Month: March 2025

Two Dictators

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Each views the existing dispensation with contempt, and looks back on a mainly imaginary past, and a wholly imaginary future.

Each counts himself and his nation as a victim.

Each has suffered a crushing loss either personally or by the nation.  ‘Never again.’  Each reacts by denying the loss or inventing reasons for which it must be avenged.  In one sense, each wants to replay events leading to the downfall to produce a different result. 

Both can look at their lives as a struggle against the forces of darkness.  Each is therefore the archetype of a hero.  If either knew who Tolkien was, he would have asked that myth maker to write his story.

Each claims the power to diagnose the cause of his suffering and that of his nation. 

Each claims to have the answer.

Neither has any time for middle ground.

Those they accuse are enemies of the nation.

Each brings a self-righteousness that is nauseating to others.

A savage and vengeful bully lies close to the front of each that sometimes drops.  His whole life is a charade.

Neither has any sense of shame.  Each is shameless.

Each bully has no trouble in finding a weak minority to beat up as scapegoat.

Each claims that by taking revenge on the enemy, he can restore the nation to its greatness.   But both are addicted to and feed off conflict in a way that reminds others of Napoleon’s addiction to la guerre éternelle.  They look like Ponzi schemes of conquest.

Each exploits the envy felt by those who have not done so well for those who have.  Envy, as Othello learned, is a killer. 

And God help any minority whose members are seen to do better than the locals, and who threaten to challenge the established order.  Some are left with only their bare civic standing to barter with, and to lose that is to lose all.

The revenge of each is very personal.

Each is capable of cruelty for its own sake.

The character of each is fixed early, and his upbringing left no capacity for honest inquiry of himself.

Although hungry for power and acceptance, each fears inferiority and resorts to fantasy – a denial of reality.

Each is a showman – is there anything else? – but the Internet carries more clout than a torch-lit parade.

Each has an unerring feel for the parochial and the nativist – the gutter.

Each brings to his followers the ultimate gift of deliverance from the insecurity of doubt.

Each therefore raises a serious question about the upbringing or education of his followers – although it is very unwise for others to raise this issue.

Neither has any friends.  Their ego leaves no room in their psyche for friends.  When the end comes, they may stand alone.

God is obviously quite out of the question.

For similar reasons, neither marries well.  Love is not in the vocabulary.

Because neither cares for other people, each gambles recklessly with the lives of others.  If he goes down, he will take as many with him as possible.  (His Grace the Duke of Wellington correctly identified Napoleon as being guilty of this failing.)

But although each gambles with the lives of others, each is terrified of failing – and refuses to acknowledge it when it happens.

Each has had brushes with the law that he seeks to paint in his favour.  The prevailing faith in the community was premised on the life and teaching of a man subjected to the most gruesome form of capital punishment.  He was a humble man who crossed the old regime. 

Neither could ever be accused of humility.  Each subscribes to his own cult.

Each has devoted cult like followers, but the rest of the nation has trouble taking most of it seriously.  They regard the message and the messenger as fantasy – and banal fantasy at that.

Each is surrounded by toadies who from fear or ambition or both are too scared to contradict their leader.  They betray their obligation to the nation, and they feed the already enlarged ego of the man appointed by destiny.

The press of course is brought to heel, and the judges are too.  They get stacked or sacked in any event.

Each understands that the dictator must make all those around him complicit in what the regime is doing. 

Their loyalty is personal to him – not to the nation.  This is fundamental, and commonly fatal to the nation – and to those who pledge their civic faith.

Each sees the world as he wants to see it.  Each shows all the signs of having been spoiled and pampered as a child,  And that is another ground for saying the claim of victimhood is moonshine.

Each knows that if you are going to lie, and you most certainly are, you lie greatly.

Each relishes chaos – he remains the center of attention.  If he happens to drop from view, he behaves like a baby throwing toys out of the cot. 

Neither can accept being left in a room alone.

Each loves the sound of his own voice.

Each has many fronts, but is capable of an arrogant humility.

The result is that those who oppose the dictators do not understand them and are reviled by them.  The new man is treated with disbelief and scorn, but that only fires up him and his supporters.  (And what, in any event, is ‘reality’?  What did reality ever do for you?)

Each claims to be a patriot, but each also ruthlessly attacks the nation insofar as it was or is outside his power.  L’état c’est moi.  This is just one of those spellbinding contradictions in terms in which he revels. 

Neither has had the time or inclination to acquire any real learning – or taste.  Each is utterly tasteless, and civilized people would be uncomfortable having them in their home.

Each has low intelligence and no conscience.  Each is a moral cripple.

But that want of general intelligence does not prevent either from sensing the taste of the gutter, or an instinct for the weak spots of their enemy.  Someone said of that instinct that it was a handy gift for a politician, but ‘had less in common with the eye of the eagle than with the nose of the vulture.’

Only one is a coward.

In the end, the old regime starts to fall apart, and the center cannot hold.  As Yeats further said, the best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity.  Chaos takes the place of fantasy, and each dictator trades on chaos.

What is essential is that neither lives in this world.  There is more to this than egomania.  Each lives in a world of his own.  As someone remarked of one of them: ‘He does not really exist – he is only the noise he makes.’

But his raison d’être is simple.  He is the hero who will save the nation and raise it to its rightful triumph.

Above all, each is heartless.  I am myself alone.  Et praeteria nihil.  (And in addition, nothing.)

Well, then, both the fantasy and the chaos in their worlds seem to us so banal.  We might look at what that observation entails.

