliers” between 1645 and 1649, but Cromwell’s iron discipline, elite training methods, and ruthlessness in following up his victories on the battlefield.

For the American Revolutionaries of 1775-83, the religious zeal of their “righteous cause” was formulated in Enlightenment language about “inalienable rights” “endowed by their Creator” making “all men equal” (excluding women, Afro-Americans, Native Americans, etc). It is often forgotten in the semi-sacred rhetoric of the American revolutionaries and their numerous myth-making apologists since then that their interpretation of inalienable rights and divine favor was held, to more or less degree, by about only a third of the adult white population of the Thirteen Colonies. Another third was diametrically opposed to their ideas and their violent methods of seeking to redress their broken relationship with the Mother Country. The final third were desperately seeking to avoid being dragged into the whole terrible mess.

As the Romans said, “History is written by the victors.” American histories and revolutionary historians strongly tend to ignore the truly ugly and unromantic side of those times. They portray the era as a unified colonial struggle to emerge as a newly forged great people on the world stage to champion liberty. They imply that victory was inevitable because their cause was so noble and, just possibly, harkening back to the Puritanism of Cromwellian vintage transplanted to Mew England, God-ordained.

Their Revolution was in fact the First American Civil War, with pitched battles and full-blown atrocities on both sides, at times even without British forces involved in the Southern colonies. It was also a war with two Great Powers (Great Britain and France) fighting another round in their generational contest to see which would gain European and even world imperial supremacy. Another much neglected aspect of the official American tale of victory over the world’s then greatest empire was that without direct and very significant intervention by France, even on American soil itself and by the French Battle Fleet off the Atlantic seaboard, it is quite possible the American cause would have failed, or at least that some of the colonies, especially in the South and New York, would not have become part of the United States in 1783.

The “Patriots” gave the 33% of neutral American colonists the choice of accepting the result and subscribing to the new reality, or being labeled as Loyalists and, ergo, traitors. In order to avoid being shamed and excluded from the life of their own communities, most finally subscribed to the new nation as it became clear how it would turn out. They hoped they would now be left in peace. A good many of these found that, once it was over, they were still shunned and shamed and shut out of normal life by many of those around them because they had never been “true Patriots”.

The “Loyalists”, as the 33% of colonists who openly opposed a break with Britain became known, were subjected to great tribulation and frequently to confiscation of everything they could not carry away with them when they chose or were forced to go into exile. Thousands saw their properties pillaged, and even burned. Tens of thousands of these war refugees made their way to Canada in the 1780s, followed by thousands more in the second and third waves in the 1790s and into the early 1800s. Thousands of others left for the Caribbean and Britain or other colonies. A great many revolutionaries and Johnny-come-lately revolutionaries used the Loyalist evacuations to greatly enrich themselves with property and confiscated valuables, settle old scores, and become powerful in the new United States of America based on their credentials, real or concocted, as “Patriots”.

In our modern age in the West, ideology now largely replaces religion. The God-shaped void in the human soul must and will be filled with something. With Christianity now largely treated as irrelevant, ideology readily steps into the vacuum. Often, the ideology just slithers into the emptiness via materialist rewards, peer pressure, educational indoctrination, and popular culture. With the modern doctrine of the separation of Church and State cemented in place, even many professing Christians leave their religion inside the Church door, then lock in a set of ideological constructs, sometimes sprinkled with Holy Water or, in the Fundamentalist formulation, with the “Blood of Jesus”, to salve their consciences. Thus we justify policies and proposals that, if objectively considered in the light of the Good Book, would be flagrantly opposed to either or both of the Two Great Commandments to (1) “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your mind, all your soul, and all your strength” and (2) “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

By their nature, revolutions are not “peaceable assemblies” or likely to lead to “loving your enemies”, as Jesus once told his disciples to do. The testimony of history has yet to give us a single example of such an outcome.

Ronald Reagan jokingly compared the profession of politics to prostitution. Joking aside, many who delve with any seriousness into politics will well understand the truth behind his witty quip. Winston Churchill, one of the greatest wits to ever win political greatness, certainly made the same comparison more than once with the same tongue-in-cheek nod towards the comment’s justice.

Perhaps revolutionaries are among the most prostituted of political zealots. They contravene many of their own lofty declarations about defending and fighting for basic rights and freedoms and violating those same rights and freedoms as they get hold of the inexorable levers of State power machinery to enforce their will on everyone “for the greater good”. Hazlitt saw this clearly in 1819 as he looked back upon the previous thirty years on the 30th anniversary of the French Revolution. he accused Britain’s Evangelicals in their reforming zeal of the same sin. Power is its own temptation, even for saints in office. That is why Jesus warned about not being able to serve two masters no matter how well-intentioned someone may be to begin with.

The French Revolutions of 1789-99, 1830, and 1848 which we have so far observed confirm the previous examples of revolutionary outcomes. Even when there was at times less outright slaughter, the lessons remain the same. As we move forward to the next Revolutionary events to be considered in this series, is there any chance to see something truly different emerge as people desperate for freedom rise up against their oppressors and even occasionally turn the tables on them?

Before we get to Russia in 1917, both the United States and France have more to tell us.

STAY TUNED

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The Uses of History, 8 – From France, 1812 to Russia, 1917, 5 – 1848

Man is born free but is everywhere in chains. –

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, 1754.

An epic heroism has shone forth in the personal struggles of Socrates, of Paul and Augustine, of Luther and Galileo, and in that larger cultural struggle, borne by these and by many less visible protagonists, which has moved the West on its extraordinary course. There is high tragedy here. And there is something beyond tragedy.

Richard Tarnas, Preface to The Passion of the Western Mind, 1991

It is for freedom that Christ has set us free; stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be bound again by a yoke of slavery.

– Paul the Apostle, Letter to the Galatians, 5:1 (New International Translation), ca 50 CE

(Photo credit – Wikipedia – a Paris street barricade on June 25, 1848 before the Army assault)

The situation of the world in the closing weeks of 2021 would require none of the thinkers quoted above to change a word of what they wrote.

The earliest of them, the Apostle Paul, St. Paul to many Christians, was writing to a group of recent converts to Christianity (a term with which they would not yet be familiar) in the Roman province of Galatia, which was in what is now central Turkey. The freedom he was urging them to preserve was not political in any immediate sense, but spiritual and social. The slavery he referred to was slavery to old habits of sin and dependence on moral-religious legalism defined by many constraining practices that had little to do with living in relationship with their Risen Lord.

1700 years later, Rousseau lamented that so little had changed, despite the passage of many centuries since Christianity had become the dominant cultural and religious paradigm of the West. The bright hope and promise of what Paul had so earnestly striven to both demonstrate and inculcate among the first generation of Jesus-followers had long given way to the stultification of another regime of laws and rules and penalties to control people’s religious, political, social, economic, and cultural behaviour.

Rousseau had himself grown up in ultra-Calvinist Geneva, been mentored by a priest in Italy, then corrupted by an older rich Italian patroness. He had fled to France to find his way among the smart set of the rising philosophe­s who were challenging all the old dogmas and social restrictions justified by the “Divine Order” of Church and State whose nabobs jointly ruled the most powerful nation in Europe.

This is perhaps part of what Tarnas’ 1991 diagnosis of the whole saga of the West’s intellectual and cultural heritage as “beyond tragedy” may refer to. A deep spiritual, social, and cultural PTSD underpins the West’s long and winding road to its present soul-crisis, which we now also see manifesting as acute socio-economic-political turmoil. As Tarnas says, it is indeed “high tragedy” and even “beyond tragedy”. As an ancient proverb says, “Hope deferred sickens the heart.”

Many would say that the root of it all is the bitterness of the continual failure of the West’s quest for the Holy Grail of “freedom”. As we survey the long tale of the emergence, ascent to hegemony, and now precipitate decline of the “high civilization” of the West, once called “Christendom”, there is certainly no lack of tragedy – high hopes, bright promise, tragic loss and bitter disappointment. The brief moment of what appeared to be the sublime triumph of Western-style liberal democracy in the 1990s did not last for more than a decade before ominous dark clouds appeared again. Today, those clouds are bringing forth truly alarming major thunder.

An apocalyptic ending is not necessarily inevitable, at least not yet. But, as Yeshua-Jesus once said, we need to be alert and awake and reading the signs. “When the Son of Man” (a title he often used in reference to himself) “returns, will he find faith in the earth?” In his riddle, faith refers to trust, trust in a living relationship with the central figure that stands at the heart of the West’s long story. Many now resent the fact that the central figure of the West’s story remains, to this day, Yeshua/Jesus of Nazareth. They would rather say that it is anyone or anything other than the “Son of Man” who still haunts our dreams through a tremendous legacy of now dashed high hopes.

For Jesus said “If the Son [of Man] sets you free, you shall be free indeed.” The deepest desire of every living human, bred in the bone, is to “be free indeed” and no longer held “by a yoke of slavery.” Just because we have left the ultimate source of these sublime hopes and ideals behind doesn’t mean we have abandoned the ideal. But left to ourselves it seems we cannot get there.

That is what Rousseau passionately understood. He had left behind allegiance to the religion that professed Jesus as Saviour, but was wise and passionate enough to mourn for his own and the whole of humanity’s loss. His own ultimate failure to find another center to fill the void made him a bitter and lonely man for the rest of his life. His brilliant mind and passionate heart could not create another core by its own strength of will. Rousseau is indeed the archetype of so much of the modern and post-modern West’s tortured psyche and tumultuous story.

Contemporaneously with Rousseau, “Freedom” is what the American Revolutionaries of 1775-83 knew they wanted. At least they thought so within the limits of a carefully crafted and limited rational version of it. Many of them based this core-passion of their lives on Rationalism, Reason, and Science, the new substitutes for the old Holy Trinity. They held that these great gifts could be enjoyed without relationship to the Giver, having satisfactorily and “reasonably” shunted the Creator to a minor role in this world.

Freedom (Liberté) is what the Girondins, Jacobins, Hébertistes and other ideologues of the French Revolution declared as their great goal. They set out to build it into their new Republic in 1792, even as they overthrew the French Monarchy and executed its King in January 1793. To ensure Liberty, they then launched the Terror to expunge the relics of the Royal regime. Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité quickly became another rationalization of vengeance and purification by blood-letting à outrance. To highlight their new truth they even created a quasi-religious pageant dedicated to the Goddess Reason, dressing a Paris prostitute in classic robes and derisively crowning her in Notre Dame Cathedral.

The problem with successful revolutions (as with battles and wars) is what the victors decide to do with their victory. All the high passion and strident rhetoric about freedom all too often disappear in an orgy of violent retribution upon the former oppressors. Between 1793-4, the Terror in France is said to have beheaded 30 000 “traitors” before it was ended by its chief perpetrator, Robespierre, taking his turn at the guillotine. The “Terror Phase” of revolution is usually followed by new sets of restrictions and limitations to control embittered losers and other dissidents, and firmly entrench the new definers of freedom in control with their hands on the machinery of State and jurisprudence. The Church is either cowed into official acquiescence or driven underground by persecution.[i]

Thus, as we turn our attention to France once more following the successful July Revolution of 1830, the beneficiaries of the new regime were not principally the workers and artisans or even the regular Middle Class, but the rich and powerful untitled class who controlled the national finances and business establishment. While concessions such as freedom of the press, religion, and some forms of association were permitted, most of the hopes for moderate reform were disappointed. The vote remained limited to a miniscule one-percent minority of the wealthiest.

In 1847, after seventeen years of this oligarchy headed by King Louis-Philippe, it began to unravel. The thirst for freedom could not be squelched forever. Political assemblies had been banned as the economy went sour and the always brooding and frustrated reformers had become more and more vocal in calling for an end to a blatantly anti-democratic regime. When meetings were banned, they began holding banquets where all the speakers advocated for political and social liberalization such as had been advancing in England since the Reform Act of 1830. England’s relative gradual success in shedding the worst aspects of reactionary repression following the Napoleonic era spared it from what exploded on the Continent in the late winter of 1848.

Once more, France led the way. On February 24, 1848, after three days of street fighting, marching, and violent protests, coupled with the refusal of the Middle-Class National Guard to obey orders to suppress the rebels and the steady desertion of the regular troops who were ordered to suppress the mobs, Louis Philippe’s government fell and he abdicated in favour of his son. But the provisional government which seized control was dominated by Republican reformers. Before long, the Provisional government declared its new regime to be the Second French Republic.

The tocsin sounded all across Europe as liberal reformers and a rising socialist wave took to the streets in all the major capitals and many minor ones from Berlin to Rome and Vienna.

By summer much of the fever-mist of the “Spring of Hope”, as 1848 was dubbed, was giving way to less sanguine outcomes from the revolutionary perspective. (Similar to what happened in the recent “Arab Spring” of 2011-12.) The liberal middle-class in most of the venues where uprisings occurred against reactionary absolutism did not have “the killer instinct” to push their advantage home. In Austria, a new Emperor named Franz-Josef took power. He proved to have much more steel in his spine than his predecessor. The military was ordered to end the rebellion, and, apart from a year-long desultory civil war with the Hungarians who sought equality with or independence from Austria, the rebellion swiftly faded out from Lombardy to Croatia to Vienna to Prague.

By contrast, King Frederick-William of Prussia did not want to spill blood. Instead, he simply waited for the liberals to demonstrate their inability to organize the new unified Germany they were calling for, then dismissed their convention. He did however grant significant concessions and reforms within his own territory. He was warned by resurgent Austria not to accept the offer of the Crown of a united Germany or face war with them.

The last word once more went to France. By late April, the dissatisfied Socialist radicals saw the new republic being suborned by the business and middle classes once more, although with a much wider franchise and more freedoms. What was on offer by June under the proposed new constitution proved a bitter disappointment to the labouring classes and those with socialist ideals. By this point Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto was circulating with great effect, and the old Jacobin ideas had been renewed with greater clarity. They wanted a “Social Republic”. In June, the National Workshops which provided a bare minimum to unemployed workers were closed by the Constituent Assembly. The failure to produce meaningful recognition of workers’ rights and needs resulted in a mass revolt in Paris where a Commune was proclaimed and barricades went up all over the city.

This time, the newly-minted “legitimate” administration did not hesitate and the National Guard obeyed orders to contain the spread of anarchy while the regular troops under the ruthless General Cavaignac moved into the city en masse with artillery batteries. The “June Days” (June 23-26) saw Paris turned into a battlefield and the streets of whole arrondissements literally flowing with blood. An estimated 3000 insurgents and 1500 soldiers died before the revolt was ruthlessly crushed. Refugees and fugitives that could fled to Germany, and many made their way to England. 4000 were deported to Algeria, which was becoming France’s penal colony, as Australia was for the United Kingdom. Queen Victoria’s stable realm was by this point seen as the richest, safest, freest, and sanest nation in Europe.

Unlike what happened in Austria, the slaughter in France was not the work of an oligarchy or a Royal tyranny. This was full-on class war in what was then considered the greatest city in Europe and perhaps the world. A republican regime had done this to fellow citizens in the name of liberté, égalité, fraternité! Karl Marx looked like a true prophet, but, no longer welcome in France, he eventually made his way to England to write articles and, eventually, his masterpiece, Das Kapital.

Nevertheless, 1848 had deep, far-reaching consequences, despite what looked largely like another victory for the reactionaries. Some real steps toward that elusive ideal of freedom seemed to have been made.

TO BE CONTINUED

[i] The same pattern can be observed over and over in the corporate world – without the bloodshed of course, unless it be in a “Family” firm such as the Mafia. The pattern is a universal phenomenon of human behaviour. Even religious zealots indulge in it in the name of “love” or “truth”.

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The Uses of History, 7 – From France 1812 to Russia, 1917, 4

(Image credit: Web Gallery of Art)

Following the failure of the Decembrist Revolt in 1825 and the accession of Tsar Nicholas I, the vast Russian Empire was locked into extreme reactionarianism. The reformist elements were suppressed and no license was permitted in expressing contrary views to Divine Right for the Tsar under God’s anointing, aristocratic privilege as its corollary, as well as the complete lock on religious life of the Russian Orthodox Church. Dissidents were dealt with harshly, and many went into voluntary exile in Central and Western Europe, where the favourite refuge was, naturally, France, with scattered enclaves in parts of Germany (preferably not Prussia) and Switzerland. For those who did not leave of their own accord, penal settlements in Siberia provided limitless space in which to accommodate them. Let them fulminate among themselves there and contaminate no one else. Isolation in a harsh environment for years might well pacify them, or kill them as they struggled to survive with only pitiful resources and no bully-pulpit to spew forth their poison.

In France, by contrast, as long as the Russian émigrés stayed out of French politics, they were free to meet, discuss, and come and go as they pleased. Charles X, the reactionary King of France (1824-30), concerned himself little with them. They could even publish their own Russian-language news sheet and print books, as long as they did not begin to disseminate unwelcome radical notions among the French citizenry. France had its own radical set to do that. Thus began the long-standing presence of a sizable Russian émigré community in France. Such exists to this very day.

France was no longer a hospitable environment for old-style Absolutism, despite the relapse into something similar under Napoleon. But, as we have previously indicated in this series, there were real differences. Napoleon did not renounce aristocracy per se. He transformed the idea to an aristocracy of merit based on talent and service to the nation (which, as long as he held power, meant himself as the embodiment of France’s greatness). But the principle was not one of hereditary status based on unearned right to rule (Divine Right in the old formulation), but allegiance to the nation, and therefore to the people under the holy Trinity of liberté, égalité, fraternité.

The more reflective and aware of France’s intellectuals and the socially, politically, and economically active citizens understood this and could not support or accept Charles’ foolish and increasingly repressive attempt to turn back the clock. Charles began to face increasingly serious opposition even among the more savvy aristocracy who understood that, unless Charles relented and ceased whittling away the even limited liberal policies of his dead brother, Louis XVIII, another revolution was brewing. And if it erupted, uncontrolled, Royal rule in France might be over for good.

Meanwhile, Charles had attempted to create a distraction by sending an expeditionary force to Algeria in 1828. Isn’t a nice little war always a good distraction for a dissatisfied people? Wouldn’t it be like a pressure relief valve on one of those new-fangled steam-engines that were invading the industrial world?

The Algerian tribes proved a tougher nut to crack than anticipated. The expeditionary force had to be repeatedly reinforced, and losses mounted. The justification was the elimination of pirates from the western Mediterranean, but the real objective was to lend some military glory to an increasingly unpopular regime, and, nominally, to bring Christianity (Roman Catholicism) to the Islamic infidels by showing that the Christian God was superior. Doesn’t lending a bit of crusading élan to naked aggression palliate otherwise base oppression? We don’t have to look to the past to see this in action in many places even in the 21st Century, and not only among the nominally once-Christian nations of the West or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In the spring of 1830, with things bogged down both at home and abroad, the economy stagnating, and new repressive measures at hand to ban all criticism of the government and reduce even further the voting franchise, the reformists decided it was time to get rid of this hated monarchy. On July 27, with the King’s agents seeking to snuff out the opposition and purify Paris of the increasingly restive populace’s growing protests, the shades of Jacobinism resurfaced. Mobs took to the streets and barricades went up. (For readers of Les Misérables, this is the background of the famous odyssey of Jean Valjean carrying Mario on his back through the sewers of Paris.)

But what, or who, should replace the hated Bourbons? Another republic? God forbid! For the haute bourgeoisie of Paris and France, who were now the real power-élite, a return to Jacobinism (the term for the most radical socialist and egalitarian ideology of the Revolution) with its anarchy and chaos was unthinkable! Jacobin elements were not hard to find in the shadows of Paris’ salons and clubs, disguised under many names. To preserve France they had to be nipped in the bud.

Should they return to Bonapartism? Bonapartists could be found around every corner in France. The dead Emperor haunted the national soul. But to have an avowed Bonapartist in power would mean almost instant war with the old foes of Austria and Prussia, and very likely Russia. England would probably take a wait-and-see approach, but the continental Great Powers would not have great difficulty in subduing an unprepared France in 1830.

The voting Middle Class and many others aspiring to access the franchise found a compromise that might just convince France’s wary old enemies to accept a major change of regime. His name was Louis-Philippe, and he was the scion of the Orléaniste branch of the Bourbons. He had been a vocal critic of his cousin, King Charles X. He had many moderate contacts and solid credentials. He was an avowed advocate of moderate reforms and an expanded franchise, freedom of the press and religion, and the new government of meritocracy rather than hereditary privilege.

In late July 1830 things came to a head. The King ordered the disbandment of the Paris National Guard, which was largely made up of the male citizens of Paris’ Middle Class, who were calling for Charles to abdicate. He also ordered the closing of or severe restrictions on almost all the newspapers, who were also calling for an end to Charles’ mounting tyranny. Riots and demonstrations followed almost every day for weeks.

Maréchal Marmont, the commander of the Army in Paris and one of Napoleon’s Marshals who had turned against his former Emperor in March 1814, now tacitly turned against the King. A liberal, without actually sending troops to aid the revolutionaries, he simply refused to call in the necessary reinforcements to quell the cascading revolt. He did not want the streets of Paris running with blood. Blood nevertheless flowed as troops at first mostly followed orders. But gradually the enlisted men and field officers began to desert in droves rather than massacre the populace. When the King’s last loyal troops, ironically another Swiss Guard (King Louis XVI’s last loyal troops in 1792 had been a previous Swiss Guard incarnation and had died to the last man), deserted rather than repeat the fate of their national forebears, Charles was forced to abdicate in favour of his cousin, Louis-Philippe.

While this upheaval has been labelled the “bourgeois revolution”, for the French Middle Class were the big winners, the lessons were not lost on the underclasses still waiting for their fair share of liberté, égalité, fraternité.

Louis-Philippe was granted a throne with more limited powers under a reinforced constitutional monarchy, leaving much more power for the new ruling class to enjoy. His reign was recognized as based on popular sovereignty, the will of the people, rather than any sort of inherited or pre-ordained right.

Louis-Philippe was titled “King of France”, but he sat a shaky throne. He escaped several assassination attempts – both from ultra-Royalists and radical Republicans who were unhappy, declaring that the 1830 Revolution was hardly worthy of the name. Much unfinished business remained. Revolts against his rule failed in 1831,1840, and 1841. The bourgeois National Guard helped crush all of them.

A period of prosperity and rapid economic growth followed, but by late 1847 the embers of Revolution were once more glowing bright. The growing Russian émigré community in exile was watching closely and learning.

On the continent of Europe, France was the key to everything that had happened since 1789, and would be once more in 1848, an unforgettable year by any measure.

NEXT TIME: 1848, a Workshop in Revolution.

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The Uses of History, 6 – From France 1812 to Russia, 1917, 3

“The English are the only people upon earth who have been able to prescribe limits to the power of Kings by resisting them, and who, by a series of struggles, have at last established … that wise government where the prince is all powerful to do good, and at the same time is restrained from committing evil … and where the people share in the government without confusion.”

