God Save the Queen

Conservatives against fascism

Today I went for lunch with two smart, good-looking young women. So – naturally – I wished to be suave, scintillating, sophisticated.

So – naturally – I talked about pensions.

Actually that didn’t happen, though I thought about introducing the subject. Pensions have been an issue I’ve been wanting to blog about for a while, in connection with some other things. First off, the USA. Social Security has been getting attention for a number of years now but no-one really wants to think about it. The problem is that it’s an unfunded scheme: current payments are covered by current receipts. One of the evil fundamentalist neocon fascist policies favoured by the Republicans is the part-privatisation of the scheme. They point out that since the Social Security fund is a collective rather than individual scheme, a lot of people – millions – are paying payroll taxes which they think are buying them a future entitlement. They’re wrong: they’re paying today’s pensions. The Republicans suggest allowing workers to use part of their money to buy private-sector pensions, the fortunes of which are tied to the stock market, which should ensure that the fund grows at a rate higher than inflation. It’s a plausible idea, though it’s also the case that the current system will stay solvent for the foreseeable future so long as the economy continues to grow at historic rates.

One has to be an expert to adjudicate on these things. It’s worth saying, though, that the Bush plan is a serious attempt to address a real problem, though it’s far from proven that it would be the best approach. If I have any left-wing readers I haven’t alienated yet, may I suggest that when you hear the inevitable scare stories about this, say to yourself: ‘it’s not necessarily bad because Bush wants it’ and repeat as necessary. I promise to do the same, mutatis mutandis, next time I hear Charles Kennedy speaking about education, or something.

But the Yanks are sitting relatively pretty where it comes to pensions. The English-speaking countries as a whole are, in fact: Britain could do better and the government is trying to address the problem (with state second pensions and the like). But the real problems arise when you look at continental European countries, which have higher pensions, lower retirement ages and less favourable demographics. France and Germany are going to hit real trouble in a couple of decades. Italy is worst off of all, which is no surprise, since from my experience of that in many respects marvellous country, it is effectively a gerontocracy. In a couple of decades there are going to be a lot of very disgruntled pensioners in the EU, unless the pension structures there get serious reform. But it might already be too late for that as the grey vote is already a reality, quite besides the strength of the trades unions, especially in Germany. The alternative to ratting on state pension entitlements would be to elevate taxes to cover the funds shortfall, except if the continental EU countries retain their current tax rates, that will scarcely be possible.

Given all this, it’s hardly surprising that the EU countries are even more in denial about the pensions problem than the USA.

So what? Well, nothing happens for a single cause. That’s one of my articles of historical faith: no event ever has a single cause. The witlessness of statements such as ‘the

Iraq

war was all about oil’ was always one of the chief motivators of my dislike of the anti-war movment. By itself, the pensions problem facing the big continental countries is not insurmountable. The trouble is that it will hit at a time when other problems are likely to come to a head.

First, oil. Big disclaimer: no-one knows what’s going to happen to oil prices in the long term. There are thousands of people who do nothing all day but think about oil prices and they can’t agree, so what chance do I have of predicting well? But let’s assume oil prices fall from their current high, thus removing one of the key incentives for greater efficiency, then trend upwards again over the next couple of decades, as easily-accessible reserves run down. The result of that will be to make it difficult for European industry to create enough jobs to knock a hole in the European unemployment rate, which everyone agrees is chronically high.

Second, race hate. This is not going to go away. Recent events – the mosque attacks that followed the murder of Van Gogh, the racist chants in the Bernabeu Stadium - have proved yet again that the most apparently advanced societies have demons lurking in their shadows. As Clive James once pointed out, Germany before 1933 was arguably the most cultured, educated society in the world. ‘It didn’t help a bit.’ The so-called visible minorities are going to constitute a larger percentage of the EU’s population in, say, 2020 than now. And the Muslim element within that percentage will contain a lot of people for whom the military/political defeat of Islamism is merely another reason to feel alienated and hostile. (Of course, it could go the other way: serious Middle Eastern reform and the growth of democracy there could defuse a lot of Islamic alienation. Take all this with a spoonful of salt.)

Now throw into this witches’ brew of angry pensioners, chronic high unemployment and race hate an oil price spike, which would throw another few million people out of work, and the conditions would be right for a real neo-fascist threat to European democracy.

In part ‘I wants to make your flesh creep’, but then also thinking about worst-case scenarios is just part of a responsible debate. The essential thing is not to blame anybody but think of how to tackle the issue.