The word ‘banal’ comes from France – curiously, a banalité was one of those feudal obligations that led the peasants to burn down chateaux during the French Revolution.  The dictionary says that ‘banal’ means ‘trite, trivial, or commonplace’, but there is often a suggestion of emptiness or hollowness behind feigned or usurped importance that is pejorative.  This may have been behind the observation in Fowler’sModern English Usage that ‘we should confine banal and banality, since we cannot get rid of them, to occasions when we want to express a contempt deeper than any of the English words can convey.’

Hannah Arendt had as penetrating an intellect as I know of in the realm of political philosophy.  She wrote a book called Eichmann in Jerusalem, A Report on the Banality of Evil.  She explained the sub-title as follows:

When I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to the phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial.  Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing could have been further from his mind than to determine with Richard III ‘to prove a villain’.  Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all.  And this diligence in itself was in no way criminal; he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post.  He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realised what he was doing……He was not stupid.  It was sheer thoughtlessness – something by no means identical with stupidity – that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period.  And if this is ‘banal’, and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, that is still far from calling it commonplace.

These observations derive from intellectual integrity, and they are of great moment.  Arendt had previously said to the same effect: ‘The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were and still are terribly and terrifyingly normal.’ 

Eichmann was no devil or demon; he was just human, and the trouble for us is that he was ‘terribly and terrifyingly normal’.  Those who do not accept that Eichmann was just human, and that there is a little of Eichmann in all of us, are seeking to impose some kind of grid or cattle pen over humanity and are at risk of falling into the error that fed the derangement of people like Stalin or Franco or Mussolini.

We might here note the matter of fact assessment of the American historian R R Palmer on Carrier, the man who drowned priests by the boat load in the Vendée during the Revolution, and after being at first applauded, was later guillotined for what we would now describe as war crimes.

Carrier, it may safely be said, was a normal man with average sensibilities, with no unusual intelligence or strength of character, driven wild by opposition, turning ruthless because ruthlessness seemed to be the easiest way of solving a difficult problem.

As Arendt said of Eichmann, ‘it was sheer thoughtlessness…that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period.’

It is in the French Revolution more than under twentieth century dictators that we see people with little or no prior experience of government trying both to govern and to lay down a system of government, each of which tasks was beyond most if not all of them. 

These tasks require more than a lifetime of experience – they require generations of history and experience, centuries even.  It is here in France during the revolution that we see ordinary people placed in a whole new world doing their best in good faith to stare down chaos and the void, and just getting slowly more out of their depth until they run out air. 

We see this all the time.  If you have any experience with what we now call risk management, you will know that your biggest worry is the functionary who is getting out of their depth and either does not see that, or is incapable of admitting it.

In any revolution, you can normally back three horses.  First, jealousy fairly shrieks its venom.  Secondly, the scum rises to the surface, as if by an iron law of motion.  (The world’s losers are the most vengeful.)  Thirdly, self-interest usually prevails.  And those at the bottom live in terror of the heavyweights leaving them to hang out and dry when the carousel comes to a stop – as it must.  Their ultimate fear is replacement. 

These are simple, obvious facts of life, but historians tend to forget that most humans are just that – ordinary human beings – when they consider how some of them reacted when the volcano that was France erupted.  When looking back on how events unfolded, with the curse of ignorance and the false hope of hindsight, we may not be surprised to see that some ordinary people did some things that they would do very differently if they had their time again.  There was no procedure or manual telling Robespierre how he might react: the script had not been written because no one had seen anything remotely like it before.  And we might also remember that if the French could at least look back on the experiences of both England and America in their revolutions, the Russians had the benefit of the lot, and made a worse mess than anyone.

There is another term that is useful in dealing with people who are sleight of hand.  Here is Brewer on mountebank:

A vendor of quack medicines at fairs…who attracts the crowd by his tricks and antics; hence any charlatan or self-advertising pretender.  The bank, or bench, was the counter on which traders displayed their goods, and street vendors used to mount on their bank to patter to the public.

There is a big gap in time between Commedia dell’arte and Mussolini, but they have so much in common.  And it is all there in MAGA.

Well, in my lifetime, the Germans and the world learned lessons from Hell.  We have no idea what may unfold as the United States falls apart before our eyes.  Who can say?  Who in the name of God could have predicted that in my lifetime, thousands of Jewish people would choose to live in Germany rather than Israel?

Two Dictators

Each views the existing dispensation with contempt, and looks back on a mainly imaginary past, and a wholly imaginary future.

Each counts himself and his nation as a victim.

Each has suffered a crushing loss either personally or by the nation.  ‘Never again.’  Each reacts by denying the loss or inventing reasons for which it must be avenged.  In one sense, each wants to replay events leading to the downfall to produce a different result. 

Both can look at their lives as a struggle against the forces of darkness.  Each is therefore the archetype of a hero.  If either knew who Tolkien was, he would have asked that myth maker to write his story.

Each claims the power to diagnose the cause of his suffering and that of his nation. 

Each claims to have the answer.

Neither has any time for middle ground.

Those they accuse are enemies of the nation.

Each brings a self-righteousness that is nauseating to others.

A savage and vengeful bully lies close to the front of each that sometimes drops.  His whole life is a charade.

Neither has any sense of shame.  Each is shameless.

Each bully has no trouble in finding a weak minority to beat up as scapegoat.

Each claims that by taking revenge on the enemy, he can restore the nation to its greatness.   But both are addicted to and feed off conflict in a way that reminds others of Napoleon’s addiction to la guerre éternelle.  They look like Ponzi schemes of conquest.

Each exploits the envy felt by those who have not done so well for those who have.  Envy, as Othello learned, is a killer. 

