Category Archives: History

There’s Been a Mistake; or, The Whirlwind Comes for Me

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Over the New Year’s holiday weekend, I watched with my boys a movie starring Emily Watson, namely Within the Whirlwind. It is a film adaptation of the memoirs of Yevgenia Ginzburg, available in English translation in two volumes as Journey into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind. [For Gentle Reader’s help, the first volume cuts off about part-way through the period covered by the film.]

Ginzburg was writing her memoirs at roughly the same time that Solzhenitsyn was writing The GuLAG Archipelago. Both Ginzburg and Solzhenitsyn had mostly finished their writing in the early 1960s but for both publication had to wait, and in both instances through foreign publication of smuggled manuscripts. Ginzburg appears to have been known to Solzhenitsyn and supplied him with generous access to her manuscript; certainly there are multiple citations to her (at that time as-yet unpublished) memoirs in his larger work.

Yevgenia was born in 1904, making her fourteen years older than Alexandr; he describes himself as being a child of the Revolution, and of course had no personal memory of pre-Revolutionary Russia (about which he wrote in so many settings so feelingly). Yevgenia would have been a fully-aware young woman when All Hell Broke Loose. True, she would have had likely only a child’s understanding and recollection of pre-War Russia, and that would have made a difference. Unless extraordinarily precocious her intellectual quickening would have played out against the backdrop of unspooling disaster for her country and her society. And then of course would have come four years of civil war, Red Terror, and the bait-and-switch of the New Economic Policy.

Still: no matter how calamitous the break with the past, Yevgenia would have been a bright teenager by the time the Bolsheviks seized power. Which is to say that she had not the excuse that children of the Revolution had, namely “we never knew anything different”.

At some point Yevgenia joined the Communist Party, and became a teacher at Kazan University, apparently with a specialty in teaching the history of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). Apparently she had was unaware that in the Soviet Union, it was the future that was known, with the past being subject to on-going revision. This was to be the barb in the hook that got her in the throat.

Her (second) husband, Pavel Aksyonov, with whom she had a son (Yevgenia had an older son by her first marriage, and Pavel had a daughter of his own), was a member of the Central Committee of the USSR, which is to say a Pretty Damned Big Fish by any means.

In addition to her day job, so to speak, teaching Party history at the university, and her obligatory agitation on various occasion (among the book’s earliest scenes is her standing on a pile of empty sacks at a factory, reading aloud to a bunch of no-doubt tired, hungry, and profoundly uninterested workers a canned Party announcement of Kirov’s murder on December 1, 1934), she had a more formal side-hustle in the form of working on the editorial staff of a magazine, Red Tartary.

As Gentle Reader will recall, Kirov’s murder, whether taxable to Stalin or not, was used by Stalin as the pretext for the beginnings of what became the Great Purge. And as Gentle Reader will also recall, the Great Purge — or as Robert Conquest styled it in his ground-breaking book, The Great Terror — began as Stalin’s annihilation of the middle and upper reaches of the Party and other major Soviet institutions (such as the Central Committee, the Red Army, and eventually the NKVD itself). True, the killing circle kept expanding its radius and sweeping in people who little or nothing to do with politics, but they were just collateral damage.

The Purge came to Red Tartary.

Apparently an editor with whom Yevgenia worked had written an article touching on, among other things, the theory of “permanent revolution”. It had been published and even included in a major compendium of such tripe published by (and here Gentle Reader must excuse a failure of memory: I cannot remember which central Party organ was the publisher), but the publishing authority was it seems quite a bit more authoritative than Red Tartary . . . a bit like having a Southern Living article re-published in the Kenyon Review or New York Magazine or Smithsonian. There was a problem, however. At some point after the article’s publication, an article was published over Stalin’s by-line, in which was also treated the theory of “permanent revolution”. Gentle Reader must not, by the way, suppose that ol’ Soso, the Georgian seminary drop-out, actually wrote this sort of nonsense himself; rather he had it ghost-written, as with the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Short Course) [N.b. Not having read the book I don’t link to it; it may be obtained through the kind offices of Amazon.com, however.], and then, as often as not, had his ghost-writer(s) shot (as also with one of the principal authors of the Short Course).

“Stalin’s” treatment of the theory of “permanent revolution” was inconsistent with the treatment by Yevgenia’s colleague. In 1935, that was enough to get you fired, expelled, arrested, and shot.

The meat of Yevgenia’s memoir begins to pick up pace upon the denunciation and eventual dismissal of her editorial colleague. Alone among those in his circle of acquaintance and/or colleagues, Yevgenia refused to confess to any sort of doctrinal lapse or Trotskyite wrong-think etc. etc. etc. She lost her license to teach and embarked upon a downward-spiralling cycle of Party accusation, confrontation, discipline, and general squeezing. The accusations against her crept upward from a simple failure to exercise proper political diligence to active collaboration with Trotskyite elements to active participation in a terrorist organization, centered upon her unfortunate colleague, the objective of which was the assassination of senior Soviet officialdom. Naïvely, Yevgenia attempted to fight the accusations, never confessing to the slightest lapse. She filed and prosecuted appeals to Moscow and at one point spent several months there trying to clear her name through the Approved Party Channels. The only thing she accomplished, of course, was that progressive ramping up of the severity of her formal charges.

Eventually of course she was asked to leave her Party card at the desk of whichever functionary she was seeing. From that moment she knew what awaited her.

On April 1, 1937, the expected call came to the apartment where the family lived. Could she please report to the Party office downtown? That day as she left, she saw for the last time her mother, her husband, and her older son. Her husband as a senior Party official was eventually arrested but died before sentencing. Her older son ended up starving to death during the Siege of Leningrad during the war. And her mother died (of causes unspecified at least in the first volume).

Yevgnia was arrested that day and stuck down in the cellars, and her interrogation began. As she notes herself, she was fortunate in that, as of the time of her arrest physical torture had not yet been authorized for those undergoing interrogation. All that her interrogators could manage was screaming and threats.

[Fast forward: Yevgenia’s principal interrogator ended up arrested himself (remember the NKVD went through its own blood-letting), and Yevgenia, then working in the kitchen in a camp, is asked to give an extra crust of bread for a dying man from Kazan, he (the dying man) having heard that a woman from his city is working in the kitchen. Yevgenia asks for his name, and upon being told, gives her own name to the go-between and instructs him to tell the major that it’s from her; it’s her only confessed moment of vindictiveness in the entire book.]

Eventually Yevgenia’s interrogation was finished and her case referred for disposition to a military tribunal in Moscow, where she was incarcerated in Butyrki prison. This apparently was an indication of the seriousness of her case. Most arrestees’ cases were disposed of at much lower levels and locally, some even administratively (it was such an administrative panel in 1945 that sentenced Solzhenitsyn to eight years in the camps). The military tribunals also doled out many more death penalties, I understand, than the other sentencing authorities. Certainly Yevgenia was convinced that she would receive the “Supreme Measure,” as they called it. The trial itself was held in Lefortovo prison, and according to the clock on the wall, visible to Yevgenia, took all of seven minutes from opening to the finishing of reading of her sentence. Ten years of solitary confinement, followed by five years’ deprivation of rights. The predictability with which these tribunals handed out death sentences can be inferred Yevgenia’s observation that the two guards standing behind her, on either side, had joined hands behind her back to catch her as she fainted. After her trial they took her back to Butryki, where by then (August, 1937) torture was routinely used during night-time interrogations. Every night, from 2300 to 0300, the screaming went on uninterrupted.

It’s in the cell at Butryki that Yevgenia begins to be exposed to a wider swathe of what Solzhenitsyn described as the 1937 “wave” of “sewage” flooding into the Soviet Union’s sewer of a penal system. There are the usual Party stalwarts (it’s all a great mistake, my case is) to the denialists (Stalin can’t know what’s going on) to the retreads (the Socialist-Revolutionary who’s an inveterate chain smoker but who, when Yevgenia offers her a pack of smokes, first has to check — via taps on the cell wall in the Tsarist-era prison Morse code — with her S.R. party superior in the next cell over before she can accept . . . and is then instructed to refuse).

It’s at this point that the book begins to become interesting, in that cell in Butryki while she’s waiting for “trial” and afterwards, as she’s waiting to be shipped off to prison. As I think I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this Humble Blog, what makes for me Solzhenitsyn’s GuLAG so intriguing is its study in human character, both inside prison, in the camps, and in the surrounding society (both in the camps’ immediate vicinity and in the country as a whole). More to the point, Solzhenitsyn examines in very unsparing particularity what happens to people when they are exposed to the rack and pressure of a socialist society. Very broadly stated, he concludes that the abuses were not merely an aberration of the Stalinist years; rather they began almost immediately after the October Revolution and continued, nearly unabated, until well after the Twentieth Party Congress “Secret” Speech of 1956. They inhered in the very fabric of the Soviet Union, which Solzhenitsyn viewed as a monstrous assault upon the soul of Holy Mother Russia.

From Moscow she was taken to Yaroslavl, where she spent two years in prison. Frequently described as “solitary confinement,” in point of fact she spent very little time at all in genuine solitary confinement. By reason of over-crowding a second prisoner was housed with her, and so she did have company; mercifully they got on extremely well. Yevgenia was not fated to spend her entire sentence in that cell, though. As she points out, by 1939 even the Leadership had tumbled to the idea that keeping prisoners in prisons was grotesquely inefficient, especially if they were to be kept in any kind of isolation. By way of example, we see that it took no fewer than five individual prison guards to complete an operation so simple as taking Yevgenia from her cell to her walled-in but still outdoor prison walk for her fifteen minutes of fresh air each day, and of course the same five to return her to her cell.

So the sentences of the incarcerated prisoners in Yaroslavl were amended wholesale to forced labor in the camps. Yevgenia and her fellow inmates were herded aboard a train the cars of which were marked on the outside, “Special Equipment”. There then began a month-long hell ride across Siberia, all the way to Vladivostok. In addition to inadequate rations, they were systematically deprived of water. The chapters on the train transport are a bit confusing (at least they were for someone of my limitations) because there are a passel of women with each of a very limited number of names. There are a bunch of Tanyas, several Nadyas, and a few other repeats; it’s difficult in places to figure out which one is being talked about, or is talking. Yevgenia also has a habit of referring to people by (usually diminutive) nicknames, which is endearing in a way, but also confusing if you don’t have background in colloquial Russian (as I do not).