In the first place, I doubt any such threat would succeed in overthrowing the democratic order in any European state. An open fascist threat to democracy would instantly unite all other parties against it. National coalition governments would be formed to impose austerity and repress street violence firmly: any truly dangerous fascist parties would be outlawed. History doesn’t repeat itself mechanistically like that. The continental Europeans have learnt that much from the 1930s, namely, don’t pussyfoot about with direct fascist threats to democracy (Islamism isn’t such a threat: it can kill people, but cannot seize power, not in Europe anyway.) People do learn some lessons – the really big, obvious ones – from history. (The main reason why Iraq is not Vietnam is, simply, Vietnam.) But the threat might not be completely open and obvious, which might tempt some unscrupulous right-wingers to adopt at least some fascist themes. We can surely agree that it would be best to prevent the threat from arising in the first place.

The best single way to draw the sting would be a dynamic economy. This is why it’s so important to get rid of EU agricultural subsidies (the main benefits of opening the EU more to Third World food exports would accrue to Europe, not to the Third World), reform the EU countries’ labour markets to enable the growth of the information economy – the so-called Lisbon agenda. Neither of these seems to be happening yet, though as the full consequences of the eastwards expansion of the EU arrive, the Common Agricultural Policy will have to put down. (The key indicator of that happening will be when the Agriculture Commissioner insists that the latest round of CAP reforms will make no significant difference – meaning the opposite.) Both are measures that Margaret Thatcher would strongly approve of.

It may be that a strong dose of Thatcherism is the best prophylactic against fascism. At any rate, I can’t think of any obviously left-wing policies that might actually work. Simply herding schoolchildren en masse into diversity awareness seminars isn’t going to cut it.

(PS I seem to remember Steven Den Beste of blessed memory pursuing a similar line of argument – about European vulnerability to fascism - at one time. The above is probably just a warmed-over watered-down version of his ideas, extruded through the warped mesh of my own mind. )

So you wouldn't have to

It's that time of year again.

Get one of these.

You know why.

Monarchy

David Starkey's new series is worth watching, though I'll probably not bother with any of the rest. Last night the subject was Anglo-Saxon kingship, the stars of the show being Ethelbert of Kent, Offa of Mercia and - above all - Alfred the Great of Wessex. Starkey made the key point, compared to which all others can be let go: that the monarchy which we have today is the lineal descendant of the Anglo-Saxon monarchies, and that they were rooted in Germanic custom. Christian and Roman ideas came later to exalt the idea of monarchy, but the substratum was that of the Germanic chief, who holds power on behalf of the people and in constant, institutionalised consultation with them. Consultation is not full accountability, but it provides an excellent foundation for it. It also enables much greater national efforts, so long as the ruler is in accord with the people: it enabled Alfred and his successors to defend Wessex from the Vikings and, within fifty years, to wrest the whole of the territory now known as England from their pagan grasp. And they did it without turning England into a dreary militaristic autocracy, but by preserving and using the customary mechanisms of the people, and at the same time as encouraging the growth of learning and the arts. Alfred and his son Edward and grandson Athelstan were men of no common stamp.

C., with whom I watched the programme, commented that Alfred's cultural efforts were a bit wasted because most of the English couldn't read. But mass education in that time was neither necessary nor possible: Alfred was trying to create, virtually from scratch (because the Vikings had slaughtered every priest and monk they could find) an educated ruling class capable of leading the people in difficult times. No offence, but C. reads the Guardian.

This kind of institutional history is a bit out of fashion today, since TV producers and publishers like to go for the easy marks and the mass market, hence the endless flood of books about Nazis and mad Roman emperors. But the difference between that sort of thing and Starkey is the difference between entertainment and understanding.

The Napoleon Syndrome

First question: what was Napoleon? That is, what country was he from? No looking at Fotherington-Thomas’ book, Molesworth! Well, what’s the answer?
France? You blithering idiot, Molesworth. See me after class. Fotherington-Thomas? That’s right. Napoleon was born in Corsica at a time when it belonged to the kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. In other words, he was Italian. His name is Italian, he dropped the ‘e’ from the end in order to fit in.
Now think of two more recent examples of charismatic national leaders who didn’t belong to the nation they identified with. No, not you, Fotherington-Thomas. Well done Peason: Hitler and Stalin. See how easy it is when you pay attention, Molesworth?
Now let’s expand the range. Do all you boys know where Pakistan is? No Molesworth, wrong again. Pakistan is the country formed in those parts of the Indian Empire where the Muslims were a majority. Whose idea was it to do that? Sir Mohammed Iqbal, whose grandfather was a convert. It was a man whose identity was only loosely grounded who felt the need for identification most strongly. In short, one who starts out from a marginal position with respect to a given community of identity will hyper-identify in order to fit in. This is the Napoleon Syndrome, the theory of marginal hyper-identification. I’m sure it’s not original.