And God help any minority whose members are seen to do better than the locals, and who threaten to challenge the established order.  Some are left with only their bare civic standing to barter with, and to lose that is to lose all.

The revenge of each is very personal.

Each is capable of cruelty for its own sake.

The character of each is fixed early, and his upbringing left no capacity for honest inquiry of himself.

Although hungry for power and acceptance, each fears inferiority and resorts to fantasy – a denial of reality.

Each is a showman – is there anything else? – but the Internet carries more clout than a torch-lit parade.

Each has an unerring feel for the parochial and the nativist – the gutter.

Each brings to his followers the ultimate gift of deliverance from the insecurity of doubt.

Each therefore raises a serious question about the upbringing or education of his followers – although it is very unwise for others to raise this issue.

Neither has any friends.  Their ego leaves no room in their psyche for friends.  When the end comes, they may stand alone.

God is obviously quite out of the question.

For similar reasons, neither marries well.  Love is not in the vocabulary.

Because neither cares for other people, each gambles recklessly with the lives of others.  If he goes down, he will take as many with him as possible.  (His Grace the Duke of Wellington correctly identified Napoleon as being guilty of this failing.)

But although each gambles with the lives of others, each is terrified of failing – and refuses to acknowledge it when it happens.

Each has had brushes with the law that he seeks to paint in his favour.  The prevailing faith in the community was premised on the life and teaching of a man subjected to the most gruesome form of capital punishment.  He was a humble man who crossed the old regime. 

Neither could ever be accused of humility.  Each subscribes to his own cult.

Each has devoted cult like followers, but the rest of the nation has trouble taking most of it seriously.  They regard the message and the messenger as fantasy – and banal fantasy at that.

Each is surrounded by toadies who from fear or ambition or both are too scared to contradict their leader.  They betray their obligation to the nation, and they feed the already enlarged ego of the man appointed by destiny.

The press of course is brought to heel, and the judges are too.  They get stacked or sacked in any event.

Each understands that the dictator must make all those around him complicit in what the regime is doing. 

Their loyalty is personal to him – not to the nation.  This is fundamental, and commonly fatal to the nation – and to those who pledge their civic faith.

Each sees the world as he wants to see it.  Each shows all the signs of having been spoiled and pampered as a child,  And that is another ground for saying the claim of victimhood is moonshine.

Each knows that if you are going to lie, and you most certainly are, you lie greatly.

Each relishes chaos – he remains the center of attention.  If he happens to drop from view, he behaves like a baby throwing toys out of the cot. 

Neither can accept being left in a room alone.

Each loves the sound of his own voice.

Each has many fronts, but is capable of an arrogant humility.

The result is that those who oppose the dictators do not understand them and are reviled by them.  The new man is treated with disbelief and scorn, but that only fires up him and his supporters.  (And what, in any event, is ‘reality’?  What did reality ever do for you?)

Each claims to be a patriot, but each also ruthlessly attacks the nation insofar as it was or is outside his power.  L’état c’est moi.  This is just one of those spellbinding contradictions in terms in which he revels. 

Neither has had the time or inclination to acquire any real learning – or taste.  Each is utterly tasteless, and civilized people would be uncomfortable having them in their home.

Each has low intelligence and no conscience.  Each is a moral cripple.

But that want of general intelligence does not prevent either from sensing the taste of the gutter, or an instinct for the weak spots of their enemy.  Someone said of that instinct that it was a handy gift for a politician, but ‘had less in common with the eye of the eagle than with the nose of the vulture.’

Only one is a coward.

In the end, the old regime starts to fall apart, and the center cannot hold.  As Yeats further said, the best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity.  Chaos takes the place of fantasy, and each dictator trades on chaos.

What is essential is that neither lives in this world.  There is more to this than egomania.  Each lives in a world of his own.  As someone remarked of one of them: ‘He does not really exist – he is only the noise he makes.’

But his raison d’être is simple.  He is the hero who will save the nation and raise it to its rightful triumph.

Above all, each is heartless.  I am myself alone.  Et praeteria nihil.  (And in addition, nothing.)

Well, then, both the fantasy and the chaos in their worlds seem to us so banal.  We might look at what that observation entails.

The word ‘banal’ comes from France – curiously, a banalité was one of those feudal obligations that led the peasants to burn down chateaux during the French Revolution.  The dictionary says that ‘banal’ means ‘trite, trivial, or commonplace’, but there is often a suggestion of emptiness or hollowness behind feigned or usurped importance that is pejorative.  This may have been behind the observation in Fowler’sModern English Usage that ‘we should confine banal and banality, since we cannot get rid of them, to occasions when we want to express a contempt deeper than any of the English words can convey.’

Hannah Arendt had as penetrating an intellect as I know of in the realm of political philosophy.  She wrote a book called Eichmann in Jerusalem, A Report on the Banality of Evil.  She explained the sub-title as follows:

When I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to the phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial.  Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing could have been further from his mind than to determine with Richard III ‘to prove a villain’.  Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all.  And this diligence in itself was in no way criminal; he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post.  He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realised what he was doing……He was not stupid.  It was sheer thoughtlessness – something by no means identical with stupidity – that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period.  And if this is ‘banal’, and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, that is still far from calling it commonplace.

These observations derive from intellectual integrity, and they are of great moment.  Arendt had previously said to the same effect: ‘The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were and still are terribly and terrifyingly normal.’ 

Eichmann was no devil or demon; he was just human, and the trouble for us is that he was ‘terribly and terrifyingly normal’.  Those who do not accept that Eichmann was just human, and that there is a little of Eichmann in all of us, are seeking to impose some kind of grid or cattle pen over humanity and are at risk of falling into the error that fed the derangement of people like Stalin or Franco or Mussolini.