From Vladivostok the principal destination was Magadan, gateway city to Hell on Earth in the shape of the camps of the Kolyma. The route was sea-borne, in ships which for misery, danger, and mortality per day at sea don’t seem to have lagged much behind the ships of the Middle Passage, with the added trauma of systematic terror at the hands of the criminals (“socially friendly elements” in Marxist dogma; cf. the announcement of the Soros-funded district attorney general in San Francisco that “ordinary” crimes of violence against the person and against property will simply not be prosecuted . . . the Bolsheviks are nothing if not consistent and predictable). Yevgenia nearly didn’t survive the voyage; in fact she spent the last few days unconscious and was carried ashore on a stretcher, thence into a receiving hospital where a doctor took mercy on her and nursed her back to something like passable health. [“Passable health” is an expression that should be taken with a shipping container or so of salt; after the prisoner transport across Siberia, one of Yevgenia’s fellow prisoners was “certified” by the camp “doctor” to be eligible for general work . . . four hours before she died of scurvy.] Upon her return from the hospital to the hut where the rest of her fellow prisoners are housed, they tell her that the doctor’s efforts will turn out to be wasted, and Yevgenia will soon enough be right back where she was.

And so it comes to pass.

Yevgenia ends up at a logging sub-camp at Kilometer 7 on the Kolyma Road, where her condition begins to deteriorate even further. It’s spring of 1940 by now, and in the melting snow she discovers a species of cranberry that has lasted through the winter. So fragile they burst if picked, she and her teammate eat them by lying on the ground and sucking them off the stems with their mouths. Yevgenia credits the berries with providing just enough nutrients to keep them going. Eventually a medical inspection team arrives at Kilometer 7. As Yevgenia points out, these sorts of inspections didn’t “just happen”; rather they were a response to mortality unacceptably high even by Kolyma standards.

It’s during this medical inspection that a Gulag Miracle happens. The inspection team consists of a feldscher, a term the Russians took over from the Germans (think a medic or corpsman in the U.S. military) and an actual doctor. The feldscher is fairly typical of the Gulag run of medical care — like the one who certified Yevgenia’s nearly-dead fellow prisoner as eligible for “general work” four hours before she died — but: the doctor knows the uncle with whom Yevgenia’s older son is staying in Leningrad (this is before the siege, of course), and he hooks her up with a three-day medical exemption from work. He also arranges to have her re-assigned as a nurse in his hospital.

The book ends during Yevgenia’s trip southward towards the hospital and salvation.

[By way of plot spoiler: Yevgenia spent a total of 18 years either in prison or in camp. She ended up marrying one of the doctors she worked with in Kolyma. After her release she stayed on in exile in Kolyma, never ceasing to appeal her case. She was completely rehabilitated in 1955.]

It is as well to note that almost all Survivor Literature to have emerged from the Gulag was written by people who spent some portion, or the major portion, of their terms working in hospitals, or in the camp shops, or (in Solzhenitsyn’s case), a sharashka, an “island of paradise” as he calls it, where he worked (fraudulently) as a physicist. In addition to Ginzburg and Solzhenitsyn, I’ve also read the memoirs of Alexander Dolgun and Janusz Bardach and some of the short stories of Varlam Shalamov, and every one of them spent large portions of their respective terms working inside the camp (Bardach in fact became after his liberation a surgeon and ended his days teaching at the University of Iowa; he developed what is apparently the standard surgical correction for cleft palate).

The above pattern is no coincidence. Early in his incarceration Solzhenitsyn was specifically warned to do whatever it took not to be assigned to general work. “General work” for any particular camp was the basic industrial activity for which the camp had been established, whether that was coal, copper, gold, uranium, or other mining, the manufacture of brick, logging, digging canals, or whatever. Assignment to general work was by and large a death sentence. Between the labor brigade, the common pot, and the differentiated ration, a prisoner on “general work” could be expected to last a few months at most. Naftaly Frenkel, whom Solzhenitsyn characterizes as the spiritual father of Gulag’s slave labor system, is quoted as opining that a prisoner on general work was expected to last three to four months, after which time no further use for him could be looked for.

So much for the narrative of Journey into the Whirlwind. What does it tell us about Yevgenia Ginzburg?

I think that the important thing to remember about Yevgenia is that she was a Party member. And that leads to the first noteworthy thing about at least the first volume of her memoirs [sidebar: I am very much aware that my comments that follow here are made without having read the second volume. On the other hand her memoirs were originally written as a single book, and it strikes me at least as highly odd for a general examination of herself and her premises, of the sort Solzhenitsyn lays out, not even to be hinted at in the first part of her story.]: There is not a single passage in this book in which she questions in the least the very moral premise and structure either of communism as such, or the Party as an institution. Oh sure; she relates the slavishness with which her fellow Party members (and co-workers, some of whom would have been fellow Party members and some who weren’t) rushed to prostrate themselves and “confess” to all manner of doctrinal and political impurities. Nowhere does she pose the question: To what extent does this transparently fraudulent, farcical, yet blood-soaked witches’ circus arise from the moral propositions on which communism, or the Communist Party, or the Soviet Union are based? On the contrary: Remember that Yevgenia refuses to admit her “guilt,” refuses to acknowledge that she has done anything for which she deserved Party discipline (even to the extent of a censure).

Throughout it all Yevgenia claims the mantle of unsullied Party doctrine. Even having witnessed her fellow toads beneath the harrow get swept up, swept away, she is crushed by the experience of having to surrender her Party card. [I am interested to read whether the second volume covers her rehabilitation and whether she eagerly grasped her Party card on rehabilitation.] This experience matches, by the way, with Solzhenitsyn’s description of the True Believers in camp. They are outraged by the physical miseries and indignities visited upon them, but what really cuts them to the bottom of what they are pleased to think of as their moral beings is the loss of that damned Party card. It’s all they want back.

Yevgenia notes with a mixture of sadness and pity the Socialist-Revolutionary cellmate who feels she must ask her comrade in the next cell over before she can accept something so basically human as the offer of cigarettes. And who when she is instructed to reject them meekly submits. To the sight-unseen dictate of someone who is likely headed for a death chamber at some point (Stalin was merciless in his liquidation of all rival leftist parties and factions, from the Old Bolsheviks to the Trotskyites to the S.R.s to the Mensheviks, Stalin had them pretty much all shot) this woman cannot muster the human dignity to assert her own separate existence as a moral agent. Gentle Reader must remember that in those circumstances a proffered smoke, or lump of sugar, or tea, or crust of bread is much, much more than a simple physical object; it is, rather, an extended human bond, a recognition of common humanity. It can be a gesture of self-sacrifice of life itself. But none of this is enough to trump party discipline for this S.R. woman.

There are several passages in Ginzburg’s book where other Party members in her cell or on that prisoner transport take her aside and whisper to her of the need to maintain Party discipline and purity, and not to mix with the political riff-raff and counter-revolutionaries among whom they find themselves. To her credit Ginzburg does not go down that route, the same moral dead-end of her Socialist-Revolutionary cellmate. To her credit. But she does not examine in the slightest the moral foundations of a Party that expects her to behave exactly that way. What kind of claim to any sort of moral pre-eminence does any political party have which demands and expects that its members so divest themselves of ordinary humanity down to that level?

As with the Party, so also with the state and society that the Party has created. In her interrogation Yevgenia is “confronted” by “witnesses” who solemnly attest to her terrorist activities, knowing as they must that it’s all a lie. What kind of a society produces that behavior? What kind of state is produced by that society? Or vice-versa? The whole examination of human character and its assertion of an underlying morality that makes The GuLAG Archipelago so fascinating a read is utterly absent from Journey into the Whirlwind. It’s just not there. One of Yevgenia’s cellmates to whom she became especially close was a young girl who was a Harbinist. Her father had worked on the Chinese Eastern Railroad that branched off the Siberian railroad and ran to Harbin on the coast. The Soviets sold the road to Japan (after its invasion of Manchuria) and called their nationals home, where, Solzhenitsyn reports, those that returned were almost without exception imprisoned and exterminated. This subsequent history would have been known to Ginzburg at the time she wrote, but not a word of it makes it into her narrative, notwithstanding her loving recollections.

I think Gentle Reader is entitled to question: Why this omission? Why does someone who survives eighteen years in this death spasm, the majority of it in the most notorious killing industries in the entire country, not include the slightest comment upon the legitimacy of the entire structure?

I’m going to order and read that second volume. I hope that what Yevgenia has to say in it will render all of my above comments nugatory, in which event I’ll happily update this post to admit my error. But I’m afraid that Yevgenia, simon-pure Party member that she claimed to be no matter what comes her way, will turn out to be little more than one of those True Believers described by Solzhenitsyn. She will be, at bottom, one of those who convinced themselves that in their particular case it was just a big mistake, or was necessary to maintain the Party, or even that it might be attributable to a rogue General Secretary . . . but as to all those other millions? They deserved what they got.

Truth is what the Party requires it to be, Comrade.

Great Moments in Take That! You Bastards

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[Note:  What follows is a work-up of a Facebook post from a week ago today, which is to say June 21, 2019.]

After the November 11, 1918, armistice, the German High Seas Fleet was interned in the Royal Navy’s northern fleet anchorage of Scapa Flow, off the northern coast of Scotland. It steamed through a double line of British battleships, all of which were at general quarters, with main batteries loaded and trained on the Germans (just in case they had not, in fact, off-loaded their own ammunition).

That evening, the commander of the Grand… Fleet ordered that the German ensign would be lowered at sunset, and would not be raised again except by permission.

in the late spring and early summer of 1919, as the peace conference in Paris dragged on, the mood aboard the German ships got ugly. The sailors were most not happy about having meekly surrendered themselves (the German Army, in contrast, had marched back home under arms), and they really weren’t pleased with the thought that their ships, which were after all their homes as well, were going to be passelled out among the victorious allies to become their playthings.

So on that June morning, 100 years ago today, after the British had left harbor for training exercises, the German admiral, Ludwig von Reuter, hoisted an innocent-looking flag signal. Whereupon the German ships all raised their ensigns (which is to say, without permission), opened their seacocks (they’d already thoroughly compromised their ships’ honeycombed watertight construction to ensure that once the flooding started it couldn’t be stopped), and headed for the lifeboats.

Ashore an American senior officer was sitting with a British counterpart. He looked out and saw an entire harbor of ships gently listing over and settling below the waves. “My God; they’re sinking!” he exclaimed. The Brit looked up briefly, observed, “Aren’t they now,” and returned to his paperwrooork.

A few of the ships got raised, but none in usable condition. Most got chopped up where they sank and sold for scrap over the years. A few are still there, in water too deep for salvage. You can dive them, with a permit.

One week later the Treaty of Versailles was signed, five years to the day after Archduke Franz Ferdinand and wife got whacked in Sarajevo, starting the whole sorry mess.

By way of interesting sidebar: Those ships still on the bottom are among the very few sources of steel that is not contaminated by post-1945 nuclear fall-out. It’s used in the manufacture of highly sensitive radiation detection equipment, apparently.

By way of even further interesting sidebar:  Those four remaining battleships are privately owned, and are for sale . . . on eBay.  Seriously.  I think the buy-it-now price is about £880,000 or something like that, I think.  Be the first kid on your block to own your own battle squadron.

