Back to the nearest memories of humankind, 1980, when the fatuous figures of Reagan and Madame Thatcher were stalking the globe as twin pestilences, Hordes of the Things made it’s first appearance on Radio Four ( BBC ). The links should be read after listening, since they naturally are spoilers. Radio, apart from it’s life-preserving, as in rescue, or life-destroying, as in war, — though British military radio from the late Balkan Wars to Iraq in the form of the aging Clansman system was wretched enough for the soldiery to opt for using their mobiles instead if possible — services has little to commend it’s survival now; yet for the prior half of the 20th century it was more important for popular cultural enrichment than TV as a later phenomenon: fortunately, both are being obviated by the internet. Still, radio humour — as variable in quality as any other medium ( viz: mostly crap ) — supplied a need in those less advanced years; and Hordes of the Things was fairly good. However rarely repeated, the combination of actors well-known in their day, and seasoned comedic writers produced from four short episodes phrases that live in the mind. The occasional mock-shakespearian rhapsody and the underlying menace of beauty from Wagner’s finest didn’t hurt a Tolkienesque burlesque with Dragons, Eagles and Spiders. Still, ‘We are trained to be patient in the Brotherhood of Night.’ kind of haunts the mind even of those of us who are severely lacking in patience of any kind.
Quite other than it’s being comedy, there is a satire implicit upon the very worst and most despicable Liberal. The utterly sincere, and really morally pure, harmonising, well-meaning, honest idiot who horridly sees good in all and tries so hard to reconcile, that his weakness destroys himself and all that he is obligated to protect. Who genuinely thinks that competing cultures must be greeted with complacent self-destruction. Combining self-satisfied fellow-travelling, dumb moral relativism and a disgustingly feeble-minded belief in the value of all, and their good intentions, together with total disdain for those who prefer reality, makes them so worthless as to be more dangerous than a frank villain such as Bush or Clinton.
Still, as I was saying, though the contemporary in-jokes have reached the inevitable fate of all such trifles, many of the finely delivered lines resonate so as to be almost unforgettable [ Bearing in mind that everything is ultimately forgot here below... ]. Thanks to a friendly torrent this aged comedy is available here.; but also proffered as a downloadable zip which is recommended for home use.
FOOOOOOLLLL ! Now I can seeee yoou !
Name not that name within these walls, Master..
Loathsome Brothers !
Just a, a minute. There’s something strange here.
Majesteh ?
Why are there so many more wenches than hags in the village ?
The men had marched a long way, Majesteh.
Oh. Ah… yes… I see…
Beware, Agar, son of Yulfric; for no power on earth is granted without a price.
You take the counsel of that cannibal and sentence your own son to grisly death ?
Right, what is this ?
Just a mirror.
It looks like the All-Seeing Mirror of Ganst, whose power lies by reflecting deep into the souls of the fallen…
Reproduction.
And all these axes here, magic helms and articles of torture ?
Collector’s Items.
I don’t doubt it Yulfric, but what sortof collector ?
Gorky was devoted to reason, knowledge and science. He wrote bitterly of the impotence of reason in the old church-dominated Russia, of the “dark abyss” and the “elegiac submissiveness to fate”. What initially alienated him from Lenin’s regime was the conviction that it was suppressing the light of reason and perpetuating in a new form the dark abyss. For Rolland, the authentic esprit was above all a rational one. Shaw, like the Webbs and like the Welsh Utopian socialist Robert Owen, whom the Fabians had latterly discovered as an intellectual ancestor, was a fierce rationalist. Like Owen, the Fabians condemned ignorance, waste, dislocation, booms, slumps and unemployment as essentially irrational. Was racism, Needham asked, anything but irrational ? Was not the Soviet Union the most determined opponent of racism ? “The subjective and irrational are anti-democratic, they are the instruments of tyranny.” Georges Friedmann described the Soviet Union as “the most magnificent effort towards the rational transformation of institutions .. . that humanity has ever attempted”. So here “reason” becomes simultaneously a system of logic or cerebration immaculately synthesized with a set of moral values. No one voiced the liberating claims of reason more fervently or consistently than Heinrich Mann with his perennial argument that the greatest weapon of the Geist in its struggle with arbitrary power was reason ( Vernunft ): indeed he published in 1923 a collection of essays collectively titled Diktatur der Vernunft. In 1937 he wrote of the USSR: “At last a state undertakes to make out of men what we have always wanted: a rational existence, the collective working for the benefit of each individual, and out of that individual shall something higher and better develop within a totality that further predicts itself.” But here rationality is interpreted as a common heritage not a class monopoly, as a matter of Geist not of Macht: he spoke of the “deep, fundamental intellectuality of the Revolution” and he pleaded that it was “in the last resort no rebellion of some against others. Basically it asks for and receives the agreement of all.” This was indeed the dream of the Enlightenment. Mann’s friend Feuchtwanger continued to regard reason as the preserve of an enlightened minority, a treasure destined to be distributed to the populace at large but so far withheld from them in all countries except the Soviet Union. “I sympathized inevitably with the experiment of basing the construction of a gigantic State on reason alone… .” He stressed the ethical “Vernunftmassigkeit” of the Plans, and later he wrote of his belief in “a slow, slow yet sure growth of human reason between the last ice-age and the next”. Similarly, “reason-through-knowledge” was the formula recommended by the Webbs and finally identified by them as operational in Russia. They were convinced that under socialism the problem of who gives orders to whom would progressively diminish since the combination of what they called “measurement with publicity” and the “searchlight of public knowledge” would burn out unreason, ignorance and apathy among the public, freeing it from its false dependence on traditional or arbitrary power. This had also been Saint-Simon’s belief.
It is of course easy to criticize the philosophical naivety of the fellow-travellers. Too blandly did they incorporate subjective, ethical premises into the general concept of reason, and in this respect they were little in advance of Thomas Paine, who described history as a periodically interrupted progress from the government of priests and conquerors to the government of pure reason - this reason being defined simply as the antithesis of ignorance. When Owen declared: “Train any population rationally, and they will be rational”, he virtually spoke for a later generation separated from him by a hundred years. Yet what sounded enlightened in 1830 could only be judged as naive in 1930. When Condorcet and Owen argued that idleness, poverty, crime and punishment were merely, in Owen’s words, “the necessary consequences of ignorance”, they could not reasonably be criticized for lacking a concept of alienation or anomie, whereas the fellow-travellers turned their backs not only on such concepts but blandly ignored a century of psychological inquiry. It was time to recognize that formulas such as Bentham’s “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” had an ethical rather than a rational basis, yet the fellow-travellers continued to elect Unitary Reason to the throne once occupied by God, complete with all the court ritual of the fall, redemption and salvation. One can at least partially sympathize with Marx’s scorn for the endeavours of Saint-Simon and Owen to convert humanity, including the rich and powerful, to socialism by means of rational persuasion; it was this aspect of their thought rather than the building of model settlements like New Harmony which provoked him to brand them as “Utopians”. Admittedly the later fellow-travellers occasionally acknowledged that the knout had become a frequent messenger of reason in Soviet Russia, but they refused to draw conclusions about the motivation of the knout-wielders, preferring to judge them as benevolent schoolmasters occasionally resorting to sterner discipline out of love for their pupils. Though they were anti-capitalist, and though some of them, like Shaw, recognized the necessity of force, the fellow-travellers still inhabited the mental universe of Auguste Comte, with his vision of history as being synonymous with the progress of the human mind towards the final, rational stage of universal positivism. No doubt the immense upheaval which took place in Russia during forced collectivization was in a sense positivistically inspired; but what appears ruthlessly rational is not necessarily reasonable, and the fellow-travellers lacked not only Kant’s insight into the necessity of an inner, moral revolution within men but also the vital gleam of cautionary wisdom offered by Voltaire when he remarked: “Le monde avec lenteur marche vers la sagesse.”