We might here note the matter of fact assessment of the American historian R R Palmer on Carrier, the man who drowned priests by the boat load in the Vendée during the Revolution, and after being at first applauded, was later guillotined for what we would now describe as war crimes.

Carrier, it may safely be said, was a normal man with average sensibilities, with no unusual intelligence or strength of character, driven wild by opposition, turning ruthless because ruthlessness seemed to be the easiest way of solving a difficult problem.

As Arendt said of Eichmann, ‘it was sheer thoughtlessness…that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period.’

It is in the French Revolution more than under twentieth century dictators that we see people with little or no prior experience of government trying both to govern and to lay down a system of government, each of which tasks was beyond most if not all of them. 

These tasks require more than a lifetime of experience – they require generations of history and experience, centuries even.  It is here in France during the revolution that we see ordinary people placed in a whole new world doing their best in good faith to stare down chaos and the void, and just getting slowly more out of their depth until they run out air. 

We see this all the time.  If you have any experience with what we now call risk management, you will know that your biggest worry is the functionary who is getting out of their depth and either does not see that, or is incapable of admitting it.

In any revolution, you can normally back three horses.  First, jealousy fairly shrieks its venom.  Secondly, the scum rises to the surface, as if by an iron law of motion.  (The world’s losers are the most vengeful.)  Thirdly, self-interest usually prevails.  And those at the bottom live in terror of the heavyweights leaving them to hang out and dry when the carousel comes to a stop – as it must.  Their ultimate fear is replacement. 

These are simple, obvious facts of life, but historians tend to forget that most humans are just that – ordinary human beings – when they consider how some of them reacted when the volcano that was France erupted.  When looking back on how events unfolded, with the curse of ignorance and the false hope of hindsight, we may not be surprised to see that some ordinary people did some things that they would do very differently if they had their time again.  There was no procedure or manual telling Robespierre how he might react: the script had not been written because no one had seen anything remotely like it before.  And we might also remember that if the French could at least look back on the experiences of both England and America in their revolutions, the Russians had the benefit of the lot, and made a worse mess than anyone.

There is another term that is useful in dealing with people who are sleight of hand.  Here is Brewer on mountebank:

A vendor of quack medicines at fairs…who attracts the crowd by his tricks and antics; hence any charlatan or self-advertising pretender.  The bank, or bench, was the counter on which traders displayed their goods, and street vendors used to mount on their bank to patter to the public.

There is a big gap in time between Commedia dell’arte and Mussolini, but they have so much in common.  And it is all there in MAGA.

Well, in my lifetime, the Germans and the world learned lessons from Hell.  We have no idea what may unfold as the United States falls apart before our eyes.  Who can say?  Who in the name of God could have predicted that in my lifetime, thousands of Jewish people would choose to live in Germany rather than Israel?

Dealing with nobody

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

If you study philosophy at university, you will soon come to Descartes – Cogito, ergo sum.  I think, therefore I am.  It may take some time for you to grapple with this.  (A Japanese T-shirt maker has come up with a variant: ‘I do not think.  Therefore, I do not exist.’  That appeals to me greatly.  As it should to a lot of our politicians.) 

You will have even more trouble with the Ontological Argument for the existence of God, and Kant’s celebrated refutation of it – ‘existence is not a predicate’. 

But you will not have to worry about any of this if someone asks you to deal with someone who does not exist.  They must be mad.

As I understand it, Russia by Putin denies the right of Ukraine to exist as a separate nation.  The Russians have invaded the territory called Ukraine on the footing that the nation of Ukraine is a fiction.  How can they negotiate with an entity that does not in their eyes exist?  More, how can the US ask Russia to negotiate with something that does not exist?

And more again, how can the US purport to negotiate with Russia behind the back of Ukraine – by denying the right of Ukraine to be present at the negotiation?

Are we at the position where there may be a vacancy at either end of the table?

Gaza does not exist as a separate nation according to international law.  Hamas claims to represent its people by means beyond my understanding.  But Hamas denies the right of the State of Israel to exist.  Those factors obviously constrain Israel in any dealings with Hamas.  Israel is certainly right to say that Gaza has no standing as a national polity.

Imagine the following.  The U S tells Netanyahu that Israel must negotiate with Hamas about Gaza.  And then tells him that if he does not bend to their will, they will negotiate with Hamas, and Israel will not be a party to the negotiations.

There is a song from my childhood that keeps coming back to me.  ‘A wise man builds his house upon the rock.’  The others are fools – at best.

Passing Bull 403 – Another unpublished letter

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Dear Editor,

Trump v Zelensky,

If I see a woman being attacked by a known criminal, and I can stop the rape, is it in order for me to ask her to hand over her diamond necklace before I do so?  I am after all a busy man of business, and she does not hold good cards.  In fact, if she refuses my offer, should I ask her to apologise publicly for being disrespectful?

Yours truly

Geoffrey Gibson

Yarraville, Victoria, Australia

Comparative grievances

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Donald Trump may be the most aggrieved person in the world – although you may think that is par for the course for a spoiled child and lousy golfer who cannot get his way.  Trump thinks Putin is another victim – Vladimir, he says, went through hell, too.  It is curious that two of the most powerful and loathed people on the planet are so insecure.

Take two sorts of person who have been reviled down the centuries – gays and gypsies (who all came under notice with the Nazis).  Which has suffered more?  The question is absurd and unanswerable.  You may as well ask whether Bradman was as good as Babe Ruth, or whether Carlton is as strong a football club as Collingwood.  Even God might draw the line at answering that question.