Coming Full Circle, 1914-1919 (and 2010, Too)

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From the Dept. of We Thought it Was a Good Idea at the Time (Div. of Unintended Consequences):

One Hundred years ago today the Treaty of Versailles was signed. It formally ended the Great War, at least against Germany (there wasn’t an Austria-Hungary left by that time; in any event a separate treaty was signed to end its war). By one of history’s gentler ironies, it was signed five years to the day after the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, were shot to death in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip.

A recent thorough treatment of the circus that came of the Paris Peace Conference is Paris 1919.

The general terms of the treaty were fairly onerous, but in truth, not more than any country ought to expect which intentionally precipitated a general war in Europe and then so far forgot itself as to lose. Huge loss of territory? Yup, that happens. [N.b.  The world seems to have forgot that point in connection with the efforts of Islam to extinguish the state of Israel.  The land belongs to Israel by right of conquest.  Full stop; end of inquiry.]  Have to confess yourself a bad boy? That too. Pay up for all the destruction you caused in other folks’ back yards? Folks are funny that way, y’know. Give up your implements of destruction? Do you think we’re suckers or what?

[To get an idea of what Germany was up to behind the lines, the two books to read are The Englishman’s Daughter and The Rape of Belgium: The Untold Story of World War I; the Germans even stole the doorknobs for the brass. All the way down to the doorknobs, fer cryin’ out loud. And they wondered they were expected to buy new.]

[To get an idea of what Germany was up to in the U.S., even before April, 1917, the book to read is The Detonators: The Secret Plot to Destroy America and an Epic Hunt for Justice.]

So yeah, Germany took it in the shorts. But they had it coming.

The problem turned out to be that they didn’t understand they had it coming, because they were never forced to confess themselves beaten. They signed an armistice on November 11, 1918, not a surrender. Their army marched home under arms. But Germany was well and truly beaten. The Allies kept up the blockade of Germany all the way up until the treaty was signed. Several tens of thousands of German civilians died during those months, of starvation. Countries which are not beaten don’t get done that way.

But on the surface, there was a fundamental mismatch between the end of the war and the terms of the peace.

Looking below the surface, in a very real sense Germany had no choice but to sign the treaty. But the German people didn’t see it that way. Their leaders told them that they didn’t lose the war but were “stabbed in the back,” and the Treaty of Versailles wasn’t what they had coming to them, but rather a sell-out.  Lies, all of it, peddled by mountebanks after no more than power.  The German people enthusiastically embraced the cynics who sold them that bill of goods, and marched off to do it all over again.

Needless to say, a generation later the Allies didn’t repeat the same mistakes. We saw to it that in large areas there wasn’t much more left than would throw a shadow.  We so thoroughly cured Germany of militaristic aggression that today their air force is more or less grounded and their navy rusted to its moorings.

Of course the big alt-historical question is, had the Allies pursued the Kaiser’s disintegrating army all the way back into Germany, had we insisted on a surrender, would German society have responded more along the lines that it did in 1945?

I’m not so sure it would have, in truth.  I don’t think one may doubt that, had German cities and towns been overrun with the detritus of a destroyed army, had German civilians seen with their own eyes the ragged, half-starved, terrified survivors of units which had abandoned their weapons in the mad scramble to do something, anything to get as far from the killing zones as possible; had they seen the endless columns of well-fed, warmly clothed Americans marching across their squares and their farms, the National Socialists and the various nationalistic right-wing parties would have had a much tougher sell than was the actual case.  But as they say in the military:  The enemy gets a vote.

How would German society have responded to crushing defeat in 1918/19?  I don’t think we can ignore the reality that a good part of why German inner resistance crumbled so completely in 1945 was precisely the fact that it was the second lost war in a generation.  After the first one there would be a more-or-less natural human tendency to think in terms of, “Well, next time we’ll know what to do; next time we’ll get it right.”

What I very much do not think is that the Treaty of Versailles, imposed after a genuine, unmistakable German defeat, would have somehow prevented the birth of National Socialism in Germany.  That movement flourished in the manure of the Dolchstoßlegende, it is true.  But the seed sprouted independently.  Let us not forget that fascism first came to prominence and power in Italy, which was on the winning side in the war after all, and which benefitted enormously at Austria-Hungary’s expense at the peace table.  It wasn’t a loser’s movement, in other words.

The nationalistic strain had been present for generations, ever since (at least) the Napoleonic invasions (see, e.g., “Frühlingsgruß an das Vaterland,” by Max von Schenkendorf in 1814, and later set to pretty dramatically rousing music).  And by 1914 the socialists had long been the largest single party represented in the Imperial Reichstag.  There is exactly zero reason to suppose that, looking south over the Alps, it would have occurred to no one to combine those two strains.

Would National Socialism have grown as powerful as it did, though?  I think not.  The German officer corps retained so much of its influence in German society largely as a result of its pretense that the Army had not lost the war.  And it was the Nazis’ successfully winning over the officer corps that ensured them the backing of the conservative element in society.  In this connection it is very much apropos to remind Gentle Reader that National Socialism began and remained very much a left-wing, radical political movement.  The conservative elements in German society, and especially the officers, originally wanted nothing to do with the Nazis; but when the Army came over, it became sortable–hoffähig in German.

William Shirer tells the story very well of Hitler’s testimony at the court-martial of three or four junior officers who were being tried on charges of having disseminated, contrary to regulations, Nazi Party propaganda among their troops.  Hitler testified for the prosecution, and it was his assurance to the senior command that his movement posed no threat to their position in society that won them over.  The liquidation of the SA as an independent power center on June 30, 1934, was another step in that process; Ernst Röhm very much intended for the SA to be a fully-functional army beside (and of course, eventually supplanting) the Reichswehr.  [Side note:  Hitler had no intention of keeping his end of that bargain, and didn’t.  Just like a parasitic wasp eventually sucks dry its host, Hitler progressively emasculated the officer corps, to the extent that they watched supinely as one of their own was baselessly smeared as a sexual pervert and cashiered in 1938.]

Now consider what if everybody and his cousin knew jolly good and well that the generals had lost the last war?  What if they were as discredited in 1918-19 as they were in 1945?  Who would have brought over the wide swathe of German society that wanted nothing more than a return to the stabilities and certainties of the Kaiser’s empire?  The National Socialists would not have enjoyed the mis-branding which support by the Army permitted them to indulge.

So no, I don’t think the National Socialists would have come to power had Germany been physically and undeniably confronted with the fact of its defeat in 1918.

In terms of what it accomplished, the Treaty of Versailles must be said to have turned out to be one of history’s larger misconceptions.  The Allies weren’t willing to fight a total war to a total war’s finish, but they wanted to, and did, impose a peace that could only last if built upon the foundation of that degree of victory.

But it seemed like a good idea at the time.

By way of pettifogging detail . . . Germany’s final payment on its (by then heavily discounted) World War I reparations was made on . . . October 3, 2010. And to close the circle with another irony: October 3 is Reunification Day in Germany, celebrating the final liquidation, in 1990, of the 45 years’ separation that they got to enjoy in consequence of their having believed themselves unbeaten in 1918.

A Joyful Noise

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22 March 1459:  The young sprig of the Habsburg family is born who grows up to be Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor.

Max practiced masterfully the art of the dynastic marriage both for himself and his descendants, significantly sweeping under either direct Habsburg sovereignty or collateral affiliation large swathes of Europe, most notably direct kingship over Hungary after the disaster of Mohacs in 1526.  It was Hungary which provided the “and royal” tag in the Habsburg “imperial and royal” descriptor after the Compromise of 1867.  On the other hand, it was in large measure Hungarian intransigence which forever derailed what feeble attempts Franz Joseph and his advisors made to drag the empire forward as a viable geopolitical force.  I forget now which German senior commander (or was it a chancellor? I’ve slept since then) observed during the Great War that Germany was “shackled to a corpse.”  Magyar refusal to entertain any measure which might impair their oppression of the crazy-quilt of ethnicities within Hungary has to bear a good portion of the responsibility for the truth of that statement.

Gentle Reader will perceive how easily that for which we strive mightily, and sacrifice nearly all to defend once in our possession, can turn out to be a poison chalice in the end, after all.  Be careful what you wish for, I suppose.

Max also is a pretty good example of the Habsburg penchant for eccentricity.  He spent a large amount of effort on a couple of lengthy epic poems as well as a novel.  The purpose, in addition to patting himself on the back for being An All-Round Swell Guy, was to glorify what he presented as the traditions of chivalry and more to the point, the Habsburgs’ role as principal exponents of ditto.  There is a fascinating history of the family which takes for its focus the means and media in which the successive Habsburg rulers used their representation in visual and written arts to establish, explicate, and fix in permanence their role and claims in the European power system.

History has been less impressed with Max as author than he might have desired.

What Maximilian did do, and what to this day remains as an enduring legacy, perhaps his only enduring legacy, is the direction he gave to one of his court flunkies in 1498 to go hire, as a permanent fixture at court, some musicians and young male singers.  Just over 500 years later the Wiener Sängerknaben — better known in English as the Vienna Boys Choir — is still going.  Roughly 100 strong, they of course perform concerts in and around Vienna; they also split into four separate touring groups and travel all over the world performing.  A couple of years ago, one of them visited the city near where I live and as a bucket-list item I took my mother to see them.  They put on a pretty good show.

In addition to concerts at home and abroad, they also play a significant part in the cultural life of what has as good a claim as any to the title “Music City”.  Here’s a video including them performing at the 1989 funeral of Zita, the last Empress of Austria-Hungary.

[Here I will confess to a bit of a personal preference.  I understand that musicians must perform what their audiences want to hear.  Thus I do not take it ill of the Sängerknaben that so much of the program they presented that evening we saw them was newer settings of newer things.  But I prefer a greater homage to the towering music of the past.  I mean, let’s face it:  Just about anyone who can carry a tune in a dump truck — and I own that I am not among them, not at all, even a bit, by any standard — can sling together a passable setting of “contemporary” music, showtunes, and so forth.  It’s just not all that challenging.  The great music of the past, however?  That takes a bit more in the way of chops.  I prefer the focus of the Thomanerchor, which is even older than the Sängerknaben (they trace their roots back to 1212, I think) and which concentrates above all on the music of their one-time Kantor, one J. S. Bach.  Not to take anything away from their colleagues in Vienna; it’s just that I sort of wish they’d devote their undoubted talents to challenges more worthy of them.  Purely personal taste.]

Perhaps Maximilian did achieve his earthly immortality, and through the medium of art.  It just wasn’t his own, or even about him.  Irony will out.

Go make a joyful noise, in memory of H.I.M. Maximilian.

Pardon Her

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That post title is not a misprint.

Nor is it an indication that I’ve finally gone off my meds (consisting of beer; on those few occasions when I see someone in a doctor’s office and I’m asked if I’m taking any medications, my invariable response is, “Does beer count?”).