Voltaire in Letters Concerning the English Nation.

(Rousseau – Image credit – Wikipedia)

The use of the term “revolution” to describe a great turn-about in some area of culture and society has been devalued and banalized by hyperbole in commercial and technological advertising. Even normal political “evolution” has been denigrated in this way of describing almost any notable change of policy as “revolutionary”.

However, the true “Age of Revolutions” began with the English Civil Wars of 1642-49. Without rehearsing the long lead-up to that seminal event, we cannot neglect its significance as a deep root of all the political revolutions that have followed in European and World History since then. Yet this event is now almost invisible in our overview of the most important events of Western and World History.

The events in England in those years settled a very basic question in one of the world’s major monarchies. The foremost reason the British Monarchy has endured to this day is because it was settled then, once and for all, that Parliament, the elected representatives of the English people (although it was then selected by a small minority of English adult male voters), could and did prescribe specific limits to the authority and reach of the Monarch and his agents. Once the principle was established and enshrined constitutionally, the rights of the people must increase and gain ascendancy over time, and increasingly so over generations.

This was confirmed by “the Glorious Revolution of 1688” when the last of the Stuart Kings attempted to restore absolutism and was driven out of Britain for good for his arrogant presumption. His successors, King William and Queen Mary, swore to respect and uphold the authority and rights of Parliament henceforth and forever.

Thus it was that several of France’s key philosophes (the intellectual ancestors of the French Revolution, such as Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu) extolled the example of England as a balanced approach to limiting (de-absolutizing) absolute monarchy and deconstructing feudalism while elevating the educated populace to a position of near, if not then complete, equality under law and in social, political, and economic status.

However, it is a fallacy to think of the Enlightenment Progressives as “democrats” in the way we use that term today. The preferred Enlightenment model of government, at least on the European continent, was “Enlightened Despotism”. Even Voltaire, who had lived in England and come to admire it, and was himself a multi-millionaire if his income were calculated in current equivalents, strove to promote Enlightened Despotism by corresponding and even visiting monarchs such as Frederick II of Prussia, whom he saw as a hopeful exemplar. Apparently, to his thinking, the English example was a peculiar aberration that could not be emulated elsewhere. Inevitably he was disillusioned by Frederick, for a “Despot” is an absolute monarch by definition. For a pragmatist such as Frederick II, restraint is a matter of the exigencies of present political, social, and economic need. When Voltaire’s “great hope” launched calculated aggressive war on his neighbours to gain territories and other advantages, his disillusionment was great indeed.

Montesquieu admired Great Britain’s balance of power in the political, social, and economic spheres. We may justly call him the “Father of Political Science”, and his laser-like insights were collected in The Spirit of Laws” in which he outlined the fine division of powers among the three “branches of government” in England – Parliament, the Legislative, or law-making, Branch, the Monarchy, or Executive Branch, and the Courts, or Judiciary Branch. Montesquieu posited that such a division was essential to avoid the abuses of Absolutism and the onset of Despotism, no matter how “enlightened” a specific sovereign might prove to be. Divine Right, if it existed at all, was with the people, not an individual claiming a sort of demi-god status anointed by the Deity.

Neither Voltaire nor Montesquieu named France’s monarchy and bloated aristocratic elite as the chief object of their eloquent criticism of Absolutism in all its forms, but their writings were perilously close to seditious in the climate of the times before the revolution broke out.

In the long run, the most influential of all the “Big Three” thinkers of the French Enlightenment was Rousseau. Rousseau stands apart. As a brilliant thinker and writer in his own right, he shocked even the trendy, progressive “salon set” with his radicalism between 1754 and his death in 1778. He further scandalized the elite social set by deliberately affronting the ethical and moral standards of the day. He was an iconoclast par excellence. Having made the fashionable rounds and enjoyed extensive patronage to gain fame and even notoriety, he refused to conform to expectations to settle down as a well-mannered participant in the theoretical discussions about how things ought to change in the proper proportion and desired direction. He wrote extensively and his books were best-sellers. His caustic style spared no one, but whatever he wrote gained a wide audience. He even dared critique the Enlightenment`s new ultimate idol, Reason, as the only source of wisdom and knowledge and the only way to understand any great issue.

Rousseau has been labeled many things – the Great-Grandfather of Communism, the Great-Grandfather of Fascism, the Grandfather of Romanticism. Such contradictory epithets almost beggar comprehension – unless you read him closely and extensively!

He was a divergent thinker and actor, not easy to categorize; he was a proto-revolutionary!

The primary radical movers of the French Revolution (especially the Jacobins) saw Rousseau, not Voltaire or any of the others, as their real inspiration. Rousseau despised the aristocrats. He saw the King as their dupe. He considered most of the mainstream philosophes as compromised – ready to do business with the old noblesse, to enjoy the privileges of special status in the intellectual salon-clubs while telling everyone else how to fix the nation. He roundly criticized the smart-set as enemies of true equality, mainly concerned with widening the circle of privilege and expanding the sharing of social and economic advantage with the most worthy, up-and-coming nouveaux-riches and practitioners of Reason (themselves) who could guide the future of the State and society. Even though he had lived in exile, Voltaire fell into this pit in Rousseau’s mind, although a little less. The famous Voltaire quip, “I may not agree with what your say but I will defend your right to say it to the death,” may well have been aimed at Rousseau.

When we seek to understand why, above all the other nations and peoples of Europe, France became the pilot-house, the cock-pit of Revolution, we must see it as the birthplace of most of the radical strains of ideology that later emerged as modern Socialism, Communism, and the laboratory where such things were tested in proto-type. As we have pointed out previously, the incredible tidal wave of fervent political and social activism that swept out of France from 1789 forward and surged into every nook and cranny of Europe would penetrate deep into Russia.

But the most toxic fruit of those seed would not emerge until 1917. The growth of that tree and its shoots is still with us in 2022.

TO BE CONTINUED

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The Uses of History, 5 – From France to Russia, 1812-1917, 2

(Image credit – Wikipedia)

Napoleon died in exile in 1821 on the small British-held island of St. Helena in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean.

The Emperor was dead, but his legend was not, nor were the enormous repercussions of his revolutionary legacy. Napoleon had self-servingly but not entirely wrongly advertised himself as the stabilizer of Europe and its liberator all at the same time. To a considerable degree, he was what he claimed to be while he held power. The “liberation” was heavily tempered by militarism and the constant danger of secret-police arrest for sedition against the Emperor, but European culture and society were in rapid reformation and were, by and large, experiencing a significant advance in the recognition of personal liberties, constitutional rights, uniform and more equitable laws and social conditions, and economic opportunities. The ideals these pointed to were spread all over Europe as the French shakos marched everywhere from Portugal to Poland, and French bureaucrats and judicial officials followed in their wake, rewriting constitutions and legal systems.

Like any great conqueror and dictator, the Emperor sought to institutionalize and legitimize his rule and actions. His self-justifying memoirs were a best-seller in France and Europe when posthumously published, despite the desire of the reactionary Bourbon Kings Louis 18 and Charles 10 to repress them. Louis enjoyed a relatively peaceful, if rather short reign (1815-24). He had the good sense to allow a small minority of well-to-do middle-class and prosperous businessmen to elect a Legislative Assembly, even if it had very limited powers. He allowed a modicum of freedom of the press and assembly. Louis did not abolish all Napoleon’s reforms, for he understood that it was impossible to turn back the clock to pre-revolutionary days and hand back all the old aristocratic estates, prerogatives, and privileges, or to restore all the immense property and influence which the Roman Catholic Church had enjoyed until 1791.

Besides, Louis had intelligent advisers reminding him that the Napoleonic system had really unified France and given the central government, which was now the Royal Government, an efficient professional bureaucracy, effective control of education and finance, a universally applicable legal system not bounded by long-outmoded old feudal boundaries and traditions, and a truly effective centralized police establishment. The national constabulary was still run by Napoleon’s architect, Fouché, who, like Napoleon’s Machiavellian Foreign Minister, Talleyrand, knew which side his bread was buttered on and smoothly switched allegiances at the right time by demonstrating his own indispensability.

Louis even allowed some of the Napoleon-created Imperial nobility to retain their titles, although not respecting all the land-grants the Emperor had made to his aristocracy of merit (or nepotism). He told many of the old nobility seeking redress and revenge that to undo the last thirty years was simply impossible, and, while he would not revoke their old titles if they chose to identify themselves by them, he would not award them compensation either – although he usually gave them a lump-sum or perhaps a stipend to tide them over while they found their way in the new social and economic reality of post-1815 France. Most of the revolutionary and Napoleonic reforms stood.

But his successor and younger brother Charles X (1824-30) was a reactionary fool who had disagreed vehemently with his brother’s policies even while he lived, and declared that he meant to undo most of the Revolution’s and the “Monster’s” [Napoleon] work of modernization, despite the clear historical proof that it had made France a European super-power. He also intended to restore all the glory of the old noblesse and the Roman Catholic Church.

What was the connection to Russia in all this? In December 1825, a group of young, idealistic Russian army officers decided it was time to force the lumbering, backward apparatus of Tsarism into the modern age. While the Great Patriotic War against the Emperor of the French had galvanized the Russian Empire led by the heroic Tsar Alexander 1 in a herculean effort that led to Napoleon’s ultimate downfall, the virus of Revolution had already spread to Russia in four successive waves (shades of COVID!).

The first wave was in the first Russian intervention in the wars of Central and Western Europe at the turn of the 19th Century. Russian troops were sent to help bring down the revolution and restore “legitimate” sovereignty. The new Tsar, Alexander 1, sought to prove himself a worthy successor of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great and a serious role-player in greater European (and world) affairs, not a mere regional power in Eastern Europe and northern Asia.

In alliance with Austria, in 1800 a Russian Army had penetrated all the way to Switzerland and was poised to invade France. It was at this critical juncture that “Bonaparte” returned to France from Egypt and saved the Republic and all the gains and reforms won for the French nation and people (especially the politically dominant middle class) since 1789. It was the first time Napoleon’s armies defeated Russian troops, driving them deep back into Austrian territory, although the French Army in Switzerland was commanded by another of France’s best generals. When Napoleon forced Austria into a humiliating peace after his great victory at Marengo, Alexander called his troops home.

This was the first major exposure of young Russian intelligentsia and officers (mostly recruited from Russia’s minor aristocracy and the boyar-class who were similar to the English gentleman-class) to the wide gap in culture and progress between Russia’s enshrined and immovable aristocratic stranglehold on any advance and reform and that of the rest of Europe. The Tsar, seen as a quasi-demigod in his own right, was sacred and untouchable, but he was surrounded by a wall of intransigent, immovable relics bearing high titles, immense wealth, and holding the mass of the Russian population in the almost slavish conditions of serfdom with little to no hope of change.

When Alexander had acceded to power in 1801, the idealists had placed high hopes that he, a young man himself, could be shown and persuaded that things had to change for the sake of the Russian people and the Empire itself. By 1825, the lower-grade officers (ranks below general – Generals and Marshals could only be upper-level nobles) had lost hope in Alexander or any of the established authorities of ever being willing or able to allow even the most modest reforms.

This second Russian intervention in Central Europe came in 1805. Subsidized by British money, a large Russian forced once more joined with Austria (also financed by Britain) to move rapidly into Germany to threaten Napoleon’s rear as he prepared to invade England. (This threat ended with British Admiral Horatio Nelson’s famous utter smashing of the combined French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar in October 1805.)

While the young Russian officers did their duty and the rank-and-file stolidly did what they were told, in a combined campaign with the Austrians they were completely out-manoeuvred and suffered one of the most crushing defeats in military history at Austerlitz in December 1805. Once more, Austria was defeated and occupied by triumphant French forces. Napoleon wintered his “Grand Armée” in Vienna and the core territory of Austria to drive home his power. Austria was forced into the French orb for the next eight years, while the remnant of the Russian army withdrew to the newly annexed Russian part of Poland with Alexander still refusing to make peace with “the Monster” and “the Usurper”.

However, the moderate Francophile elements in Russia’s middle-class and minor nobility could not avoid being powerfully impressed by the evidence of change and progress they had met and kept meeting in foreign lands to the West of Mother Russia. They could not help thinking that Russia must accept such new ways too if it were not to be left behind. It was evident that the power of these changes and new perspectives had turned France into Europe’s super-power with the whole nation behind its supremacy in the political, social, and cultural realms. Alexander eventually made peace with Napoleon in 1807 after another defeat, and in the wake of Napoleon’s complete crushing and humiliation of Prussia in 1806. Prussia had been the only other major land-power still standing until then. Like Austria, it was completely humiliated and forced to ally with Napoleon, giving up huge tracts of territory and submitting to severe limitations on its army and political independence.

The third “wave” of exposure to the revolutionary virus for the Russian minor nobility and gentry was during the “Great Patriotic War” of 1812-14 when Napoleon sought to invade and coerce Russia to adhere to his “Continental System”, but failed. We have already discussed this, but during that war the virus penetrated to the very heart of Mother Russia. It did not retire with Napoleon’s beaten army as 1812 drew to a close.

The fourth wave was during the Russian occupation of Paris and parts of France following Napoleon’s abdication in 1815. The Russian army and swarms of Russian civilians followed the army into the heart of “revolutiondom”. Despite the Bourbon dynasty’s return to France, all the ferment and undertow of the revolutionary-Napoleonic tsunami were still pulsating and swirling. The example of so much exposure to new ideas and perspectives journeyed home with the last withdrawing Russian contingents in 1818.

In 1818, the Tsar joined with the Emperor of Austria and the King of Prussia to assume the role of arbiters of legitimacy in all of Europe east of France. All revolts and insurrections aiming for greater rights and liberties for the common people were ruthlessly crushed henceforward, and Poland and Italy in particular felt the wrath of “the League of Three Emperors” and “their Most Christian Majesties”, although King Frederick-William of Prussia was technically not an emperor. This was the clincher for the fading hopes of the Russian reformists. It confirmed the hopelessness of Russia’s fossilization symbolized by Alexander’s now ossified “delusion”, in their minds, of being God’s anointed instrument in crushing the godless French Emperor.

In December 1825 the Tsar died unexpectedly of typhus. The desperate wannabe Russian proto-revolutionaries decided to act before the still more reactionary successor, Nicholas I, could consolidate his rule, revolted, and briefly threatened the whole Tsarist system with chaos and overthrow. They failed. The seeds of all this had been long-before sown in and from and through France.

The wind had been sown; the whirlwind would follow.

TO BE CONTINUED

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The Uses of History, 4 – From France to Russia, 1812-1917, 1

(Image credit Wikipedia)

On June 22, 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of the French, sent his massed armies into the immense expanse of the Russian Empire. Never before in history had anything like it been seen: 650 000 French and French allied troops representing most of the peoples of Europe invaded the last European land-power still daring to oppose “the Emperor”, as Bonaparte had now become known.

Those Napoleonic armies stood for much more than the overreach of the most successful military commander in European History up to that time. They stood for the essence of the new kind of modern state arising, willy-nilly, out of the crumbling debris of the old feudal order which had held European society in its grip since the last previous great pan-European Emperor, Charlemagne (768-814 CE), 1000 years before.

Napoleon was well aware of the parallels. He loved to exploit the symbolism of the new order supplanting the old. His aristocracy was merit-based, not inherited regardless of merit. The French Republic he had overthrown had given him the basic tools, but he had honed them into the well-oiled, administratively efficient modern state aiming to bring Europe into being the next great age in its evolution – a United States of Europe under the incarnation of the Enlightened Despot ideal of the philosophes. Needless to say, he was that incarnation.

Napoleon’s Grand Armée had a mission everywhere it went – to plant not only the French flag but the French Enlightenment ­à la [mode de] Napoléon. All this can be read from Napoleon’s memoirs, written from his final exile on St. Helena in the mid-South Atlantic Ocean between 1815 and 1821.

Now, over 210 years later, we live in the all-but-invisible shadow of everything that ensued from the whirlwind epoch of France’s nearly complete conquest of Europe.

If we are conscious of any of this as we historically sleepwalk towards our own version of Armageddon in the 21st Century CE, it is usually with only the vaguest notions. “Napoleon? O yeah, wasn’t he some guy from France who tried to conquer Europe? When was that again? Couldn’t have been that big a deal, could it? After all, those people were still using single-shot smooth-bore muskets and wonky cannons that couldn’t shoot farther than a couple of kilometers.”

With two horrendous World Wars under our belts since then, and some very nasty revolutions that killed more tens of millions, the events of those far-off days pale in comparison – don’t they? The ten million dead of the European wars fought from 1792-1815 wouldn’t think so.

In all overall sense, if we just want a crude body-count, it would seem that that far-off first “total war” in world-history was not so impressive. But its human cost was half of that of World War One inflicted on a much smaller population. Furthermore, major battles of that time lasted a single day or perhaps two, or at most three, not weeks. Yet they left proportionately far higher body counts than most combats in either World War – even using the “crude” weapons of that day. Borodino, fought on September 7, 1812 over about 14 hours, about 100 km west of Moscow, at the height of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, inflicted almost 100 000 casualties out of approximately 270 000 combatants. Waterloo, the last battle of the Napoleonic wars on June 18, 1815, inflicted 58 000 casualties on approximately 155 000 combatants in the space of seven hours of relentless slaughter – more than the casualties for the three-day Battle of Gettysburg (July 1-2, 1863).

Following Borodino, Napoleon captured Moscow, something Hitler’s armies failed to do following the German invasion of Russia which began on June 22, 1941. Yes, Hitler launched his attack on the same day Napoleon had! At length, after almost four years, Hitler’s war on Russia had the same result – a disastrous defeat resulting in the collapse of the French/German hegemony in Europe, with a consequent enormous expansion of Russian power.

It is unknowable how long the influence of the French Revolution would have endured outside of France without Napoleon as its self-appointed Apostle. When he seized power in 1799, Napoleon literally saved a corrupt and crumbling state from sliding into collapse and an orgy of retribution at the hands of its numerous enemies. France’s foes were then closing in on the pre-revolutionary borders of 1789, having stripped away almost all the territory the Republic’s sometimes rag-tag armies had wrested from the various monarchies opposing her.

Napoleon had been away leading an army in Egypt and Palestine, trying, and failing, to establish a base to move on India, the jewel of the British Empire. When he returned, eluding the British blockade of Egypt, he found enough collaborators to claim power and launch a ruthless campaign to eject the corrupt administration then in place and reform the army. He then personally led it to a series of rapid victories that cemented his role as the indispensable saviour of the Revolution. He owned the battlefields of Europe for the next twelve years.

Our previous episode outlined some of the long-term legacy left by the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era, and thus of the Emperor himself, in Europe and the world at large. Our object is now to draw out the direct line from France in 1812 to Russia in 1917, when another revolutionary tsunami shattered much of the residual imperialistic monarchical world-order that had been carried forward from Napoleon’s incomplete vision.

One may well wonder what kind of causality flows from Imperial France in 1812 to Imperial Russia in 1917. Were not both monarchies and imperially bloated mega-states which collapsed via war?

Indeed they were. But that is a mere superficial connection. The roots run much deeper.

Although Napoleon took control of the French state, and despite his severe censorship and his efficient secret police, he did not succeed in muting those who clung to the most radical elements of the French revolutionary intelligentsia. His moderate reforms were designed to calm the masses, not stir up disorder about failed hopes and expectations. These included universal male suffrage, although only exercised in periodic referenda to ratify his authority, or to elect the rubber-stamp National Assembly and Senate and various local authorities. These were radical by the standard of what existed elsewhere in Europe, or the world for that matter. Slavery had been abolished in the French Empire. Education had been generalized and centralized under state control. The Roman Catholic Church no longer directed education or could collect tithes and force the populace to adhere to its dogmas. Public office was open to all to apply and win by merit of ability, as were all rankings in the armed forces. The Legion of Honour was created to award contributors to the well-being of the nation from every class. Sadly, women were not yet included in most advances.

The ideologies of the original Revolutionaries had run the gamut from extreme socialism (embryonic communism), anarchism, to progressive capitalism and middle-class conservatism. What won out was a very modest bourgeois democracy, with a large dollop of agrarian equality thrown in.

The whole vocabulary of the political spectrum as we know it in our “Left vs Right” with all its intermediary factions formulation stems directly from the original French National and Constituent Assemblies seating arrangements, with the more radical elements, such as the Jacobins and Girondins sitting to the left of the Speaker/Chair and the moderates and monarchist seated to the right of the Chair.

These were the seeds that were paid forward into the next hundred plus years (and right to our time) along with the hope awakened among ordinary folks and citizens for better days and more equal distribution of resources and opportunities. The shoots which sprouted would feed forward both openly where they could, and under the surface in states which maintained repressive, anti-democratic governments. These were the streams that would run forward to Karl Marx, Bukharin, and a host of others to engender the Socialist International, the trade unions movement, the powerful thrust by the bourgeoisie (middle class) to win its way to power and open the doors for all to be free and to fairly try their chance.

The regimes which repressed and oppressed and practiced brutal suppression would all crumble away over time. This was prophesied, and the prophets proved true over the next decades. For Russia, progress was delayed and stone-walled until 1917 when the economic, social, spiritual, and political bankruptcy of the Tsarist regime collapsed in the wake of catastrophic defeat in World War One and national bankruptcy, opening the door for Bolshevism, which coopted the term Communism to its exclusive use.

There were a number of intermediary stops along the road from 1812 to 1917, but we cannot name or deal with them all here. France eventually went full circle, from “Progressive” Empire to a short-lived rebirth of the old aristocratic regime between 1815 and 1830, then went through three more revolutions, the last of which, in 1871, gave birth to the Third Republic, which fell to Hitler in 1940. Russia’s autocrats, blinded by privilege and class to the growing ferment beneath, and living in its bubble of ultra-rich oligarchism sanctioned by the Russian Orthodox Church as their Divine Right, were deaf to everything and so vanished in the ashes of their burning regime and World War.

All this sounds eerily familiar, except today we have a post-modern narcissistic and nihilistic Dictator à la Dostoyevsky, or perhaps Nietzsche, in charge of the biggest nuclear arsenal in the world instead of a foolish Tsar living under a spell cast by a mad self-proclaimed monk.

TO BE CONTINUED

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The Uses of History, 3 – The French Revolution, 1789-99, 2

 Between 1789-99, France experienced more turmoil than at any other time in its history, save perhaps the stunning catastrophe of the German conquest of 1940.

The Revolution which erupted in 1789 began fairly benignly as an honest attempt by Louis XVI to find a way out of France’s economic crisis of governmental bankruptcy. It rapidly became apparent that the original arrangements closed the door to any meaningful reform with the representatives of the Three Estates meeting separately and each Estate holding a single vote in determining which, if any measures, would be passed.