Yet, a very fine article by Waleed Aly in The Age says some people prominent in our public life, such as it is, are happy to compare the suffering of Jews with that of Muslims arising from racism.

Liberal senator Dave Sharma in December: “Any time any senior minister mentioned antisemitism in the last 12 months, they also mentioned a fictitious Islamophobia which was not going on.”  Lest that be dismissed as an isolated stance, here’s his colleague, Sarah Henderson: “Frankly, there is no issue with Islamophobia”, before adding later, “I really reject any argument that there is some sort of equivalence between antisemitism and any other form of racism, including Islamophobia, at the moment on Australian university campuses, because that is simply not the case.”  This as Muslim and Palestinian students were reporting instances of verbal and physical assault to the Register.  Or here’s Nationals senator Bridget McKenzie: “[The government] seem[s] to think there’s a moral equivalence between Islamophobia and antisemitism [but] there absolutely isn’t. And it needs to be called out.”

The result according to Aly is:

The consequence is the conviction, now deeply entrenched in Muslim Australia, that the country simply doesn’t care about anything that happens to them. That Australia recognises them only as perpetrators, but never as victims.

If Aly is correct in this, those involved, in government or opposition, who have led to this should be deeply ashamed of themselves.

And the frightful irony of their fault is that it shares the vice that is at the bottom of this malady of racism that has marred the earth since the time of the origin of man.  That vice is that it is in order to treat every member of a group that is said to be distinct by breed or faith as marked by a common attribute merely because of events in their shared history.  People are like branded cattle.  This dogma calls to mind that ghastly exceptionalism of the Americans.  ‘My country right or wrong.’

It is a flat denial of the principle of humanity – that each of us has our own worth or dignity arising merely from the fact that we are human.  And you do not have to resort to faith in the supernatural to build a moral code on that principle.

It is trite to say that Australia is a migrant country – our First Nations people would see all white and Asian people here as migrants, and very recent ones at that.  But we have Australians who have connections on both sides of the war in Gaza. 

The tension is not helped by a singular imbalance of political and social clout between them here.  Sir Isaac Isaacs was made Governor-General of Australia in 1931.  We are a long way from seeing a Muslim Australian head of state.  (Of course, under the English constitution, neither could be appointed as the Crown.  At least in that sense they are equal.)

People on both sides are prone to dismiss pleas from those against them as propaganda or, worse, bigotry.  (They might bear in mind that in that infamous Oval Office brawl, Vance accused Zelensky of taking people on ‘propaganda’ tours – of the victims of Putin’ s war crimes.)  Insular vision of imported conflict is a problem for the rest of us.  Two one-eyed people do not make one whole person. 

Most Australians do not care about which God is the more saleable, or which tribal history is the more pathetic.  But we may remind the warriors of the true faith or blood on either side that the more they go to war against each other, the more they court the venom and disease of which they justly complain.

Religion, power, and money – The Comfort of Tawney

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Tawney’s book, noted below, is a source of comfort when politics get me down – which at the moment is every day.  They don’t write like that any more.  Nor do you often get such rude good sense blessedly bereft of footnoted caveats. 

The relations between religion and business and politics are as fraught today as when Tawney wrote – just over a century ago, and it may ease our pain if we look at a sane humanist response.

Tawney saw that the Church was part of the Establishment.  I do not understand how you can build a monolith on one sent to destroy it – who signed his death warrant when he took a lash to the money lenders in the temple.  The Church naturally ‘denounced agitations, like the communal movement, designed to overturn that natural order.’  The great Marc Bloch thought that the commune was one of the great triumphs of the west.  Perhaps the Church thought the commune stole its thunder.  Bloch said:

It was there in the commune that the really revolutionary ferment was to be seen with its violent hostility to a stratified society.  Certainly, these primitive urban groups were in no sense democratic.  The greater bourgeois, who were their real founders and whom the lesser bourgeois were not always eager to follow, were often in their treatment of the poor hard task masters and merciless creditors.  But by substituting for the promise of obedience, paid for by protection, the promise of mutual aid, they contributed to the social life of Europe a new element, profoundly alien to the feudal spirit properly so called.

It was in this context that Tawney made the droll remark referred to in the note below about the aversion of the Church to doctrines impugning the sanctity of wealth.  Are ‘Left Wing’ and the Church contradictions in terms?

Elsewhere, Tawney said:

The prevalent religious thought might not unfairly be described as morality tempered by prudence, and softened on occasion by a rather sentimental compassion for inferiors.

That is as good a description of the English Tory as I have seen.  It is wholly foreign to the US, and beyond those who falsely claim to be ‘conservative’ here.

Puritanism, not the Tudor secession from Rome, was the true English Reformation, and it is from its struggle against the old order that an England which is unmistakably English emerges……  ‘The triumph of Puritanism swept away all traces of any restriction or guidance in the employment of money.’

The author could produce the scalpel.

A society which reverences the attainment of riches as the supreme felicity will naturally be disposed to regard the poor as damned in the next world, if only to justify itself for making their life a hell in this.

So much of this book published in 1926 is so relevant to the US in 2025.  The essential difference between the U S and the U K lies here:

The distinctive note of Puritan teaching was different.  It was individual responsibility, not social obligation.

Roscoe Pound, the great American jurist, said exactly that at that time. 

Tawney saw a ‘philosophy of indifferentism’.

Naturally therefore they formulate the ethical principles of Christianity in terms of a comfortable ambiguity, and rarely indicate with any precision their application to commerce, finance, and the ownership of property.

But is there no limit?