Nor have I suddenly become unable to read, and thus discovered an element of intent in a statute which plainly contains no such element.  18 U.S.C. § 793(f) reads, in full —

“(f)Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the national defense, (1) through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, or (2) having knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust, or lost, or stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer–

Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.”

The FBI director allowed that he was recommending She not be prosecuted for violating that statute because they couldn’t find any solid indication of intent on Her part to commit the acts described in it.  No Virginia, the word intent does not appear in that statute, nor does any variant of it.  Nor, for that matter, does reckless.  But the mens rea for both components of it is in fact expressed, so that you cannot even say that you must infer the standard of intent. The affirmative act proscribed requires only “gross negligence” (which was, as I recall, more or less exactly how Comey characterized Her actions), and the omission (failure to report) requires only “knowledge”.  She certainly had knowledge of the events itemized in the statute.

She is, in round numbers, Guilty as Hell, as are many of Her underlings and associates.  She is subject to imprisonment for up to ten years.  Full stop.

I have expatiated, both here and elsewhere, on why Her actions in respect of this country’s most sensitive information (barring, perhaps, the actual nuclear launch codes) made it impossible for me to support Her candidacy, no matter how revolting Her opponent may be, and no matter what Her actual policy actions might have turned out to be (in contrast to Her objectives as stated for public consumption).  Her blithely compromising our national security would alone have done that.  That, added to Her sale of the fourth-highest public office in our gift (the secretary of state is fourth in line for the presidency, behind only the actual president, the vice president, and the Speaker of the House), and you could have run a yellow dog against Her and I’d have voted for the dog.

Before proceeding, I want Gentle Reader to understand how it pains me to have to write that last sentence.  I grew up among Yellow Dog Democrats, people who proudly proclaimed they’d vote for a yellow dog if you ran him as a Democrat.  And they meant it, too.  I once attended a talk given by the author of a book about a very tumultuous time in my Southern state’s history.  It was neither more nor less than a full-blown constitutional crisis, and several key players came together to salvage the integrity (to the extent we enjoy any around here) of the Rule of Law.  Come to think of it now, those several weeks early that winter marked the point at which the Democrat Party in this state went into a decline from which it has not recovered to this day, forty-odd years later.  What I remember most about the author’s presentation was the praise heaped on the then-chief justice of our state supreme court, because he chose to uphold his oath of office, rather than do what he dearly wanted to do, namely not do anything that might benefit a Republican.  Apparently he actually did struggle with his decision, on exactly that basis.  Pause and think about that for a moment:  The highest judge in the state finds it even a close question as to whether to put party loyalty before his “so help me God” oath to preserve, protect, and defend the constitution of our state and of the United States.  I want to go find his grave, that I may shit on his headstone and otherwise desecrate it and those of his ancestors.

All of the above notwithstanding, I would like nothing more than to see Dear Leader pardon Her on his way out the door.  Certainly pardon Her for Her compromise of national security and all the crimes She committed in connection with the cover-up (destruction of evidence, obstruction of justice, conspiracy, and God only knows what else), and — here I confess I waffle a bit — probably for the corruption-related crimes as well.

However much She richly deserves to spend the bulk of the balance of Her life in an orange jumpsuit (She’s on the wrong side of 70 and not in good health; there’s a decent chance She wouldn’t do the full term even if sentenced), if She is prosecuted by the Trump administration, it will later be explicitly used by a Democrat administration as a precedent to bring witch-hunt criminal charges against defeated opponents.  Capture office and you not only sideline your opponent politically, but you use the physical coercive power of the United States government to destroy the individuals on the other side.  I still remember — I think it was the very first day of class — my 1L criminal law class, and the professor pointing out that criminal law is concerned with the application of the physical coercive power of millions upon millions of people and all the wealth they command to the body, the corporeal being, of a single human.  Or as Stalin phrased it, “How much do you suppose the Soviet Union weighs?”

Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and the other totalitarians are of course only the best-known practitioners of that principle.  A goodly bit of The GuLAG Archipelago covers Stalin’s use of the Soviet criminal law system (I refuse to use the expression “justice” in connection with anything appertaining to the Soviet Union) to wreak the physical destruction of vanquished political foes.  And by “physical destruction” I don’t mean that they had to eek out a marginal existence as third assistant bottle-washer in some dreary provincial town.  I mean they were sent to the execution chambers, just as they had, by the way, joyfully sent thousands of others before them.  So my sympathy for them is muted.

What is less known, because the perpetrator is something of a secular saint around here, is that Stalin and Hitler were far from the only ones doing that.  I refer Gentle Reader to the story of one Andrew Mellon (yes, of that family).  He had been Coolidge’s and Hoover’s Secretary of the Treasury.  After Hoover’s blow-out defeat by FDR, the new president instructed the chief prosecutor for the IRS, one Robert H. Jackson, to bring criminal charges against Mellon.  Not, you understand, for any misdeed taken in any official capacity, but rather for allegedly fiddling on his personal income taxes.  The specific offense charged (because Jackson did FDR’s bidding; his reward later was appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court) was Mellon’s having claimed deductions against his income.  The problem was that the deductions were specifically legal to claim, and Mellon was well within his rights to claim them.  No matter; Roosevelt commanded that he be charged and prosecuted as a criminal, and Jackson the toady in fact tried to do it, although the grand jury returned a no true bill.  The whole sordid story is well-told in Amity Schlaes’s The Forgotten Man.  Not having been able to get the grand jury to do his master’s bidding, Jackson then went after Mellon for civil penalties; eventually Mellon was fully exonerated.  Jackson went on to become the chief Allied prosecutor at Nuremberg’s IMT trials of the chief Nazi defendants.

So Gentle Reader may not think it can’t happen here, because it can and it has.  In fact it continues.  What’s left of the Democrats in Texas have made several — thus far unsuccessful — runs at their opponents.  In Alaska they succeeded in a witch hunt trial of Sen. Ted Stevens.  They convicted him of corruption and he lost his re-election bid to a Democrat, with the vote of whom the “Affordable” Care Act became law.  There was only one problem:  The Department of Justice rigged the whole thing, up to and including manufacturing of evidence and suborning perjury.  Don’t take my word for it.  Let’s hear from the Special Counsel’s report (completed and released too late to avoid the disastrous consequences of his loss to the Senate):  “The investigation and prosecution of U.S. Senator Ted Stevens were permeated by the systematic concealment of significant exculpatory evidence which would have independently corroborated Senator Stevens’s defense and his testimony, and seriously damaged the testimony and credibility of the government’s key witness.”

The fact that She is in fact guilty, that there is no reasonable dispute as to Her guilt, the fact that the damage She did to national security interests, all in an effort to cover up . . . well, we don’t know quite why she went to such lengths . . . will endure for decades:  None of that changes my thinking.  Trump’s prosecution of a consummately guilty person will, no matter the outcome, later be used by his Democrat successors as an excuse to destroy the innocent.  And then it will be only a question of time before a successful Republican does it.  And then it will become part of our political DNA.  Lose office and they’ll hound you into jail or the grave, whichever comes first.

When you raise the stakes of political challenge-and-defense to that level, candidates and incumbents alike will stop at nothing in their effort to win.  And by “nothing” I am not speaking metaphorically.  At that point anything and everything will be viewed as being on the table, up to and including outright assassination.  Grabbing the scalp of a senator is one thing; when the stakes are the Oval Office on the one hand or federal incarceration on the other, things become imaginable which otherwise never ever would.  When we reach that point we will be indistinguishable from some banana republic, from Mexico, from Putin’s Russia, from Cambodia, from North Korea.

So I heartily endorse the notion that Dear Leader will pardon Her for Her criminal actions in regard of The E-Mail Server and its cover-up.  The sale of office offenses I have a little more hesitation about, but if pushed would probably swallow that as well.  My hesitation in that respect arises from the unfortunate fact that sale of public office is so easily accomplished and so difficult to prove, and it may be practiced at all levels of government, and its unabashed practice — which would, by the way, be the inevitable outcome of Her getting away with it — has the independent ability to destroy the republic.

And the pardon must come from Dear Leader.  Everyone expects him to, anyway, for starts.  Secondly, such a pardon from a President Trump would in an instant destroy his credibility with everyone who — as I did — pulled the lever for him by reason of Her guilt.  If you want to destroy Trump’s presidency once and for all, have him grant Her clemency.

I would note that, because the FBI has an independent counter-intelligence function, pardoning Her will not end its jurisdiction fully to investigate and evaluate all those e-mails.  This is important, because the American people do deserve to know the full details of what She did while in office.

I would not, however, support clemency for Her raft of co-conspirators and enablers.  Exactly how many hundreds of people had to be in the loop on that illegal server, seeing what any fourth-grader could recognize as classified information flit to and fro?  How many bag men for the Clinton Foundation were there who made the arrangements with the foreign donors?  All of Her scheming could never have got off the ground were it not for the underlings.

Let us run a thought experiment:  I am some senior staff member to a senior government official.  I am given instructions by my chief that I know from the moment the words leave his mouth are flagrantly not just illegal, but constitute major felonies.  Thinking that my chief and I sink or swim together gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling, because I’m thinking he has the political pull to save himself, and by doing so will necessarily save me as well.  What if, on the other hand, I can look back and find ample precedent for the outcome that my chief, for whose benefit I am asked to commit multiple crimes, is going to skate and enjoy a long and remunerative retirement, while I go to prison?  Will I be more likely or less likely to go along with it?  How likely is it that my chief will organize a John Q. Zimmelfritz Legal Defense Fund to keep my country ass out of chokey?

What if senior staff at the State Department had refused to communicate with Her except across a properly authorized, secure government e-mail account?  What if She Herself had had to do all her negotiating favors for the King of Morocco, or the Russian uranium interests, or Ericsson for cash (like the $750,000 speech Bill gave to Ericsson’s board of directors, or the $500,000 speech he gave to the Moscow bankers financing Putin’s acquisition of 20% of U.S. uranium production capacity, or the $23 million that the king kicked into Her foundation), instead of having shoals of willing errand-boys and -girls?  I will tell you one very likely outcome of my alt-history:  We would be getting ready for our second President Clinton right now, because millions of voters — voters such as yore ‘umble correspondent here — would very likely have opted for Her, instead of Trump.

I don’t want to live in Central America, or Russia, or China, or North Korea.  I damned sure don’t want those places brought here.  Pardon Her, and be done with it.  To borrow from Cromwell:  In the name of God, go!

On the Kaiser and the Administrative State

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A couple of weeks ago a buddy forwarded to me a photo that a friend of his had taken, of House Doorn in the Netherlands.  This is it:

house-doorn

As Gentle Reader might surmise from the bust in the foreground, this was the house in which Kaiser Wilhelm II spent the last two decades or thereabouts of his life.  He is buried on the grounds there, and is likely to remain there forever.  His express wish was not to be returned to Germany until it became a monarchy again, and the likelihood of that occurring is somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.0.