David Caute : The Fellow-Travellers
One of the finest books ever written; and by a leftist, too…
This suggests the fascinating possibility that the key for a group intending to turn Europeans against themselves is to trigger their strong tendency toward altruistic punishment by convincing them of the moral blameworthiness of their own people. Because Europeans are individualists at heart, they readily rise up in moral anger against their own people once they are seen as free riders and therefore morally blameworthy — a manifestation of their stronger tendency toward altruistic punishment deriving from their evolutionary past as hunter gatherers. In making judgments of altruistic punishment, relative genetic distance is irrelevant. Free-riders are seen as strangers in a market situation; i.e., they have no familial or tribal connection with the altruistic punisher.
As a very interesting and influential European group, the Puritans exemplified this tendency toward altruistic punishment. A defining feature of Puritanism was the tendency to pursue utopian causes framed as moral issues — their susceptibility to utopian appeals to a ‘higher law’ and the belief that government’s principal purpose is moral. New England was the most fertile ground for “the perfectibility of man creed,” and the “father of a dozen ‘isms’.” There was a tendency to paint political alternatives as starkly contrasting moral imperatives, with one side portrayed as evil incarnate — inspired by the devil. Puritan moral intensity can also be seen in their “profound personal piety” — their intensity of commitment to live not only a holy life, but also a sober and industrious life.
Puritans waged holy war on behalf of moral righteousness even against their own genetic cousins. The suggestion is that this is a form of altruistic punishment found more often among cooperative hunter-gatherer groups than among groups based on extended kinship. For example, whatever the political and economic complexities that led to the Civil War, it was the Yankee moral condemnation of slavery that inspired the rhetoric and rendered the massive carnage of closely related Anglo-Americans on behalf of slaves from Africa justifiable in the minds of Puritans. Militarily, the war with the Confederacy rendered the heaviest sacrifice in lives and property ever made by Americans. Puritan moral fervor and its tendency to justify draconian punishment of evil doers can also be seen in the comments of “the Congregationalist minister at Henry Ward Beecher’s Old Plymouth Church in New York [who] went so far as to call for ‘exterminating the German people . . . the sterilization of 10,000,000 German soldiers and the segregation of the woman,.”
Thus the current altruistic punishment so characteristic of contemporary Western civilization: Once Europeans were convinced that their own people were morally bankrupt, any and all means of punishment should be used against their own people. Rather than see other Europeans as part of an encompassing ethnic and tribal community, fellow Europeans were seen as morally blameworthy and the appropriate target of altruistic punishment. For Westerners, morality is individualistic — violations of communal norms by free riders are punished by altruistic aggression.
Guilt is rather necessary, for we ought to know what we are; but it is also necessary to discard it as mere vainglorious self-obsession once past fault is recognised and subsumed. Natürlich, some of us find it easier than others; but that’s just through rigorous self-training ( or something ) — which is far less complacent than the opposite urge to purge another’s guilt. And certainly beats killing or self-killing to satisfy a ridiculous moral ego…
You are quite right –– I am not moved by any ‘love’ of this sort, and for two reasons: I have never in my life ‘loved’ any people or collective –– neither the German people, nor the French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of that sort. I indeed love ‘only’ my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons. Secondly, this ‘love of the Jews’ would appear to me, since I am myself Jewish, as something rather suspect. I cannot love myself or anything which I know is part and parcel of my own person. To clarify this, let me tell you of a conversation I had in Israel with a prominent political personality who was defending the – in my opinion disastrous –– non-separation of religion and state in Israel. What [ she ] said –– I am not sure of the exact words any more – ran something like this: ‘You will understand that, as a socialist, I, of course, do not believe in God; I believe in the Jewish people.’ I found this a shocking statement and, being too shocked, I did not reply at the time. But I could have answered: the greatness of this people was once that it believed in God, and believed in Him in such a way that its trust and love towards Him was greater than its fear. And now this people believes only in itself ? What good can come out of that ? Well, in this sense I do not ‘love’ the Jews, nor do I ‘believe’ in them; I merely belong to them as a matter of course, beyond dispute or argument.
Also… from the same publication, an amusing glance at feel-good morality when it contemplates atrocity by persons it disapproves of, Effing the Ineffable.
Of course, the proponents of the antithetical beerier type of incontinent love of folk are the most apt to promote sacrifice for the religious object of love; group, gods, or even person — carefully ignoring the fact that no sacrifice except one’s individual own can have the faintest value howsoever that value is defined… Only an Imbecile God — perhaps Azathoth — can prize the stench of some burnt offering.
‘We need a futile gesture at this stage. It will raise the whole tone of the war’.
* Actually, another source gives this as Susanna Bathing *shrugs*
This is one of the most beautiful and inspiring Bible stories that ever instructed happy infants in a Sunday School. ** Still, since the story of the idiot Jephtha is apposite here, I’ll stick to that attribution…
**
The Jewish people had been exiled to Babylon, but their captors allowed them to retain their customs and laws. Two elders who had been appointed judges met to adjudicate disputes in a spacious and pleasant home, where Susanna lived with her husband and children. One day, the two licentious elders spied on Susanna bathing in her garden. Inflamed with lust, they tried to coerce her to lie with them, but the virtuous beauty said she would rather die than offend the Lord by committing adultery.
Infuriated, the elders claimed that they had seen Susanna lying with a young man in her garden. She was being led to the execution ground when the Holy Spirit inspired the young prophet Daniel to suggest that the elders be questioned separately. What sort of tree were Susanna and her lover lying under? When one named a mastic tree and the other an oak, Susanna was vindicated and the elders were dragged to execution.
Cursorily, one can say, virtually any act among the Hebrews was liable to get one killed.