The collusion between the clergy of the First Estate, dominated by scions of the aristocracy, and the almost completely self-serving Second Estate, composed of the aristocracy in its own right, frustrated every attempt by the Third Estate, the commoners, dominated by the Bourgeoisie, or Middle Class, to put forward meaningful measures to more fairly distribute the tax burden and hold the Royal administration to real account for its expenditures.

Having been threatened with dismissal by the King and locked out of its own meeting hall, in June the Third Estate locked itself in the Royal Tennis Court of Versailles and refused to disburse or go home. Instead, they took an oath (the “Tennis Court Oath”) to continue sitting until they gave France a constitution limiting the King’s powers and holding the other Estates liable for all the ensuing consequences. They then declared themselves “the National Assembly” and the only body entitled to claim to represent the people of France.

We will not rehearse all the peregrinations of France’s tumultuous evolution into the First Republic in 1793, with the execution of its King, and the Queen months later. By that point France was at war with Prussia (the most powerful German state before the unification of Germany in 1871) and Austria (an Empire then encompassing large territory now found on the map of Europe as numerous smaller nations such as Austria, Hungary, the Czech and Slovak republics, Croatia, Slovenia, and part of Romania) the two European monarchies most directly affected by its overthrow. Great Britain joined France’s enemies later in 1793 and would remain at war with France for almost the entirety of the following 22 years.

In 1799, the wars and semi-chaos of the French Revolution in European affairs gave way to the advent of a military tyrant and phenomenon named Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon insisted he was a true son of the Revolution, and in some ways he was. He could never have gained power without the Revolution opening the door for him to rise to greatness as a military commander. Once in power as a stabilizing force he ended France’s internal turmoil, then, following each of his successive military triumphs, he set about exporting many of the major characteristics of the new French model of the state.

Several very important consequences of France’ transformation and European hegemony for the better part of two decades took deep root and eventually overthrew the ancien régime all across Europe. From Europe these effects have gone into the wide world:

  1. The emergence of nationalism as a potent defining force in geopolitics;
  2. The creation of a centralized bureaucratic form of government to administer the affairs of the much-expanded role and reach of government in society and the economy;
  3. The beginning of the merit system as the best method of directing most political and social functions;
  4. The direct intervention of the state in education, in determining its form, its role in society, and much of its content;
  5. The displacement of religion as the primary ruler of basic personal loyalties and allegiance;
  6. The politicization of almost all aspects of public life.

This list could be much longer, but we will leave it there.

It is not that such things had never been seen or suggested before, but nowhere else before had they been purposely and systematically instituted on a nationwide basis. The new French bureaucracy was ruthless, often arbitrary, and efficient – far more than any other nation or empire’s had been before. It also gave the Emperor (Napoleon assumed the title of Emperor of the French in 1804) the resources to overrun Europe and maintain his hegemony for almost fifteen years.

The links from the United States and France were close and multiple, including inspiration at the beginning and ongoing sympathy, as the USA hoped to see a sister republic emerge as a great power in Europe, and thus challenge the British so that Britain would not consider attempting to restore its old empire. The War of 1812-14 between the United States and Britain was a direct offshoot of the long struggle between Britain and France in Europe.

Perhaps far more momentous were the consequences of France’s explosive exportation of its newfound ideology of liberté, fraternité, égalité across Europe in the wake of its victorious armies. The establishment of French puppet regimes inculcated many of the new values in the subjected territories – not least, if nevertheless unintended, was the sleeping giant of nationalism.

If the French people could arise and sweep away the remnants of feudalism and the old order of duties and God-ordained “place”, it became clearer as time went on and the French example awakened other peoples, that the ancien regime of any state could be as justly challenged as that which had been torn down in France, Europe’s primary trend-setter and military power.

It would take decades for the full force of such things to take root and produce fruit. But by the 1830s and 1840s, Europe was experiencing the definite tremors of an oncoming earthquake.

Farther down that road lay the complete shattering of the old order which would merge into World War One and the Russian Revolution.

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The Uses of History, 2 – The French Revolution, 1789-99, 1

History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are who we are.

David McCullough

(Image credit: Britannica.com)

I might modify our opening citation by David McCullough to say, “History ought to be a guide in perilous times”. Why we do what we do brings us to the old debate about nature versus nurture, heredity versus environment. But it is a false dichotomy, for we are who we are as a result of both.

Yet there is a third element – our actual choices. Choices may actually run quite counter to both heredity and nurture. For some people, their most fervent desire is to escape the chains of heredity and nurture. That is one of the strong motivations for emigration.

The escape can never be total. Chromosome-splicing aside, I cannot escape the genes I was given at conception, and those genes set certain limits on what I can become both physically and in the realm of personality. By hard work I may overcome or at least diminish innate weaknesses, as well as adverse circumstances. Indeed, the “American Dream” is founded on that very notion and it still exercises a powerful attraction to millions of immigrants. Nevertheless, I can train my body and work to keep it healthy, but who can naturally add one inch to his height? Who can change the innate disposition of their personality? Character can be developed, but personality must be worked with, not against.

These basic facts of existence apply to whole peoples and nations as much as to individuals. France is a salient historical model of this. The French Revolution of 1789-99 was a socio-political earthquake in Europe, and eventually changed the world through its “trickle-down effects”. The old debate among historians about whether the Revolution was inevitable or avoidable is rather beside the point. It happened. While its long-term and immediate causes can still be debated, its consequences reverberate more than ever even in the 21st Century.

Just as both nature and nurture play into our own lives and choices, so they did in France in 1789. In France during the decade leading up to 1789, the snowball of the people’s misery had been growing steadily for the 90% of the populace living in or close to the edge of poverty. In fact the load of debt and deprivation had been accumulating for more than a hundred years as the Royal government fossilized in its extravagance and the ruling classes ignored the pleas of the growing middle class and peasantry to divest themselves of the medieval trappings that stifled the nation’s prospects of becoming all it could be. Self-interest and the belief in a divine order [or at least an ordained hereditary order] made the “ultras” of the aristocracy and the religious establishment deaf to all attempts to open society and rationalize the nation’s immense economic potential.

Hindsight allows us to look with disdain at the old aristocracy of France’s ancien régime. The divide between the ultra rich and everyone else had grown into a chasm, and the privileges accorded to the aristocrats included virtually no taxation. Many of the great nobles held an almost feudal control over the lives of the tenants and peasants who lived on and around their enormous estates. Numbering 130 000 (0.5% of the population), they held title to between 25-30% of all the land. he Roman Catholic Church also enjoyed total exemption from taxation even as it held title to as much as 10% of all the lands in France. The great clerics were all of the nobility and lived as richly in the Church as any Count or Duke.

The laborers and peasants bore most of the tax burden, and the business class groaned under the limitations and politically motivated preferences and monopolies of the financial and economic infrastructure within France’s borders. All commoners were subject to pay tithes to the Church and fees and duties to the nobles for the use of their lands. Peasants often still paid a significant proportion of the produce of their farms even in bad years.

Hope sprang up during the early reign of the well-meaning King Louis XVI, but his Queen [Marie-Antoinette] and the powerful aristocratic coterie around her thwarted all his attempts to bring in modest fiscal and administrative reforms by engineering the dismissal of the ministers such as Necker who were appointed to implement them. Louis did not have the iron character of his great-grandfather, Louis XIV, to carry out his program and reign in the nobility’s avarice and arrogance. When Louis did finally overrule the willfully blind anti-reformers and call the long-dormant Estates-General to meet in May 1789, there was so much pent-up bitterness and frustration that there was no way he or any minister would be able to control what would ensue.

By that point, France had a living model of successful revolution to look to from across the Atlantic Ocean in the newly founded United States of America (see previous post). Furthermore, France had substantially helped this new nation come into being. With the American rebels struggling to find the resources and wherewithal to push the British out of the thirteen southern-most American colonies (they had several more to the north in what is now Canada), France’s declaration of war on Britain in 1778 (along with Spain and, later, the Netherlands) proved a great drain on British resources, especially the Royal Navy. Elite French army units came across the Atlantic and provided crucial assistance in several important engagements. They played a key role in the American victory on the final campaign of 1781.

The French government’s motivation for this intervention was not simple altruism. It was revenge for France’s devastating defeat in the Seven Years War of 1756-63. It was pay-back, meant to weaken the British by tearing away the jewel of their empire. The gamble succeeded. In 1783 the British recognized American independence, but in the meantime had wreaked further havoc upon the empires of America’s European allies. In North America, Canada remained British, despite an American attempt to conquer it during the Revolutionary war.

The French who had gone to help the Americans could not but be influenced by what they had seen. Some of the new American idealism for liberty and democracy and equality (among the white population at least) inevitably rubbed off, both among the ordinary soldiers and sailors and the officers, many of whom were middle class and even of noble extraction, such as the Marquis de Lafayette. A little leaven leavens the whole lump. The first American ambassador to France was Benjamin Franklin, one of the key founding fathers of the USA.

Six years later, as the Estates-General gathered at Versailles in May 1789, none of this could be lost on the representatives of the Three Estates to consider how to change France’s obviously broken social, political, and economic machinery. For the First Estate, the Church, there was some sympathy for the Third Estate, the Commons, but the main leaders of Church had much more in common with the Second Estate, the Aristocracy. The First and Second Estates, who made up 2% of the population, stood to lose greatly in the wake of any change to the established order, in which they enjoyed enormous privileges and little responsibility to contribute to the nation’s general welfare.

The Third Estate saw the American example as their inspiration and model. As a symbol of this, Thomas Paine, the celebrated author of Common Sense, which, in 1776 had become the de facto manifesto of the American revolution, crossed the Atlantic to come to Paris and become the darling of the political and salon set. His message to the French citizenry was to seize the moment and make change happen, tearing away the apparatus of social and economic oppression like the American colonists had done.

TO BE CONTINUED

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The Queen

If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous [upright] do?

Book of Psalms, The Hebrew Bible,chapter 11, verse 3.

(Photo credit – Alamy)

The passing of Queen Elizabeth, Queen of England, the United Kingdom, and 13 other countries, including Canada, my home, after an extraordinary reign of 701/2 years certainly is worthy of reflection. Even many of the most cynical and sworn foes of monarchy find themselves affected. Only the most hardened mockers and cynical ultra-progressives can just spitefully grunt, “Good riddance!”

Regardless of one’s views on the continuation of monarchy anywhere, let alone in the most famous venue where it still exists, the United Kingdom, Elizabeth Windsor filled the role she inherited with amazing grace, real wisdom, and genuine concern for the peoples of whom she was the acknowledged sovereign. She visited all her non-British realms multiple times, and of those, Canada more than any, on 22 occasions as monarch. She called this vast land “my second home”.

A little-known fact buried in the obscure details of World War 2 is that she, with the royal family of King George VI, almost moved here in the dark days of 1940. This possibility was seriously discussed with the King by Prime Minister Churchill as the threat of Nazi invasion loomed large. After some consideration, King George decided he could not abandon his people in their darkest hour, although he might send his wife and children to Canada. His strong-willed Queen, also named Elizabeth, staunchly declared she would have none it. She and the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret would stay and share the fate of the King and the country.

The young Princess Elizabeth became the only female member of the Royals to serve in the Armed Services late in the war. This was a sign of how she would fulfill her later role as Queen Elizabeth II, whom some are now calling the greatest of all British monarchs. Perhaps this is melodramatic emotionalism at the end of the “Second Elizabethan Age” and the longest reign in British History, as well as one of the longest in world history. In Canadian (and World) History, only one reign surpasses hers in sheer length: King Louis XIV of France, 1642-1714. But we must qualify Louis’ record by saying that he was an infant when he succeeded, and only took over personal power from his Regent, Cardinal Mazarin, in 1661. Thus, Elizabeth II reigned in her own right with full sovereignty longer than anyone ever recorded.

The First Elizabethan Age was during the reign of England’s Queen Elizabeth I, 1558-1603. To attempt a comparison of the two Elizabeths is rather like comparing apples and oranges. However, there are some points to consider.

Both Elizabeths lived through times of great social upheaval and seriously threatened invasions of England (the Spanish Armada for Elizabeth I in 1588), although Elizabeth II was the heir to the throne in 1940-41, not the sovereign. Both lived with high expectations placed upon them, and great doubt as to how they could stand up to the challenge. For the first Elizabeth, she could not avoid knowing that a male monarch would have been the preferred choice. If, perhaps for some, that sentiment still existed in 1952, it had become irrelevant, even though the sexist law of male primogeniture still applied. Eventually, it was Elizabeth II who abolished it (via Parliament, of course). That step was long overdue, as everyone then knew.

Other than longevity, what might be offered as evidence that Elizabeth II is the greatest of all British monarchs?

Perhaps saving the monarchy itself is her great legacy. Certainly, there is some reason to grant this. A great many changes to the venerable institution of the British monarchy have occurred since 1952, not least because Elizabeth was open-minded and willing to allow them and even forward them.

She was not alone in this. Her husband Prince Philip the Duke of Edinburgh stimulated much of the change, but she was receptive and gave him the latitude to begin the process of bringing in a modernized, “open” monarchy. The goal was to let the public see the Royals as real people with lives, not just isolated figures remote from reality. Against stiff opposition from the “Old Guard”, Philip taught Elizabeth and the family that allowing the media to determine public perceptions via scandal-mongering and negative criticism had to be countered by positive action. One might say that that lesson finally took permanent root following the tragic fate of Princess Diana in 1997 and the strong public indignation at the apparent coldness of the Queen’s and the Royals’ reaction. The Queen’s slowness to react was restrained more than cold because of the highly dubious circumstances. She felt it and its tragedy deeply, with not a little personal regret about how painful Diana’s life had been made by her family’s, and her son’s, treatment of her.

Elizabeth was no wall-flower ready to simply follow old traditions and died-in-the-wool advisers. She frequently overruled such traditions, even over the objections of her grandmother, Queen Mary, the widow of King George V, her own mother, and Lord Mountbatten, her cousin and close friend. Unfortunately, she did not always make the right choices when it came to the happiness of her children or her sister in marriage, despite the inclination of her heart to let them be as happy as they could. The cloud of the scandal of what had happened to King Edward VIII, her father’s older brother, when he chose to marry a divorcee and abdicate in 1936 because of the strictures regarding divorce in the Royal family, still hung heavy. As we now see, that too has all changed, not least because Elizabeth said it must.

Some might argue that a sovereign who presided over the dissolution of the British Empire following World War 2 can hardly qualify to greatness, but is rather a sad remnant of an old imperialistic heritage that is best forgotten. Canada’s indigenous peoples consider the monarchy a paternalistic institution that robbed their ancestors of their liberties and subjected them to generations of oppression and abuse and neglect. The expressions some have made about Elizabeth’s death have not all been graceful. By contrast, those of many other colonized peoples have applauded her for promoting their liberation and advocating their full inclusion, with substantial support for their advancement, in the Commonwealth of Nations, the group of countries who once belonged to vast the British Empire. She was noted as calling for an end to racism and discrimination everywhere in the Commonwealth and was known as showing no trace of prejudice towards anyone of any colour or gender.

We could go on at length about her wisdom and her sure touch in handling people and steering through often very murky waters and political booby traps. Virtually everyone who spent any personal time with her had only high praise for her friendliness, her approachability, her ease with people which in turn put them at their ease, and her very strong sense of humour and irony. If she disliked someone she had to deal with, such as a few of Britain’s Prime Ministers or some other Heads of State she sometimes had to relate to, she succeeded in remaining thoroughly professional. She was a shrewd and diligent administrator and had excellent judgment in choosing the right people for the right tasks.

As a person, Elizabeth Windsor could not be separated from her monarchical role. She was every inch a queen, but also a genuinely caring, compassionate person who did not put on airs of superiority or make others feel less important. Behind all of the rest, she always attributed a very great part of the strength she displayed year after year and decade after decade to her personal faith. That faith was not ostentatiously foisted on others in private or in public, but she was never reticent about its source. Her sense of duty and obligation to serve stemmed from it, as she affirmed.

As the official Head of the Church of England (the Anglican Church, and the world-wide Communion of Anglican Churches), she was a Christian. But, unlike many who have preceded her in that role, to her being a Christian was not just a function of formal title. It was very real and part of the very fabric of her being. To anyone who listened objectively to her public declarations during feasts such as Christmas and New Year’s, the complete sincerity and conviction of her statements came strongly through. She avowed being a praying person during her whole life, as well as a Bible reader, taking much inspiration from the “Book of Books” since her youth. Certainly, the way she lived and the grace and compassion she showed are strong evidence of this foundation.

Our opening citation is a warning. It certainly seems apparent that much of “the foundations” that Queen Elizabeth II stood so strongly on have been seriously eroded, and some are in ruins across many of the nations of whom she was Head of State. For example, Canada seems to be increasingly one of those. If you are from another of those states, you can speak to conditions in your own homeland.

If we are willing to look at Elizabeth R.’s life as a parable and a portrait, she has much to teach. Would to God that some of the myriads of leaders and supposedly wise observers and commentators would see what she really has to teach them and take it to heart. At the very least, one can hope and pray that her son and successor, King Charles III, will do so, as will the extended Windsor Family.

We conclude not with “God save the Queen!” but, in the Christian hope that Elizabeth herself professed, “God has saved the Queen! Now God save the King!”

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Cold Love, 6 – Enduring to the End

Those who endure to the end will be saved … –

Yeshua/Jesus of Nazareth

(Image credit – Pinterest)

As we navigate the uncharted cultural, social, economic, and political waters we are now in, it is harder than ever to find truth. Despite our lip-service to liberal democracy, there is little for public input at any level of government. Climate alarmism trumps policy, as we now see in living technicolor with the totally artificially generated energy crisis while an incredibly energy rich nation like Canada turns a deliberate blind eye and deaf ear, even to the interests of its own citizens. Misinformation, disinformation, deliberate obfuscation and falsification predominate in the public forum. The screamology of extremism drowns out reason and rational discussion of almost any subject of significance.

As mentioned in a previous post, ideology trumps fact in the name of saving the planet and even having a future for the human race. Actual reality versus virtual reality is more and more confused in people’s minds. Rumor and inuendo take the place of investigation and verification. Doctor Goebbels and Vladimir Lenin would have been thrilled to have had the means to mold the popular psyche now available. Foucault and the progenitors of postmodernism can be proud of their achievement in creating universal doubt in the possibility of knowing anything for sure. Accept, by faith, the chosen “truth” of your ideological dogma.

Ordinary folks do not, of course, consciously and constantly live with this awareness. Life interferes; the pressure of “getting through” blocks out most of the big questions most of the time. There is a gnawing, deep-seated sense of gloom and perhaps even dread that, perhaps, all our bickering, striving, and quarreling is futile in the long run. The best we can do is make the best life we can now and for our children and grandchildren in the near to mid-term. After that, all bets are off, especially if the various doom-scenarios which gather so much attention are correct. Choose your doom; there are plenty of candidates out there from climate catastrophe to nuclear holocaust, or even a meteoric extinction event as per the dinosaur era long ago. Fantasy and post-apocalyptic science-fiction sell big.

As in every era of history, the ultra-privileged classes at the top, live in the illusion of their safety while the rest can all suffer so they can keep their privileges and their hold on the leavers of power. They cannot fathom that the increasingly alienated and desperate under-classes may just be being driven to a level of desperation that will actually hold them to account and overthrow them. If this is no longer possible within a rigged system, history teaches that violence will be the last resort.

Most of us struggle to find hope. We don’t often say it out loud, but the question of hope is constant beneath and behind much of what we do, especially as life moves us from adolescence to young adulthood and to the inevitable “mid-life crisis”. I meet more and more couples who have chosen or are choosing not to have children – many more than the occasional ones I met 40-50 years ago. (I betray my age.)

As for you, what do you hope in? and why?

Do you hope for some sort of life after death? Or is your hope solely aimed at something for this world’s sojourn for what remains of it for yourself, and, if you have any, your descendants?

These are not, of course, new questions. As long as humans have consciously considered their own existence, most have hoped that death is not the end. But most of the scenarios for something beyond the grave were not attractive as something to be desired, unless it was just as a hope to escape total oblivion.

For we moderns and post-moderns with our scientific approach to almost every problem, there is no way to validate any such hope. The best that can be said about any and every answer to the big questions that science cannot and will never be able to answer is that it boils down to faith. And faith, in its simplest terms, is a matter of trust. Thus, as you ponder your own answer to the ultimate nature of reality and your own existence, you must recognize that, whatever answer you choose, it is the one you have chosen because you trust it is the truest, based on some sort of evidence that you trust. What you believe reflects the nature of reality as you experience it and what you’ve been taught about its meaning. You interpret it according to that experience and that of other people whose input you find trustworthy.

Everyone who lives to the age of Reason and Accountability adopts basic beliefs based on trust, based on faith. There are no exceptions; the Noble Prize Winner and the humblest unknown labourer are on exactly the same footing in this. The politicians running your governments and the ultra-rich tycoons are the same as the factory workers and computer geeks.

Our faith convictions determine the kinds of choices we make, especially on the most important decisions, both individually, as in the choice of career and life-partner, having children or preferring a dog, and as social influencers and directors, as in the kinds of rules for society are to be set, and the limits to be placed on dissenting groups.

Underneath all of that, there is the issue of God. Everyone in all the categories we have mentioned and any others you care to consider sooner or later wonders whether the Cosmos came from nothing for no reason, or from the action of a Being, a Power who/which willed it into existence and imbued it with all the properties we have since been striving to understand.

When it comes to ultimate hope, there are really only two relevant answers: God made it, or it just happened somehow, sometime, we know not how or why. All protestations and appeals to the scientific arguments about the Big Bang and inevitable evolution aside, both positions are really and truly faith-based. The Big-Banger deftly dancing past and around the questions of WHY? and HOW? must know that their firm insistence that no Deity is necessary really means “No God is wanted or need apply. Some day we’ll find the magic bullet, the one original micro-particle that, somehow, jumped out of nothing and started everything.” Even such a particle appearing out of nothing just begs the question, “But what made it appear?”

To reconnect all this to the question of Hope versus Futility seems fairly obvious. If God did it, (S)He would have a reason. We, by extension as reasoning beings coming from His/Her creative hand, should be able to discover some part of that reason. And, even more hopefully, some of our kind and species have already made some progress on that front.

On the other hand, if no Creator is responsible, there is ultimately no reason, despite all the illusion of design and purpose. The only purpose in biological Evolution is survival. But if all is ultimately just heading for extinction after however many eons shall pass until entropy extinguishes it, or cosmic implosion annihilates it, then futility is your hopeless answer.

Where does that leave the Theists?

Christians recall what Jesus declares in our opening citation: “Those who endure to the end will be rescued/saved.” Hope is in His faithfulness, which is certified by His resurrection from the dead, and His followers are assured they will likewise rise transformed for life eternal.