The Napoleon Syndrome is in a way an expanded version of the well-known phenomenon, already a cliché when Moses was a lad, about the special fervour of the convert. It’s an expanded version because it applies not only to religion but also nationality. Was it so remarkable that Winston Churchill, the embodiment of romantic British patriotism, was half American? And the only house in England where I’ve ever seen a portrait of the Queen on the wall belonged to an Irish Catholic family.
It’s not a theory that explains anything: it leaves too many facts and too many people out. It’s just a pseudo-theory to make one sound knowledgeable when one hears of something that fits it, an intellectual game: but it’s fun.

The ultimate crime

This post at Chrenkoff has the quote of the day, by a Czech who might be presumed to know what he's talking about:

'...the ultimate crime of Communism is not that it destroyed democracy and the rule of law. Not even murdering its opponents makes it uniquely evil. Nor even its murderous frenzies when people were murdered just to instil terror in those left alive could be regarded as unparalleled in history. Its ultimate crime consisted in forcing millions of people for decades to express publicly and cheerfully their consent with something they regarded as criminal, untrue or idiotic. The numbness was thus for all but few the only way to preserve sanity.'

Quite right, and a good point to make in those endless tiresome debates about ideological body counts and the Cold War. If there was ever a society which (pace Michael Moore) went out of its way to remain stupid it was the USSR. I am usually unmoved by accusations that one or another democratic leader is lying, when what's usually the case is that all accountable leaders typically mix truth, half-truth, quarter-truth and hyperbole together, but rarely tell bare-faced flat-out lies. (Any politician who never told anything but the absolute whole truth wouldn't get beyond the parish council.) One can develop a decent filter, especially if you're as much of a news junkie as I am.
Some journalists seem to get a thrill from passionate excoriation of politicians' deviousness, to settle their own bad consciences, perhaps. Whatever. Such denunciations tell us more about the journalists themselves, especially if they combine such writings with apologia for tyrannies which are a pack of lies from beginning to end.
Further reflection: the Communist experience ought to be a decisive argument against Marxist theories of ideology (in the pejorative sense), hegemony, or manufactured consent. For seventy years, the Party had the kind of media control that Rupert Murdoch could only dream about. How much consent was it able to manufacture? Not enough, demonstrably. So how can one use the theory of manufactured consent to argue that entire populations are fundamentally deceived about their own best interests? Yet that is the explanatory load the theory is expected to bear: such mass brain-washing, we are told, is how the reactionaries hold their power.
At this point, of course, one starts getting into repressive tolerance or the like, whereupon one can start to play a little game, Come Up With A Phrase As Inherently Bonkers As 'Repressive Tolerance'. 'Passionate dullness', perhaps, or 'biassed objectivity'. Or how about 'fake but accurate'? Oh, wait...