“There followed a series of uncovered plots, some true, others fantastic, some Cheka provocations. Dzerzhinsky was constantly sharpening the weapon of Soviet dictatorship. To Dzerzhinsky was brought the mass of undigested rumours from all parts of Petrograd. With the aid of picked squads of Chekists, Dzerzhinsky undertook to purge the city. Little time was wasted sifting evidence and classifying people rounded up in these night raids. Woe to him who did not disarm all suspicion at once. The prisoners were generally hustled to the old police station not far from the Winter Palace. Here, with or without perfunctory interrogation, they were stood up against the courtyard wall and shot. The staccato sounds of death were muffled by the roar of truck motors kept going for the purpose.”
“Dzerzhinsky furnished the instrument for tearing a new society out of the womb of the old — the instrument of organised, systematic, mass terror. For Dzerzhinsky the class struggle meant exterminating ‘the enemies of the working class.’ The ‘enemies of the working class‘ were all who opposed the Bolshevik dictatorship.”
“At meetings of the Sovnarcom, Lenin often exchanged notes with his colleagues. On one occasion, he sent a note to Dzerzhinsky. ‘How many vicious counter-revolutionaries are there in our prisons ?‘ Dzerzhinsky’s reply was: ‘About fifteen hundred.’ Lenin read it, snorted something to himself, made a cross beside the figure, and returned the note to Dzerzhinsky.”
“Dzerzhinsky rose and left the room without a word. No-one paid any attention either to Lenin’s note or to Dzerzhinsky’s departure. The meeting continued. But the next day there was excited whispering. Dzerzhinsky had ordered the execution of all the fifteen hundred ‘vicious counter-revolutionaries‘ the previous night. He had taken Lenin’s cross as a collective death sentence.”
“There would have been little comment had Lenin’s gesture been meant as an order for wholesale liquidation. But, as Fotieva, Lenin’s secretary, explained: ‘There was a misunderstanding. Vladimir Ilyich never wanted the executions. Dzerzhinsky did not understand him. Vladimir Ilyich usually puts a cross on memoranda to indicate that he has read them and noted their contents.’”
The doom of our culture was already well upon it’s way by the time of the Second World War — or War of the Republics as I would prefer it to be known, since this was conducted entirely betwixt differing republican systems, all equally loathsome. Possibly not Japan, I guess, since it was at least nominally a monarchy, although cursory search indicates it was more of a constitutional monarchy. WWII may be summarized as that the nazis were detestable; the western allies despicable; and the communists disgusting.
The Russians had reverted to becoming savages by 1945: the Americans maintained their customary anthropological status as barbarians. Their especially barbaric political system of representative democracy had grave consequence as victors… The very first moralistic theatre was the judicial murder of General Anton Dostler, of which may be read here, written by the son of his American defense counsel. Essentially, 15 American soldiers were captured disguised as Italian civilians, and the — non-nazi — General referred the case to Kesselring, who ordered them to be executed. Admittedly Smiling Albert had enough to occupy his mind right then without giving this a great deal of thought, but under the laws of war this was a done deal anyway. It is pointless to object or blame soldiers for disguising; it is equally pointless to object to the consequence — which procedure is actually there to protect civilians. Thus although guiltless — neither prosecutor nor defence expected anything except acquittal — General Dostler was then sentenced to death after new instructions were handed down from Washington in response to the revelation that the prosecution would fail, that is that henceforth in these trials hearsay evidence would be admissible. This was to satisfy the voting constituents. Democracy is awesomely repellent not merely in practice, but still more so in idealist theory…
‘Hope to God we never lose a war.’ said the prosecutor.
As a child I studied one of the part-works — a form once popular from the 1920s to 1980s, but which has rather naturally fallen out of vogue: magazines issued weekly — on WWI; obviously such publications included photographs which should be seen once, in order to understand consequence, but not dwelt upon unless one is in training to become a serial killer. Actually, mere death cannot appall: there is nothing in the least romantic in death — as opposed to dying well — and it’s displays are solely squalid; however ongoing injury or the truthful immediacy of creatures suffering causes as much instantaneous flinching within as if in their presence. The issue dealing with the murder of Tsar Nicky and his family had on the back page another murder, that of a black man burning with grinning morons surveying this act.
To maintain that these lynchings — within living memory — were all of the innocent seems both unlikely and inapposite; since that matters not: such behaviour is utterly unacceptable were you dealing with devils from Hell. Still, it can be pointed out that this is one form of action that can be justified under any variant of democracy, from pure populism to libertarian individualism. And again, those who condemn such atrocities of the past, just under current fashion rather than for the pure lack of decency in such degrading manifestations, are often glad and usually silent when the victims are those of whom they disapprove — such as say, nazis or Saddam’s people..
Once only — at Chattanooga — did I meet with disagreement : and then I was asking for it. Two negroes had been lynched a few days before my arrival on the usual charge of having assaulted a white woman: proved afterwards ( as is generally the case ) to have been a trumped-up lie. All through the South, this lynching horror had been following me; and after my reading I asked for permission to speak on a matter about which my conscience was troubling me. I didn’t wait to get it, but went straight on. At home, on political platforms, I have often experienced the sensation of stirring up opposition. But this was something different. I do not suggest it was anything more than fancy, but it seemed to me that I could actually visualize the anger of my audience. It looked like a dull, copper-coloured cloud, hovering just above their heads, and growing in size. I sat down amid silence. It was quite a time before anybody moved. And then they all got up at the same moment, and turned towards the door. On my way out, in the lobby, a few people came up to me and thanked me, in a hurried furtive manner.
My wife was deadly pale. I had not told her of my intention. But nothing happened, and I cannot help thinking that, if the tens of thousands of decent American men and women to whom this thing must be their country’s shame would take their courage in both hands and speak their mind, America might be cleansed from this foul sin.
***
My curiosity has always prompted me to find out all I could about my fellow human beings wherever I have happened to be. I maintain that the American man, taking him class for class and individual for individual, is no worse than any of the rest of us. I will ask his permission to leave it at that.
The last time I visited America was during the first year of the war. America then was all for keeping out of it. I had friends in big business, and was introduced to others. Their opinion was that America could best serve Humanity in the bulk by reserving herself to act as peace-maker. In the end, she would be the only nation capable of considering the future without passion and without fear. The general feeling was, if anything, pro-German, tempered in the East by traditional sentiment for France. I failed to unearth any enthusiasm for England, in spite of my having been commissioned to discover it. I have sometimes wondered if England and America really do love one another as much as our journalists and politicians say they do. I had an interesting talk with President Wilson, chiefly about literature and the drama. But I did get him, before I left, to say a little about the war; and then he dropped the schoolmaster and became animated.