For Muslims, hope in Allah’s mercy and your efforts to live by Muhammad’s revelations to get you admitted to Paradise.

For Jews, hope in Yahweh’s mercy and favour, and perhaps to some degree, your efforts will make the world a better place. Anything beyond that remains to be seen.

For Hindus, keep on trying as you go round the cycle of existence until you graduate to nirvana because your good karma has finally erased your bad karma. Buddhists have a similar view with slight nuances.

But for atheists, hope is an illusion, except, as we said above, to leave something positive for the future, as far as there may be one.

While science tends to negate “faith” as a religious notion, it holds fast to its own creed, with little beyond affirmation that its methodology will someday solve all the mysteries – even the ultimate ones. If that is not as great a religious faith as the Theist’s, I don’t know what is! But as to hope for something beyond the here and now, it will all be futile in the end.

Christianity offers the hard evidence of thousands of years of results in changing lives, making great advances in improving the human condition, and providing the hopeless with hope and comfort. The wrongs done by people using Jesus’ name does not and cannot cancel its legacy of making the present better for billions, and offering a brilliant future to all who apply to Jesus. As its foundation, it points to this Jesus, a man who lived and died in history and convinced thousands of people of his own time that he was not just a “mere” man, but the embodiment in flesh and blood of the eternal Creator Himself. To seal the deal, He came alive three days after his murder-execution in a renewed physical form which can no longer die. He thus confirmed that there is a real, living hope that the Creator loves the Creation and chooses to save it, to rescue it, from the futility of death and meaninglessness. And we humans, who can know this loving Creator, can enter into this eternal, deathless, and absolutely purposeful ultimate reality through Jesus.

Enduring to the end means two things: (1) the end of your sojourn on earth in this age, and (2) the chosen time of Jesus’ return to transform the mortal and time-limited Cosmos into a sublime, immortal one which Creator is preparing for us right now.

If you are a follower of Jesus, be of good hope; He will be true to His promise. If not, consider the source of your hope and whether it can endure to the end and rescue you from futility.

For, in the end, Cold Love will be annihilated in the light and flame of God’s all-consuming agape.

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Cold Love, 5 – Ideology

ideology – science of ideas; visionary speculation; manner of thinking characteristic of a class or individual; ideas at the basis of some economic or political theory or system.

The Concise Oxford Dictionary, 1964

(Photo credit – Time)

Ideology is a product of the mind, as our definitions above clearly indicate. Love is born in the heart, whatever form it takes. Very often, if not always, ideology and love are divided by a wide chasm – in practice if not in theory. Nevertheless, the two must coexist, and no mature human can function without having both present, however unconsciously and informally held.

We can intellectualize love, conceptualize love, analyze love, psychologize love, but we cannot create it by any exercise which originates primarily in the intellect. The heart may remain untouched despite all the most careful thought. The one emotion that ideology seems all too readily and too often to generate in abundance is hate. It may, however, also generate a pseudo-love, a counterfeit to stand in the place of what love, by its nature, is meant to be. Ideologically bred “love” is obsession, fanaticism, a sort of veneration of national, class, social, or economic identity. This pseudo-love is usually an amalgam of more than one of the above, and it absorbs the “lover’s” sense of self in the process.

Let us consider this paradox for a moment.

English and many other modern languages are not very supple in communicating the many shades and nuances of what real love entails. English is a poor vehicle in this respect, although eminently pliable in creating terminology and abundant expressions to convey technological and behavioural subtleties. Of the other modern languages of which I have some understanding, the same lack of nuance regarding love is true.

In contrast, the subtle ancient Greeks had four words for love to express nuance and context: eros indicated sexual love, erotic love; phileo – companionate or friendship love, sibling love, “brotherly” love; storge – parental, guardian, protective love; agape – self-denying, self-sacrificing, selfless love, characterized by God’s love for humanity in Jesus Christ. All of these are real forms of love, but the first three are incomplete without the last, which therefore governs them. For example, Jesus once said, “No one has greater love than this – laying down his life for a friend.” Phileo thus reaches its highest expression by giving oneself for the benefit of another without seeking a return. So too with eros and storge, as immediately becomes evident with a moment’s consideration. Parents know this instinctively in their love for their children, and mothers more readily than fathers, even if, these days, saying so is frowned upon as an old stereotype. Romantic love based on sexual attraction must develop beyond this if the relationship is to endure.

One of the greatest delusions of our arrogant claim to be a scientific society is to turn everything into ideology. For ideology, “love” must be captured, weaponized, and made into a commercial and economic commodity as a weapon in the arsenal of the social and cultural engineers claiming to know what we all need most.

Because of love’s universality in human experience, when directed by these careful social manipulators it automatically creates empathy and sympathy for whatever cause or target has been selected in the current program of “progress”. It is powerful in generating zeal on the one hand and shame, blame, and guilt on the other. It takes no prisoners, leaving all those confronted with its demands (whether reasonable or not) sensing their failure. This opens the path for the next demand for the latest newly discovered worthy recipients of official compassion – “rights”. Engineered, ideological “love” is the most potent marginalizing force we know, as well as the most pliable for manipulating well-disposed, fair-minded people to climb aboard the train to the destination the engineers have indicated is where all right-hearted people will want a just society to go. By nature it leaves those who don’t subscribe to its dictates out in the cold, literally and figuratively.

Canada is one of the most open societies on the planet. It has become a progressivist haven for much of the increasingly active and militant Woke agenda. With firmly ensconced ideologues presently in office, or acting as close advisers to those who are, the current government is more than slightly well-disposed to its claims. In addition, for many years the courts have consistently favoured the extension of basic human rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to redesign Canadian society in the image of Progressive Utopia.

One of the latest signs of this is in the allocation of resources to favoured groups by the National Government. The latest example is in special funding for the development and strengthening of 2SLGBTQI+ community and life.

Statistics Canada has recently released the first solid statistical data regarding population breakdown according to type of household based on gender affiliation and orientation as of 2021. “Rainbow” self-identified households make up less than 2% of the population (about 700 000 individuals). Presumably, the thinking is that the Rainbow elements of society are in danger of re-exclusion, which may be arguable, although recent cultural trends would place that notion in grave doubt. The intent is certainly to make it fully mainstream and accepted as normal.

It may be argued that the government is supporting a specific set of lifestyle choices and ideological values. But it has become almost impossible to engage in any such discussion because of the immediate challenge that basic rights are being threatened.

By contrast, Canada has a very large disabled population which includes people of all ages, genders, orientations, and ethnic origins. This is the same sort of situation raised in terms of gender and sexual orientation identity. In 2017, 22% of the population, 6.2 million, were identified as suffering from one or more significant disabilities. The measure of consistent government neglect, both Federal and Provincial, of this huge population segment has been monumental and perennial for decades.

In government policy, 20% of the population with special needs far more urgent and basic than strengthening their cohesiveness and cultural presence are virtually invisible. During COVID-19 and its variants, almost nothing has been offered to help the large number of these sufferers living on barely enough to eat and find shelter. Tens of millions of dollars have been wasted on bogus claims for support by healthy citizens who found themselves temporarily unemployed or simply able to pass through the flimsy screening process to receive benefits. In comparison, what pittances were offered to the disabled were obscure and hard-to-find and apply for, with the result that few even knew they were available. Those that found what was offered were given meager one-time only payments that amounted to 25% of what was given to other applicants for one month. Elitist ideology creates a hierarchy of worth that these people do not fit into. Instead, we change laws to offer “medically assisted death” for those whose suffering has become intolerable while we offer next to nothing to alleviate their suffering or improve their quality of life.

The intent of this story is not to provoke anger, although indignation is not out of order. Rather, it is a very real and current illustration of the role of ideology in one of the most “advanced and progressive” nations on earth. We clearly see how implemented ideology in power designates what is valued according to our socio-cultural elites. In this case, compassion, which is one form of the expression of love, is granted to a quite small preferred minority which primarily self-identifies and is granted status almost without question. They enjoy strong, positive, official cultural recognition with increasingly well-entrenched rights bolstered by very public celebrations of their diversity and cultural identity. The disabled remain invisible and are offered no encouragement to be valued for who they are.

We could easy find other illustrations of the current, divisive cultural ideology now largely entrenched throughout the West. History offers numerous examples of the rampages misguided ideological cold love generates. The 20th Century was full of them and documents all their worst features in their extreme nationalism, racism, and favoritism. Let us hope that we are not heading to a new variation of such horrors as we watch the growing disaffection and alienation of a large segment of the West’s less-favoured and less valued groups and classes beginning to seethe with anger over their new exclusion. While those rising may see the exclusion of formerly favoured (or seen to have been favoured) classes as only just, we can only warn that pendula always swing two ways. Breaking the law of backlash will not occur as long as those on the upside ram their values and status down the throat of those on the downside.

I am not advocating the withdrawal of rights and recognition to anyone. We must realize that ideology is a potent force too often prone to be abused and misused when it turns on the shame, guilt, and blame switches in people in order to manipulate them into compliance with a chosen agenda, shutting down any public discussion and dialogue.

Ideology cuts both ways. As Newton long ago observed, “To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” In metaphysics the rule is parallel: “Karma always returns to bite you in the butt”, or, more refined, “You reap what you sow; if your sow the wind, you will reap the whirlwind.” When it comes to legislating values and shaming opponents into submission, rather than leaving the avenue open to have a healthy discussion and debate in the appropriate forums for this, the resistance will not go away. If dialogue is suppressed, it will find its way out in uglier and angrier ways. These will not be any more open to change than the opposite which drove them underground in the first place.

Ideology is another manifestation of the rampant “cold love” plaguing the modern West and, by extension, the whole world. Its fruits betray it – anger, resentment, fanaticism, violent explosions, and, at worst when left to fester, war, revolt, and revolution.

No society yet devised by humans has yet proven immune to these evils.

The only way out of them is to rediscover agape. Whether we remain capable of that at a societal level we shall probably soon see.

For those who still profess Jesus Christ, agape must begin at home and within our own communities of family, faith, and local community. To rant and rave about its absence in the wide world is not helpful when it is not practiced right where we are with those who are right here with us – regardless of ideology, class, ethnicity, or gender identification.

NEXT TIME – COLD LOVE, 6 – CONCLUSION: ENDURING TO THE END

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Cold Love, 4 – The Quality of Mercy

mercy – compassion or forbearance shown to a powerless person, especially an offender or one with no claim to kindness.

The Canadian Compact Oxford Dictionary, 2002.

The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the earth beneath.

William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

(Image credit – Vectorstock)

Mercy. Every convicted criminal hopes for it. Every school child “sent to the Office” appeals for it.

Mercy – most death-bed patients earnestly pray for it before they cross the final frontier.

 For the 60-70% or so of Westerners (depending on the nation and even the region within a nation) still professing belief in some sort of God resembling the traditional Judeo-Christian idea of an infinite personal Being and Creator, the standard logic on the mercy of God goes something like this:

‘God is love. Therefore, He must be merciful, because really loving people are merciful and forgiving, right? A loving God will therefore not banish anyone to exile/hell or whatever other nasty place there might be. So when I die, I will automatically be accepted by God and live forever in a nice place filled with love. As to hell, God’s love would never have created such a thing in the first place. So mercy is automatic; all my nasty deeds and selfishness will be erased and forgotten, and, like in the Disney world, we all get to live happily ever after regardless of what we’ve done and how we’ve chosen to live here on earth.’

Many an atheist has been repulsed from the idea of God’s existence, let alone the religions that profess and uphold it, by the whole notion of judgment by a Maker who assesses our lives pronounces “Pass!” or “Fail!” Their revulsion is confirmed for them by every hell-fire and brimstone sermon they’ve (n)ever heard (mostly never in our current society), or even heard of, and by the record of God’s over-zealous human proselytizers condemning heretics and infidels to eternal damnation and temporal torture and repression. Too often, when it comes to how a “merciful God” is presented to doubters and sinners here in our flawed and suffering world, the “quality of mercy” has been strained indeed, in fact all but relegated to the back-room where only a select few seem to qualify to merit it.

No surprise that Jesus warned that, before his Second Coming, which his saying about cold love refers to, that “agape-love”, which demonstrates and embodies the unqualified mercy of God, would become a rare jewel even among those claiming to be his fervent followers.

In the original context of the words coming straight from Jesus, cold love refers to the fading away, the diminishing of agape in humankind. Besides relegating God to the last-ditch reserve bench in life, this includes how humankind behaves among themselves and towards the rest of creation. As we have noted before, agape is the highest form love takes: self-denying and sacrificial in its care and compassion, seeking no benefit from the object of the sacrificial caring. It rises above mere sentiment and mushy feelings of affection. In fact, it does not depend on them even being present, although if they are to some degree it helps make the giving and caring easier. Even the passion of sexual love cannot endure and overcome the tests and stresses that arise without agape to help the lovers get over the inevitable hurts and disappointments that come into every meaningful relationship.

The ultimate origin of agape is the Creator, who created all that exists purely out of His/Her own infinite agape. Creator did not have to make anything. Yahweh-Creator-God chose to create out of agape. God’s agape is His/Her desire to love and give love in infinite measure outside His/Her own self-sufficiency. At the height of the Creator’s creative activity, He/She created Humans to bear His/Her very image and likeness as a living, walking representative, a creating entity able to manifest the kind of nature the Creator has stamped within the very Cosmos itself, saturating it, putting the testimony of its origin everywhere.

Since the ancient rebellion of the first humans against the Creator’s intent, the presence of agape has often been lost, distorted, even forgotten. Hence, much of our energy has been wasted and twisted into destruction and misappropriation of the Creator’s good gifts. The rebellion was aimed at establishing human mastery over creation apart from serving the Creator. It has proven a tawdry substitute for the richness of enabling and enhancing the Creator’s goal to cause the Earth to flourish and reach its full potential to show the wonder and beauty of the Creator’s. (Glory means the full manifestation of the Creator’s intention brought into expression by the Creator’s commissioned stewards – us.) If God’s plan were adhered to, the humans would reach their own full potential as Creator’s appointed image-bearers, God’s living icons, so to speak.

Instead, in our self-proclaimed godhood, we have reaped destruction, decay, death, and alienation among ourselves, and have inflicted these same blights on the whole world.

The Christian Story says that the Creator-God did not sit back and shrug. Instead, speaking anthropomorphically, (S)He is deeply grieved, even distressed, and even angry. However, God’s ultimate response is mercy rather than wrath, although wrath has been allowed to fall. If we are willing to face our rebellion and defiance of God, we must see that, just as with human offenders in human society, there is an inevitable day when judgment finds the unrepentant transgressor. This is called “natural consequences”, and it applies in both the physical and metaphysical realm. It also comes as a legal requirement.

Without engaging in theological debate, history demonstrates that, with regard to respect for God and God’s creation, as well as for one another, we have justly deserved judgment more often than mercy. Most of the time, the Creator has just let us experience some more or less severe consequences of our actions. This can approximate Divine wrath in the hope that we may yet, even if only for a time, come mostly to our senses. But, if we are able to wrap our minds around it, we are also given Divine mercy even in the midst of what may well seem like wrath and judgment.

Consider how, all through our hegemony over this one and only Gem of a world we have been gifted with, we have chosen to rape and pillage it and slaughter one another to gain both group and personal ascendancy. Consider what this looks like from Creator’s perspective, especially when compared to what He/She made us for and intended us and all the rest of His/Her works here on Mother Earth to be. If any of us usurped our neighbour’s home and ransacked and destroyed all they had built, would we not cry out for redress, justice, and appropriate punishment? As politically and culturally incorrect the whole notion of “punishment” seems to have become in our burgeoning “Wokism”, punishment is sometimes the only recourse left.

As the one who made this wondrous world, the Creator planted us here in this “Garden” to “till and tend” it and make it flourish. Yahweh-I AM has every right to insist on justice – not only for what has been and is still being done to it all, but perhaps even more for what we have done and continue to do to one another.

The Christian Story says that, instead of just wiping us out, Yahweh the Creator sent Yeshua (Jesus), His/Her Son, the incarnation in human form of the Creator, to take the judgment on our behalf. That is why Yeshua commented that “mercy triumphs over justice”.

Thus, we have never yet been subjected to the full, terrible consequences of all the evil and wrong we have inflicted and continue to inflict upon one another and on our fellow creatures. It may not look like mercy at first glance, but imagine if God had never intervened to “cut those days short”, as Jesus once phrased it. We are told that “No flesh would have survived” if the Creator had not taken a hand to restrain the diabolical fury of humanity’s dark side run wild. That remains true.

Mercy triumphs over judgment. Imagine if the Nazis had won World War 2. “Impossible!”, you say. Not at all! It was a very near-run thing. Read Winston Churchill’ History of the Second World War sometime to get an inside picture. D-Day could very well have gone sidewise. Hitler’s armies came within a hair of taking down the Soviet Union in 1941. Etc. Tens of millions died, a toll so terrible that we forget that it could have been many millions more. It was Divine mercy that it was not. In 1940, Churchill publicly called it a “war to save Christian civilization” and he meant it. The Nazis intended to extinguish Christianity, as well as Judaism. It was not just Churchillian rhetorical flourish to rally the people.

Time and again this has been so. The Book of Genesis tells the stories of Noah and Sodom and Gomorrah as two examples. The Book of Exodus tells the same story of deliverance from rebellion and its consequences in the context of Israel, followed by the multiple episodes recounted in Judges.

The other side of this oft-repeated story is that, at some point, even the infinite Creator’s patience seems to run out. Thus, ancient Israel and Judah (the two Kingdoms set up by the Israelites following their liberations from Egypt and then from the numerous oppressors from neighbouring kingdoms – see the Book of Judges in the Bible) eventually must reap the final consequences and are wiped out by the neighbouring superpowers of Assyria and Babylon.

Mercy is always to be hoped for, but judgment will also fall on the day when mercy can no longer find a perch.

Paradoxically, agape demands it because agape is always married not only to mercy, but to justice. God’s agape is given freely, but it is granted at great cost.

TO BE CONTINUED

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Cold Love, 3 – A Case Study

“All you need is love,

Love is all you need.”

– The Beatles, 1968

(Image credit – Pinterest)

The Counterrevolution of the 1960s captivated much of the West’s imagination for a few years in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I grew up during that time, and was myself drawn into it, like many of my contemporaries trying to find a new path to peace in the midst of a conflicted world teetering on the edge of annihilation. I tried the experiment of living with urban wannabe hippies, and, when that evaporated, living with a few “cool dudes” who, we hoped, could support one another in maintaining some separation from the Establishment grind of conforming to the system.

As the Sixties departed, the true Hippies retreated to their communes to let the system and its oppressive culture “go f— itself” amid the ugliness of race riots, horrible Indochina atrocities, the turmoil of Middle-East affairs, Superpower proxy wars in Africa, and nuclear war near-misses. The millions of Hippie-imitators and wannabes who had held onto the Counterculture coat-tails to enjoy its more hedonistic aspects began to face the truth that they had to actually begin to work for a living. That meant making a pretense of “conforming to the Man and his demands”.

Some, like myself, tried to hang onto the some of the threads of our old illusions, but found we were mostly deluding ourselves. Young as we were, this called for some serious reflection about who we really are and what we are here for on Planet Earth. It seemed that love is not all you need. It requires something strong to bolster it and keep it, and the hope it gives, alive.

This great social and cultural crisis thus dove-tailed with personal crisis for many of the somewhat more idealistic millions of young adults of the early boomer cohort. The resolution of this great identity search seems, to a great extent, to have depended on how we had been raised. Many reverted to the values and expectations, although usually not the religion, of their upbringing – go get a job, settle down, contribute a bit to society, and raise a family. Or: go get a good education, find a career, climb the ladder, get your share of the rewards, raise a family, contribute a bit to the community, then retire and enjoy what was beginning to be euphemistically called “The Golden Years”. Our views on love had become much more prosaic and less “heavenly”.

There is no doubt that we all need love. All through life we all need to be loved, and to love, to receive it and to give it. This transaction is the most validating part of life. This is what makes every human being “belong” and feel valued.

One of the earliest justifications for abortion, which had then become so “pregnant” an issue all across the West, was “every child a wanted [read loved] child”. We will not rehash the abortion debate in this space. Suffice it to say that the root cause of that still virulently corrosive issue that has driven such deep wedges in all nations across the world in the last fifty years is cold love – or no love.

Abortion has been selectively and somewhat surreptitiously practiced for thousands of years, but only in the last century has it become a world-wide ideological and metaphysical pandemic. Obviously, it is not a “pandemic” in the same sense as our latest exemplar, COVID-19 and its variants. But it is far more deadly if we want to be honest about running an actual body-count over the last fifty-odd years or so. If we were to do so, its only rival would be the Bubonic Plague, the “Black Death”, which has been guesstimated to have killed at least 100-million in the space of 10-15 years as it swept across Central Asia and into Europe in the mid-14th Century. But on a sheer numbers-basis, abortion dwarfs the Black Death.

It is a measure of our collective shame and guilt that many nations (of which Canada, my homeland, is one) are no longer honestly reporting or even collecting accurate abortion statistics. Canada has become the only nation on Earth without any law on the books governing abortion. In 1988 the Supreme Court struck down the existing law and told Parliament to make a new one that conformed to its evolving interpretation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The politicians attempted this over the next several years and, failing to find a consensus, then failed in moral courage, all the while blaming one another. However, lest we blame them too much, they merely reflected the state of agonized public division and wishing the whole thing would somehow just go away. Nevertheless, reputable statistical extrapolations can be and have been done to approximate both the local and global impact of abortion on population.

Once more, we can use Canada as our exemplar in the question of statistical impact on society. Canada has had legal abortion since 1969. For thirty plus years, statistics were kept and collected from the Provinces by the Federal Government. In the last 10 years when they (we) still kept track of these “procedures”, the annual number of documented abortions in both public and private hospitals and clinics was between 90,000-110,000. We also knew that reported statistics were probably not complete, so the numbers were probably a little higher, meaning we should probably add another 5,000 or so.

If we assign a conservative average of 80,000 over the 53 years of legalized abortion in Canada, we arrive at a reasonable estimate of 4,240,000 abortions. If we allow a “fudge factor” of 10% for under-reporting, which we know has been the case, we arrive at almost five million future contributing citizens having been eliminated.

All we need is love? Where was the love for five million human beings not allowed to be born and live a normal life-span because they were “not a wanted (loved) child”? This makes an utter mockery of this maudlin cliché that “every child should be a wanted child”.

The purpose of this reality-check is not to assign blame. It is not to make the women who felt/feel compelled or desperate enough to choose abortion feel ashamed and guilty and terrible. Let us be frank that many of them did and do not really have true liberty to choose (so much for freedom of choice!) when surrounded by insistent and indignant parents, bullying male partners, and well-meaning peers and friends, all the while fighting their own internal maternal instinct. What options were/are given them besides, “If you have the baby and keep it, you will be ruining your (and my/our) life?”