Compromise is impossible between the Church of Christ and the idolatry of wealth, which is the practical religion of capitalist societies…. ‘Modern capitalism’ writes Mr Keynes ‘is absolutely irreligious, without internal union, without much public spirit, often, though not always, a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers.’

All that sounds to me a fair pointer to the mess we are in now.

RELIGION AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM

R H Tawney

John Murray, 1936.  Rebound in quarter blue leather with red title label on boards in fancy paper.

Tolstoy wrote a book – another of his very long books –saying that the main reason for the failure of civilisation was our failure to take seriously the Sermon on the Mount.  Could the British Empire have been erected by applying the Sermon on the Mount?  And how could Wall Street have been built in a pious nation that took seriously those warnings about the problems facing rich men trying to get into heaven?  Indeed, how could capitalism have even got off the ground if charging for the use of money is against the word of God?

This book of Tawney is on the shelf for three reasons.  It deals with those questions.  It shows how wobbly, if not downright silly, the Left/Right and Socialism/Capitalism distinctions are.  And the grace of its writing makes the book a pleasure to read.

To put it softly, tension is inevitable in applying religion to capitalism.  Loving your neighbour may be hard one on one, but is it not impossible when you are engaged in conduct, called competition, which has the predicate of Darwin that it is in order for you to annihilate your neighbour if he fails in the contest? 

We might see the history of the West as the story of the reduction of the impact upon us of the supernatural.  In the beginning, Tawney adopts the suggestion that ‘the secularization of political theory [was] the most momentous of the intellectual changes that ushered in the modern world…. Reason takes the place of revelation, and the criterion of political institutions is expediency, not religious authority…. the appeal to religion is often a decorous drapery for a triumphant materialism.’

We see immediately that when it comes to religion and money, as it does with religion and government, faith-sapping casuistry – argumentation so clever that it just has to be suspect – is not the exclusive preserve of the Church of Rome.  Here, then, is the crunch question of the book: ‘Can religion admit the existence of a sharp antithesis between personal authority and the practices which are permissible in business?’ 

The same question arises for government.

The damnation of lending for interest, or buying and selling for profit, was very serious – as would be Wall Street’s diagnosis of madness today.  In the name of God, the books abound with claims that governments should set prices!  But the Church had a vested interest in protecting property and the class system, so that people like those fanatical Franciscans had to be closely watched lest they may be taken seriously with things that matter – like money.  This leads to a very dry remark by Tawney – ‘doctrines impugning the sanctity of wealth resembled too closely the teaching of Christ to be acceptable to the princes of the Christian Church…. The very essence of feudal property was exploitation in its most naked and shameless form….’  That might sum up the book. 

The most crucial and the most difficult of all political questions is that which turns on the difference between public and private morality…. The prevalent religious thought might not unfairly be described as morality tempered by prudence, and softened on occasion by a rather sentimental compassion for inferiors.

Only an Englishman could have said that.

But were Luther or Calvin any better?

Luther’s utterances on social morality are the occasional explosions of a capricious volcano, with only a rare flash of light amid the torrent of smoke and flame, and it is idle to scan them for a coherent and consistent doctrine…..His sermons and pamphlets on social questions make an impression of naïveté, as of an impetuous but ill-informed genius, dispensing with the cumbrous embarrassments of law and logic, to evolve a system of social ethics from the inspired heat of his own unsophisticated consciousness…..

It was [the] doctrine that all things have their price – future salvation as much as present felicity – which scandalized men who could not be suspected of disloyalty to the Church, and which gave their most powerful argument to the reformers. 

Then there was the cold, inevitable and bloodless discipline of Calvin.

Legalistic, mechanical, without imagination or compassion, the work of a jurist and organiser of genius, Calvin’s system was more Roman than Christian, and more Jewish than either.

That sort of comment might get you into real trouble now, but if Tawney was right about Calvin blessing the middle class, then we might better understand the blank determination of the descendants of the Puritans never to let God come between them and the mighty dollar.  For those people, ‘a creed which transformed the acquisition of wealth from a drudgery or a temptation into a moral duty was the milk of lions.  It was not that religion was expelled from practical life, but that religion itself gave it a foundation of granite.’  And just look at where that has left us. 

For better or worse, they don’t write history like that anymore – large and in the round and with style.  Instead, they have gone the way of the courts, and we get visual graphs and verifiable footnotes, and a timidity dulled by anxiety.  And we miss the relief of insight fed by common sense and simple decency.

In every human soul there is a socialist and an individualist, an authoritarian and a fanatic for liberty, as in each there is a Catholic and a Protestant.  The same is true of the mass movements in which men marshal themselves for common action.

And over there in the land of those who thought that they were free, we see the Antichrist, the most vicious manifestation of capitalism yet seen, reigning above the ‘tedious, stale forbidding ways of custom, law and statute.’  And tourists and locals throng to the Frick Gallery, a monument to grandiosity left in expiation by a baron of capitalism.  There they gaze in awe at a painting by El Greco, the supreme voice of the Counter Reformation.  The painting in the colours of jockeys’ silks is of the luminous Nazarene – the phrase is Einstein’s – taking to the money dealers in the temple with a lash, and he looks like he is doing so to a tune of Mozart.  He is putting an end to lucre’s defiling of the house of God.  And for that, a howling mob had him lynched á la mode by the corrupt stooge of a pagan emperor.  In a straight contest between God and Mammon, the latter generally starts at very short odds.  That may or may not have been how Professor Tawney saw it, but that’s the way it is.