The default settings

‘History teaches us only that no-one ever learnt anything from history.’ Possibly, George: I think that conclusion’s too optimistic. Klio has taught me that the default settings of human society are xenophobia, tyranny and superstition, and that only rarely have human communities made partial escapes from any of them. Such communities are in rebellion against nature, and cannot win. But they shed a fine light down the ages.
A total escape from the default settings is probably neither possible nor desirable. One can argue the issue more than one way: is the opposite of xenophobia tolerance or self-hatred? If one says that the opposite of xenophobia is tolerance, that leaves no room on the hate-spectrum for self-hatred, a feeling, or disposition, that we know exists. Of course one might suggest that xenophobia and self-hatred are closely related, two sides of the same coin: is it possible to hate others without hating ourselves, at some level? This is certainly a plausible position in spiritual terms.
These considerations will be limited by an Aristotelian framework: I want to suggest that the opposite of one vice is another vice and that virtue lies midway. If Aristotle drives you up the wall feel free to stop reading.
Assuming, then, that the opposite of xenophobia is self-hatred, the midpoint is a cosmopolitan patriotism: the state of mind in which one hates neither oneself or others, but manages to respect and value others while feeling a particular loyalty to one’s home.
Similarly, the opposite of tyranny is anarchy, the virtuous middle being accountable government. The opposite of superstition – believing things regardless of evidence or logic- is cynicism, a refusal to believe in anything.
Consider the ancient Athenians. For a brief space, a century and a half, they achieved all three, opening their borders to the metics, creating a democracy, and fostering the growth of rationalist philosophy. They remained patriotic – indeed they failed to free themselves sufficiently from xenophobia, as one can see from reading Thucydides. Nor did they achieve a properly accountable government – the absence of stabilising intermediate corporations left Athenian policy dangerously unpredictable and subject to the tyranny of the majority. Most of all, they did not manage to free themselves sufficiently from superstition, regardless of all the headlines about Socrates and Plato. The Sicilian Expedition came to grief partly because of a commander’s superstitious dread of a lunar eclipse. The dread of ritual pollution was a force powerful enough to drive the plays of Sophocles. Socrates himself insisted on making a sacrifice to the god Aesculapius in his last hour. The Athenian escape from superstition was very limited in time, degree and numbers.
Yet even this partial achievement of escape from the default settings can move us today: it shines in the ancient world as an example of what might be.
Later, the English achieved the same thing. But if we’ve done better than the Athenians we’ve had some mighty helpers. The universalism of Christian ethics is a powerful corrective to xenophobia: the Athenians could only appeal to reason – a much weaker regulative ideal. Germanic customary law provided (and provides) a much better institutional foundation for accountable government than Kleisthenes could. And the Athenians themselves provided the intellectual toolkit which rendered the English less susceptible than most to superstition – and if that seems like a questionable assertion, Robert Darnton’s book The Great Cat Massacre might be a useful corrective.
But the rebellion had to cross the sea to find its fulfilment in a community that encompassed a mixture of peoples greater than any that Britain could contain. The Native Americans paid the price – a hideous price - for an extraordinary novus ordo seclorum. Bill Whittle, in this essay, described Americans as the Rebels. His frame of reference was Star Wars, but he was actually right: America is a rebellion – a permanent revolution, if you will – against the way things are. It should scarcely need demonstrating that its patriotism is cosmopolitan: there is not a nation in the world which has not sent people to wrap themselves in Old Glory.
Its government is probably as accountable as the government of any extensive territory could be. Incidentally, talk of Americans believing that only their form of democracy is legitimate is wide of the mark: Americans have no difficulty recognising other nations as democratic even if they are monarchies as opposed to republics, even if they use proportional representation instead of first-past-the-post, even if they have an unwritten constitution as opposed to a written one. There is plenty of scope for diversity within the American political model: the essence of that model is accountability. The rest is detail.
As for rationality, America’s escape from superstition has gone as far as most humans can cope with: there is a certain quantum of irrationalism that will always be expressed in any community. Gun fetishism, evangelism and a belief in the objectivity of mainstream media are not the most harmful forms of irrationalism that a country can have.
It can’t last, of course. The default settings will reassert themselves. This is why Bill Whittle’s desire for endless triumph is basically noble but tragic: it won’t happen, though I sympathise greatly with the wish. (After America is gone most of those people who resent American power will wish for it back.) America’s power will wane, all earthly powers do, and new powers will arise who will make the same old-new appeal to the monsters from the id. America’s arche might last another century, or two at most. And the memory – of a glittering, free, brilliant cosmopolis - will endure through the ages. Just like Athens.

The day. Recommendations

'The engine is tuned to a major key. It has a harmonic that sends a shiver along your spine, like being in a Mass.' Thus the director of the movie Dark Blue World, an unfairly neglected tale about Czech pilots who flew with the RAF, on the sound of the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine.
It's a good movie, much more human than the usual Hollywood pap or Continental pretentiousness. The reviews at the Amazon link above are a fair reflection of its quality. It does a very fair job of showing the young warriors as men who were subject to the usual human foibles yet nevertheless were brave and decent men, their bravery and decency amounting, in all seriousness, to sublime heroism. As such it's far more honest and generous in spirit than any self-consciously radical or debunking war story, in which the main purpose is usually to depict the officers as callous upper-class imbeciles and the other ranks as either brainwashed or resentful.
There's a bit of solid Nazi-bashing as well, exploding bombers and the like, which is always a good thing.
(This might be just my usual anti-Bolshevik mania at work, but there may be a reason it didn't get more coverage. It draws an implicit - and at one point explicit - equivalence between Nazis and Communists, as the hero ends up imprisoned in post-war Czechoslovakia for the crime of having fought in the RAF. You can't imagine many UK newspaper film reviewers who would be comfortable with that.)
Another link for the day is to Stephen Bungay's great book The Most Dangerous Enemy, the best book ever written on the Battle of Britain. Bungay understands systems and the fact that modern war strategy is all about intelligent systems design: he also knows that the key to victory in warfare (as in business, something else he evidently understands) is not the absolute avoidance of error but the relative avoidance of it, i.e. making fewer mistakes than your enemy. Again, that makes for a more intelligent and balanced understanding of history than one finds with those writers who set out to debunk. Bungay is also a very witty writer, with a fine dry sense of humour.