“We have in America,” he said, “twenty million people of German descent. Almost as many Irish. In New York State alone there are more Italians than in Rome. We have more Scandinavians than there are in Sweden. Here, side by side, dwell Czechs, Roumanians, Slavs, Poles and Dutchmen. We also have some Jews. We have solved the problem of living together without wanting to cut one another’s throats. You will have to learn to do the same in Europe. We shall have to teach you.”
Undoubtedly at that time Wilson was intending to remain neutral. Whether his later change of mind brought about good or evil is an arguable point. But for America the war would have ended in stalemate. All Europe would have been convinced of the futility of war. “Peace without Victory ” — the only peace containing any possibility of permanence — would have resulted.
To the democrat, America is the Great Disappointment. Material progress I rule out. Beyond a certain point, it tends to enslave mankind. For spiritual progress, America seems to have no use. Mr. Ford has pointed out that every purchaser of a Ford car can have it delivered to him, painted any colour he likes, so long as it’s black. Mr. Ford expresses in a nutshell the mental attitude of modern America. Every man in America is free to do as he darn well pleases so long as, for twenty-four hours a day, he does what everybody else is doing. Every man in America is free to speak his mind so long as he shouts with the crowd. He has not even Mr. Pickwick’s choice of choosing his crowd. In America there is but one crowd. Every man in America has the right to think for himself so long as he thinks what he is told. If not — like the heretics of the Middle Ages — let him see to it that his chamber door is locked, that his tongue does not betray him. The Klu Klux Klan, with its travelling torture chamber, is but the outward and visible sign of the spirit of modern America. Thought in America is standardized. America is not taking new wine, lest the old bottles be broken.
I ask my American friends — and I have many, I know — to forgive me. My plea is that I am growing old. And it comes to me that before long I may be called upon to stand before the Judge of all the earth, and to make answer concerning the things that I have done and — perhaps of even more importance — the things that I have left undone. The thought I am about to set down keeps ringing in my brain. It will not go away. I am afraid any longer to keep silence. There are many of power and authority who could have spoken it better. I would it had not been left to me. If it make men angry, I am sorry.
The treatment of the negro in America calls to Heaven for redress. I have sat with men who, amid vile jokes and laughter, told of “Buck Niggers” being slowly roasted alive; told how they screamed and writhed and prayed; how their eyes rolled inward as the flames crept up till nothing could be seen but two white balls. They burn mere boys alive and sometimes women. These things are organized by the town’s “leading citizens” Well-dressed women crowd to the show, children are lifted up upon their fathers’ shoulders. The Law, represented by grinning policemen, stands idly by. Preachers from their pulpits glorify these things, and tell their congregations that God approves. The Southern Press roars its encouragement. Hangings, shootings would be terrible enough. These burnings; these slow grillings of living men, chained down to iron bedsteads; these tearings of live, quivering flesh with red-hot pinchers can be done only to glut some hideous lust of cruelty. The excuse generally given is an insult to human intelligence. Even if true, it would be no excuse. In the majority of cases, it is not even pretended. The history of the Spanish Inquisition unrolls no greater shame upon the human race. The auto da fe, at least, was not planned for the purpose of amusing a mob. In the face of this gigantic horror, the lesser sufferings of the negro race in America may look insignificant. But there must be tens of thousands of educated, cultured men and women cursed with the touch of the tar-brush to whom life must be one long tragedy. Shunned, hated, despised, they have not the rights of a dog. From no white man dare they even defend the honour of their women. I have seen them waiting at the ticket offices, the gibe and butt of the crowd, not venturing to approach till the last white man was served. I have known a woman in the pains of childbirth made to travel in the cattle wagon. For no injury at the hands of any white man is there any redress. American justice is not colour blind. Will the wrong never end ?
A sort of doubt has always hung around the character of Tolstoy, as round the character of Gandhi. He was not a vulgar hypocrite, as some people declared him to be, and he would probably have imposed even greater sacrifices on himself than he did, if he had not been interfered with at every step by the people surrounding him, especially his wife. But on the other hand it is dangerous to take such men as Tolstoy at their disciples’ valuation. There is always the possibility — the probability, indeed — that they have done no more than exchange one form of egoism for another. Tolstoy renounced wealth, fame and privilege; he abjured violence in all its forms and was ready to suffer for doing so; but it is not easy to believe that he abjured the principle of coercion, or at least the desire to coerce others. There are families in which the father will say to his child, ‘You’ll get a thick ear if you do that again’, while the mother, her eyes brimming over with tears, will take the child in her arms and murmur lovingly, ‘Now, darling, is it kind to Mummy to do that ?’ And who would maintain that the second method is less tyrannous than the first ? The distinction that really matters is not between violence and non-violence, but between having and not having the appetite for power. There are people who are convinced of the wickedness both of armies and of police forces, but who are nevertheless much more intolerant and inquisitorial in outlook than the normal person who believes that it is necessary to use violence in certain circumstances. They will not say to somebody else, ‘Do this, that and the other or you will go to prison’, but they will, if they can, get inside his brain and dictate his thoughts for him in the minutest particulars. Creeds like pacifism and anarchism, which seem on the surface to imply a complete renunciation of power, rather encourage this habit of mind. For if you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics — a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage — surely that proves that you are in the right ? And the more you are in the right, the more natural that everyone else should be bullied into thinking likewise.
I cannot esteem the tragic Walter Ralegh particularly highly, if the jury may still be out on whether he was a traitor or not he had an unfailing ability to give bad advice, and his pompous Polonian — wholly unasked for by King James — precepts suggesting that the Dynasty reconcile itself to parliamentary governance would have resulted in Kings becoming mere feeble puppets of whatever faction is temporarily in power, as it has with the present useless grinning eunuchs of Windsor, down, down into the the noisome abyss of true democracy. Still, like many men of action including the brutal dictators of the past century he had a pithy turn of phrase on occasion expressing obvious sense; in one debate on the Puritan Menace he rightly pointed out:
“That law is hard that taketh life, or sendeth into banishment where men’s intentions shall be judged by a jury and they shall be judges of what another man meant.”
To which, more pointedly still, one biographer adds: ‘Instead of proceeding against intentions, Ralegh said, the law should proceed against deed and fact; where they could be established, let the law be as harsh as necessary and justice would still be done.‘ Better words were never said, and the fact that Ralegh himself was convicted on deed rather than opinion is just another pleasant irony.