And since Professor Tawney wrote this beautiful book a full generation before the Holocaust, he did not stay to notice the one truly awful consequence of the pussyfooting of the Christians about usury, and their squalid need to find a tribe of disposable scapegoats so that they could pretend that their hands were clean.  The questions that this book poses about capitalism and morality are at least as large now as when Tawney wrote it in 1926.  It comes to us from a different age but in the same world.  It is in the very best tradition of history as literature and we look to be unlikely to get much more of it.  It is my favourite kind of history – history as tone poem

Religion, power, and money – The Comfort of Tawney

Tawney’s book, noted below, is a source of comfort when politics get me down – which at the moment is every day.  They don’t write like that any more.  Nor do you often get such rude good sense blessedly bereft of footnoted caveats. 

The relations between religion and business and politics are as fraught today as when Tawney wrote – just over a century ago, and it may ease our pain if we look at a sane humanist response.

Tawney saw that the Church was part of the Establishment.  I do not understand how you can build a monolith on one sent to destroy it – who signed his death warrant when he took a lash to the money lenders in the temple.  The Church naturally ‘denounced agitations, like the communal movement, designed to overturn that natural order.’  The great Marc Bloch thought that the commune was one of the great triumphs of the west.  Perhaps the Church thought the commune stole its thunder.  Bloch said:

It was there in the commune that the really revolutionary ferment was to be seen with its violent hostility to a stratified society.  Certainly, these primitive urban groups were in no sense democratic.  The greater bourgeois, who were their real founders and whom the lesser bourgeois were not always eager to follow, were often in their treatment of the poor hard task masters and merciless creditors.  But by substituting for the promise of obedience, paid for by protection, the promise of mutual aid, they contributed to the social life of Europe a new element, profoundly alien to the feudal spirit properly so called.

It was in this context that Tawney made the droll remark referred to in the note below about the aversion of the Church to doctrines impugning the sanctity of wealth.  Are ‘Left Wing’ and the Church contradictions in terms?

Elsewhere, Tawney said:

The prevalent religious thought might not unfairly be described as morality tempered by prudence, and softened on occasion by a rather sentimental compassion for inferiors.

That is as good a description of the English Tory as I have seen.  It is wholly foreign to the US, and beyond those who falsely claim to be ‘conservative’ here.

Puritanism, not the Tudor secession from Rome, was the true English Reformation, and it is from its struggle against the old order that an England which is unmistakably English emerges……  ‘The triumph of Puritanism swept away all traces of any restriction or guidance in the employment of money.’

The author could produce the scalpel.

A society which reverences the attainment of riches as the supreme felicity will naturally be disposed to regard the poor as damned in the next world, if only to justify itself for making their life a hell in this.

So much of this book published in 1926 is so relevant to the US in 2025.  The essential difference between the U S and the U K lies here:

The distinctive note of Puritan teaching was different.  It was individual responsibility, not social obligation.

Roscoe Pound, the great American jurist, said exactly that at that time. 

Tawney saw a ‘philosophy of indifferentism’.

Naturally therefore they formulate the ethical principles of Christianity in terms of a comfortable ambiguity, and rarely indicate with any precision their application to commerce, finance, and the ownership of property.

But is there no limit?

Compromise is impossible between the Church of Christ and the idolatry of wealth, which is the practical religion of capitalist societies…. ‘Modern capitalism’ writes Mr Keynes ‘is absolutely irreligious, without internal union, without much public spirit, often, though not always, a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers.’

All that sounds to me a fair pointer to the mess we are in now.

RELIGION AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM

R H Tawney

John Murray, 1936.  Rebound in quarter blue leather with red title label on boards in fancy paper.

Tolstoy wrote a book – another of his very long books –saying that the main reason for the failure of civilisation was our failure to take seriously the Sermon on the Mount.  Could the British Empire have been erected by applying the Sermon on the Mount?  And how could Wall Street have been built in a pious nation that took seriously those warnings about the problems facing rich men trying to get into heaven?  Indeed, how could capitalism have even got off the ground if charging for the use of money is against the word of God?

This book of Tawney is on the shelf for three reasons.  It deals with those questions.  It shows how wobbly, if not downright silly, the Left/Right and Socialism/Capitalism distinctions are.  And the grace of its writing makes the book a pleasure to read.

To put it softly, tension is inevitable in applying religion to capitalism.  Loving your neighbour may be hard one on one, but is it not impossible when you are engaged in conduct, called competition, which has the predicate of Darwin that it is in order for you to annihilate your neighbour if he fails in the contest? 

We might see the history of the West as the story of the reduction of the impact upon us of the supernatural.  In the beginning, Tawney adopts the suggestion that ‘the secularization of political theory [was] the most momentous of the intellectual changes that ushered in the modern world…. Reason takes the place of revelation, and the criterion of political institutions is expediency, not religious authority…. the appeal to religion is often a decorous drapery for a triumphant materialism.’

We see immediately that when it comes to religion and money, as it does with religion and government, faith-sapping casuistry – argumentation so clever that it just has to be suspect – is not the exclusive preserve of the Church of Rome.  Here, then, is the crunch question of the book: ‘Can religion admit the existence of a sharp antithesis between personal authority and the practices which are permissible in business?’ 

The same question arises for government.

The damnation of lending for interest, or buying and selling for profit, was very serious – as would be Wall Street’s diagnosis of madness today.  In the name of God, the books abound with claims that governments should set prices!  But the Church had a vested interest in protecting property and the class system, so that people like those fanatical Franciscans had to be closely watched lest they may be taken seriously with things that matter – like money.  This leads to a very dry remark by Tawney – ‘doctrines impugning the sanctity of wealth resembled too closely the teaching of Christ to be acceptable to the princes of the Christian Church…. The very essence of feudal property was exploitation in its most naked and shameless form….’  That might sum up the book. 