There was a time when Britain's cause was very obviously the world's, and many young men who loved freedom came here to put their love into practice. Today is the best day to remember it.

The Caliph and the Khan

Madeleine Bunting has a point when she says that discussion of Islam should be grounded in knowledge. (No-one that I ever heard of suggested that it should be grounded in ignorance, but let it pass.) The trouble I have with her ilk is that one knows from the outset that only a certain type of knowledge will be permitted in Buntingworld: knowledge that fits her agenda. What we need is history, which means neither demonisation of an entire religion nor airbrushing of the record. Where there is beauty and grace, acknowledge it frankly and do not try to downplay its value as being really due to external factors. And where there is a case to answer, let there not be any special pleading – by which I mean the use of an argumentative tactic by one side which is not allowed to the other (e.g. ‘you started it’ being considered a valid argument for one party but not for their opponents).

The medieval world is awash with rulers who displayed on the one hand culture and open-mindedness and on the other hand outrageous duplicity or cruelty. Charlemagne encouraged a revival of learning, employing the great English scholar Alcuin and even trying to learn to read and write himself. He also launched military campaigns against the Saxons that would today be called genocidal. Then there were the repeated campaigns against the Avars. Who? Quite.
Harun al-Raschid, everyone’s favourite Caliph, with whom Charlemagne exchanged compliments and presents (each untroubled by the fact that the other was an infidel), presided over the most brilliant court of the age. He also had his chief minister beheaded and bisected for being too generous and consequently too popular.
One can multiply examples. Mahmud of Ghazni was a ruler who employed Hindus and was celebrated for centuries afterwards by poets (by Farid ud-din Attar, for instance, a saintly Persian mystic) as a patron of the arts. He also raided north-west India repeatedly committing atrocities on a spectacular scale, the worst, from the point of view of his victims, being the desecration, plunder and destruction of Hindu temples and the slaughter of Brahmins. (Although this happened a millennium ago it’s a hot-button issue in the subcontinent: Hindu nationalists like to refer to his activities, and those of his successors, as a ‘Hindu holocaust’.)
There are some rulers, though, at whom one looks more or less in vain for redeeming features. William the Conqueror was one: Hulagu Khan another.