Who was/is there for them to offer them another road, amid the often unsympathetic and vehemently righteous pro-life/anti-abortion advocates and the carping, oppressing, bullying unsupportive significant others, not to speak of the frequently strident ideological and uncompassionate militancy of the pro-choicers?

Love was/is desperately needed, but has gone into the deep freeze on both ideological sides, and, sadly, at the personal level where these forlorn women live. The pregnant and vulnerable woman is still pretty much left alone and abandoned, the victim of cold love, even while protests of “We’re only telling you this because we love you,” are drummed into her ears.

Let us also be clear that governments, churches, and other charitable organizations were/are not disinterested bystanders during all this. Almost the whole old-fashioned support system of orphanages and homes for single mothers has been defunded and gutted, whether by design or neglect.  Much cheaper to erase the problem than fund assistance to a young woman trying to raise a child and still have a life for ten-to-twenty years, or whatever time it may take for her to find a husband/partner who will help support her and her child. And the religious institutions who used to do most of this sort of thing are largely in disgrace for reported scandals of abuse of various kinds. “Shut ‘em down!” runs the Greek tragedy chorale.

This is but one flaming example of the utter failure or our society to demonstrate real love to so many segments of the population who have been marginalized, ostracized, victimized, vilified, etc. For more examples, we can look at how we neglect and shove the disabled and mentally ill out of the way. We can consider how we warehouse our inconvenient seniors because we can’t, or won’t, provide funded assistance to the many who could still live at home if we bothered to pay care-givers a living wage. This would be far cheaper and, for many, far more compassionate than funding long-term beds at $40-70,000 per annum in impersonal institutions.

Consider how we still cheat the indigenous of what they are entitled to after 200 years of racism. The parallels with the abortion issue in all these cases is striking. In similar fashion, all the old-fashioned but at least partially effective institutions have been defunded and gutted, leaving these underclasses isolated, unsupported, and driven to the brink of despair.

Agape where are you? Where have you gone?

Agape is the highest form of love which God exampled in Jesus. He commissioned a community of followers which became known as the Church, to continue to spread it and bring it into every part of human life and society. It is sad to watch and lamentable to admit that cold love has all too often and too much crept into the Churches of the West, not to speak of the secular, godless ideologies which have supplanted them here in the rich and comfortable First World.

TO BE CONTINUED

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Cold Love, 2

You have heard it that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: love your enemies! Pray for people who persecute you! That way, you’ll be children of your faither in heaven! After all, he makes his sun to rise on bad and good alike, and sends rain upon both the upright and on the unjust.

Yeshua/Jesus of Nazareth, ca 30 CE in Galilee, northern Israel, cited in The Gospel of Matthew, chapter 5, verses 43-45 as translated in The Kingdom New Testament, trans. by N.T. Wright.

(Slide credit – Etsy)

In the statement above, Yeshua/Jesus transforms the normal human understanding of relating to friends and enemies. In another teaching in The Gospel of Luke chapter 10, he explains whom he means by “neighbor”; he declares that everyone becomes my “neighbor” in times of crisis and need, not just those I am related to by blood, affinity, and proximity. (See The Gospel of Luke, chapter 10 in the parable of Good Samaritan.)

In a teaching parallel to the one cited in our opening quote Yeshua pushes the “pray for people who persecute you” command even further:

“… love your enemies! Do good to people who hate you! Bless people who curse you! Pray for those who treat you badly! If someone hits you on the cheek—offer him the other one! If someone takes away your coat—don’t stop him taking your shirt! Give to everyone who asks you, and don’t ask for things back when people have taken them. Whatever you want people to do to you, do that to them. If you love [only] those who love you, what credit is that to you? Think about it, even sinners love people who love them. Or again, if you do good only to people who do good to you, what credit is that to you? Sinners do that too.”

Luke 6:27b-33

These are among the best known but most difficult of Jesus’ sayings to put into practice. Even great “saints” find them very hard and sometimes fail to do them, let alone hot zealots who revel in fulminating about God’s doom hanging over sinners to strike down those who mock God and despise Christ, Christians, and Christianity. After all, loving and blessing (which implies demonstrating what you say) an enemy or opponent is much harder than damning them to perdition and walking away from them.

Hot zeal for God’s judgment to fall on sinners can be a shield protecting the zealot from actually having to practice the harder things such as agape-love (agape being the Greek word used for love in all of these citations) which Jesus is talking about. As pointed out in Cold Love, 1, Jesus is talking about the highest form of love (agape) which governs all others. It is this kind of love which we need to live by, and this can only happen in constant relationship with its giver – Yahweh-Adonai, the Creator and Author of all that is.

Let us recall that Yeshua said that it was precisely this kind of love which would become increasingly scarcer as the times grow darker and we approach the Great Finale. It is one of the sure signs of what is called in the New Testament Greek text the Parousia, loosely translated as “the Royal Appearing” – the “Second Coming” in modern-day popular theological jargon.

The Parousia was a term used in the First Century Roman World to refer to the arrival of the Emperor, or perhaps a King, being heralded as a Savior, a Redeemer. There was a protocol for this as the Ruler approached the city he was coming to grace with his august (as in Caesar Augustus, First Emperor of Rome) presence. There was a great procession modelled after the Roman Triumph – the great and magnificent Victory Parade awarded to Rome’s greatest commanders and heroes after a major campaign had been completed with resounding success. Hundreds of thousands would turn out in their best robes, and the whole thing was carefully choreographed to display the full splendor and glory of the Victor. All the spoils of this latest enemy-obliterating campaign would be on display, with treasures aplenty, plundered statues of the new conquest’s gods, goddesses, and great rulers to show that Rome’s gods were greater, and the general or Emperor (who might also be the general – the Latin word for Emperor is “Imperator”, which, until Augustus had meant “Supreme Commander”, a military title) splendidly robed in a golden chariot – hordes of newly-minted war-captives-cum-slaves, the victorious legions, or at least one of them as representative, and, at the end, the most distinguished captives, who would be ceremonially executed by strangulation before the Emperor and Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the Supreme Roman Deity, whose son the Emperor was tacitly proclaimed to be.

The Christian idea of Christ’s final triumph bears some relationship to this picture, just as does the Apostle Paul’s statement that only the Holy Spirit could bring someone to declare “Jesus is Lord”. To say this in any public way in such a culture could well mean death. That statement meant that Caesar, whose Parousia all must acclaim whenever he went on tour in each great center he visited, was ultimately not Lord (Dominus in Latin). With Jesus, there was one higher than any earthly ruler.

But the Kingdom of Jesus was “not of this world” – it was a Kingdom built on agape, and its citizens were/are all equal, regardless of sex, race or ethnicity, and social class or status. In that alternative Kingdom, an Emperor/Empress is no higher than a slave, a man is not higher than a woman, black-, brown-, yellow-, red-hued, and white humans are all equal. This was not intended to be mere pious rhetorical flourish, but reality in practice and effect. But the only way this could and can ever be a reality is by, through, and within the living presence of agape in each of the Kingdom citizens’ hearts and minds, and practiced day by day.

It is no wonder that, for the Roman state, this movement, which began to grow with alarming rapidity in the eastern half of the empire and then found its insidious way west across North Africa and into Europe, became more and more the target of suspicion, then growing concern, and finally outright persecution.

How attractive and compelling such a faith quickly became to the downtrodden and oppressed! It was, and is, a complete alternative worldview and lifestyle to that of that ancient world, and indeed to our own culture and society, if truly lived. Eventually, numbers of the jaded and sated ruling classes and wielders of power and influence could not help but begin to wonder and look at this powerful spiritual and metaphysical force themselves, and some of their own number began giving themselves to this alternate “Lord” named Jesus.

It was said of those first generations of Christian disciples that it was their agape that was “turning the world upside down”. It was said of them that they blessed their persecutors, and prayed for the rulers who sought to destroy them. It was said that they knew how to die even as well as they knew how to live. It was said that inexplicable wonders sometimes accompanied the declaration of their euangelion – Good News – another word borrowed from the Roman Imperium with its message of the beneficent rule of the “Imperatores” – Emperors.

Cold love was not the hallmark of that age within the people then called Christians.

Let us bear that in mind as, next time, we examine what Jesus therefore meant when he said cold love would be a sure mark of the nearing of his Parousia.

TO BE CONTINUED

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Cold Love, 1

“Because of the increase of lawless wickedness most people’s love will grow cold…”

The Gospel of Matthew, chapter 24, verse 12, in the New Testament, my rendering.

(Photo credit: Outreach Magazines)

In the blistering, record-shattering summer of 2022 in Earth’s Northern Hemisphere, few (? no?) rational people would say that we are heading towards a new Ice Age. On every side, from Academia to government agencies and para-government prognosticators, we hear the alarm bells of climate change and see the effects of global warming. For example, here in Canada we are witnessing a large increase in the severity of summer storm and tornado activity in the east and center.

In the region where I live, we experienced what, so far, has been a once-in-a-lifetime event called a derecho, a sort of straight-line tornado without the twisting funnels touching down, but with straight-line winds recorded at speeds up to 212 kph (130mph). It cut a wide swath (up to 100 kilometers in breadth and about 1000 km in length) through southern, central and eastern Ontario and western Quebec, leaving huge devastation in its path, and power outages from a natural cause on a scale never seen before in Ontario. The national capital area of Ottawa-Gatineau, with 1.43 million people Canada’s fourth largest urban area, was worst hit, with some areas out of power for almost two weeks as Hydro workers struggled to replace thousands of destroyed power poles and towers, transformers, and sub-stations. Overall insurable damage was $720 million, but add to that materials and labor costs to rebuild the infrastructure, and this does not speak to the devastation wrought on business, farming, industry, and commerce.

How much of climate change is due to human action over the last two hundred or so years may still be debated, but there seems little doubt that human pollution of the air and sea, and pillage of the land, particularly of the forests and sensitive ecosystems all over the world, have played and continue to play a significant role.

One of the premises of the West’s modern-postmodern culture and society is that we should keep our personal religious and spiritual convictions out of the public forum. This seems a fine ideal if we can live up to it and all are willing to participate in it equally. For people in power it is a very tough temptation to overcome, and disguising one’s metaphysical convictions as rational and scientific is a common ploy when effectuating change to the social fabric. For some decades, many Western nations seem to have made a real effort to be somewhat non-partisan in religion and metaphysical influences. However, one may be excused for suspecting that the veneer of civility and sincerity in not using power for the furtherance of favored values and morals with little regard for those of the mass of conscientious citizens has become threadbare.

In the West’s history over the last 1500 years or so since the demise of the Western Roman Empire, religion has too often been an instrument, a motivation, and a justification for some of the most terrible events in recorded history. Some of history’s most horrific and inhumane things done by humans to one another have been done in the name of Jesus Christ, to whom the perpetrators paid lip-service as the Prince of Peace and the ultimate manifestation of God’s boundless love for humanity and His creation. These failures and excesses by individual Christians holding positions of power, and by institutions claiming to act under Christ and according to His principles have provided great fodder for the secularization of the West.

Over the last hundred years, ideology has stepped into the moral vacuum, and continues to do so. The dismal record of the twentieth century amply illustrates that ideology is just secularized metaphysics with all the religious zeal and much of the sacramentalism of religion dressed up in other names. Without God, humanity creates its own form of religion and creates the kinds of laws, principles, and institutions the latest power-clique deems suited to anchor itself in place and manipulate the underclasses who must adhere to their orthodoxy or suffer the penalties for not doing so. Such penalties may be as mild as social pariah-ship and isolation, or as severe as death and mass extermination.

It is an education to consider the perception and role of love across the annals of recorded history. It would be a long and perhaps wearying tale to undertake it in detail. Books about love in all its aspects abound across the millennia and in numerous cultural expressions. We cannot do them justice here, and it is not my intent to try.

But we may consider what Jesus was talking about in the quote at the top of this post and see where it takes us.

When Jesus said that as things move towards the ultimate climax of human history (whenever that might be), “most people’s love will grow cold”, the word for “love” in the original Greek (which was actually already a translation of the Aramaic word “hooba” which Jesus would have used when talking to His disciples) was agape. This kind of love is different from sexual love (eros), parental love (storge), or friendship and sibling love (philia). It is the highest form of love, selfless, giving without expecting any return, reflecting God’s love for humanity and His creation.

Jesus was not saying that people would stop falling in love, stop having sex, or stop caring about family and friends. However, if those other kinds of love are to truly reach their highest potential, they must be ruled by something yet higher – agape. That is what Jesus was predicting would “grow cold” for most people.

What consequences ensue from the decline of selfless, giving love-commitment which does not impose some sort of controlling agenda or conditions in return? Surely it is not wrong to hope for and expect some reciprocation in relationships with one’s most significant others? Certainly not! And I am sure Jesus would concur. But when it fades away, when the beloved turn away and reject you, then what?

That is where agape emerges, if it is present and has been nurtured already.

What Jesus is saying is that in the “end-times” we will see (and it appears already that we are entering them, or are already well along the path towards them) is the strength of underlying and over-arching agape as the root strength of all love fading out of view.

The consequences of that are “the increase of lawless wickedness”, which is also one of the causes of the moral and ethical glaciation unto death of western (and world) culture and society. It is both cause and effect, like the snowdrift high on the mountainside that breaks loose and, when it catapults down the slope, brings a tremendous avalanche of devastation.

TO BE CONTINUED

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Psalm 73 – A Parable for Our Time, 3 – Strange Time, This Time

(Photo credit -Quotefancy)

This short series on “A Parable for Our Time” based on Psalm 73 of the Hebrew Scriptures will conclude in unorthodox fashion with a rather lengthy original poem. Although using poetry to convey complexity and perplexity may be a bit of a hurdle, I hope this will not put off the reader.

Given the maelstrom of complex issues and influences swirling around humanity and our role and place on Planet Earth, and the parallel perplexity many of us are experiencing in our souls about it all, perhaps poetry can be a more effective way in reflecting all this than the regular sort of narrative composition blog.

At any rate, should you choose to peruse this venture in poetic license, thank you for you indulgence and patience.

I leave readers to formulate their own interpretations. Each one will hopefully find soul-food somewhere along the way.

Shalom!

Strange time, this time

© V.J. Marquis, July 2022

Strange time, this time

we sojourn in

strange time, this time

of endless din

and silent noise

of ether sky

consumed with waves

particles fly

uncaptured ghosts

shooting through me

swirling ‘round me

photonic beams

in endless streams

screaming voices

I cannot hear

unless I use

the proper gear.

Strange times, these times

restless masses

seething classes

seen through glasses

darkened lenses

barely capture

fleeting senses

what might be seen

what might be heard

sublime, absurd

folly, wisdom

panic, boredom

everything from

wonders to slime

beauty to crime

chaotic brew

one may construe

just as you please

as lonely truth

goes to its knees.

Strange time, this time

rumors of war

lurk at the door

dire projections

dark shadows loom

rage breath of doom

heartless, soulless

glitzy nabobs

shun starving mobs

no qualms or guilt

can stick to them

rake it in now

choked with splendor

“let them eat cake”

we remember

a great queen said

then lost her head.

Strange time, this time

though not the first

there was Noah

of long ago

the story goes

that in his time

imaginations

of multitudes

teemed with evil

all the day long

to hell with good

just bring it on

power, pleasure

makes us all strong

just do as we like

no God to see

no God to hear

no God to care

or make us fear

robbers, killers

and all the rest

top of the heap

short-term bit-king

live by the sword

die by the sword

God may be slow

yet all will see

his dreadful wrath

bring them to dust.

Strange time, this time

hypocrisy reigns

mocking disdain

for any to claim

to yet sustain

moral virtues

old-time values

perhaps abstain

from urgent lusts

consider e’er

you put your trust

in brand-new fads

stranger theories

fresh-concocted

to ease the road

into unproved

notions of who

and what we are

why wait for proof

just go and do

and ridicule

the dinosaurs

who will not see

just shout them down.

Strange time, this time

the great divide

a chasm wide

from left to right

so far apart

with seething rage

a deadly stew

can it be true

conspiracy

that other side

no eyes to see

no ears to hear

no willingness

to listen or

to move aside

receive a word

let it be heard

that comes across

from those people

your truth, my truth

just what is truth

Pilate-Jesus

once exchanged

all truth, no truth

just yours or mine

with no God there

just who’s to say

all truths can change

from day to day.

Strange time, this time

no certainty

it has been said

except we all

will end up dead

“gotta serve somebody”

as we all know

deep in our gut

some rights and wrongs

some truths and lies

fake excuses

for ourselves

lay the blame game

the other guy

made me do it

but underneath

the still small voice

whispers “you know!”

you had a choice

persistent cuss

that little voice

leave me in peace

and if it won’t

I can kill it

I can still it

ignoring it

neglecting it

till I grow deaf

or it goes dead.

Strange time, this time

the deaf and blind

have taken charge

a rumor comes

and panic reigns

a storm streaks by

the ship is blown

now right now left

the course unknown.

Strange time, this time

the sages sitting

upon the heights

of their wisdom

can tell us all

we need to do

to claim our rights

to save ourselves

to practice what

has been approved

how next to move

to reach the goal

justice for all

a few freedoms

checked, withdrawn

more right for some

than other ones

trust us we know

we balance fair

flexible law

in swivel chair.

Strange times, these times

poor blessed ones

meek heirs of earth

pure-heart seekers

given small worth

grieving mourners

shoved to the side

collateral costs

of progress y’all

mercy is mocked

in victims’ case

villains pitied

while families weep

peacemakers called

God’s own blood kin

run to and fro

seeking that one

mucho peace-talk

running here, there

no reality

found anywhere

not in one heart

nor multitude

a rare jewel

so hard to find

sell all to get

no one knows how

it’s really found

hunger and thirst

for God abound

no one dares name

what’s really sought

no one dares kneel

dares breathe the Name.

Strange time, this time

beginning, end

the great trial

to weigh the soul

mene-tekel

moment-finger

Babylon-feast

orgy-garden

drunken stupor

steaming cauldron

drink it down dregs

consequences

consequences

always come home

all know deep down

all debts come due.

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Psalm 73 – A Parable for Our Time, 2

Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
And you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’

Bob Dylan, 1964

Bob Dylan – The Times They Are A-Changin’ (Official Audio) https://www.youtube.com › watch

As much as it did in the day of King David and its author, Asaf, a worship leader in ancient Israel 3000 years ago, Psalm 73 speaks to how masses of ordinary folk see the world in this age. As such, it is true prophecy with a timeless message, as well as a poignant warning to all the arrogant who think they will never have to pay for their crimes against the poor, the downtrodden, the abused, and the oppressed of every kind and degree.

As Asaf observes, it seems as if the rich and evil just get richer and compound their evil depredations at the expense of people who just want to live a quiet normal life with a modicum of comfort and perhaps a measure of social recognition for themselves and their family. While the elites devise more and more methods of extracting everything they can take from them and their toil, the “folks” want reasonable security for their families and opportunities for their children to enjoy the good things they have worked for.

More and more regular citizens become aware that much of their work does not contribute to their own modest hopes and aspirations but is siphoned off by unscrupulous oligarchs, aristocrats, plutocrats, and downright criminals scheming to exploit every means possible to maximize profits and gain more wealth for themselves and their coterie. The plutocrats are seen as manipulating and even controlling the political oligarchs by giving them both a financial cut of the loot and a path to continued future power and influence once they have played out their political credit.

In our day in almost every state, the horrendous actions of the criminal sector are becoming more and more brazen and bold in directly challenging the “legitimate” sector for direct control of whole regions and sectors of the economy and society. They are often so deeply intertwined with the political authorities that their actions are almost indistinguishable. When the populace awakens to this reality, it becomes a mere matter of time until the exploited become so enraged and angry that they begin to rebel.  

What Psalm 73 and other Psalms and prophetic parts of the Bible, both Jewish and Christian, declare is, whatever may appear to be happening, the Creator is always aware and keeping tabs on all of this. Sooner or later, everything is paid for. Evil always reaps its own destruction if it is not ended by “repentance” – a true and sincere turning away from it with restoration and restitution.

“Those who live by the sword die by the sword.” When you drive people into the last corner where no hope is left, the courage of despair rises up with rage and fury to attack the oppressors, even if it seems hopeless. “Those who sow the wind will reap the whirlwind.” “Be sure that your sins will find you out.” “God cannot be mocked [with impunity].”

These are hopeful, sobering sayings, but the difficulty for the victims of the accumulating mountain of injustices and oppressions is in not readily seeing anything being done right now to put an end to them. Ordinary folks still want and hope for that quiet life for themselves and their children and grandchildren. Sometimes it takes generations for the oppression to become so unbearable that the explosion of wrath can no longer by prevented.

History has shown that what may happen is the emergence of someone even more subtle and ruthless than the brutal and callous coteries who have ensconced themselves in the castles with their garrisons of men-at-arms – the “forces of order. The castles of the 21st Century are the bastions of the socio-political-economic Powers of our day.

When the people’s apparent “great hope” emerges, they will usually be seen as “a man [woman if you prefer] of the long-suffering people”, “one of us”, with the power to articulate the spoken and half-understood grievances and outrage of those who have been, or see themselves as having been, disentitled, disenfranchised, used, fobbed off with hollow promises and empty rhetoric, etc.

There is no shortage of examples from history to demonstrate this phenomenon and what can happen when the oratorical, inspirational, motivational, and organizational genius emerges to give voice to and stimulate action from within “the masses”. Here are a few: Alcibiades in ancient Athens; the Gracchi brothers, Spartacus, and Julius Caesar in ancient Rome; “Jacques” and the Jacquerie in Medieval France, Watt Tyler in Medieval England, William Wallace in Medieval Scotland, Thomas Muntzer in Reformation Germany, The Jacobins (Murat and Robespierre, et. al.) in Revolutionary France, Lenin and the Soviets in Russia, the Taipei and Mao in China, Mussolini and Fascism in Italy, and, perhaps the “greatest” populist revolutionary exemplar, Hitler. There have been many smaller-scale models of this phenomenon as well.

As we survey human societies around the world in the 21st Century, we cannot avoid the question, “How close are we to such uprisings?” If such were to break out in this day, can they take on the scale of one of the massive events listed above?

Perhaps of some comfort to the entrenched powers of 21st Century society, most of the outbreaks of popular rage in history have failed in their ultimate aim of overthrowing the oligarchs, plutocrats, aristocratic oppressors, etc. The “forces of order” are often too strong for the poorly armed, amateurishly-led populace to uproot the “Establishment” without some inside help, perhaps some opportunistic or idealistic and repentant person or group from the ruling set who can swing some of his own sort, or at least some part of the military and police forces, to assist the rebels. We see this at the Fall of the Bastille in Paris in 1789, and in St. Petersburg in 1917 with the sailors’ revolt.