Being the considerate, courteous feller that I am I thanked my buddy.  I passed along that I have the two-volume biography of Wilhelm by Lamar Cecil, which I found to be very well done, and remarkably fair given the subject.  Cecil doesn’t pull punches, but refrains from gratuitous character-blackening.  But it’s his final comment on Wilhelm that sticks in the mind.  Of the last kaiser it could equally be said, so Cecil, what Wellington pronounced upon George IV:  He lived and died without being able to assert so much as a single claim upon the gratitude of posterity.

My buddy then e-mailed me back to allow that Cecil’s judgment echoed what he had read about ol’ Kaiser Bill in both Paris 1919 and The War That Ended Peace, both by Margaret MacMillan.  I have both and recommend them both, but the exchange with my buddy got me to thinking back to the war’s beginnings.

As I think I’ve mentioned before, the Great War has been a fetish of mine for right at 30 years.  I can’t say I have any friends I know to give a tinker’s damn about it, but for me it is a source of endless fascination and continuing reflection.  [N.b.  By an odd coincidence, a very dear friend of mine had one grandfather who was a machine-gunner for the kaiser; the other grandfather had been a machine-gunner in the A.E.F.]

I have on loan from a mutual friend the BBC mini-series 37 Days, the story of the interval between the Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination on June 28 and the August 3, 1914, British declaration of war.  As you might expect from the Beeb, the story is told primarily from the viewpoint of the Anglo-German dyad.  There are two brief scenes each of Franz Joseph and Nicholas II; the balance of the action takes place in London and Berlin.  The central character around whom the narrative is framed is Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign minister.  Ian McDiarmid plays Grey marvelously.

There are a couple of historical inaccuracies in the plot.

Franz Joseph is implied to be the motive force behind the famous ultimatum to Serbia, when in fact it was his cabinet, and above all his military Chief of the General Staff, Field Marshal Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, who seized upon the assassination (which Franz Joseph greeted with, above all, a sense of relief, remarking as much in so many words) to crush Serbia once and for all, both to remove a source of agitation for the empire’s Serb minority and to re-assert Austria-Hungary’s place as a Great Power in Europe.

In Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm’s initial reaction is presented as being bellicose, when it was nothing of the kind.  At least at first.  For obvious reasons the Austrians wanted to know whether they had Germany’s backing in doing anything to Serbia as such in response to the assassination.  So they sent Alexander, Count von Hoyos a foreign service official, with a memorandum in hand to see the Austrian ambassador to Germany, who was then to meet with Kaiser Wilhelm and the German Reichskanzler, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg.  Bethmann-Hollweg’s initial reaction during that meeting — and more importantly, the kaiser’s as well — was cautionary.  But during the Austrian ambassador’s meeting with kaiser and chancellor, Hoyos was meeting with his own German counterpart to “explain” the memorandum’s actual meaning.  Hoyos had long been, it seems, a proponent of violent reckoning with Serbia, and the gloss he put on the memorandum was that Austria wanted a short, victorious war against Serbia and it expected Germany to live up to its alliance obligations.  That “interpretation” was then communicated up to Wilhelm, and by the time dinner came around that evening, Wilhelm was wearing his war paint and declared that whatever Austria wanted to do, Germany would back it to the hilt.  Thus was the famous “blank check” given.

The final point of inaccuracy in the BBC miniseries is that it presents Bethmann-Hollweg as being much more belligerent, and much more energetic about provoking warlike measures by the Austrians, than he actually was.  He’d never served in the army and had no illusions about its out-sized role in Germany policy-making.  He had long been an unsuccessful opponent of Admiral Tirpitz’s quixotic naval construction programs.

But that’s not what this post is about.  The BBC miniseries very accurately presents the role played by the German General Staff, the Generalstab.  The generals very very much wanted a war, but not a war between Austria and Serbia.  They were looking for war with Russia, a preventive war.

What follows below is the (slightly edited) e-mail I sent to my buddy:

If you back up a half-step from the historical narrative and look at the meta-story of it, what you realize is that what was going on was that the responsible organs of government – the kaiser and the reichskanzler — abdicated a central decision-making function – how to address the continent-wide instabilities created by two decrepit, ancient political systems (Austria-Hungary and Russia) as they desperately fought for continued relevance in a notoriously volatile part of Europe — to supposed “experts” viz. the Army Generalstab. 

Everyone and his cousin knew the issue – What to Do About the Balkans, Dear – to be fiendishly complicated. 

But hist! the Generalstab more or less hijacked the decisional process.  For them the issue wasn’t the Balkans as such, it was the supposed settling of accounts (“Which accounts, exactly?” the innocent bystander might have asked) with Russia.  For decades – ever since Caprivi had let the Secret Reinsurance Treaty with Russia lapse in 1890 (I think it was), the Generalstab had assumed a war with Russia as part of Germany’s treaty obligations to Austria-Hungary.  To be true, they’d at first discounted the possibility that despotic Russia and republican France could ever find their way to the same bed, but in 1894 it had happened.  But they were “experts,” after all, and what good is an “expert” if he can’t “solve” any problem you set him, right? 

In 1914, the “experts” of the Generalstab offered several assurances to the responsible decision-makers:  (i)  There was a rapidly approaching, apocalyptic event – the overtaking of Germany by Russia in military and economic power – the result of which, if not stopped, was the utter destruction of Germany as a flourishing polity and puissant European power.  (ii)  Only the Army had the power to stop it.  (iii)  The only method of addressing this on-coming apocalypse was to cede authority and command over events to the experts, who were to be given free hand in crafting a salvation from it, and that salvation was a specifically military solution.  (v)  There were no unknown developments to fearfrom the experts’ be-all-and-end-all solution of provoking a general war against Russia in the east (oh, for example, the American industrial economy being effectively thrown into the scales on the other side, or Italy getting bought by the Allies with promises of Austrian territory).  (vi) Any known risks of side-effects had been fully accounted for and contained (the Schlieffen Plan and knocking France out of the war in six weeks, thereby reducing the British and more critically the Royal Navy to impotence . . . assuming Britain even bothered to come in at all). 

You will readily recognize in the above the fundamental paradigm of the modern state.  The organs pursue their own agendas, which they form internally and without reference, by and large, to the determinations of the responsible political organs.  Those agendas grow from the agencies’ own objectives, the ultimate outcomes of which, whatever other attributes they might enjoy, invariably display one common feature: the increase in the control exerted by that agency, and the protection of its insiders.  The agencies invariably present their programs never as a trade-off among competing priorities, but rather as the sole chance of staving off catastrophe.  The agencies explicitly take the position that no one from outside them can possibly understand their pet issue(s) or be morally entitled to take a position on them which must be respected and is entitled to be accounted for in any ultimate resolution.  The agencies strenuously maintain, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that they possess full knowledge of every possible consequence of their actions, have accounted for those consequences, and have so arranged everything – Everything, I tell you!! – that no meaningful harm can come from just turning the keys over to them, and if we’ll all just shut up and do as they say, the lion will lie down with the lamb and all will be for the best in the best of all possible worlds. 

Hold that template up to nearly every single agency of modern government, and you will see it fits like pigskin on a pig.  The legal system?  Check.  The EPA?  Check.  The Fed?  Spot-on.  The educational industry?  Oh boy yes; try making a suggestion about how classroom education might be improved to someone carrying an NEA card in her purse and see how much an Outsider gets listened to.  Pretty much any of the alphabet-soup agencies?  Like it was tailor-fit to them.  The military?  Pretty much yes, although the cultural memory of Vietnam has done a great deal to pop a lot of seams in the cloth (kind of ironic that the one aspect of modern America which doesn’t fit perfectly the paradigm of summer, 1914 is precisely the American military in its relationship with the responsible organs of government). 

And now remind me how the Kaiser’s decision to put the generals in the saddle in July, 1914 worked out.

We are glibly informed by our president that, “I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone,” and so he’ll jolly well do as he pleases and Congress be damned.

We have the Consumer Financial Protection Board, which actually isn’t a “board” at all, but rather a non-firable single administrator whose budget comes from the Fed’s surplus income and who answers to no one (mercifully, that structure was just the other day ruled to be unconstitutional by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit).

We have the EPA just more or less deciding to destroy the American power system through regulating carbon dioxide as a “pollutant”.  The courts, indulging the lunacy, agreed that what comes out of your chest as you exhale is subject to regulation by the EPA.  Think about that one, Gentle Reader.  The product of one of your basic life processes is subject to regulation in Washington, D.C.  You are a discharge point.  The EPA runs the National Point Discharge Elimination System (at least for wastewater; I can’t say off the top of my head whether it applies to airborne pollutants — like your breath — as well).  Can you say “residency permit” and “internal passport,” Gentle Reader?  Don’t think it can’t happen; the Army Corps of Engineers famously tried to regulate wet-weather pools on private land as being “navigable waters”.

It is an unfortunate fact of Life that it is far, far easier to do harm than good.  It took the better part of 600 years to build the cathedral at Cologne (or Köln, as we Germanophones would say it); one truck bomb lit off by an ISIS sleeper cell (and the German security services have admitted that such are already there) could bring it down with a few hours’ work.  The German Generalstab managed, with a few weeks manipulation of processes and personalities, to provoke a war which just about destroyed European civilization; in fact, it did destroy it.  If in 1895 you’d asked anyone but a raving lunatic whether it was OK to shoot and gas 6,000,000 people because of where — not just they, but their ancestors going back six generations — went to church, they’d have tried to calm you down while they quietly fetched the gentlemen bearing the straitjackets.  If you’d suggested that it was OK to kick hundreds of thousands of people off land they and their ancestors had inhabited for centuries (as happened in Poland, and eastern Germany, and the Sudetenland), they’d have very carefully put a table between you and them.  If you’d proposed that it would be a very good thing to starve to death your entire independent agricultural class, they’d have run for the hills shouting there was a madman on their tails.  And yet by mid-century all this and much, much more had happened, and had been blessed not just by the perpetrators but by “serious” third-party observers, such as The New York Times whitewashing the Holodomor.

What might an uncontrolled administrative state work by way of mischief?  I am afraid that I will live long enough to find out.  I am terrified that my sons almost certainly will.

Sometimes You See it in a Single Card

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[Ed. — Wow.  I haven’t put anything up on this humble little blog since spring.  What have I been doing?  I couldn’t tell you, for the life of me.  The time just sort of heaves and sighs, and poof! there are another few months gone under the bridge.  Is this what we have to look forward to, as we age?]

You can see it in the slightest things, sometimes.  Someone in whom a particular mind-set, a philosophy, a Weltanschauung is so stamped that it has become a part of who he unthinkingly is will sometimes do or say something and not realize that he has laid bare, to some degree, the most fundamental mechanisms of his soul.  Reporters, the overwhelming majority of whom in Western societies are hard-core leftists, are especially prone to do such things.  They’re so far to the left that they don’t even realize that they are leftists; that’s just how the world looks to them.  And so they’re forever turning cards face-up on the table so that the rest of us can see what’s going on behind their eyes.  They’re no more self-conscious about it than a dog licking his balls.