Baghdad was the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate, the central Muslim power of the medieval world, which thrived from the eighth century to the thirteenth. Harun al-Raschid ruled there. But anyone who has watched the news lately will have noticed that the place today looks modern. There don’t seem to be any medieval buildings. There’s a reason for that.
In the 1250s the Mongols turned their efforts to the rich civilisation of the Muslim Middle East. Earlier in the century they had established themselves in central Asia and then Iran, overthrowing the pre-existing Muslim dynasties there, and destroyed the Assassin sect in a long grim campaign in the mountains. Then in 1257 Hulagu Khan demanded the submission of Caliph al-Mutasim. Our primary source for the events that followed is the Jumi'u't-Tawarikh (‘Compendium of Chronicles’ - and many thanks must go to Ghazan Khan, who commissioned it, Rashiduddin Fazlullah, who wrote it, and Professor Thackston, who translated it).
Mutasim refused to pay homage – the Abbasids were not used to doing homage to anyone, rather the reverse - and Hulagu invaded Mesopotamia in overwhelming force, first ravaging the Kurds and advancing on Baghdad from all sides. Mutasim then conceded what Hulagu had previously demanded, to be told that this was now insufficient. Hulagu wanted it all.
The Mongols proved unstoppable, as always previously. The key to their success in empire-building was that they could beat all comers in the field but could also take fortified places, largely through the services of Chinese siege engineers. In Europe at this time, siege warfare was much less advanced, which was why warfare was so often inconclusive: besieging armies typically had to reduce strong places by starvation rather than storm, but found that starvation cut both ways.
Having received promises of safe conduct, the defenders surrendered. The soldiers came out, ‘hoping to find safety, but they were divided into units of thousands, hundreds, and tens and killed to the last.’ This was normal, since the Mongols had already fought their way onto the walls and into part of the city, which – under the rules of war – meant that the garrison could expect no mercy.
With all strength gone, the Caliph then made his submission to Hulagu, surrendering on 10th February with his three sons. 'He approached Hulagu Khan, and the padishah did not exhibit any anger but asked after his health kindly and pleasantly.' It was all a show: as usual utter ruthlessness hid itself behind civility. First Hulagu deceived the Caliph into ordering the remaining defenders, armed civilians, to surrender: ‘The people disarmed themselves and came out in droves, and the Mongols killed them.’
It wasn’t over. ‘On Wednesday the 7th of Safar [February 13] the pillage and general massacre began… the army went into the city and burned everything except a few houses belonging to Nestorians and some foreigners… Most of the holy places like the caliph's mosque, the Musa-Jawad shrine, and the tombs in Rusafa were burned.’ The estimates for the death toll range from 80,000 to 2 million. Medieval chroniclers, Middle Eastern no less than European, were very fond of exaggeration, and as a rule of thumb it’s a good idea to drop a zero from the end of any numbers they give. But a sack of a major city like Baghdad could hardly have had a death toll lower than 80,000. Such a toll would be entirely consistent with Mongol practice elsewhere, and is not inherently implausible given the usual absence of any sense of restraint under these circumstances.
Hulagu then ordered a halt to the sack and left. ‘Hulagu Khan decamped from Baghdad on Wednesday the 14th of Safar [February 20] on account of the foul air’, a phrase that reads today as an exceptionally bleak sort of joke.
Hulagu then summoned Mutasim before him again. ‘…the caliph despaired of his life and requested permission to go into the bath to renew his ablutions. Hulagu Khan said he could go in with five Mongols. "I don't want the companionship of five myrmidons of hell"’ was the Caliph’s last defiance, and one hopes that he did actually say it.
‘At the end of the day on Wednesday the 14th of Safar 656 [February 20, 1258], the caliph, his eldest son, and five of his attendants were executed in the village of Waqaf.’ According to one story, Hulagu had been warned against killing Mutasim, on the grounds that he would be damned if the caliph's blood touched the earth. Therefore he had Mutasim and his sons sewn into carpets and trampled to death by cavalry. Another story, more inherently plausible, is that the Caliph was strangled. ‘On Friday... the caliph's middle son was dispatched after his father and brother, and the reign of the House of Abbas… came to an end. Their caliphate lasted five hundred twenty-five years, and there were thirty-seven of them’.
Two points come out of this, one moral, one historical. Morally, it is simply beyond the pale to suggest that all of this might be justified by the Mongols having a different code of ethics. Sensitivity to cultural difference does not mean acceptance of any and every outrage. If one believes that civilisation is a term that means anything, one can hardly avoid sympathising with the Caliph against the Khan. It is – and I can’t ultimately prove this rationally, only assert it as a belief - natural for us to do so, and in reality even the toughest cultural relativist would find it difficult to say ‘but it’s cultural’. Of course, the universities and media, the places where cultural relativists are most likely to be found, are also the places where reality is least likely to intrude.
The historic point: the psychological shock of all this can hardly be over-estimated. It was as though thirteenth-century Europe had seen the obliteration of Paris (intellect), Rome (faith) and Florence (culture) all at once. After this disaster, the Arabs were dominated for centuries by a variety of foreigners: Mongols, Mamluks, Turks. It is good to recount that the Muslims got a sort of revenge two years later, when the Mongols were defeated for the first time at Ain Jalut: they were never such a menace again. But even this victory was won by Mamluks, Egyptian slave-soldiers of central Asian Turkish origin. (The Mamluks had assistance from the Crusaders at their capital city of Acre, as the Pope had declared the Mongols to be unspeakable heathens: the Muslims were the lesser evil. Thirty-one years later, an army led by Khalil, Sultan of Egypt, took Acre itself, ending the Crusader States. Gratitude is not a negotiable currency in international relations.)
The Arabs, meanwhile, had to wait until the twentieth century to start finding heroes again, and the dearth in the meantime meant that their ability to choose heroes wisely had atrophied somewhat.