If we consider all of this from the perspective of Asaf, the ancient Israelite poet-prophet (in ancient societies poets often had the role of “prophet”), he does not seem to condone bloody revolution as a good solution to the massive injustices suffered by the underclasses. Instead, he seems to advise patience and trust in God, who sees and will, in his Providence, bring retribution upon the oppressors and exploiters.

From the perspective of an ordinary citizen of any age, this is a hard pill to swallow. Asaf is very aware of that. Read (again?) a good translation of the actual Biblical text or, if preferred, refer to my paraphrase in the post previous to this. Perhaps this “counsel of patience in the face of injustice and adversity” just seems too unrealistic to practice, especially to Westerners of the 21st Century CE. It is much more satisfying to take action, even violent action if things get too desperate. What can Asaf be thinking as he tells us to wait for God to settle with our abusers and oppressors?

“They wear their pride brazenly and move along openly using violence and intimidation when it suits them. They grow fat with ease in their rich lifestyle, while their minds always devise new evil which infests their hearts and oozes out into their actions. They speak with malice and scoffing while they spew out threats. They even mock God and heaven while they strut and swagger boastfully here on earth.

“Many people are taken in by them and their “success” and turn to them, swallowing their “how-to-get-rich” story whole and acting like them. Those arrogant swaggerers sneer, “I don’t see any evidence that there’s a God watching! Does he even exist?”

“There they are, those evil scourges of humanity, always at ease, getting rich, swelled with self-importance and power. It seems to me these days as if I’ve remained good and innocent of wrongdoing for nothing. I know nothing but trouble every day, as if I’m being punished the minute I get up in the morning.”

Psalm 73 paraphrase

How can I/you/we find the patience to go on enduring the burdens they heap on us so callously? What about the crushed, much-worse-off victims in so many other afflicted states in Africa, Asia, Latin America? Is it at all reasonable to suggest, “If you just wait patiently, God will give those despicable evil people their just desserts in due time?” How can that be seen as any kind of solution for people watching their children die and their humble hopes crushed as so much dung under the boots of ruthless semi-human killers?

The very earth calls out for redress and for just consequences for the very worst of these beings who look like humans but act like incarnate devils.

Here in Canada, perhaps more than in any other Western nation, we move as in a dream far removed from most of the turmoil. We are deceived, just as our leaders seem to be. They but reflect the somnolence of the people as we imagine that we shall escape what is happening far offshore. Our mighty southern neighbour is deep in internal turmoil, and its waves are lapping at our doorstep, even spilling over, although so far we have felt but ripples.

The point is that, far and wide, the world stage is set for some great emergence, some sort of great upheaval in human order and society. Nature itself seems to mirror this.

To borrow more Biblical imagery, we might say the “the whole earth is groaning in distress felt right in the gut [the old translations say “travail”] as it awaits the glorious revelation of the sons (children) of the Creator.” (St. Paul in Romans, chapter 8.)

It seems an appropriate time to be describing where things have come to in apocalyptic language. Read again the opening citation from Bob Dylan who might, with considerable justice, be called the “poet laureate” and greatest minstrel of this time in human history. For those who miss the allusions in the last verse of that great classic song of almost 60 years ago, they are firmly anchored in the teachings of Yeshua/Jesus who was referring to the elite of the society he was living in two thousand years ago.

“The times they are a-changin'” but, “plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose”!

TO BE CONTINUED

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Psalm 73 – A Parable for Our Time, 1

(Photo credit – wikipedia – shofar)

(The following is my rather liberal paraphrase of a literary gem from the Hebrew Bible. It is based on David Stern’s translation in The Complete Jewish Bible.I have eliminated the verse separations to facilitate the flow of this shockingly relevant 3000-year-old discourse on the nature of human society in the eyes of a citizen who also happens to still believe in God and His ultimate justice.)

God is very good to Israel, to those whose hearts are pure before Him.

But I lost my balance and my feet almost slipped away when I became jealous of arrogant rich and powerful people and saw how much evildoers prosper. For when their death comes it’s painless, and they stay healthy all their lives, never having the troubles of ordinary people and cruising along untouched by sickness and pain.

They wear their pride brazenly and move along openly using violence and intimidation when it suits them. They grow fat with ease in their rich lifestyle, while their minds always devise new evil which infests their hearts and oozes out into their actions. They speak with malice and scoffing while they spew out threats. They even mock God and heaven while they strut and swagger boastfully here on earth.

Many people are taken in by them and their “success” and turn to them, swallowing their “how-to-get-rich” story whole and acting like them. Those arrogant swaggerers sneer, “I don’t see any evidence that there’s a God watching! Does he even exist?”

There they are, those evil scourges of humanity, always at ease, getting rich, swelled with self-importance and power. It seems to me these days as if I’ve remained good and innocent of wrongdoing for nothing. I know nothing but trouble every day, as if I’m being punished the minute I get up in the morning.

But when I talk like this, I’m betraying my children and grandchildren. Nevertheless, it’s very troubling to think about.

Then, as I come before God to worship and stay in His presence, I see the truth about their fate. You, God, have put them on a slippery slope sliding straight into the pit of destruction. In an instant they are destroyed and swept away by sudden terrors. There is nothing left of them but dream-mist when an aroused God shows how He despises the way they live.

For a while I was angry and bitter and deeply wounded. In my anguish, I became an utterly ignorant fool myself, like one of the brute beasts you’ve made. But you did not leave me or forget me. You took me aside by the right hand and counseled and guided me. You showed me that when I die, you will receive me into your glorious realm.

So, Lord, whom do I have in heaven but you? And as to here on earth, when all is said and done, I want nothing else but you.

My body will fail and my heart may give out, but God is my real strength and my eternal home.

Those who have already gone too far and those who are even now heading far away from you will perish; the unfaithful to you are as good as destroyed already.

As for me, the nearness of God is my true good and is all that is truly desirable and good. I am making Yahweh-Adonai my refuge so that I can tell everyone who will listen of all your works.

——————————————————————————–

Lately, I feel as if I really connect to Psalm 73. Previously I have experienced trouble with this and other Psalms of similar sentiment because of what seems like God’s harsh attitude in categorically rejecting those who have gone astray from Him. I sometimes find the language of the Psalms towards rebels against God brutal and vengeful in my 21st Century years.

But there is a real dilemma for anyone who gets caught up in that semantic trap – for that is what it is, a semantic trap. It springs from our post-modern, enlightened, progressivist reinterpretation of what God should be like according to us rather than the reality of who God really is. We have remade God to suit our touchy-feely ideas.

Here is the internal dialogue we postmoderns typically recite along that route: “I want everyone who claims to be good to be nice and sensitive and forgiving of everything I do. Hmm – but that means we all need to be forgiving and non-judgmental of whatever anyone does. If I want that for me from everyone else, I guess I should be that way too. (But there are limits of course, especially when people mistreat me!)

“So, if God really exists, he/she/it/they would automatically have to be all-forgiving, no matter what!. (S)he would not harshly and brutally condemn people to hell, even if they do horrible things. In fact, hell shouldn’t exist at all – so let’s just declare it can’t, it doesn’t. If God is love, and hell is full of hate, well it just can’t be real! But heaven is a great place, or would be if we didn’t have to just do everything God says all the time. I mean, how much fun would that be? So, let’s just say that “heaven” will be perfectly adaptable, according to everyone’s idea of what it should be like to be heaven for them.”

The most economical postmodern solution to this disturbing dilemma of people actually doing for-real terrible deeds while we try to make sense of them in a universe that still has a God sitting above it, is to deny there is a God. Then we don’t have to deal with the moral conundrum the inconvenient Deity creates for us poor mortals living in a painfully unjust world. Without the Supreme Being, morality is just a social construct and not a real problem – unless, of course, you happen to be on the receiving end of the injustice. Then, it’s very hard to remember as you suffer that injustice doesn’t have a true reality, just the appearance and feel of it for the recipients. The random-chance universe of inanimate evolution is just a cruel, brutal place, so cruelty and brutality are just human attributions put on something that is not personal. But, oops! All that right and wrong talk still smacks of judgment and morality! So just where does that SO inconvenient apparently innate sense of justice and morality come from anyway if the universe is devoid of it. How moral are atoms and molecules?

This is the kind of semantic game philosophers who deny there is a God or say that God is irrelevant must play to escape the trap they’ve created for themselves and everyone else who ignores or excludes God, especially a Personal God, from their understanding of life and the Cosmos. Therefore, the denial of God, and of real (in)justice and actual good and evil in the Cosmos as it is, is nothing more or less than a semantic trap. It has no exit. Only God provides an exit, but we can no longer admit that exit into public discourse and polite society. As Stephen Hawking said about the best resolution for the enigmas of how evolution could ever have happened, and time come into being, “The simplest and most elegant solution is God. But we do not have need of that hypothesis.”

Hawking was of course dead wrong; we desperately need not only the “God-hypothesis” but the actual living, Personal God, Yahweh-Adonai, the One who identifies as “I AM WHO I AM: I WILL BE WHOM I WILL BE,” “The God Who Is There!” as Francis Schaeffer put it in a book of the same title.

In ancient times, the polytheists understood this when they began to consider the nature of the gods they had fallen into worshipping and appeasing. They realized that the way they attributed frivolous human moral ambivalence and pettiness to them simply would not do. Gods who could whimsically be benevolent one day and downright malicious the next could not be worthy of worship, except out of fear. But no amount of appeasement seemed to make them any more or less benevolent. So why bother?

But few ancients were willing to say that no such thing as morality and justice really existed. They needed to make the gods more just in order to hang onto truth, so gradually they did. There were a few open atheists, like the Roman Lucretius. But he was considered rather blasphemous and certainly impious by his contemporaries. To the chagrin of his great Medieval admirer, Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, often considered the greatest ancient philosopher, if not the greatest of all time, was ambivalent about the God question. He rejected the Greek pantheon as unworthy of esteem, but, unlike his mentor Plato, was agnostic about there being a single Supreme Being. Plato concluded there must be such a Being.

In the ancient world, most everyone innately understood and accepted that there truly is good and evil at work, and that right and wrong are everyday choices to be made even in the most banal and certainly in the most significant issues in life. If we scratch enough below the surface of the regular John and Jane in the 21st-Century, I suspect the situation is little changed from our ancient progenitors. Such stubborn persistence of moral absolutism related to a belief in God may be the despair of the radical progressive set. They would dearly love to make morality as plastic and redefinable as possible in order to keep everyone moving towards full acceptance of the next crusade’s new value on the ever-morphing WOKE agenda. They can’t understand how, after setting the educational agenda for decades now in the West, ordinary folks still hold onto the “God-hypothesis” as the only logical answer to that most basic of all childhood questions, “WHY?”

This “stubborn persistence” is closely aligned to the deep malaise at work among hundreds of millions of unhappy regular citizens whose anger about fundamental inequalities and moral follies being ignored and even sanctioned as “good” is approaching boil-over temperature. John and Jane Doe see endless demands to stretch their lifestyles and values while removing their hope of economic betterment in order to suit the latest enlightenment revelations about “truth”. Outrage, we are discovering, is a two-way street. In the early 2000s, the left seemed to be the righteous outraged faction. Now the right has their own version of righteous anger. Neither faction likes it when the other takes to the streets and the barricades in wrathful outpourings. Shades of Germany in the early 1930s!

Psalm 73 is actually remarkably close to what we are discussing here, yet it was composed (as a song!) 3000 or so years ago by an Israelite worship leader named Asaf. As King Shlomo (Solomon) (an Israelite ruler close to Asaf in time) observed, “There is nothing new under the sun.”

Before we close this episode, and to prepare for our next one, let us briefly set up the discussion Asaf is embarking on in his 3000-year-old “protest” song (shades of Barry Maguire, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Neil Young!). He wasn’t a hard-swearing rapper, but he is scathing nonetheless!

Asaph, our ancient Protester (Protestant?) is talking about the conscienceless ultra-rich and powerful oppressors of the underclasses of his time. He asks all the sorts of question which any person with a still functioning conscience and sense of justice and right and wrong would ask today. He might even have been looking at the oppressive rule of Israelite Kings as he wrote this, or at least at some of his oppressive officials who, like the bloatedly opulent Kings, were using their high offices and trade and business connections to grow richer and richer while oppressing, over-taxing, and gouging the poor farmers and laborers.

Sounds like the obscene plutocratic system we see in this age, eh?

TO BE CONTINUED

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Outliers, 8– Profile of the Ultimate Outlier, 2

Even if someone [meaning himself] were to rise from the dead, still they would not believe. –

Jesus/Yeshua, in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man in the afterlife. – ca 32 CE

There is no God but Allah, and I am the Prophet of Allah.

Muhammad to the Meccans in 610 CE.

The Buddha is not to be worshipped, nor is he himself the way; the Buddha is but the one who shows the way.

Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) to the Sanghya (the order of monks who followed him), ca. 500 BCE

Last time, we concluded that only three persons in human history qualify for the designation “Ultimate Outlier” or “Super-Outlier”: in chronological order, they are Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama – 563-483 BCE), Yeshua ben-Yosef of Nazareth in Israel (Jesus – 4 BCE-33 CE), and Muhammad of Mecca (570 CE – 632 CE). There have been almost innumerable other prominent outliers in human history down through the last five recorded millennia, but previously we rather conclusively demonstrated that none of them approach the caliber of the three named above.

Furthermore, these three are all well-established, documentable historical persons, not vague legendary individuals of whose real lives we know very little or next to nothing. As we found previously, the legacies of these three are so gigantic and durable that they bear no comparison with any other famous personage in any field of achievement we could name. They surpass any temporal empire based on conquest and national ambition, as well as any other great achievements in any category of historical renown.

When considering the issue “Who is the greatest person who has ever lived?” Western materialists are inevitably prone to reduce it to some sort of quantifiable criteria. As tempting as this may be, it simply will not do for these three. What sort of quantifiers could be used? Numbers of followers over time and in the present? A mugs game at best. How about numbers of ethnicities or nations whose populace by-and-large today name each of them as their religious icon or Messiah? Once more, there are so many variables as to render such a comparison mute. Using such crude indices will render no meaningful result.

When answering the burning question, “Who is the greatest of all?” Mohammed Ali (Cassius Clay), the world heavyweight boxing legend, brazenly and unabashedly replied, “I AM THE GREATEST!” Similarly, the adherents of one or the other of the three great faiths named above would doubtless nominate their own founder to the title.

No human, living or dead, is capable of objectively deciding who is THE Ultimate Outlier in human history. I will not pretend to be objective either. For any regular reader of this blog, you will already know that I am an affirmed Christian, so my answer is obvious. Yeshua ben-Yosef/Jesus, son of Joseph, of Nazareth IS THAT ONE.

That does not mean that I cannot admire the other nominees, at least to some degree. For example, Buddha’s teachings are among the most sublime on record, and those who practice them consistently may well succeed in living harmonious lives and doing far less harm to others, their world, and themselves than those who do not. “Good” Buddhists are among the least offensive and aggressive people on Earth.

Muhammad faced and overcame great adversity. He was ready to die for his mission and message and was a great teacher, inspirer of men, organizer, recruiter, and unifier of previously hostile tribes. But the harshness of parts of his message, once he had gained power in Yatrib (Medina), and the thrust of his revelations underwent a profound change. Its application by both himself and subsequent Caliphs towards those who did (and do) not voluntarily accept it has led to enormous injustice against those named “infidels” for their refusal, including wholesale massacres and mass forced conversions. The justification for this kind of “evangelism” counterbalances subsequent attempts to create more equitable conditions. Too often these have failed and continue to fail in the face of stubborn insistence on holding fast to Medieval cruelties and inequalities in the name of “preserving the faith”. For example, by and large in Islamic societies, women are still kept in abject suppression to men at every stage of their lives.

Neither can the reprehensible behavior of people claiming to be sincere followers and adherents of Jesus be excused, either in the past or in the present. Horrors committed on millions in the name of Jesus and “Christian civilization” are an inexcusable blot on the legacy of the Lord of lords and Prince of Peace. Those who condoned and continue to condone such blasphemies will have much to answer for standing before the Judgment Seat of the One they profess to serve. They also have much to answer for right now in the court of human esteem and justice itself.

Diametrically opposite to the above kind of behaviors, and like Buddha, Jesus taught and exampled peace, respect for all regardless of any sort of categorization extant in the prevalent society, forgiveness, and open acceptance of all, male and female, slave and free, regardless of race (there is only the human race, not several) and ethnicities. For him, all can come to him as equal inheritors of God’s offer of a new Kingdom here on earth and in “the age to come”. No evidence can be advanced from any legitimate historically vetted source to show that Jesus ever preached taking power by force, overthrowing established powers and societies by subversive revolution, or advancing the idea of any sort of racial or cultural mastery of one people, tribe, or nation over others. On the country, when on trial for his life before the Roman Superpower’s governor in his homeland of Israel, Jesus told Pontius Pilatus, “My Kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my followers would fight for me, and I could ask my Father [he claimed God as his Father] for ten legions of angels [60 000 angels!] and He would send them.”

Instead, he declared that he had come to bring an end to the dominion of sin on Earth, and that he would do this by voluntarily sacrificing his own life as the price to bring reconciliation between forlorn and lost humanity and our broken-hearted Creator. In turn, that would open the road to mutual reconciliation among the warring peoples of earth, among individuals, and even with the wider creation itself.

Instead of launching a violent revolutionary crusade to overthrow the military Superpowers of the world who crush and oppress the suffering masses, he would send a bunch of ordinary people to teach and live by example God’s message that the way out of the same-old millennial pattern of ambitious, unscrupulous, and downright wicked people taking over and ruling using a lot of helping soldiers and bureaucrats and accomplices who benefit from the system was to turn the value system and heart commitment upside down.

“You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”, but I tell you love your enemies, forgive those who persecute you, do good to those who hate you, and you will be children of your heavenly Father.” Jesus said that real change could only happen when heart-and-soul inner change took place and enough people started living by a whole other set of criteria.

The usual response to this very hard message is that it is all very nice in theory, but can never work in practice in the dog-eat-dog, only-the-fittest-survive universe we have seen extant since human history has been recorded.

Ending war, mutual hatred, and group-to-group animosity and fear has long been recognized as the great quest for bringing peace on earth and true goodwill to all humans. All of us know that this must happen or we are doomed – and perhaps life on Earth itself is doomed if we fail.

But, despite all the understanding of the need for such a great utopian breakthrough, we continue to see that “the beat goes on” as it ever has. Every great Golden Age of every society and civilization has come crashing down in ruins as one kingdom has risen up against another and people beat their ploughshares into swords and their pruning-hooks into spears and shields, and once more the chariots of war rumble out.

Once more we live in a time of wars and rumors or wars. Once more we hear the trumpet blast to rally the armies for another time of slaughter. And we now also sea the seas being turned to wormwood, and the heavens becoming as brass, burning up the very ground. The very skies can now rain down fire and brimstone.

Buddha’s offer of peace is for personal extinction in nirvana. Muhammad’s offer is that everyone submit to Allah or the might of his wrath will smite all the infidels until all who are left bow to him or burn in hell forever. Jesus’ offer is, through confessing your need to God to be forgiven through the sacrifice of Jesus, to receive forgiveness for all your sins and then become an ambassador of peace and God’s love to any who will hear.

In simplified form, these are the three basic choices the three Ultimate Outliers of human history have left for us.

But there are four choices, not just three.

The fourth choice is to refuse all of them and keep hoping we humans can still find a way out of our deepening crisis for ourselves. That is the choice actually at work for a great many, if not most people in the West right now. It is also the choice at work in non-Western nations which have taken on a largely Western approach to living and dealing with socio-economic-political realities.

Making war to end war has never brought an end to war. Karma is as true now as it ever was. “If you live by the sword, you will die by the sword,” another one of those straight-to-the-heart Jesus sayings. Biblically speaking, “The wages of sin is [always] death” – and, “Those who sow the wind reap the whirlwind”.

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Outliers, 7 – Profile of the Ultimate Outlier, 1

No one has ever spoken like this man! –

The Temple Guards Captain to the High Priest when he returned without arresting Jesus, ca. 33 CE

It is harder for a rich person to enter God`s family than it is for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.

– Yeshua/Jesus of Nazareth

The typical individualistic Westerner wants to express who “I really am underneath”; to make a statement and stand up for his/her own special uniqueness. The quintessential launching point for this ideal in recent memory was in the 1960s, the era of “Flower Power”, long hair for guys, newly approved birth-control pills, adaptable morality, and Rock Festivals. However, it must be recognized that the genesis of this movement had begun long before, reaching as far back as the Renaissance and Reformation in the 14th-16th centuries. What we saw emerge in the 1960s was the fruit of a long process of shedding traditions based on God and religious institutions.

The Beatniks of the ‘50s and Hippies of the ‘60s spawned millions of wannabe imitators growing long hair, reciting often bad poetry, singing folk- and protest-songs, wearing headbands, talking “cool” new lingo, sporting tie-dye T-shirts and pastel dresses and robes, marching in antiwar and Ban-the-Bomb protests, and flashing the Peace-sign as they jumped on the “All you need is love” bandwagon. They defied their parents and found their validation with their peers, asserting they did not have to conform to the “Man’s” (the System’s/the “Establishment’s”) expectations, while imitating the music, the clothing styles, and the talk of their “Counterculture” idols.

Many of these “cool” and “groovy” “dudes and chicks” were mostly aiming to hop into as many beds as possible while the hopping was hot. They could also sample some other groovy stuff like smoking joints, toking hashish, and trying out the psychedelic fast-track to spiritual enlightenment. But when real disapproval with real consequences began to assert themselves and “the Establishment” began to shut down a lot of their cultural mirages, “giving the Man the finger” went underground and external conformity to the Rat Race set in.

Since then, when the Western individual vaunts his/her dedication to unique individuality and personal expression, Western Capitalism quickly adapts and graphically markets the proper fashions and parameters by which to be your own unique person. Given the now great capacity to micro-market, any trend can be rapidly commercialized. The Counterculture Movement of 1963-75 was eventually massively coopted by smart entrepreneurs and its idols were brought mainstream by slick entertainment and business agents offering deals that could not be refused to people who were addicted seeking personal pleasure. The music idols of that generation all signed on to cash in. Many former real, and most pseudo-, Hippies headed back to school or got jobs to get a rich life once the hangover set in.

The West continues its admiration of everyone’s striving to be an Outlier in their own way while showing and telling via many cultural products what ways are actually acceptable to pursue modest individualistic distinction while advising, “Don’t get too far carried away by it.” After all, aspiration to self-expression via commercial stylism is extremely good for business.

No other culture in recorded history has idolized the appearance of individuality and pseudo-Outliership so avidly. It is no longer just the fashionable “stars” of entertainment and sport who aspire to be noticed. Imitate your preferred petty-gods and you gain a sort of proxy-Outliership. Not so different from the ancients with their domestic deities and ancestor-busts (a Roman custom) set up on little altar-shrines in their homes.