It can never be too strongly felt that all opinion should be free, and that law should only concern itself with deeds. [ Plus the need for heavy penalty against vile deed, of course --- *meditatively* --- Terrible Swift Sword should never be a mere phrase... ]
Fast-forward to our own day with ludicrous ‘Hate’ legislation to protect the injured feelings of fools. If a definite crime has been committed then it should receive due punishment: it is not aggravated because the actor did it from hate; justice should ignore good or bad intentions and concentrate solely on the action, and it’s due. For expressing opinion, no matter how vile, or just inciting others, there should be no penalty whatsoever. I am not harmed if some wretched iman urges his dumb flock to massacre non-muslims. I am if they act on it, and only if they act on it. If they do so, then they are the guilty, and he was merely the agitator. They should have had more sense than to carry out his suggestions, and therefore need to carry the penalties also. No-one should be blamed for thought or speech, however distasteful, that does not cause palpable injury, since to select what thoughts people should have leads to robotic tyranny and the paradise of 1984.
Some years back, where I was working one man was forbidden to talk to the clients as an interviewer since he belonged to a proscribed political group, not that he would be offensive, merely that he belonged to this group. A number of fellow-workers were of the opinion that he should not be given employment at all. A penalty that has obviously been applied to members of a number of groups ranged from socialists, nazis, communists, jews, Irish etc. etc., and continues as people are sacked for holding views, racialist, communist, insufficiently islamist or pro-islamist ( depending on location ) all around the world. The point being, that if you debar people from all employment for, say, being racially bigoted; the next step is to suggest they should not have government or state resources — their views being so abhorrant — and maybe that they should be run out of town… The Left has a strong tradition of suggesting morally objectionable persons should be killed, or at the least dealt with by fascist-type violence. In effect by denying the rights of citizens to hold views that do not conform to current morality — usually purely subjective and emotionally held — one is denying their rights to exist at all; and logically they are then expendable after a while.
Sir Walter was legally dead from his sentence, and reprieve, until his later execution; but his life in the Tower was not too bad for a prisoner in any age. The legally dead of the future state won’t be so lucky.
Feeling blue, I decided to go from pyrates to their successors, and watched the comedy Goodfellas. Obviously the usual satire is that it mirrors the establishment since mobsters are merely a bunch of psychotic little men in suits whose exaggerated concept of respect only emanates from the money nexus; yet it is more lightly done than in 70’s and 80’s films, and if much of the humour comes from an agonising tradition mind-blenchingly done to death in British comic films — bungling gangsters: at least here it derives from their competence being short on detail, rather than pure slapstick stupidity as in the latter. And as with the prominente in the real Mob, from the instituting of the Five Families on to Gotti, it rarely seems to have dawned that mindless killing, and really most of their murdering, was counter-productive to their ends; to kill unnecessarily is as sentimental a fault as not to kill from exaggerated respect for human life — and grosser. The film is true to life, too, in the fact that mafioso launch into pointless and demented self-justification at the drop of a hat: I’ve a copy of Joe Bonanno’s autobiography somewhere. Maybe their catholic heritage; maybe the fierce anti-intellectualism of the lower classes…
The lifestyle displayed in those dear dead, thank God, days beyond recall, such pure awe-inspiring tastelessness it resembles, as in a mirror darkly, islamic visions of Paradise.
I have the severest dislike for Cool, but this rendition is extremely powerful.
“Now then, me Bullies: would you rather do the Gallows’ Dance — and hang in chains ’till the crows pick your eyes from your rotting skulls — or would you feel the roll of a stout ship beneath yer feet again ?” Captain Kidd film
The last ship of Captain Kidd has been found and coincidentally I watched the above film with Charles Laughton: the acting, with of course the exceptions of both him and Mr. Carradine, was rather stilted, but the actress was very pretty.
As for Kidd, it scarcely matters whether he swung unjustly or not. He should have been deaded for serving William of Orange anyway; as should anyone who served that usurper and all his successors; and indeed, so should William himself, ‘The Unhung Thief‘, as Cabell dubbed him.
Life as a legitimist monarchist has the added bonus of making a very large percentage of human existence very cheap indeed; so saving one from getting worked up over mass inevitable mortality — no matter how randomly purposed.
***
Sweden, despite still having a remarkably tough military, has never been the same since the affair of the Masked Ball… that hideous snivelling progressiveness so redolent of all the Scandinavian countries has never been so well epitomised as in the castrating of the Royal Lion. Apparently ‘female soldiers‘ from a rapid reaction force made a sudden swift surgical whine regarding the fact that an animal has genitalia and the Army, instead of telling them to take a long walk off a short pier, caved in with an abasing alacrity that would have delighted the soviets had they invaded. The original designer from the Nation Archives is naturally deeply pissed.
‘Female Soldiers‘ are in any case a modern joke of course, and were not present in the Armies of Gustavus Adolphus, Queen Christina or Charles XII when those not wholly admirable monarchs’ armies were the Swedish Terror of — Northern — Europe: so, really, if any military has declined in spirit enough to have such beings, then one must just expect attendant lunacies to come along with them.
It’s a relief to turn to a purer aspect of Scandinavia. I’ve never owned, nor wanted, a bicycle, but this blog on Copenhagen bicycling is rather fascinating.
It is taken as a rule that whenever, and no matter in which context, a personal pronoun is used, the speaker is — hopefully unconsciously — boasting. Still, I have identified my major flaw and can’t really feel it increases self-esteem. I am incapable of reverence. This might be a coded way of saying rebellious, were it not for the fact that as a reactionary traditionalist I’ve never seen the point in rebellion for it’s own sake save as a narcissistic attitude ( see: Shelley, and indeed, Byron ); rejection of belief seems as pointless as it’s easy acceptance, and considerably more self-dramatizing. Naturalich, I feel honour to my hereditary lord: he is God’s Vice-Gerant; then again, I am scarcely likely to meet him, even less to serve him; and no chance at all to die for him > which last should be man’s natural doom. I think it was Lord Bernard Stuart who died with his back to a tree fighting eight Roundheads; and later, as my namesake lay dying…
The Viscount then asking the said Johnston: “How the day went ?”
“The day went well for the King, but I am sorry for your Lordship.”
Claverhouse : “It is the less matter for me, seeing the day went well for my Master.”
Dying was worthwhile in those days. Now it has the same unimportance as life.
To continue, no singer or band has ever held my heart. No people or group, large or tiny, seem the least bit worthy. I can’t respect breeding, wealth or achievement, no matter what it cost the achiever; work, any work, is as only good as the result; and most present day work produces ugliness adding to the material world. As a legitimist, concurrent politics merely seem the futile gesturings of freed slaves aping the process of governance. Religion is not to be crudely disdained, even — especially —- if one is fundamentally irreligious, so short ceremonies are easy enough to be for mannered respect, but in church I’ve never felt anything except annoyance and a dislike of kneeling — and this lack of interest applies to all manifestations of the religious impulse, whether church-based, atheistic, faith in science, faith in materialism, faith in people ( all, or a selected group ), nationalism, racialism, anti-racialism, and all the creeds that mix any of these to form a cocktail of belief. And too philosophers have very little to do with a functioning spiritual life any more than economists have to do with the random workings of whatever the economy may be: both are merely theologians, only to be read for the funny bits.