I recently ran across a splendid example of it, in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the newspaper I’ve used as my internet start page ever since CNN took to shilling for al Qaeda back in 2006.  [Remember the snuff film they produced, of U.S. soldiers getting killed by snipers in Iraq?  They made and released that film in an explicit, self-proclaimed effort to influence the outcome of the 2006 mid-term elections.  CNN took that film, which its own makers had announced as an intention to subvert the American political process, and ran it, again and again and again.  What would we have thought if the Germans had made a similar film in 1944 and then Movietone had run it with the newsreels before every showing of every film in the U.S?]

The article deals with a statute with a wonderfully German name:  the Bundesausbildungsförderungsgesetz, or the Federal Education Improvement Law.  With typical glee in abbreviation and acronym (the Gestapo’s nickname was also one: in truth its full name was the Geheime Staatspolizei) it’s universally known as Bafög.  In round numbers it provides for federal level financial aid  to German students who are attending university (and presumably the technische Hochschulen as well).  The process starts with filling out a standard form, much like the FAFSA form here in the U.S.

At least, the Bafög provides that financial aid to students whose families aren’t well-off above a certain threshold.

The article’s title — “Unity and Justice and Bafög” is a play on the first words of the German national anthem: Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit, unity and justice and freedom.  The point of the article is that our newly-minted Abiturient — the holder of the coveted Abitur, which allows you to attend college in Germany — looking forward to the freedom and Selbstbestimmung (self-determination) of adulthood, with the university years as joyful, stimulating, liberating, challenging, endlessly intriguing opening chapter, is in for a let-down when he sits down to fill out the Bafög application. You see, on page 3 of the form the student is required to state his parent’s income and resources.  Too much and you don’t get any Bafög assistance.

Oopsies!  Turns out the blossoming student isn’t viewed as being quite liberated from his parents, after all.  More to the point, his ability to be a care-free student —

is materially affected by attributes of his family.  Wait.  Isn’t one of the Big Points of university exactly the separation of the student’s identity from that of his background?

The article correctly states the issue implicated:  We are called upon to take a position in the “eternal conflict between freedom, equality, and justice”.  You see, the problem with Bafög is that it is taxpayer funded.  By all taxpayers.  Including the baker whose son is doing an apprenticeship at the local machine shop, whose daughter is a waitress at the restaurant down the street, and whose wife is a nurse’s assistant at the hospital.  His and their money is being taken from them to fund the heightened life prospects of our new student.  Remind us again how this is just and equitable, if the student’s ability to launch himself in life with recourse to the resources of those who — at this point in life at least, before spouse and children appear — have the No. 1 Biggest Stake in his future prospects, is not to be taken into account.  [Note that just making university “free” to everyone doesn’t address our baker’s objections.  He’s still having to fork out to give someone else’s child a leg up in life, irrespective of the ability to help of that child’s parents.]

The article suggests that from our hypothetical tradesman’s perspective, it would be much fairer to require the student and his family to borrow the money and then pay it back from his presumably greater earnings.  As they do it in America, the author points out.  But what has been the result of that system in America, the author asks.  “Mountains of debt” just at the outset of one’s career.

The other way to go is the Scandinavian model, in which everyone — including the children of millionaires — has a right to support from the state.  To treat the children of the wealthy differently would be “not to take them in earnest.”  Whatever.

And now, the tell.  “The liberation from the oppressing bonds of background, which it [the money-for-everyone system] promises the student, has another hook.  It only come as a package.  In other aspects of life as well the state prefers to work directly, without disruptive intermediaries such as the family, with people.”  It is a “großangelegtes Vereinzelungsprojekt” — a comprehensive atomization project — with “grave side effects.”

There you have it.  The socialist system rests upon what is in substance an unlimited claim upon the individual humans who make up society.  It cannot and will not tolerate any other locus of power or independence.

First and foremost is the nuclear family.  It is no accident that among the earliest “reforms” of every socialist dictatorship (and they all are, even the Scandinavian ones with the smiley face) is a programmatic subversion of the nuclear family.  Divorce laws are loosened, the legal privileges of married status are withdrawn.  Children are removed, sometimes by force (membership in the Hitlerjugend or the Young Pioneers was not optional), and often by enticement (universal “free” day-care, anyone?) from their parents’ supervision.  The adults from whom they receive their daily, drip-drip-drip of influence are no longer the parents (or grandparents, or older siblings, aunts and uncles, cousins, and so forth) but rather government functionaries, teaching lessons, values, and self-understanding chosen by the state.  Children are encouraged to spy and report on their parents.  Those who do (or who are said to have) are celebrated, publicly.

Churches come into the cross-hairs for the same reasons.  From the liquidation of the hierarchy under the Bolsheviks to Hitler’s co-opting the German churches — kudos to Bonhoeffer and the other organizers of the Confessing Church movement in Germany; they weren’t going along to get along — there is a remarkably consistent pattern in the subversion of religious organization by socialist government.

The Cultural Revolution was more of the same.  A couple of years ago I read a fascinating biography of Chairman Mao, and of course that period comes in for some close examination.  Traditional Chinese society is, of course, exactly that: deeply and abidingly traditional.  Although the Reds had completed their formal conquest of the country by 1949, and even though they had starved — very intentionally, by the way — somewhere between 45 and 60 million people — mostly peasants — to death during the Great Leap Forward (the link is to the Wikipedia article, which give a high of 42 million and a low of 18 million; on the other hand, this history gives the 45-60 range), Chinese society still remained in many of its core organizing principles the same traditional society it had been.  Mao realized that he had to smash, irretrievably, that hold which tradition had, because in traditional Chinese society the state, as such, played so small a part in everyday life.  Hence the Cultural Revolution’s targeting of everything which traditional China revered, first and foremost the teachers.

It was Mussolini who made famous the formulation: Everything within the state; nothing outside the state; nothing against the state.  This is the first and basic credo of the socialist.  You can pretty it up and say, “Government is just the name for the things we all do together,” but it’s the same thing.  You can stick a label on it — Gleichschaltung — so you can speak in catch-phrases.  You can even attempt to replicate it, to some degree, in the context of a free association, in such things as labor unions, with their ladies’ auxiliaries, athletic teams, children’s groups, and so forth.  But that doesn’t really work, does it, without coercion.  Witness what happened in places like New Harmony:  Without the coercive power of the state, the experiment in an all-encompassing socialism flew apart under the stresses of its own centrifugal forces.

Which is why, at bottom, if the premise of socialism is this unlimited claim upon the individual lives of the people, its essence is violence, physical coercion.

But how does this fascism-with-a-smiley-face play out in wonderful Scandinavia?  Let’s go back to that FAZ article for a reference to just one of those “grave side effects”:  “There are for example few lands in which so many people as in Sweden die completely alone, without any connection with their family.”  Or we can look at the WHO data on alcohol-related disorders:  For males, the rate in the U.S. is 5.48%.  In Sweden it’s 6.32%; in Finland 6.39%; in Norway (you know, that place we’re all supposed to be like) it’s a whacking 9.05%.  Here’s a link to an article in The Washington Post about the prevalence of diagnosed depression.  In the U.S., according to the map at the link, the rate appears to be in the 4-4.5% range.  It’s hard to tell from the map (there’s a further link to the underlying study, if Gentle Reader wants to read that far), but it looks like Sweden comes in at 4.5-5%, and Finland and Norway at 5.5-6%.  Those don’t sound like terribly bad numbers, until you consider that the jump from 4% (the U.S. low-end) to 5.5% (the low-end in wonderful Norway) is a 37.5% leap.

It looks, in other words, as though whatever else the intrusion of the state into every nook and cranny of its citizens’ lives is working for the better, it still seems not to do a very good job of avoiding your dying drunk, depressed, and alone.

Cheer up, Comrade.

Harriet and Andy

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The news in numismatics this week is that Andrew Jackson, the nation’s seventh president, is to be booted from the face of the $20 bill in favor of Harriet Tubman, of Underground Railroad fame.

Jackson’s getting the axe for two reasons:  The present administration is determined to put a face on U.S. currency that is not a white male face, and Jackson owned slaves.  He is also warmly despised for ejecting the Five Tribes from the Eastern United States.  So he has to go.

Harriet Tubman was a leading figure in the organization and operation of the Underground Railroad, that system of hiding places and safe houses which conducted escaping slaves from their points of origin to Canada, where the fugitive slave laws didn’t apply.  It was work conducted, at least in the South, at peril of the parties’ lives, and once in the north, at peril of arrest and imprisonment.

Suffice it to say that Harriet Tubman was equipped with guts enough to equip a regiment.  If you were to set out to fill an auditorium with the Greatest Americans who have thus far lived, she’d have a seat somewhere.

And yet I do not favor kicking Andrew Jackson off the $20 to make place for her.

Why?

For starts, a portrayal on U.S. paper currency is, if you will look at it, presently reserved for people who did great deeds in their capacity as public officials, not for acts of private significance, however worthy.  The only even possible exception is Benjamin Franklin on the $100 bill, but even then, Franklin was among the United States’ most important public servants.  The revolutionary alliance with France, that enabled us to win the war for independence in the first place, was a product of Franklin’s credibility at the court of Louis XV, of Franklin’s acknowledged place in world society (he regularly corresponded, as an equal, with the pre-eminent scientific minds of his generation).  Even before the war, he represented several colonies in London, and it was his personal experience of vituperation in Parliament which decided him that continued affiliation with Britain was not a workable long-term solution.  Later, he was a key player in the constitutional convention in 1787.  So even though he never held any public office under the United States Constitution, he was one of the men but for whom that compact would never have come into existence.

The other public servants scarcely need introduction.  Washington?  Father of the country.  Lincoln?  His deeds require no justification for the reverence in which we hold his memory.  Hamilton?  Father of our national economy (and also a key player in the constitution’s birthing).  Grant?  If being the key commander in winning the Civil War doesn’t merit his place, what might?  On coinage the pattern is similar.  Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson.  Eisenhower, who held together the Western allies in defeating Germany.  The two heads I don’t really understand are Truman’s on the dime and Kennedy’s on the half-dollar.

There is a single exception, and one that never took off:  The Sacagawea dollar (by coincidence I happen to have one in my pocket at this moment).  But even she has a claim to a service in the public interest:  It was she who guided the Corps of Discovery (better known at the Lewis and Clark Expedition) over the western mountains, who was valuable in securing for them the safe passage from the tribes whose lands they crossed.