Marxism again

I’m pleased to have been praised by SiaAoW. Their post in response to this post of mine includes this comment:

‘…we can’t accept the implied division between a humane but ineffective Marxism and an inhumane and all too effective Bolshevism.’

The point when I came to the conclusion that some such division did indeed correspond to the real world was a pivotal moment for me (though not a terminus, as I realised that it was perfectly possible for Marxists to be neither humane or effective – witness the Stoppers). SiaAoW’s counter-example – Victor Serge – really doesn’t address the point that the October Revolution (AKA Bolshevik coup), the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, and the violent suppression of the other Russian left-wing and liberal parties, were inherent to Leninism and represented the death of hope. You don’t have to go to Kronstadt to find the point when the Revolution was betrayed: on what grounds can one defend the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly but oppose the suppression of the Kronstadt mutiny? In the quotes supplied by SiaAoW, Serge refers to the formation of the Cheka in 1918 as a grave error into which the Bolsheviks were provoked by domestic and foreign enemies. It was only an error if you believe in the Revolution as the beginning of a process leading to a unalienated, just society. In pragmatic terms, if you assume that Lenin was aiming at dictatorial power from the beginning, it was entirely sensible. And Lenin’s entire pre-1917 career in the Social Democratic Party suggests (to put it no more strongly) that that is precisely what he was aiming for, even if he wasn’t aware of it himself.
Serge defends the Red Terror on the grounds that it was the only antidote to White Terror. Yes, the Whites were at least as violent. But the chronology is wrong, surely. In October 1917 the Whites were not an imminent threat to the Provisional Government, having been discredited by the Kornilov affair. So why was there an immediate need to overthrow the Provisional Government, if the rationale for doing so was to fight the Whites effectively?
I believe the October coup was the worst disaster that could possibly have befallen socialism. If some thoughtful person had assassinated Lenin in summer 1917, the coup would probably not have happened, as it was Lenin’s personal policy. That would have meant a coalition government. What would have followed from that is a matter for debate: such a government might have fallen under military pressure from the Germans, or proven unable to fight effectively against the Whites. But I think it would at least have had a chance of survival, with all that would have flowed from that. No Cheka-state, less terror, fewer famines and plagues, less international isolation, no cult of personality? Maybe. In any case it could hardly have been worse than what happened, because such a coalition government would have accepted that it was in some sense accountable to the people. In the modern world, nothing else can create the foundations for hope.

In defence of Marxism

Coming late to this debate, here is my ha’penn’orth, to be taken as the view of a non-Marxist with a good deal of respect for Marx and none at all for most of his followers.

This quote from SiaAoW has been on my mind lately, and it gives me a reason (an excuse, really) to set down some of my own reflections on the matters it raises.

‘… the left “as a serious political project” died long ago, some time in the early 1920s if not before, when the deepest division of all - that between reformists and revolutionaries - became set in stone.’

Tell it like it is. Let’s take names, shall we? This is Lenin’s doing. He is the central figure of the twentieth century because he showed what Marxists would have to do to take and hold power. His example also demonstrates that in doing so they would have to destroy their own purpose, his method being simply mass murder pro bono publico. The Bolshevik coup of October (November by our calendar) 1917 was not motivated by anything except Lenin’s desire to hold absolute power. As some Marxist historians have said in order to justify the coup, some form of dictatorship was probably inevitable after the overthrow of the Tsar: but not the particular disastrous form that emerged. Lenin’s defenders have not adequately pondered the quote from Aristotle that Alan Bullock used as the epigraph to his great book on Hitler: ‘men do not become tyrants in order to keep out the cold’.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks could easily have co-operated with the other liberal and socialist parties in a type of popular-front emergency government with the goal of establishing a sort of social democracy. Instead he first excluded them and then crushed them. The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918 was the sin that anyone who calls themselves a member of the left should ponder day and night. It’s a more seminal act than anything else he did (though foreshadowed by all his previous acts as boss of the Party). After that, his decision to destroy the other left-wing parties – the Kadets, the SRs - followed logically. Co-operating with them would have meant too many compromises. And since Lenin was in possession of The Truth, how could he compromise?
And by his side in all this, a loyal helper, was Leon Trotsky. The idea that Trotsky represented some sort of humane alternative to Stalin as Lenin’s successor is false. If Trotsky had won out the specific disasters brought by Stalin would not have befallen Russia and her neighbours: an entirely different (and not necessarily lesser) set of disasters would have come instead. There is not the least chance that Trotsky would have been able to accept the only principle that could have restrained Communist violence, megalomania and tyranny – the principle that the government should be accountable. (In theory democratic centralism makes the executive accountable to the Party, but only in theory.) After all, like Lenin, Trotsky had The Truth. (And the more disgraceful to Trotsky, he had seen what Lenin represented, had warned against him years before, and despite this had thrown in his lot with him.)
In summary: once Lenin had destroyed hope in 1917, the whole miserable history of the USSR (and the other countries it tormented) was already there, in embryo. It was not foreordained in detail, but it was foreordained that whatever followed would be disastrous.