Historically, until the modern and post-modern, post-Christian West emerged, an excess of individuality had always been seen as presumption and even arrogance. It was also a threat to the social equilibrium. Some allowance was made for a few really fringe cases, but too many would eventually bring out the heretic hunters to deal with the order-disturbing elements. This pattern is still seen in many non-Western cultures, particularly among Muslim and Oriental nations. There are remnants of this even in the West.

In honor-and-shame cultures, fulfilling one’s role, keeping traditions, honoring one’s ancestors and relations, and avoiding bringing shame on one’s family and personal reputation weigh too heavily to allow Outliers a lot of leeway. In these cultures, the obsession of Westerners with self-expression, often at the expense of the very values so honored in the Middle East, the Orient, much of Africa, and, to a lesser extent, Latin America, is seen as decadent and irresponsible.

Cultural pendula swing back and forth, like Western clothing and hair styles. The degree of unorthodoxy a culture is willing to sustain without seeking to suppress it usually depends on the elite controllers’ sense of security in holding onto their sway and keeping their ability to maintain compliance among the generality of the populace for the benefit of those at the social, economic, and political summit. Thus, if the arbitrators of the key areas of conformity to orthodoxy feel secure in the mass of the people’s compliance to the “Establishment’s” set forms and rules and standards, they will allow the occasional outrageous manifestation to play itself out as long as it does not become a blatant challenge to fundamental official values or the culture’s general worldview.

In the ancient world, non-violent insanity was often viewed as “an affliction of the gods”, and the insane were not locked up but tolerated lest the god whose work the insanity signaled be offended. The European Medieval world took the view that the devil might be to blame and exorcism might be in order. Some examples needed to be made, and this might mean a few show-trails and heretic-burnings. If the affliction was of only mild effect on the family and community, the afflicted might be cared for in the home or an institution for the “mad”. Dementia was not understood. If the disorder became widespread, out came the heavy hitters of Church and State to root out the heretics, the witches, and the demonized. Perhaps a Crusade might be deemed necessary.

The problem has always been how to deal with anyone whose Outliership is so sane and well-developed that it remains within the boundaries of cultural, theological, and ideological orthodoxy but challenges the abuses of the system and some of its most fundamental interpretations of long-held Truth right to the core.

Enter Buddha, Muhammad, and, most outstanding of all, Yeshua/Jesus of Nazareth.

When someone of this caliber appears, the whole established order and the system itself can and will be challenged. The usual response of killing the interloper cannot erase the effect they have. Of the Big Three, only Jesus was executed, but He then proved His ultra-ultimate Outliership by refusing to stay dead and actually physically resurrecting! At least so say the Christians, and there is pretty solid historical evidence for His really having done this. Pretty hard (actually … IMPOSSIBLE! …) to get rid of Him after that!

There is no one else who matches the overall impact of the Big Three in recorded history. These three individuals stand out as the Ultimate Outliers. They are head and shoulders above other great leaders, teachers, and moral examples – and certainly far above famous military and political “heroes” such as Cyrus of Persia, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, or more modern figures such as George Washington, Catherine the Great, or Napoleon Bonaparte, to name a few. Neither do scientific “heroes” like Newton, Madame Curie, and Einstein belong in such a discussion, as great and revolutionary as they are for science. And as to entertainment and sports superstars staking a claim to supreme Outliership, the less said the better.

There is an abyss separating the “Big Three” from the rest of the ranks of “Great Outliership”. Here are some similarities among the Super-Outliers: all three taught and established one of great religions of the world, leaving an immense legacy that endures to this day. All three continue to inspire and create disciples in the millions even today. All three did not themselves leave writings and authoritative documents with instructions for successors to follow in establishing institutions and systems to propagate and regulate the work their disciples would carry on in their name. That was all left to the disciples to work out along the road into future. What they left were stories, actions, discourses, examples, and moral authority to carry on and extend their message and example of how to live. The disciples set about collecting and regularizing the accounts of what they said and did so that followers would know how to follow.

All three left an embryonic sort of organization, a living, morphing movement rather than a set-in-stone system and institution. The followers would have to work out how to create a lasting organism to preserve and grow the founder’s message and mission. This sort of legacy was genius, for it left a flexible, organic, adaptable movement able to live and grow in different times, places, and cultures and so become “universal” rather than time-limited, parochial, national, or merely ethnic.

TO BE CONTINUED

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Outliers, 6 – Consequences

Whoever undertakes to set himself up in the field of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.

– Albert Einstein

There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find its defenders among the ablest men [and women].

– John Dalberg (Lord Acton)

Today we set out to explore how choices always create consequences. In the previous episode, we discussed the greatest, most consequential choice we can ever make – that of our dance partner in the “Great Dance” and our individual part in it. We noted that everyone must dance. When we boil it all down, we will dance with one, or perhaps, over the course of our lives, with a succession or combination of the following partners: (1) the gods/idols of our ancestors, (2) the gods/idols of the present time, (3) ourselves as our own god/idol, or (4) Yahweh the Creator, the One, the Ultimate Partner. As Bob Dylan said “You gotta serve somebody.”

There are no doubt some who will argue that the sort of statement made above is based on the false and thoroughly discredited notion of belief in a Divinity, a Creator, and its corollary that there is such a thing as Absolute Truth. [For the remainder of this discussion we will use “Truth”, capital T, to mean Absolute Truth and “truth” for its opposite – relative truth based on personal conviction.]

To say that there is no such thing as Truth is an inherent contradiction. The declarer is in fact saying there is at least one Truth – that there is no Truth. Simply affirming or denying one’s personal conviction about Truth cannot prove or disprove its actual existence. Just as the denier of Truth will doubtless appeal to science and mathematics to “prove” that there is no “Truth” because there is no scientific way to demonstrate its reality, it is equally accurate to say there is no scientific way to disprove its reality. In each case, the affirmer must weigh the evidence and the probabilities, choose to believe, and accept the ensuing consequences based on the life one lives in accordance with one’s “faith” – for both are faith-based decisions about what is ultimately true.

If I cannot or will not live by the truth/Truth I declare to be reality, I am perhaps an unconscious deceiver of myself and others, or a self-deluded hypocrite, or an outright scoundrel who is deliberately misleading others, or a fool who does not even know what my true convictions are.

Perhaps my delusion is based on my desire to impress others, to be seen as someone I am not. Perhaps I think that, if I profess certain convictions, I may gain recognition, acclaim, position as a road to power and influence, wealth and immunity from consequences – with a secret aim of being able to indulge my baser passions without giving an account. Or perhaps this is what happens as a by-product of the underlying quest disguised by the nobler-sounding aims designed to fool oneself and the others I have used along the way. All too often we see this on vivid display among tycoons, states-people, and high-profile big names in all sectors from religion to entertainment.

The old saw about religion and science not mixing and being completely incompatible was never true and is wearing thinner and thinner. We suffer every day from its Goebbelsian (Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister or Propaganda) Big-Lie repetition from on high in Academia. In public oratory and decreed public policy about all the new values that must be unquestioningly bought into, we are lectured about all kinds of censure and other opprobrium which will be the consequences upon transgressors of the New Enlightenment discoveries about Nature, Human Nature, and the Cosmos itself. [These are spelled with capitals to designate their status as gods/idols of this age.]

The Truth is that faith and science have always been intimately connected. There is in fact now a very large minority of serious “real” scientists who quietly recognize both their own individual spirituality, and that it is not a contradiction for them to believe that there is deep mystery in the Cosmos – both macro and micro. They understand and see up close that life in all its inexplicable, intricate, and mind-blowing complexity, which hangs on a razor’s edge, bears a profound impression of deliberate purpose and design which no amount of infinite evolutionary regress can erase. One micro-deviation at any number of infinitesimal micro-instants would have aborted and still could abort it all.

This brings us to “probabilities”. In brutally brief clarity, the odds are virtually infinitely against anything being here, let along what actually is with all its mind-blowing wonder. And then we add in the even much less probable emergence of a highly sentient, self-aware entity called humanity, complete with innate moral and ethical sensibilities and a capacity to conceive the infinite and the Ultimate Source of all that is or ever could be.

Admittedly, understanding probabilities does not constitute “Truth”; it only points overwhelmingly towards its probability. The choice whether to accept this gigantic probability remains with the perceiver. Regardless of saying “yes” or “no” to the Great Partner in the dance, we humans are certainly, absolutely the most extreme of Outliers in the great Cosmos.

The absurd paradox of it all is that in the most scientifically advanced society in the history of Earth, most of its denizens are desperately choosing to deny who and what we are and what we were made for, and by Whom. The consequences of this flight from reality are akin to a Berchtold Brecht Theatre of the Absurd drama – Waiting for Godot, Reprise to the nth degree. [Apologies to Brecht fans; this “title” is my invention, not a real play.]

By all rights, the most scientific and mathematically honest perspective should be that there is a virtual certainty that, even if we poor humans can’t fully perceive it, absolute Truth exists because a Creator-Designer exists to give True meaning to the Cosmos and to us. Whether the Creator worked this wonder by fiat decree or gradual, guided processes is not the debate at this point.

As to consequences, for 300 or so years the West’s most influential Intelligentsia have striven with grit, determination, and even some rudimentary design, to deconstruct the “old regime” based on the existence of the Creator to give order and meaning to all things. This work has been carried on with great ingenuity in undermining all the extant influences of tradition and meaning founded on the Creator – whether by discrediting the Scriptures or the Church as institution, or the intellectuals who have opposed their work. Humans have been reduced to sophisticated animals. All in all, this long culture war has brought victory to the Enlightenment ideas of relativistic truth, relativistic morality and ethics, and plastic, every-morphing concepts of human nature – even while “Nature” has been idolized and humanity largely vilified.

In the 2020s, we find ourselves swimming in the social, moral, ethical, environmental, industrial, cultural, and economic swamp which is the consequence of this deconstruction. The swamp is filled with the increasingly murky waters of personalized, politicized “truth” seeking to drown and smother Truth in the muck of “everything is OK, as long as you’re not intolerant (oops! how did that new “Truth” slip in there?), except of those we declare to be intolerant because they tell us there really is Truth and right and wrong and good and bad in the world.”

The Big Lie says that there are no consequences for all the lunacy we can indulge in in the name of Freedom (another modern idol) and Self-Expression. There are always consequences. Science tells us with absolute certainty that “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction; what goes up, will come down; what goes around, comes around.” Karma tells us, “Every action has an outcome; good actions beget good outcomes; bad/foolish/self-deluding/wicked actions beget bad and even disastrous consequences.” We can deny what nature (both Cosmic and human)/the Creator has designed into everything and us only until we reach the limits of what the design can absorb before it and our own beings will suffer brutal and terrible consequences. We are on the cusp of judgment. Whether it be the Last Judgment remains to be seen and is known only to the Creator.

Saying this is not “judgmental”. It is not a personal attack on any individual or group. Take it to heart as appropriate. Ignore it at your peril – individual and collective. It is the judgment of consequences which we largely inflict on ourselves. It is not accusatory to declare what is patent and ought to be totally obvious Truth. Running away from it hiding our eyes and blocking our ears while screaming “You have no right to tell me this! I don’t have to listen to your holier-than-thou diatribe!” will not stop any of the consequences which are coming as ineluctably down the mountainside as an avalanche. It is as sure as Bob Dylan’s “Slow Train Coming’” told us several decades ago.

Choices! We all have them! We can’t avoid them. Small ones lead to big ones. I can avoid and ignore warnings and signs of what’s coming until I become oblivious and even morally comatose.  But I have no one to blame but myself for the consequences.

There is always a choice. Even now, you can choose to be an Outlier willing to give up your other god/gods and turn to the only Dance Partner who can set you free from the ultimate consequences of denying who He/She is and who you are and are really meant to be.

Absolutely!

TO BE CONTINUED

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Outliers, 5 – Choices

The key to good decision-making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.

– Malcolm Gladwell

… the man [woman] of firm decisions fashions the universe.

– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Life puts no greater burden upon a man [woman] than the necessity of making decisions.

Frank Yerby

Choose today whom you are going to serve; if Adonai (the One Creator-God) is God, serve Him. Or if the gods of your ancestors from centuries past are gods, or the idols of the people among whom you live today are gods, serve them. But as for me and mine, we will serve Adonai. –

Y’hoshua/Joshua – Book of Joshua in the Bible, chapter 24: 15,16 (my partial paraphrase)

You gotta serve somebody.

– Bob Dylan

(Photo credit FUMC Allen)

From infancy to the grave, life is choice. Almost everything we do and experience involves choice in one form or another.

There are a few exceptions: we don’t get to choose our parents; or our siblings; or when and where we are born. We don’t get to design our basic anatomical specifications, or even many of the details such as hair and eye and skin colour, or how tall we can grow. And as young children, we don’t get any (direct) say in major decisions within our families, or much of our early life. Our parents or some other adult authorities make those choices.

The question of choice always raises the issue of predestination, determinism, fate, heredity versus nurture, etc., versus freedom. Perhaps freedom is mostly an illusion, but I doubt that my choice to wear blue socks today has been predestined in any meaningful way, and will likely have no significant effect on the course of my or anyone else’s existence. The Big Bang 14 billion years ago did not ordain me to wear blue socks on a particular day in May 2022.

Did God? Setting aside the most abstruse, obscure, divisive, and ultimately sterile kind of theological debate about God’s interventions (if any) in time and space, let alone my or anyone’s private affairs, the practical answer remains, “No! God does not weigh the fate of the universe, or even my personal well-being or that of anyone else, on my choice of which socks to wear on a particular day.” Does this exclude the possibility that God may choose to intervene directly on rare occasions in the realm of time-space? As the Creator, that is His/Her prerogative and He/She is answerable to no one else for such sovereign action. Your liking or disliking the Creator’s decision to change the course of an event every so often will have no bearing on His/Her action or inaction. Your disbelief in His/Her existence affects nothing as to its reality, it simply blinds you from seeing what is sometimes staring you in the face!

Our wise opening commentators concur with this. We have to choose day by day in big and small things, philosophy and theology aside. Believe what you want about God’s final sovereignty and predestination, but you must still live day by day as if you have real choices to make with real consequences ensuing – from blue socks to “popping the Question” to the love of your life. And in answer, she/he will also have to make a real choice with lifelong consequences.

Choice is real for other sentient life-forms as well. Instinct does not govern every decision your dog or cat or horse, or the wild creature nearby, makes. A little aside: in French you “take”, not “make” a decision – an interesting little twist in cultural perspective among different peoples.

Some decisions, like the question of wearing socks, are frivolous. Some, like choosing a mate, a fraught with serious repercussions. All are made with both micro and macro contexts leading us to them – hence the argument about ultimate predestination or determinism. After all is said and done, could we make any other choices than the ones we make? But we return once more to the practicality of our lives. No psychological analysis can “deterministically” tell me if I was compelled to marry this one person and no other.

When we look at choosing to believe in a personal Creator, we face the same questions. Theology is of little real help even here. Whether God “sovereignly chooses and draws to Him-Her-self whom He/She will” or not, doesn’t release me from, to all appearances and in personal application, making/taking the Yes-No choice. What is for certain is that your answer to this central question will have a profound impact on the rest of your life-journey.

Which brings us back to Dylan’s famous and excellent song, “Gotta Serve Somebody”. This “gotta” is one more for our list of things we don’t get to choose. You get to choose whom you will serve, but not whether you have to choose. The choice of words is not that we ultimately get to choose “what” we will serve – regardless of making a commitment to some noble or ignoble cause, some selfless or quite selfish goal and ambition, — but, ultimately, that we “gotta”, HAVE TO, serve somebody, a personal being.

This is the point at which most of we Westerners consciously tune out. Serving the Creator-God is not very much on the radar for a huge majority of 21st-Century Westerners. Let alone the idea that if we don’t choose the Creator, we are actually choosing to serve another personal being in place of Him/Her.

Why does Dylan use this language; is it all poetic license? He is saying something profound, as any great artist does at her/his best. The universe is not dead. It is not an impersonal, accidental kaleidoscope which has totally improbably emerged from nothing into the big Something. It has come from the choice of SomeOne! The Ultimate Someone. The Alpha and Omega Someone. The Beginner and Final Destination of all beings and things that ever have been and can be and will be.

Only the blind, whether from ignorance or from willful, deliberate decision, can fail to see that the choice not to serve the SOMEONE is a choice to serve someone else – not something else, but someone else. For when we get deep down inside it all, at its most profound depth, beyond all possible sub-atomic particles, whether known or not-yet-known, beyond great galaxies dancing with one another in almost infinite space, the signature of THE PERSON is everywhere, in and on everything and everyone and every possible thing and being.

We are all in the dance, and we must all choose a partner. If I will not choose THE PARTNER, I still cannot avoid the dance. I must dance. If not with HIM/HER, then with another I put in HIS/HER place, even if it is, to my mind, a choice to dance alone to my own tune according to my own rules – or what I believe to be my own rules.

But, underneath that chimera, my rules, or those of anyone else than THE ONE’s rules, do not exist except in my arrogant hubris substitute for the real thing. Thus, in the final analysis, I can do the dance (Evan Almighty anyone?) with the ONE AND ONLY PARTNER Who matters, or as a shadow-dance, or with a substitute other partner (shudder at what some of those choices can be and have been in history) I set in the ONE’s place.

By this point, the reader may be wondering what this rabbit-trail has to do with the whole subject of “Outliers”. Simply that to choose to dance with the ONE as your partner in life, will make you an Outlier, especially now in the West in 2022 and henceforward. And, whether you think so or not, your choice about partnership with the ONE, matters even more than the one who has answered or will answer “Yes” to “the Question” and with whom you will also dance for a long time.

Therefore, be warned before you say that even bigger “Yes” to Adonai, the One Creator. A yes to Him/Her is an eternal decision. He/She does not take it lightly, nor will He/She ever let you take it lightly from this day forward, or from whatever other day it was or will be when you answer Y’hoshua’s momentous question, “Choose today whom you will serve – Adonai, the idols of your ancestors, or the idols of the world you live in now.”

Among the idols of today, put yourself. For, believe it or not, a refusal to serve any of the three choices Y’hoshua laid out is the choice to be my own sovereign god.

NEXT TIME: CONSEQUENCES

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Outliers, 4 – Losing Our Salt

If the salt loses its savor, what good is it except to be thrown out on the trash heap?

Jesus – Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 5, verse 13a

(Photo credit – aero)

How does salt lose its potency? If you leave it alone in its natural state, it is almost impossible for that to happen. The only way to disarm salt is to dilute it, wash it away, or combine it with another substance that neutralizes it by another chemical reaction that breaks its bond.

While the ancients may not have known the specific chemistry involved in making and destroying salt, they knew the practical method of rendering it ineffective. Dump it into water, or wash it away with water. Pollute it and dilute it by mixing with something else. Some of their more knowledgeable scientists even understood about using another substance to wipe it out.

Salt was a valuable commodity. It had to be mined. We still have to mine it. Effective, large-scale evaporation techniques had not been developed to render it from sea-water in enough quantity to make that a practical alternative.

Salt-mining was a deadly and dirty business performed by criminals and recalcitrant slaves condemned to a slow death. The Roman state kept a tight control on who could operate salt-mines. The average life-span of a slave or criminal in the salt-mines was three years. Salt was an imperial monopoly, although its mining was contracted to entrepreneurs willing to foot the production bill and pay hefty annual fees to the Imperial treasury. Profits margins were high, as were the risks of losing shipments by shipwreck, or to pirates, raiders, and bandits.

Salt was used in preserving food, cooking, cleaning, and medicine. The ancients understood quite well that it was essential for good health. As did Jesus, which is why he referred to it in his teaching. To run out of salt was a serious issue.

Therefore, when Jesus told his disciples and listeners, “You are the salt of the earth,” they understood implicitly what he meant. It wasn’t just that they added some zest to life or helped a bit in making the world a better, more interesting, and healthier (tastier) place. It included those nuances, but it also meant that they were essential to the world’s preservation, cleansing, and healing. It was a commission to become world-changers, difference-makers, genuine Outliers who challenge the status quo and bring metanoia (see previous post) and shalom (true peace).

Two thousand years in, we’ve lost most of the urgency and immediacy of what Jesus was saying. Here in the West, the old heartland of Christendom, we’ve also lost our way, living for generations now as we do in so much abundance and wealth and inherited power. To us, salt is a condiment in our diet. It’s incorporated in our prepared foods and restaurant servings to the point we are incapable of understanding Jesus’ metaphor about salt. With rare exceptions, we don’t use it to clean or even very much in medical applications.

The Ekklesia, the God-family Jesus founded two thousand years ago and told to be “the salt of the earth”, the God-family which once upon a time wielded immense influence and power in the West, and, by imperial extension, the world, has largely lost its preservative power, its cleansing and healing power. These days, it certainly appears to have lost its ability to add “savor” – joy and happiness to life.

We cannot say such things about the Church (non-denominational sense) without applying them to ourselves as individuals and local expressions of God’s family on earth. When people look at us – at me – do they see anything that looks like metanoia, joy, and a healing presence? Do they see and hear the voice of a comforter, an Outlier pointing beyond my personal goals and desires and towards the presence of the Creator among us and within me?

Do my neighbors, near and far, known and strangers, only hear a wrathful message of “You’re all damned!” even while they watch me/us play out the old hunger and thirst for lost political power and social control manifesting as self-righteousness? Do they ever hear about the mercy and grace of God brought by the Prince of Peace and the sacrificial lamb instead of a proclamation of Jesus’ coming wrath and his warrior return as the arm of God’s avenging justice? Far too often this generation sees and hears a militant crusade to take back the lost levers of power and access to the top echelons of decision-making over society, rather than the servant-way of reaching out past the great rift through our culture and society to offer a road to reconciliation and mutual forgiveness,

Jesus did not give the example of the truly humble, suffering servant to His disciples so they (and we) could shrug it off as some sort of time-limited one-off performance so we could all move into triumphalist militant preparation for the Second Coming. To those who wanted to outdo the Romans by overthrowing the Empire and taking over the reins of power as His right- and left-hand wielders of justice and vengeance on all the infidels, He said things like the following (a little paraphrased): “Those who live by the sword, die by the sword. Do good to those who persecute you. Rejoice if you are persecuted and killed for bearing My name. Your reward will be great in My Father’s Kingdom. The servant is not above the Master. It is enough that the servant be like (Greek implies “just like/the same as”) the Master.”