Now let’s think of why Jackson might be on the $20 bill.  He was the founding light of the oldest continuing political party in American history.  Being a party hack doesn’t really merit a spot on the currency, though, does it?  Victor of New Orleans?  Well, as every school child knows, that battle was fought after the peace had been signed, although the point has been made that it in fact was not, in all likelihood, totally irrelevant for that reason.  There is strong reason to believe that Britain, had it been in possession of the mouth of the Mississippi, would not have surrendered it willingly after the war, which would have utterly changed the complexion of later American development.

No, I think Jackson earned his spot on the $20 bill when he stared down the South Carolina nullifiers.  As Gentle Reader will recall, a protective tariff had been adopted for the benefit of northern industrial interests.  The new imposts had the desired effect, of making imported manufactured goods more expensive than domestic production.  The burden fell hard on the Southern agricultural interests, because of their dependence upon their trade relationships with the British to move their cotton crop.  They bought a large proportion of their manufactured goods from Britain as a result of that trade.

Needless to say, the Southern interest was outraged at the new tariff law.  South Carolina announced an intent to “nullify” the federal statute.  It even passed an ordinance declaring the law to be unconstitutional and null within its borders.  It just was not going to apply in South Carolina (sort of like all these bullshit “sanctuary cities” that have announced that the federal immigration statutes don’t apply within their city limits — San Francisco is very much in the slaveholders’ tradition in this respect).

Let’s pause for a moment and take stock of where things stood during the Nullification Crisis:  In 1832-33 the United States was still a comparatively weak country, a comparatively small country.  Its parts were not yet bound by an enormous rail network, and outside the coastal plain there weren’t even all that many canals.  Large areas were still virgin wilderness (that situation applied far longer than one might expect: not far from where I live there is a county in which there were still over 100,000 acres of virgin hardwood in 1910).  The forces of cohesion in the country were still fragile, and there were still many powerful actors in the world who would have rejoiced in a failure of what was then known as the American Experiment.  This was still a world in which people’s demands for written constitutions were believed to be, and were treated as, an act of rebellion.  In fact, the Revolutions of 1848 in Central Europe were based in large part on precisely that — demands for written constitutions to tie down monarchs’ privileges.

[By the way, note what this understanding of constitutionalism has to say about the notion of a “living constitution.”  Until the U.S. Supreme Court got into it, everyone understood that a written constitution was written for the precise reason that its meaning did not morph over time into whatever you wanted it to say.  The U.S. Constitution was a revolutionary document for exactly the reason that it was written and its meaning did not change to suit the whims of the ruler of the moment.  The idea of a “living constitution” in which no provision has any permanent meaning does violence to the very concept of a constitution, and until the American left got at it, was universally understood to do so.]

The United States with its written constitution was a direct and immediate threat to all those crowned heads in Europe who fiercely resisted the pressure to shackle themselves to a written document with ascertainable substance.

Had South Carolina succeeded in openly defying the federal government as to Congressional action in respect of a matter unambiguously placed within its constitutional competencies — the regulation of trade with foreign nations — the American Experiment would have failed.  The country would not have survived, and there would have been no Underground Railroad because the borders would have been largely closed off.

Jackson was having none of it.  Congress authorized the Force Bill to compel South Carolina’s compliance with the law.  But of course, it would have been Jackson as commander-in-chief who would have been charged with implementing that, or not, and if so, how vigorously.  And what was Jackson’s position?  Well, a visitor from South Carolina asked him if he had any message he’d like to send to the good folks back home.  Jackson gave it to them with the bark still on it:  “Yes I have; please give my compliments to my friends in your State and say to them, that if a single drop of blood shall be shed there in opposition to the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man I can lay my hand on engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach.”

South Carolina knew he meant every last word of that promise.  Compare and contrast Dear Leader’s “red line” in Syria that wasn’t.  South Carolina knew what it had to expect from Jackson, and a compromise was reached.  Syria knew what it had to expect from Dear Leader, and it has acted accordingly.

Jackson, in short, did no more and no less than save the union in 1832-33, at a time when there was an immediate danger of its dissolution.  For that, he more than deserves his place on the $20 bill.  Whatever Harriet Tubman’s private courage and dedication to the cause of human liberty may have been, her life’s work simply does not rise to that level of national significance.  The Underground Railroad never would have changed a damned thing about the institution of slavery; there is no way on earth they could have spirited enough slaves out of the South to make any but the most minuscule dent on the institution.  It took a civil war to make that happen, and had it not been for Jackson’s stance in the face of the nullifiers in 1832-33, there never would have been the northern industrial and demographic powerhouse twenty years later which tore the poison lance of slavery from the national body by main force.  Just wouldn’t have happened.

If you absolutely want to have Tubman’s face on U.S. currency, bilge either Truman or Kennedy, preferably the latter.  But to degrade the man whose courage saved the country betrays a profound ignorance of American history.

Gödel and Washington

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Among the very earliest posts on this humble little blog was one on Washington’s Farewell Address, posted on the occasion of its anniversary. In truth I’d not read it until then, an omission which I now very much regret. The Farewell Address must be one of the most extraordinary documents in American political history, and it is worthy of tremendously more attention than gets paid to it these days. It should, rather, be required reading in just about every level of American education.

For the moment I’d like to return to a part of it, specifically the following passage:

“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice ? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.“It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule, indeed, extends with more or less force to every species of free government. Who that is a sincere friend to it can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric?”

I’d like more specifically to drill down on the statement, “And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” Let’s just say that modern American public discourse is obliged to discount that thought. Religion, or perhaps better stated religiosity, is thought to be in bad taste at best, oppressive by merely allusion to it at worst.

Some time ago while ruminating, what I am pleased to call my mind began studying on the question of exactly on what basis do I require of my fellow humans that I be treated as anything other than an instrumentality. We’ve all heard of Kant’s categorical imperative, but I mean, really? If you, dear reader, have an objective and I am in the way of its achievement, by what right do I claim that you must, to borrow a line from one of my favorite Abe Lincoln stories, “plow around” me? It can only be that I claim some peculiar status in the world which you inhabit.

You say we are all equals, in some moral sense. How is that? Do we see non-human life exhibiting this same recognition of abstract equality? Or do we see, even among pack animals, behavior which cannot be explained except upon purely utilitarian grounds? The alpha male drives the juvenile male from the herd, to wander alone in a world in which he is not at the top of the food chain, until either he is eaten or finds another herd in which he can with violence establish himself. Males battling each other for the privilege of mating with the females, and the females not observably having any choice in the matter. Males preying on their own off-spring. The sick or the old or the lame abandoned to the predator. It all makes sense if you view those animals’ existence from an amoral perspective. Not so much if you apply Kant’s imperative as among them.

What is it that makes humans different? Why should you extend to me any greater consideration than you would a tree, or a rock in your garden, or raccoon who wants only to feed from your garbage? Turning Lincoln’s critique of the slaveholders’ racialist apologia on its head, it cannot be because I am your equal in intelligence, because as like as not you’re sharper than I am. It cannot be that I have some unique talent for any particular task or form of expression, because again, you probably excel me there and besides, on what basis do I assert that my talent for X is somehow more worthy than yours for Y? Strength? No. Leadership? Not there. Looks? Not even in the park. Am I more useful than you? Highly doubtful. No, the only this-worldly basis that I have to demand your recognition of me as your equal is because I can compel it. But that’s nothing more than a catch-all description of the lone male wandering the brush and forcing himself into a new pack, pride, herd, family group, etc. Or, even more bluntly stated, it is the proposition that Might Makes Right.

Thomas Hobbes famously grounded his conclusion that all men are equal in the fact that every man can kill any other man, for each man must at some point sleep. Very true, and very much of a piece with his characterization of the natural condition of man: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. But that’s not an identifiably moral basis for asserting equality.

I defy anyone to enunciate a anthropocentric basis upon which you must address me as your equal and which does not on closer examination boil down to expedience or force (which is itself little more than a specific application of the principle of expedience). Expedience of course cannot be reconciled with Kant’s imperative. And what if in fact I am not useful to you, if my existence athwart your path is inexpedient to you? Oops; I’m not sure I like that outcome one bit.

No, if I want you to recognize in me anything more morally compelling than that raccoon knocking over your garbage can, I must refer to a morality that confers that claim on me from outside our shared humanity. That “outside” can come only from a supra-human source, from a source that we by its very nature as supra-human characterize as “divine,” as in partaking of divinity, the attribute we reserve to Him whom we confess to be God. Only by recognition of the divinity of God may you recognize a small portion of that divinity in His creature, in me. Small it assuredly is, but it is enough, it is a basis to which you can point and acknowledge my claim upon you for no other reason than the fact that I am.

I am. Only a confessing believer in a higher being can logically recognize that as being a perfect statement of claim. Without that belief you must necessarily ask, “You are what?” and adjudge that “what” to be or not be sufficient.

Or so I reasoned. Seemed tidy enough, and explained enough to me for my own purposes. I am no mathematician. My D and D- in two semesters of calculus resolved that much if nothing else. So I beg indulgence from those whose abilities in that regard extend beyond those of the great apes. As better explained in a book later on lent to me by one who actually enjoys theoretical mathematics as a hobby (de gustabus non disputandum est, and leave it at that) Kurt Gödel (rendered in English, happily deprived of diacritics, as “Goedel”) demonstrated that you cannot prove a system from within that system. I won’t go further into the particularities of his proof for knowing that I would misstate something, but suffice it to say that he showed that you cannot bootstrap a logical system. I was mighty proud to find out that my stewing wasn’t so wildly off the mark after all: you cannot prove up a logical system of morality from within that system. Kant’s categorical imperative seems to be a “big bang” analogue, but respectfully I’m not having that.

Washington was, in other words, dead-on right when he reminded his fellow citizens that the maintenance of a republic over time could not succeed without virtue, and that virtue cannot exist without religion. For without religion, without the acknowledgement of a mind, purpose, and power above all human comprehension, there can be no morality but only the expedient of the moment.

I’d also observe that the truth of the above can be demonstrated by observing the tragi-comedy of “international law.” In point of fact there is no such animal, because there is no authority to which the nation-states are willing absolutely to concede the right and power of enforcement against themselves. So we get treated from time to time to the spectacle of some professional bloviator allowing that such-and-so is plainly contrary to “international law,” by which is meant that Country A has done something to Country B to the speaker’s vigorous disapproval, but which will go entirely unpunished. The only source of “international law” is the same source which Chairman Mao identified as the source of political power.

I first turned my attentions to the Farewell Address in the fall of 2012, as America was about to go to the polls and re-elect to the presidency a man who is about as close to the antithesis of George Washington as a citizen could imagine. This is a man who, when asked point-blank in an interview to define “sin,” replied that “sin” was when someone did or desired something that was inconsistent with his own thoughts and positions. All the hoo-hah about whether he’s a Muslim or not is really mis-guided, as I saw it observed once: This is a man who does not recognize any being as superior to himself. He can have no religion because he truly believes himself to be a latter-day messiah, but the Good News He brings is solely that of His own advent among us.