Once upon a time there was a tradition of humane, learned ethical Marxism. Walter Benjamin was perhaps its finest ornament, Rosa Luxemburg its best practical exponent. Of course, both of them are palatable today because they never held any power. Benjamin was a sort of brilliant freak, all the more attractive to the Left because he was a martyr to fascism. His essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is finely written and persuasive, and based in a deep knowledge of history, art and literature. It comes to a doubtful conclusion:
‘Mankind, which in Homer's time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.’
The implication is that the politicisation of art is a response to a fascist deformity. In point of time it was not, since the politicisation of art was implicit in Marxism from the beginning, in the idea that art was a part of the superstructure. The other flaw in the essay is that it simply makes the same mistake that all Marxists were making at the time: the belief that fascism and capitalist democracy were the same thing fundamentally. (Orwell himself made this mistake during the 1930s, but he recovered from it, thanks to the war.) He displayed the usual aristo-Marxist contempt for liberalism (in the traditional sense of the word) as seen in Britain and the USA, both of which (in classic German style) Benjamin dismissed – in the cruellest way, by not mentioning them - as art-free plutocratic hellholes unworthy of serious consideration. But still, it’s a brilliant essay. RTWT.

Rosa Luxemburg represents the more actively political side of this tradition. She too was a martyr, so can’t be judged. (That was irony, by the way.) If anything she was the most important thinker in the broad Marxist tradition. I say broad, because her ideas – as expressed in the seminal work The Accumulation of Capital - in some ways represented a rejection of Marx. She was vexed by the question of why capitalism had not collapsed as Marx had predicted, and why it indeed continued to grow. In that, Luxemburg – ironically given her hostility to him - has something in common with Bernstein (another fine representative of the Marxist heretical tradition), who also used Marx as a source both of direct inspiration and fruitful error. Hannah Arendt sums up the theory in her essay on Luxemburg, and identifies the key idea in Luxemburg’s interpretation.
‘…the process of growth was not merely the consequence of innate laws ruling capitalist production but of the continued existence of pre-capitalist sectors in the country which ‘capitalism’ captured… Once this process has spread to the whole national territory, capitalists were forced to look to other parts of the earth, to pre-capitalist lands, to draw them into the process of capital accumulation, which, as it were, fed on whatever was outside itself… Hence, capitalism was not a closed system that generated its own contradictions and was ‘pregnant with revolution’; it fed on outside factors, and its automatic collapse could occur, if at all, only when the whole surface of the earth was conquered…’
As Arendt points out, the other Marxists of the time, Lenin at the head, denounced this as heresy. But:
‘The trouble was only that what was an error in abstract Marxism was an eminently faithful description of things as they really were.’
Marx might have got to the same point as Luxemburg if he had ever written his third volume of Capital, which was supposed to deal with international relations, though it would have meant changing his earlier theories.
Luxemburg and Arendt’s conclusion has some interesting implications for the consideration of contemporary globalisation. Most contemporary Marxists and radicals are unlikely to see them, however, or agree with them if they do, since most contemporary Marxism is predominantly emotive rather than rational – essentially concerned with feeling good rather than doing anything. It surprised me as a student to learn that the right was supposed to be emotional whereas the left was supposed to be rationalistic. Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s the discourses of the two sides always appeared to me the other way round.
The tradition of humane, cultured Marxism, permanently suspect of heresy, is a fragile one. Its representatives are marginal to the Marxist tradition which is itself marginal to mainstream society. No wonder Benjamin and Luxemburg look exotic even as blooms within the Marxist garden. Not surprising too that the tradition is virtually dead. These guys keep it alive.