Thus both religion and ethical theory fail, if just because both make enormous logical leaps by constructing the desired end — good and evil — first, then creating the theory that accounts for why they think one of these is right or wrong. There are only two pole-stars for correctness: personal honour and loyalty. So in fine, there is nothing in life that can command respect or even much admiration.
I feel horror and disgust at having lived in the decades I did, both from their and my own inadequacy: all platitudinous self-serving of both rulers and ruled nauseates; we are lucky enough to have excellent gear now, but a hideous environment to house it. Technology is excellent, yet can hardly substitute for the lack in modern life. If I go anywhere in Great Britain, I know exactly what I’ll find, no matter if I’ve never seen the area once. All towns. cars, supermarkets, garages, motorway stations, same shops everywhere — maybe a museum or gallery might be interesting for an hour, or it might be as trite as the media society that invests us all. Certainly the countryside in Europe is still pretty good in places: but you have to get further in than you see from the roadside. Culturally, the bittersweet Still Game regarding two pensioners in Glasgow pretty well sums up the dead end-game of life in Britain. I can now go anywhere, but can’t conceive of any place I want to live in.
And North America and Europe — which comprise the continents I should feel comfortable within —- are pretty much the same way. All is dullness. And the people are devoted to weakness and ineptitude. We live, as predicted, in Ressentiment World. Slaves Rule.
A month or so back I attended some bookfair and amongst others, purchased this small item for 50p, which I only just decided to look at: 18th century writing being somewhat precious.
This horrific little tale is slightly patronising to uneuropean cultures in the world-set of the time, nevertheless displays a healthier and more cynical view that the hideous idealism and disgusting relativism inseminated by Rousseau and brought to birth by Boas — both of whom have good claim to be in the top ten of most repellent persons evah — which holds sway for now. In the end, one culture, however massively imperfect, can still be decided to be generally better than another; and the nearer to naked nature a culture, the less satisfactory it remains. Anyway the author was evidently having enormous fun in writing it…
More thoughtfully, it does increase the conclusion that, whatever the difficulties, it is worth being a vegan if only for hygenic reasons.
VII. STORY OF TQUASSOUW AND KNONMQUAIHA, TWO HOTTENTOT LOVERS. CONNOISSEUR, numb. 21.
TQUASSOUW, the fon of Kqvuffomo, was Konquer or Chief Captain over the Sixteen Nations of Caffraria. He was defcended from N’oh and Hingn’oh, who dropt from the moon; and his power extended over all the Kraals of the Hottentots.
This prince was remarkable for his prowefs and activity : his fpeed was like the torrent, that rufhes down the precipice ; and he would overtake the wild afs in her flight : his arrows brought down the eagle from the clouds; the lion fell before him, and his launce drank the blood of the rhinoceros. He fathomed the waters of the deep, and buffeted the billows in the tempeft : he drew the rock-fifh from their lurking-holes, and rifled the beds of coral. Trained from his infancy in the exercife of war, to wield the Haffagaye with dexterity, and break the wild bulls to battle, he was a ftranger to the foft dalliance of love ; and beheld with indifference the thick-lipped damfels of Gongeman, and the flat-nofed beauties of Hauteniqua.
As Tquaffouw was one day giving inftructions for fpreading toils for the elk, and digging pitfalls for the elephant, he received information, that a tyger prowling for prey was committing ravages on the Kraals of the Chamtouers. He fnatched up his bow of olive-wood, and bounded, like the roe-buck on the mountains, to their affiftance. He arrived juft at the inftant, when the enraged animal was about to faften on a virgin, and aiming a poifoned arrow at his heart, laid him dead at her feet. The virgin threw herfelf on the ground, and covered her head with duft, to thank her deliverer: but when fhe rofe, the prince was dazzled with her charms. He was ftruck with the gloffy hue of her complexion, which fhone like the jetty down on the black hogs of Heffaqua : he was ravifhed with the preft
griftle of her nofe ; and his eyes dwelt with admiration on the flaccid beauties of her breafts, which defcended to her navel.
Knonmquaiha, ( for that was the virgin’s name ) was daughter to the Kouquequa or Leader of the Kraal, who bred her up with all the delicacy of her fex. She was fed with the entrails of goats, fhe fucked the eggs of the oftrich, and her drink was the milk of ewes. After gazing for fome time upon her charms, the prince in great tranfport embraced the foles of her feet : then ripping the beaft he had juft killed, took out the caul, and hung it about her neck, in token of his affection. He afterwards ftripped the tyger of his fkin, and fending it to the Kouquequa her father, demanded the damfel in marriage.
The eve of the full moon was appointed for the celebration of the nuptials of Tquaffouw and Knonmquaiha. When the day arrived, the magnificence, in which the bridegroom was arrayed, amazed all Caffraria. Over his fhoulders was caft a Kroffe or mantle of wild cat-fkins : he cut fandals for his feet from the raw hide of an elephant; he had hunted down a leopard, and of the fpotted fur formed a fuperb cap for his head ; he girded his loins with the inteftines, and the bladder of the beaft he blew up, and faftened to his hair.
Nor had Knonmquaiha been lefs employed in adorning her perfon. She made a varnifh of the fat of goats mixed with foot, with which fhe anointed her whole body, as fhe ftood beneath the rays of the fun : her locks were clotted with melted greafe, and powdered with the yellow duft of Buchu : her face, which fhone like the polifhed ebony, was beautifully varied with fpots of red earth, and appeared like the fable curtain of the night befpangled with ftars: fhe fprinkled her limbs with wood-afhes, and perfumed them with the dung of the Stinkbingfem. Her arms and legs were entwined with the fhining entrails of an heifer : from her neck there hung a pouch compofed of the ftomach of a kid : the wings of an oftrich overfhadowed the flefhy promontories behind ; and before fhe wore an apron formed of the fhaggy ears of a lion.
The Chiefs of the feveral Kraals, who were fummoned to affift at their nuptials, formed a circle on the ground, fitting upon their heels, and bowing their heads between their knees in token of reverence. In the centre the illuftrious prince with his fable bride repofed upon foft cufhions of cow-dung. Then the Surri or Chief Prieft approached them, and in a deep voice chaunted the nuptial rites to the melodious grumbling of the Gom-Gom; and at the fame time ( according to the manner of Caffraria ) bedewed them plentifully with the urinary benediction. The bride and bridegroom rubbed in the precious ftream with extafy ; while the briny drops trickled from their bodies, like the oozy furge from the rocks of Chirigriqua.