The kind of deeply militant representation of the Gospel we have seen and continue to see in some North American manifestations as “real-man Christianity” is an aberration bordering on a heresy. It is dangerously close to blasphemy in refashioning Jesus as the “ultimate manly Man” inspiring an imperial state which operates with an acute sense of being God’s anointed nation in the earth with its own special “Manifest Destiny”. Into this theologically justified ideology have been grafted all kinds of special doctrines (some of which are used to soft-peddle the continuation of repression of racial minorities and the definite subordination of women) in a kind of blind, or even deliberate, syncretism justified as the true will of Jesus for today. Forget the original sense of the “Great Commission” and the methodology of love and compassion and inclusion passed from the Master to His Messengers [Apostles] in carrying it out.

The analysis presented here may be offensive to some readers of this episode of this series. If so, I would ask them to seriously ask themselves why they are offended. I would suggest that they honestly review the Gospel Jesus preached and the way He treated people as the living, breathing, human (as He still is even as the resurrected One) Messiah, including minorities and women, and instructed His first disciples to treat them and serve them and be light and salt in the world. That is the standard, not the ideological reinterpretation of cherry-picked aspects of things Jesus and the Apostles said, did, and taught to fit an extra-Biblical ideology needing baptism or holy-water sprinkling.

Recovering our salt means recovering our true calling and doing a reset to once more become the heart, soul, and hands and feet of our Master for the world of today, rather than shouting at the darkness and launching imprecations at the things we find ugly and reprehensible.

TO BE CONTINUED

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Outliers, 3 – Metanoia

The usual English translation of the Greek word which is this episode’s title is “repentance”. As is often the case in translating ancient words, and as with the art of translation at all times, the English (or other modern languages of your choice) does not do it full justice.

The first problem with automatically translating it as “repentance” whenever this word shows up in the original language is that the English (French, Spanish, German, etc.) term now carries such enormous cultural and religious baggage that most secular people simply tune it out as “Uh-oh! Here comes a self-righteous Christian to rant about sin and everyone needing to get saved by Jesus!”

The Greek word is much more descriptive and much less compartmentalized. It was perfectly acceptable 2000 years ago in the eastern regions of the Roman Empire where Greek was the universal language (it was Latin in the West) to use the term in a completely non-religious way. For example, you are going somewhere and get lost. You stop to ask directions. The local villager tells you, “Whoa, friend! You’re way off track! You’ve got to turn around (metanoeō)and head back to _______ and take a different route.”

The English word is from penitire, poenitere, via Old (and modern) French (se) repentir (cf. Concise Oxford Dictionary), which was the Latin translation from the Greek New Testament in the late 4th Century by St. Jerome. The emphasis in the Latin is more specifically moralistic and punitive. In the English and Romance-language translations, we are using a sort of derivative which has conceptually robbed us of the interpretive possibilities found in the original Greek New Testament. Latin is the major root language of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French – and through French has contributed heavily to the evolution of English. Thus the narrow moral sense of metanoia is heavily biased in a secondary transference of meaning.

One level of interpretation can be applied to morality and ethics – taking the wrong road in life, doing bad stuff to other people and deciding to stop and turn over a new leaf. However, the holistic concept is about radically changing the road your life is on, seeing it as a bad one, and making a new start. It is much richer than having a momentary revelation of remorse and regret, making a few apologies and some gestures of recompense and moving on feeling better about yourself.

Real metanoia is not primarily about a religious exercise or experience, although it is profoundly spiritual. It is about restoration, correcting and re-forming as in forming anew, not just revamping something obsolete to make it work better. Metanoia-change is a total life commitment, a radical (axe-to-the-root) turn-about and dedication to set wrongs right, bring justice as far as possible, restore broken things, remake relationships on a new foundation of love, respect, and real equality within the Creator’s intention.

Want to be different? To be a real world-changer? To become a true radical and Outlier? It starts with metanoia, not just religious-formula repentance. Metanoia takes us outside religion, turns us off that old highway of “do the right stuff and God will love you and reward you; do the wrong stuff and you’ll be rejected and sent to hell.”

Metanoia turns us away from the fixation and need to be esteemed and approved and judged as “righteous” by the people by whom we want to be accepted. Instead, we turn off the old road that leads to more servitude and condemnation and needing to be seen and even raised up by our superiors before our peers.

Metanoia turns us directly to Jesus/Yeshua the Messiah, the only one who can bring us to and take us down the true way; He said, “I am the way/road, the truth and the life. You can only come to the Father/learn to know the Creator/ by/through Me.” Every other road, however religiously appealing it may seem, is the wrong road, a road to metanoeō.

In the end, the only Outliership that will amount to anything really new, true and everlasting is one based on metanoia. Here is how Jesus described the paradox of being a big-time Outlier according to our general cultural worldview and being a metanoia Outlier (liberally paraphrased): “The road to destruction is a wide highway which multitudes take. The road to eternal life is a narrow track which few find.”

The most radical, greatest Outlier who ever lived is Jesus. He is the only human being who died but rose from death and is still alive today. Even if He had not done this, He would still rank at the top of the list in terms of his impact on history, culture, and society over the last two thousand years. To conform all He claimed we have His real resurrection. It is both a faith and historical fact.

It is easy to be cynical as we consider the West’s rejection of so much of what its history and cultural and social development have owed to this man. Before the West’s intellectual and socio-cultural engineers could dismantle so much of that heritage, they had to dismantle the main faith that underlies all of that. The originators of this centuries-long campaign knew full well what they were about. It was deliberate, although not orchestrated by any sort of central authority. This is not conspiracy theory. It is documented and documentable, wide-open to verification.

The great underlying mystery is how a relative few anti-Christian radicals, often disingenuously disclaiming their real intentions, could succeed against what appeared to be a deeply rooted, monolithic system called Christendom, a system dominated by various manifestations of its primary social and cultural institution, the Christian Church. It was a process that took centuries. The tale of that deconstruction is a long one which we will not embark on here. Much of it was self-inflicted by the very people holding authority and influence within Christianity.

The seeds of decay were sown early in the history of the West’s emergence as a distinct society. The first major step was a leadership choice to turn off the path of metanoia in order to access the levers of power and centralized social and political control. It was the sin of hubris.

The Ekklesia’s leaders began thinking and believing that the Servant-Messiah who commanded that leaders be servants and practice humility and self-sacrifice would accept the Ekklesia’s (His metanoia community on the road back to a healed relationship with the Father-Creator) stepping into a partnership with the Imperial broad-highway power to hasten the process of cajoling the mass of recalcitrant unbelievers and Christian heretics to join up and “accept the truth”. Having more than a few of the perks of power and prestige as rewards to the hard-working, ambitious, and long-persecuted leaders of the Church didn’t hurt the decision to take the “high” road either.

Thus, the hybrid society called “Christendom” was born. Outwardly, everyone at the top said, “Jesus is Lord” while the top-dogs’ actions declared, “But we’re really in charge and are taking control in His name.” Many symbolic trappings from the non-Christian culture and world were sprinkled with Holy Water and re-consecrated so that the old ways of doing things and preserving distinctions and power-structures could carry on. Even gods and goddesses could be incorporated by granting them a new identity. Many individuals could and still did find the metanoia-road, and even some local institutional expressions of ekklesia found it from time to time. But on the whole, Lord Acton’s dictum, “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” proved as true as ever.

Caution to all: It is always easier and simpler to take the religious highway than to live and travel the metanoia road. Religion allows us to develop, deploy, and pick and choose what sorts of practices, techniques and observances to prefer, and to switch them in and out according to rewards received or recognition for good performance achieved. Religion can be plugged into our lives according to time, place, and context as desired. It allows us to shift our allegiances and preferences according to the standards and precepts of impressive personalities and groups which align with our personal tendencies and character. We are speaking of religion here in its particular influences in our daily life (rites, rituals, ceremonies, strictures and prescriptions, religious imperialism in all its guises, etc.), not in its etymological sense of our overall binding worldview.

Metanoia is primarily relational, based on walking a path with and towards Jesus. It includes essential elements of living and staying on the narrow track that leads to life, such as disciplines and practices, being a servant member of ekklesia, and taking one’s place in Creator’s family. It also keeps us alert to discern the siren-song and allure of seeking the trappings of worldly-style outliership, even in its churchly disguises.

Our next episode in this discussion will focus on how Ekklesia has wandered so far off the path of Metanoia, its true calling to Outliership. We will attempt some reflections on what to do about it.

Pax vobiscum! Kyrie eleison!

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Outliers, 2 – Little People

I don’t think I realized that the cost of fame is that it’s open season on every moment of your life. – Julia Roberts

The internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had. – Eric Schmidt

… the little places, where I can more easily be close to God, should be my preference …. Quietness and peace before God are more important than any influence a position may seem to give … – Francis A. Schaeffer, No Little People, 1974, chapter 1.

(Photo image – Yelena Bonner – Quotefancy)

Our three opening citations cover enormous ground, but give insight on the phenomenon of outliers, the present subject of discussion in World.V.You.

Julia Roberts reminds us that stardom and fame make it extremely difficult to live anything approaching a “normal” life. Media and social-media scrutiny to find “stories” to gossip about are unending. Being a “Super-Outlier” puts you on continuous display before all the millions of voyeurs who care to look. We live in a peeping-Tom society because we can. It’s a sort of sneaky compulsion, a “harmless” venial sin we excuse ourselves for indulging in.

Schmidt points out that in the virtual world, anyone can assert and seek just about anything without much accountability, despite the best efforts of public and industry police and regulators to gain some sort of control over the worst elements who are exploiting it for all kinds of malignant purposes. Wannabe and actual negative outliers abound in this “Wild-Wild-West” virtual universe.

Francis Schaeffer, a Christian thinker who wrote well before the Internet took form and computer use was still embryonic in its application to personal uses, offers a perspective that any God/Creator seeker should heed, and all the more if they are hungering and thirsting for recognition and, as he puts it, a position of influence, no matter how modest it may be.

Outliers exist from the humblest to the grandest social settings. Every family has its weird uncle/aunt, its black sheep and wayward son/daughter, its over-achieving acquisitor, its relentless zealot, its hyper-intelligent know-it-all with a chip on her/his shoulder, etc. I’m sure you can put names on these roles right now in your own sphere.

Every level of community has them – the local celebrities whom everyone talks and gossips about, the town troublemakers, the glitzy, trendy set – whether in the local service and social clubs, businesses of any size, churches/religious institutions, political affairs, the cultural influencers who arbitrate what art and literature it’s cool to accept and boost in the area.

You, dear reader, may be one of them.

Then there are the quieter sorts of outliers – people more in tune with the spirit of Schaeffer’s observation. These stand out because they don’t go after the local, or any, version of fame and acclaim. Their priorities are different, and this makes them stand out, “weird”, out of tune with the normal ways of people seeking a voice. The curious, the sceptical, and the cynical mockers find them strangely attractive or repulsive because they are somehow a threat.

Among these idealists, the abilities that lead to outliership are used to walk “the road less traveled”. They do not seek the same sort of recognition most people who want it go after. Idealist outliers choose to keep remote from the mainstream frenzy because of conviction and principle, because their view of the world and its underlying reality is out of step with what the general culture declares is of first importance.

Mostly, power and acquiring it are far down their list of what is really important. It may come to them despite their unconcern for such things, but living in a fashion consistent with their convictions is foremost. To that end they may well choose to forego the pursuit of the wealth, position, and recognition most of our society admires so much. If any of it comes to them, they turn it towards furthering their idealistic goals. (Think Mother Teresa.)

Withdrawing from society altogether is one way to become an outlier. Hermits and recluses still exist, and a few may even become well-known local “characters”. However, short of living a hundred kilometers out in the wilderness with no neighbours except the birds and local fauna, total withdrawal has become a near impossibility.

The life-road based on firm principles and consistently seeking to live by them can be a costly one. Becoming an outlier in this way can lead to just as much outside scrutiny as the road to celebrity and fame which Julia Roberts represents and deliberately chose to withdraw from. The sceptics, critics, and cynics are just as prepared to exploit the failures and inconsistencies of the idealist as those of the deliberate ladder-climber, perhaps even moreso. To the media and other salacious voyeurs who lurk everywhere, it seems more delicious to revel in the fall of the “goody-two-shoes” than the tortured angst of the hoi-polloi. The fall of the pursuers of good and social betterment lets the rest of us off the hook. Then we can all smugly declare, “See! There’s no use in being overzealous about making yourself and the world a better place! Even the saints just fall into sin, and, when they fall, they leave behind a huge mess of disillusionment, broken hopes and shattered dreams!”

However, these humbler, meeker outliers of whom we are speaking now are very often the true world-changers. Most of what leads to peace and hope and joy comes from them. They are almost all “simple folk” who want to raise good kids and do more than fill their lives with glitz and bling and silly pursuits that add little of value to their own or other lives.

It is not the demigods of business, entertainment, politics, and sport who have raised the poor from the slums, ended slavery, fought for workers’ rights, brought in universal healthcare (at least in the nations which have it), fought to end discrimination of every sort, and poured out their blood to defeat the horrors of Nazism, Fascism and other tyrannies. And it will not be the Superstar Outliers who will continue to lead the defense of freedom, liberty, and what is left of morality.

Over the last century, we have been defrauded of much of our heritage. We have been taught that traditional beliefs and values are destructive of our personal freedoms and rights. We have been and are bombarded daily with propaganda about truth being strictly “scientific” and “rational”. We have been instructed that scientific methodology shows us “objectively” that spirituality is largely for chumps and losers when deciding how to create a better tomorrow. Our educational, social, financial, and political institutions have been cajoled and indoctrinated en masse into a worldview where moral values and categories are plastic and entirely transmutable according preference, context and current social needs/wants. Like drugged spectators, we have watched and continue to watch the systematic deconstruction of that heritage of 1500 years which laid the foundations of who and what the West became, and, to a large extent, still is.

We are told that our past and its creations are almost entirely reprehensible, despicable for our oppressions, repressions, persecutions, imperialistic colonialism, and acquisitive greed and exploitation. It is now the established and ensconced ideology in Big Academia to renounce and denounce all of it. Instead, it seems that all the other cultures and heritages of every other origin are superior and, apparently, even innocent of the kinds of terrible crimes against humanity we here in the West have perpetrated on all the other races and peoples of Earth. Lastly, it is we who have devastated this planet’s biome and should pay the price of making all that right.

There is truth in much of what we are accused of. But, there is an enormous paradox in it all, as well as not just a little blind and even deliberate hypocrisy. We are quick to excoriate our own ancestors and look upon their monumental handiwork with dripping disdain. Yet the virulent critics of our life continue to function within and exploit the very structures and institutions created by those same forebears they despise, glad to have the bully-pulpit of learned prestige their foremothers and forefathers earned for them.

And as they paint the West as a terrible blight upon the world, the rest of the world nods in agreement while lusting to adopt and adapt all the West’s major methods and models to surpass the West in its own game and move into the vacuum the West’s self-deconstruction is creating. Racial and ethnic superiority complexes will not disappear from the earth just because the West hates its own manifestations of them. Imperialism and colonialism and ethnic cleansing and genocide have never been the exclusive purview of the West. Honesty about history is as applicable to Asia and Africa as it is to the West.

Somehow, ironically (could it actually be because of the kind of built-in conscience our despised archaic values and morals still saddle us with?), the West has grown an acute case of moral shame and guilt for all its sins, but most of the rest of the world seems not to suffer the same kind of remorse about their equivalent forays into horrific inflictions on their neighbors. Thus, they nod and accuse and point their fingers to push the West’s self-flagellation along while preparing to step in and sweep up the shambles.

Even now, most of the charity and real aid for the world’s most desperate flows generously from the nations once known as Christendom.

Food for thought!

TO BE CONTINUED

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Outliers, 1 – Big-Shots

(Image credit – Pinnacle)

Perhaps ten years ago, I read a very thought-provoking book entitled Outliers, the Story of Success (2008), by Malcolm Cladwell.  The author presented examples across many domains demonstrating how important “outliers” are in virtually every area of natural and human history and experience.

An outlier is an anomaly, an oddball, a misfit, or, as per the Oxford Dictionary “[an] outlying part or member”. In context, an outlier is something or someone situated far from the center, something or someone remote from the norm. The outlier is not excluded from the set or subset of whichever category or group they are identified with, but they “differ” from almost everyone else by a high degree of non-conformity.

With a little reflection, it does not take long to understand that outliers can take many forms, both positive and negative. High achievers of whatever sort are almost always outliers, as are serious criminals on the negative side. Billionaires are, by definition, outliers on the scale of income and net worth, and very probably in business and management acumen. Most entrepreneurs may be talented and inventive, but their endeavours fold within the first few years. Thus they do not achieve the sort of outlier status we are speaking of.

Not so long ago, millionaires would have been placed in the financial outlier category, but given the ballooning worth of property values, stock portfolios, and inflationary pressures, most of our newly minted millionaires would better fit a “high-normal” status, at least here in the capitalist West.

Great villains and great heroes are doubtless outliers. Their courage or audacity exceeds almost everyone else’s and they do what seems impossible to the rest of us. Stars and superstars in the sports and entertainment world are usually outliers in native talent and certainly in achieving recognition of that talent. That being said, many of equal talent may not rise to the top because of factors out of their control, or by preference for a more quiet, stable, less public existence. I have known some incredibly gifted musicians who prefer anonymity.

We could expand almost endlessly on who would qualify as an outlier in any domain we can think of, but today we are considering the rich, famous, notorious, and glamorous.

To be considered a “success” does not necessarily require “outliership”. Many people are successful at what they do, and their success stems from their ability to meet expectations in most of the areas relevant to their chosen path. Outliers far exceed the normal sets of criteria for “success”.

One of the common factors for entering the celebrity outlier category is ambition. Another is determination, and yet another is persistence in the face of frustration and even failure. Edison’s lightbulb only succeeded after 1000 failures. Most great musicians only play flawlessly in their pinnacle performances after tens of thousands of hours of hard work and previous appearances in which they learned to overcome the jitters and faux-pas.

Besides a high degree of innate ability, and perhaps even genius, outliers usually have an aptitude to combine their primary gift with subsidiary abilities. At least a few of these seem to be necessary in rising to “great outlier” status. Wayne Gretzky is an outstanding example of the innate necessary talents plus the persistence required to become “the Great One” in Ice Hockey History. The same could be said of Maradona for football (soccer).  

Opportunity also plays a role in becoming élite in one’s chosen field. Many people of genius and outstanding talent never become well known. Their talents and abilities may well be in the outlier (exceptional) category, but the “breaks” and recognition never come their way, at least during their lifetime. Perhaps they lack some of the subsidiary abilities, or the ambition, that would raise them to the pinnacle. Vincent van Gogh is an example. His artistic genius was crippled by his personal problems during his lifetime. His work is now valued as almost priceless by great art aficionados.

While opportunity can be sought and created (as in a carefully orchestrated campaign), it may also fall across one’s path. “Great ones” are also opportunists who seize the moment to make a breakthrough into the next level. Some outliers arrive in the Himalayan air of extreme outliership seemingly by accident. They had not sought it, had not planned it, and did nothing to chase the recognition and acclaim, but were “discovered” and set upon high by their “fans”, their followers, their disciples, and finally by a broad recognition.

This sort of “fortuitously-born” outlier is much rarer than your “regular” (an oxymoron?) outlier who runs after a big name by exploiting their talent and ability and orchestrating a path to the top.

If someone deliberately sets their aim at achieving high-level outliership, they often recruit or attract helpers to open the way, set up opportunities, plan campaigns, and even create their own legend. Thus, publicity and propaganda can be important tools in becoming one the great outliers of history. Alexander the Great is one such from the ancient world.

There are hundreds of examples of this in today’s celebrity-worshipping culture where professional agents and promoters loom large. There are now many means and variations for getting yourself “out there” for people to know and admire you. This can even be done by adopting the “bad-boy/bad-girl” ploy to gain extra attention. The anti-hero image has become a major “thing” for entertainers, although not-so-much if you just want to live a regular life. A normal-life practitioner of anti-heroism is probably heading for prison.

Who are true Superstars of Outliership in history? Does the momentary éclat of a Rock Band or pulp-fiction author, or a movie starlet, etc., qualify? Who still knows who Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall were, outside Hollywood old-time movie buffs? Who still recalls Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, or Janice Joplin outside devotees of old-time Rock’nRoll? Should we put John Grisham [apologies to Grisham fans; I read his books too] alongside Jane Austen in literary annals? And who can ever stand beside Homer, William Shakespeare, Rumi, or Dante Alighieri in the annals of world-class literature? Who can match Michelangelo in art?

While we can recognize the undoubted outliership of some historical rulers such as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte, should they even be mentioned in the same breath as Francis of Assisi or Mother Teresa, let alone Siddhartha Gautama or Jesus of Nazareth? (Napoleon didn’t think so!) Where do we fit the “great monsters” of history – Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Idi Amin, and, maybe now Putin? They are certainly outliers, but more like human Satan figures than anything else.

It really comes down to whom we choose to admit to the pantheon according to which criteria. Our personal choices of whom to admire and emulate go a very long way to betray our real values and worldviews rather than the ones we profess with our mouths.

Whom do we choose to a rank above we lesser mortals? Why have we elevated them on high? As Bob Dylan (a potential all-timer in folk-music history) once wrote and sang, “You Gotta Serve Somebody”. We are hard-wired to look beyond ourselves, to find a higher realm and greater reality than the mundane grind of daily existence. Even the Exalted Outliers discover this about themselves once they “arrive”. The old inner emptiness is unfulfilled. There must be more.

The ancients were more forthright about this business than we are now. They thought about the stories and legends of their great ancestors and heroes, then granted demi-godhood, or maybe even full godhood status if the “great one” was deemed worthy of it.

In contrast, we are downright disingenuous and double-minded about the whole business. Now social media catapults all sorts of aspirants to outliership into a comet-moment that grants them their Andy Warhol 15 minutes of fame/infamy and acclaim/disdain. As with most meteors, their turn in the limelight burns out almost as soon as it appears. Even so, many are still desperate to grasp even this tiny sliver of immortality, only to discover how ephemeral and vain it all is. You got there, were noticed, wowed or appalled a bunch of people for a bit – then what? Your soul is still lost and you still don’t know who you really are.

If they survived into a more contemplative old age or phase of life after their rocket-ride to the top, almost all the Outlier Superstar cohort down through the ages have testified to coming to the end knowing the truth of what Saint Augustine once wrote, “Our hearts, O God, can find no rest till we find our rest in You.”

It is not wrong to be or become an Outlier. After all, “Someone has to do it.” We seem to need saints and great sinners to understand ourselves. Some people end up on the heights despite themselves because others insist on putting them there. The ancients used to call this “Destiny”. We seem to need outliers or, as Cladwell very ably illustrates, we’d still be living in caves and building monuments using thousands of slaves for decades.

Even as we go about the business of life choosing whether to pursue the kind of goals that may take us into celebrity outliership, we must never lose sight of the greater truth that that too is pointing us to what is much greater than ourselves.

Ultimately, what all of us are seeking is immortality, and that comes only from the Ultimate, Almighty Outlier.