Today, in 2016, we get to observe the spectacle of two candidates, one of whom is – barring divine intervention – going to be our next president, neither of whom brings anything to the table other than a firm conviction that he or she, as the case may be, is entitled to the office because. And neither of whom has any known floor below which he or she will not stoop.

Four dead Americans, one of them a serving U.S. ambassador? What difference does it make “at this point” that She lied to the American public, lied to the dead men’s families, about why those men died? They’re dead and her political party won the election; that’s what’s important. The formal representative of his nation to a sovereign country slaughtered like a wild animal and his corpse dragged through the streets? That’s just chaff, at this point.

A man who has bragged, in writing, about buying his way to influence with politicians? Whose entire public persona is built on the practice of saying or doing anything necessary to close the deal on his own terms? This is the same thinking that got us the Tonkin Gulf Resolutions. Those were built on fraudulent representations of an attack that simply never happened (don’t believe me? read In Love and War, the book by Vice Admiral Stockdale, who was in the air over the Maddux and Turner Joy when they were supposedly attacked, and who point-blank states it never happened).

Back in the day, when it first became undeniable that Wm. Clinton had shamelessly perjured himself in deposition about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, I had a conversation in which my interlocutor repeated the New York Times-approved talking points that it just didn’t matter because it was purely and private matter and besides shut up. I very vividly remember telling him that it very much mattered when a president perjures himself because the only thing that stands between us and – well, at the time the most prominent failed state was the former Soviet Union, but now you’ve pretty much got your pick – was the notion that when someone raises his right hand and swears to tell the truth, that he will do so. Without that presumption the court system is meaningless. And when the court system is meaningless, people will implement their own justice and seek redress on their own.

I refer Gentle Reader to President Washington’s observations, all those years ago.

As the anniversaries of Washington’s Farewell Address succeed each other, we the posterity to whom he addressed himself blunder on, heedless of his wisdom. Re-learning lessons tends to be more difficult than learning them the first time around.

 

Oh, Well, but Other Than That, Mrs. Lincoln

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What’s the play actually about, anyway?

Sometimes you come across something that, almost in passing, so glaringly reveals an underlying truth about its subject matter that it takes your breath away.

This week some random guys who adhere to no identifiable ideology or religion just randomly decided to light off a couple of bombs in Belgium.  It was a bad week for workplace violence, in other words.  And in other news, the president enjoyed yukking it up at the ballgame with a murderously oppressive regime.  But I digress.

In follow-up to the Brussels bombings, this article ran in USA Today.  The headline sort of tips the author’s hand:  “The Quran’s deadly role in inspiring Belgian slaughter,” by a fellow identified as Nabeel Qureshi.  From his self-description and how he relates his family background, he seems to be one of those adherents of the Religion of Peace that is being referred to on that silly “Coexist” bumper sticker.  His father spent a career in the U.S. Navy, starting as a seaman and retiring as a lieutenant commander (which, by the way, tells you his father must have been pretty hot stuff, to make it that far up from that far down).  “As a Muslim growing up in the United States, I was taught by my imams and the community around me that Islam is a religion of peace. My family modeled love for others and love for country, and not just by their words.”

All to the good.  I’d have no problem with him, or his family, for my next-door neighbors, any more than I’d object to any other American family.

But let’s let Comrade Qureshi tell it himself:

“As a young Muslim boy growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, it was impossible for me to look up a hadith unless I traveled to an Islamic library, something I would have never thought to do. For all intents and purposes, if I wanted to know about the traditions of Muhammad, I had to ask imams or elders in my tradition of Islam.”  That is, as he notes, no longer the case.  Just as the Bible’s translation into the vernacular enabled the masses to access for themselves just what exactly scripture has to say about any particular thing, without the interposition of the clerisy, so today’s Muslim masses can look it up for themselves.

And just what are they finding?  Why, they’re finding the same things that Qureshi did, once he no longer was reliant upon his elders and imams.  “Yet as I began to investigate the Quran and the traditions of Muhammad’s life for myself in college, I found to my genuine surprise that the pages of Islamic history are filled with violence.”

Do what?

“When everyday Muslims investigate the Quran and hadith for themselves, bypassing centuries of tradition and their imams’ interpretations, they are confronted with the reality of violent jihad in the very foundations of their faith.”  “The Quran itself reveals a trajectory of jihad reflected in the almost 23 years of Muhammad’s prophetic career. As I demonstrate carefully in my book, Answering Jihad: A Better Way Forward, starting with peaceful teachings and proclamations of monotheism, Muhammad’s message featured violence with increasing intensity, culminating in surah 9, chronologically the last major chapter of the Quran, and its most expansively violent teaching. Throughout history, Muslim theologians have understood and taught this progression, that the message of the Quran culminates in its ninth chapter.”  [N.b.  The foregoing quoted language has links in it over at the USA Today website.]

Qureshi then pulls a few chestnuts out:  “Surah 9 is a command to disavow all treaties with polytheists and to subjugate Jews and Christians (9.29) so that Islam may ‘prevail over all religions’ (9.33). It is fair to wonder whether any non-Muslims in the world are immune from being attacked, subdued or assimilated under this command. Muslims must fight, according to this final chapter of the Quran, and if they do not, then their faith is called into question and they are counted among the hypocrites (9.44-45). If they do fight, they are promised one of two rewards, either spoils of war or heaven through martyrdom. Allah has made a bargain with the mujahid who obeys: Kill or be killed in battle, and paradise awaits (9.111).”

According to Qureshi, the implications of Surah 9 are acknowledged by modern Muslim theologians.  “Muslim thought leaders agree that the Quran promotes such violence.”  And there’s the rub:  The most potent recruiting tool and mechanism for radicalization available to ISIS is . . . just quoting the foundational documents of their religion.  “With frequent references to the highest sources of authority in Islam, the Quran and hadith (the collection of the sayings of the prophet Muhammad), ISIL enjoins upon Muslims their duty to fight against the enemies of Islam and to emigrate to the Islamic State once it has been established.”

And that, folks, peels away quite a bit of bullshit that’s being peddled by self-loathing Westerners.  The “extremists” among the Muslims have the theologically better argument of their “moderate” or assimilated co-religionists.  That is the irreducible fact that stares us in the face over the shards of glass and spattered bits of airline customers.

Pity the Muslims don’t have the theological equivalent of modern U.S. Supreme Court jurists to explain to them that all those words simply don’t mean what they say.  No, when ISIS wants to convince a young Muslim man that his most solemn duty is to fight, kill, and maybe die in order to subjugate practitioners of any religion other than strict-form Islam, they perversely go out and just show him the actual words and have the temerity to suggest to him that they mean precisely what they say.

Deconstructionism, in other words, hasn’t made very deep inroads into Islam.

A couple of quick points.  Islam appears to be enjoying something of the same process that Christianity went through, at least in its early phases, with the Reformation.  There was a reason, after all, why for so long either translating the Bible into the vernacular, or even possession of a translated Bible was a capital offense.  Literally.  Get caught with a Wyclif Bible and they’d make short work of you.  Step 1 of the Reformation was therefore what is now known as “disintermediation.”  It’s really not much more than the same process as online commerce.  The internet has largely dissolved the barriers between the ordinary Joe on the “Islamic Street” and the authoritative pronouncements of his faith’s founding documents.  Generally disintermediation is a very good thing.  Anything which undercuts the ipse dixit hierarchy of any one group (priests, imams, broadcast network news shows, judges) over another, by providing the people that walked in darkness direct access to ultimate authority (Holy Scripture, the Koran, multiple independent news sources, or the actual words of constitutions and statutes) is to be praised on that ground alone.  I’ll state that as a categorical.

So what is to be done if the ultimate authority commands, in pretty plain language, behaviors such as we have seen in Brussels, Paris, New York, Madrid, London, and so forth?

I honestly don’t know.  It seems to me that the fellow quoted by Qureshi has a long, hard slog ahead of him, and whether the thing is to be done at all must be seen as wholly questionable:  “Maajid Nawaz, co-founder of the Quilliam Foundation in the United Kingdom, has said, ‘We Muslims must admit there are challenging Quranic passages that require reinterpretation today. … Only by rejecting vacuous literalism are we able to condemn, in principle, ISIS-style slavery, beheading, lashing, amputation & other medieval practices forever (all of which are in the Quran). … Reformers either win, and get religion-neutral politics, or lose, and get ISIL-style theocracy.’ In other words, Muslims must depart from the literal reading of the Quran in order to create a jihad-free Islamic world.”  By his own words he may well be chasing a will-o-the-wisp.  What Nawaz calls “vacuous literalism” the boys of ISIS can call “the words’ plain meaning,” without strained or sophistical reading.  And slavery, beheading, lashing, amputation, and “other medieval practices” are “all . . . in the Koran.”  Well, of course they are; that’s what makes it so straightforward to convince the jihadisti that they are commands of Allah. Just read the damned words, boy, and make up your mind for yourself.

And what is this about creating a “jihad-free Islamic world” in the first place?  If jihad is part of the central framework of Islamic existence in this world, then how can you excise it and still call what you’re left with “Islamic”?  I recall once, a number of years ago, this billboard alongside the interstate in a city near where I live.  It was from one of these First Church of What’s Happening Now, where Christianity is on offer as a practical therapeutic lifestyle option.  The billboard encouraged the wanderer to come discover “a non-religious path to God.”  That is an oxymoron plain and simple, folks.  It seems as though what Qureshi is positing is the same sort of oxymoron.

The Protestant movement’s most powerful arguments rested on the elemental fact that, once translated and accessible, Holy Scripture was seen not to provide authority for quite a bit of what had grown to encrust the Roman Catholic church as an institution.  The problem today is that what the ISIS recruiters are propounding can be seen to be very much in the Koran, in exactly as many words as they’re saying.

Islam is not, in other words, a Religion of Peace, not on its own terms, read in the ordinary sense of the words actually used, without contorting them into their opposites.

The situation outlined by Qureshi makes it doubtful whether anything like a Protestant Reformation can ever be in the cards for Islam.  Accomplishing that would require millions of Muslims all over the world to believe in the in-most recesses of their hearts that the ordinary words of the foundational texts just do not mean what they so obviously say.  How do you convince people of an argument the unspoken subtext of which is: “Mohammed didn’t know what he was talking about”?  My understanding of Islamic dogma is that the Koran’s words are not actually those of the prophet, but rather of Allah himself.  Quite different from even the most literalist Christian fundamentalist, believing every word in the King James Version to be divinely inspired.  To “interpret” the Koran in a way which would allow peaceful coexistence requires you to accept either that, to some extent, Mohammed was a false prophet because he failed accurately to transmit Allah’s pronouncements, or alternatively, that Allah knowingly allowed his words to be mis-transcribed.  How can either of those suggestions be acceptable to a devout Muslim?

Not all problems have solutions.  I very greatly fear that Islam is among the problems that don’t.