The Hottentots had feen the increafe and wane of two moons fince the happy union of Tquaffouw and Knonmquaiha, when the Kraals were furprifed wiih the appearance of a moft extraordinary perfonage, that came from the favage people who rofe from the fea, and had lately fixed themfelves on the borders of Caffraria. His body was enwrapped with ftrange coverings, which concealed every part from fight, except his face and hands. Upon his fkin the fun darted his fcorching rays in vain, and the colour of it was pale and wan as the watry beams of the moon. His hair, which he could put on and take off at pleafure, was white as the bloffoms of the almond tree, and bufhy as the fleece of the ram. His lips and cheeks refembled the red oker, and his nofe was fharpened like the beak of an eagle. His language, which was rough and inarticulate, was as the language of beafts ; nor could Tquaffouw difcover his meaning, till an Hottentot ( who at the firft coming of thefe people had been taken prifoner, and had afterwards made his efcape ) interpreted between them. This interpreter informed the prince, that the ftranger was fent from, his fellow countrymen to treat about the enlargement of their territories, and that he was called, among them, Mynheer Van Snickerfnee.
Tquaffouw, who was remarkable for his humanity, treated the favage with extraordinary benevolence. He fpread a mantle of fheep-fkins, anointed with fat, for his bed ; and for his food he boiled in their own blood the tripes of the fatteft herds, that grazed in the rich paftures of the Heykoms. The ftranger in return inftructed the prince in the manners of the favages, and often amufed him with fending fire from an hollow engine, which rent the air with thunder. Nor was he lefs ftudious to pleafe the gentle Knonmquaiha. He bound bracelets of polifhed metal about her arms, and encircled her neck with beads of glafs: he filled the cocoa fhell with a delicious liquor, and gave it her to drink, which exhilarated her heart, and made her eyes fparkle with joy : he alfo taught her to kindle fire through a tube of clay with the dried leaves of Dacha, and to fend forth rolls of odorous fmoke from her mouth. After having fojourned in the Kraals for the fpace of half a moon, the ftranger was difmiffed with magnificent prefents of the teeth of elephants; and a grant was made to his countrymen of the fertile meadows of Kochequa, and the forefts of Stinkwood bounded by the Palamite river.
Tquaffouw and Knonmquaiha continued to live together in the moft cordial affedtion ; and the Surris every night invoked the great Gounja Ticquoa, who illuminates the moon, that he would give an heir to the race of N’oh and Hingn’oh. The princefs at length manifefted the happy tokens of pregnancy ; while her waift encreafed daily in circumference, and fwelled like the gourd. When the time of her delivery approached, fhe was committed to the care of the Wife Women, who placed her on a couch of the reeking entrails of a cow newly flain, and to facilitate the birth gave her a potion of the milk of wild affes, and fomented her loins with the warm dung of elephants. When the throes of child-birth came on, a terrible hurricane howled along the coaft, the air bellowed with thunder, and the face of the moon was obfcured as with a veil. The Kraal echoed with fhrieks and lamentations, and the Wife Women cried out, that the princefs was delivered of a Monfter.
The offspring of her womb was white.—— They took the child, and wafhed him with the juice of aloes: they expofed his limbs to the fun, anointed them with the fat, and rubbed them with the excrement of black bulls : but his fkin ftill retained it’s detefted hue, and the child was ftill white. The venerable Surris were affembled to deliberate on the caufe of this prodigy ; and they unanimoufly pronounced, that it was owing to the evil machinations of the Daemon Cham-ouna, who had practifed on the virtue of the princefs under the appearance of Mynheer Van Snickerfnee.
The inceftuous parent and her unnatural offspring were judged unworthy to live. They bowed a branch of an olive tree in the foreft of lions, on which the white monfter was fufpended by the heels ; and ravenous beafts feafted on the iffue of Knonmquaiha. The princefs herfelf was fentenced to the fevere punifhment allotted to the heinous crime of adultery. The Kouquequas, who fcarce twelve moons before had met to celebrate her nuptials, were now fummoned to affift at her unhappy death. They were collected in a circle, each of them wielding an huge club of cripple-wood. The beauteous criminal ftood weeping in the midft of them, prepared to receive the firft blow from the hand of her injured hufband. Tquaffouw in vain affayed to perform the fad office : thrice he uplifted his ponderous mace of iron, and thrice dropt it ineffectual on the ground. At length from his reluctant arm defcended the fell ftroke, which lighted on that nofe, whofe flatnefs and expanfion had firft captivated his heart. The Kouquequas then rufhing in, with their clubs redoubled their blows on her body, till the pounded Knonmquaiha lay as an heap of mud, which the retiring flood leaves on the ftrand.
Her battered limbs, now without form and diftinction, were enclosed in the paunch of a rhinoceros, which was faftened to the point of a bearded arrow, and fhot into the ocean. Tquaffouw remained inconfolable for her lofs : he frequently climbed the lofty cliffs of Chirigriqua, and caft his eyes on the watry expanfe. One night, as he ftood howling with the wolves to the moon, he defcried the paunch that contained the precious relicks of Knonmquaiha, dancing on a wave, and floating towards him. Thrice he cried out with a lamentable voice, Bo, Bo, Bo : then fpringing from the cliff, he darted like the eagle foufing on his prey. The paunch burft afunder beneath his weight: the green wave was difcoloured with the gore ; and Tquaffouw was inveloped in the mafs. He was heard of no more ; and it was believed by the people, who remained ignorant of his cataftrophe, that he was fnatched up into the moon.
The fate of this unhappy pair is recorded among the nations of the Hottentots to this day ; and their marriage rites have ever fince concluded with a wifh, “That the hufband may be happier than Tquaffouw, and the wife more chafte than Knonmquaiha.”
The cold of those white Siberian nights with a pale, sickly gleam by which you could read, pierced us through and through. The prisoners, inadequately nourished by hot water, went below decks to sleep off the hunger which was becoming ever more acute.
A draft of women convicts was separated from us only by a thin wooden wall made of planks. Behind it were a few score of thieves, prostitutes and other assorted criminals: Russian, Ukrainian, Cossack, Tartar and Azerbaijan. Locked up in such close proximity to the men prisoners, they were yet more restless than the latter. Their long sojourn in captivity had affected them quite differently: more than food and sleep, they desired men.
One of the planks dividing us was soon prised free and a woman crawled through the opening, to find herself amid rows of men, lying one beside the other, like brown loaves on a baker’s shelf. We heard no affectionate exchanges, but a few heavy sighs, quickened breathing and a hasty struggle followed by a moment of silence while one lover changed places with the next. This scene caused no undue commotion. The barge was wrapped in darkness, many of the men were sound asleep, totally unaware of the amorous delights available, and the woman, moreover, was dressed no differently from the men. This daring escapade might well have passed unnoticed by the authorities had it not been for the malice of man. Someone whose moral susceptibilities were above average or who, perhaps, was himself incapable of such amorous pursuits, ran off to report. We heard the rapid tread of army boots and in rushed the soldiers who, obviously well directed, made straight for the scene of the crime. They caught hold of a man by the neck and flung him on the floor thus revealing the girl. She betrayed no fear. She was a street-walker. That was what had brought her to prison, to trial and now to Siberia. Nothing worse could befall her.
A soldier grabbed hold of her legs and started to pull her, but she was perfectly willing to go of her own accord, which she did with an impudent smile of triumph. What could they do to her ? But the authorities were well able to deal with the case.
With the soldier as escort the girl set off in the direction of the ladder, parading between the rows of men who surveyed her with regretful longing — sorry to see her leave so soon. She was taken up on deck and there ordered by the soldier to remove her padded jacket, her blouse, a sweater in shreds and her vest. Thus stripped, she was placed in the bow and made to face up-river. She was going to freeze, so that she might cool down a little.
In the grey, misty silence of the Arctic, the half-naked woman with her shameless smile and hair streaming in the wind, the full, white flagons of her breasts thrust proudly forward, seemed to challenge the forest deities lurking in the tundra, slowly gliding towards her.
Behind the girl stood a soldier, silent, sullen and indifferent. He was not a man, not even a male with whom she could go. With bayonet levelled at the girl’s bare back he stood there motionless, as though carved out of wood. The punishment lasted one hour, and the frozen girl had hardly gathered up her clothing to go below when another woman was sent up to take her place on that unusual pillory.
For sentimental reasons, the Lancastrian usurper PKing Henry V is somehow excused for ordering prisoners killed at Agincourt — even in the following civil wars affecting parts of England during the rest of the century, caused by his verminous House’s illegal seizure, this would only happen to prisoners of high enough status to merit expungement — however, although England has actually had more monarchs who were usurping thieves than legitimate rulers, this little fellow may well be in the top three for unpleasantness: a snivelling pious puritan who majored in self-righteousness and slaughtered as freely as any serial killer for pointless aggrandizement.
Usually however it’s considered a bêtise to slay the surrendered — the Aussie furore on behalf of Breaker Morant and his mates being shot for so doing may be charitably ascribed to pitiful anti-Pom nationalism rather than condoning his shooting of captives.
After the invasion of Russia in 1941 the Germans, partially through luck and partially through skill were rewarded with hundreds of thousands of prisoners: partially through immediate inability and partially through ideological imperative a large proportion of the 5-6 million soviet POWs were starved to death in a crime worse than the labour-camps. This had a precedent ( apart from the fact that 85% of German POWs died in the camps that Stalin kept for his own people, and anyone else he could collect… ):
In the evening of the long day, as the imperial column was approaching Gzhatsk, we were surprised to find a number of dead Russians, still warm, on the road in front of us. We noticed that their heads had all been shattered in the same manner, and that their brains were scattered about. We knew that two thousand Russian prisoners had gone before us under the escort of Spanish, Portuguese, and Polish troops. Some of our generals greeted this with indifference, others with indignation, still others with approval.
…
…but the next day those murders had stopped. After that we simply let our unfortunate prisoners die of hunger in the enclosures where we penned them up for the night, like cattle. This was doubtless an atrocity; but what were we to do ? Exchange them ? The enemy refused to consider it. Set them free ? They would have spread the news of our destitute condition far and wide, and soon would have joined up with others and returned to dog our steps. In this war to the death we should have sacrificed ourselves in letting them live. We were cruel by necessity. The evil lay in the fact that we had got ourselves in a position where we were faced with such a terrible alternative.
Count Philippe-Paul de Ségur : Napoleon’s Russian Campaign
These important changes in the social role of women ought to be considered alongside the 1978 amendments to the Code of Personal Status introduced by the Ba˘th. The preamble states that the new code is based on “the principles of the Islamic shari˘a [ Islamic law ], but only those that are suited to the spirit of today.” The break with tradition as it affected women occurred in two important areas: first, authority was given to a state-appointed judge to overrule the wishes of the father in the case of early marriages; second, the new legislation nullified forced marriages and severely curtailed the traditional panoply of rights held over women by the men of the larger kinship group ( uncles, cousins, and so on ). The intent of the legislation as a whole was to diminish the power of the patriarchal family, and separate out the nuclear family from the larger kinship group whose hold over the lives of women was considerably weakened.
… In general, wherever women were clearly being involved in new areas of decision making, these were explicitly formulated as pertaining somehow to their sex ( not their individual personhood ) and simultaneously “politicized” to a remarkably unnecessary extent. The only way in which the “popular committees” could function is as pressuring agencies, forcing couples to conform to whatever outcome the party line deemed suitable. The facts of the case, the letter of the law, and the “rights” of everyone concerned are shunted aside in such arrangements. In addition whenever traditional male rights over women were weakened or abolished, the state adopted this role, acting “on behalf of” the female sex, not upgrading the status of women as individuals who were being discriminated against because of their sex.
… The Ba˘thi measures must not be exaggerated. No social group, least of all Iraqi women, was exerting pressure on them. But by choosing a particular “style” of legislating on this issue, they reveal how they think when not being boxed into a corner by the “contradictory demands of modernization and development and those of ‘cultural authenticity.’”
… Ba˘thist ideals, tied up as they are with the Ba˘thist view of the Islamic experience, provide the ultimate source of authority and the final test for what is justified. Even the power of the Leader is derivative from these ideals, and all sources of authority outside them threaten the Ba˘th. It rankles to have fathers, brothers, uncles, and cousins, all lined up to exert varying degrees of real power and control over half of the Iraqi population. Thus, if a new loyalty to the Leader, the party, and the state is to form, women must be “freed” from the loyalties that traditionally bound them to their husbands and male kin. This was the essential purpose of the 1978 legislation on Personal Status, which diminished the power of the patriarchal family. Therefore, women, ( like children, as we have seen ) gain somewhat in status in relation to these particular groups of men, only what they must lose in freedom to the Ba˘th. Politically, the appropriate imagery is once again that provided by Saddam Husain of the child informer.
Samir Al-Khalil : Republic of Fear — Saddam’s Iraq
Actually, the Invasion, and imperialist imposition of a new regime over there has rather nullified most of the Ba’athist sexual equality measures, leading to the restoration of the traditional opportunities for muslim women. The joy of the above passages relate to the fact that feminism, like other ploys, was merely a means for the revolutionary state to shatter opposition and tighten control. As has happened here also.
Whether either Saddam’s pro-feminism or the new lot’s older ways were better should be regarded as a deep question, involving the various alleged rights of plenty of differing and utterly disparate groups; the rights of imperialist conquest; the rights of indigenous peoples; questions of religion and questions of culture, that can best be answered by ‘Meh, who cares ?‘
Nonetheless, the sort of people who go around looking wise, and pontificating: ‘Only Time will provide an answer.‘ are in rare luck.