The most crucial and the most difficult of all political questions is that which turns on the difference between public and private morality…. The prevalent religious thought might not unfairly be described as morality tempered by prudence, and softened on occasion by a rather sentimental compassion for inferiors.

Only an Englishman could have said that.

But were Luther or Calvin any better?

Luther’s utterances on social morality are the occasional explosions of a capricious volcano, with only a rare flash of light amid the torrent of smoke and flame, and it is idle to scan them for a coherent and consistent doctrine…..His sermons and pamphlets on social questions make an impression of naïveté, as of an impetuous but ill-informed genius, dispensing with the cumbrous embarrassments of law and logic, to evolve a system of social ethics from the inspired heat of his own unsophisticated consciousness…..

It was [the] doctrine that all things have their price – future salvation as much as present felicity – which scandalized men who could not be suspected of disloyalty to the Church, and which gave their most powerful argument to the reformers. 

Then there was the cold, inevitable and bloodless discipline of Calvin.

Legalistic, mechanical, without imagination or compassion, the work of a jurist and organiser of genius, Calvin’s system was more Roman than Christian, and more Jewish than either.

That sort of comment might get you into real trouble now, but if Tawney was right about Calvin blessing the middle class, then we might better understand the blank determination of the descendants of the Puritans never to let God come between them and the mighty dollar.  For those people, ‘a creed which transformed the acquisition of wealth from a drudgery or a temptation into a moral duty was the milk of lions.  It was not that religion was expelled from practical life, but that religion itself gave it a foundation of granite.’  And just look at where that has left us. 

For better or worse, they don’t write history like that anymore – large and in the round and with style.  Instead, they have gone the way of the courts, and we get visual graphs and verifiable footnotes, and a timidity dulled by anxiety.  And we miss the relief of insight fed by common sense and simple decency.

In every human soul there is a socialist and an individualist, an authoritarian and a fanatic for liberty, as in each there is a Catholic and a Protestant.  The same is true of the mass movements in which men marshal themselves for common action.

And over there in the land of those who thought that they were free, we see the Antichrist, the most vicious manifestation of capitalism yet seen, reigning above the ‘tedious, stale forbidding ways of custom, law and statute.’  And tourists and locals throng to the Frick Gallery, a monument to grandiosity left in expiation by a baron of capitalism.  There they gaze in awe at a painting by El Greco, the supreme voice of the Counter Reformation.  The painting in the colours of jockeys’ silks is of the luminous Nazarene – the phrase is Einstein’s – taking to the money dealers in the temple with a lash, and he looks like he is doing so to a tune of Mozart.  He is putting an end to lucre’s defiling of the house of God.  And for that, a howling mob had him lynched á la mode by the corrupt stooge of a pagan emperor.  In a straight contest between God and Mammon, the latter generally starts at very short odds.  That may or may not have been how Professor Tawney saw it, but that’s the way it is.

And since Professor Tawney wrote this beautiful book a full generation before the Holocaust, he did not stay to notice the one truly awful consequence of the pussyfooting of the Christians about usury, and their squalid need to find a tribe of disposable scapegoats so that they could pretend that their hands were clean.  The questions that this book poses about capitalism and morality are at least as large now as when Tawney wrote it in 1926.  It comes to us from a different age but in the same world.  It is in the very best tradition of history as literature and we look to be unlikely to get much more of it.  It is my favourite kind of history – history as tone poem

Haffner on Hitler

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 1 Comment

Hitler embodied evil.  It is therefore as well to note some symptoms.  The following observations come from The Meaning of Hitler by Sebastian Haffner that is the subject of the note below.

There is no development, no maturing of Hitler’s character and personality.  His character was fixed at an early age – perhaps a better word would be ‘arrested’ – and remains astonishingly consistent; nothing was added to it.  It was not an attractive character.  All soft lovable reconciling traits are missing…. His positive characteristics – resolution, boldness, courage, perseverance – lie all on the ‘hard’ side.  The negative ones even more so: ruthlessness, vindictiveness, faithlessness and cruelty…. a total lack of capacity for self-criticism.  Hitler was all his life exceedingly full of himself and from his earliest to his last days tended to self-conceit……

He did not wish to be the first servant of the state but …. an absolute master.  And he perceived correctly that absolute rule was not possible in an intact state mech anism but only amidst controlled chaos….and he knew how to control it…. A close study of him reveals a trait in him that one might describe as a horror of committing himself, or… anything final.  It seems as though something within him caused him to recoil not only by way of a state system, but also his will by way of a firm set of goals…. As a star performer Hitler probably ranks higher than Napoleon.  But one thing he never was – a statesman….

Of course he was no democrat but he was a populist, a man who based his power on the masses, not on the elite, and in a sense a people’s tribune risen to absolute power.  His principal means of rule was demagogy, and his instrument of government was not a structured hierarchy but a chaotic bundle of uncoordinated mass organisations merely held together by his own person.  All these are ‘leftist’ rather than ‘rightest’ features…

Nothing is more misleading than to call Hitler a fascist.  Fascism is upper class rule, buttressed by artificially manufactured mass enthusiasm, but never in order to buttress an upper class.  He was a class politician, and his National Socialism was anything but fascism….

…. There is no denying the voluntarist trait in Hitler’s view of the world; he saw the world as he wanted to see it.  The world is imperfect, full of conflict, hardship and suffering …. he does not state these things with the sad courageous earnestness with which Luther calmly faced what he called original sin, or Bismarck what he called earthly imperfection, but with that frenzied voice with which Nietzsche, for instance, so often hailed what was deplorable.  To Hitler, the emergency was the norm, the state was there in order to wage war.

Three things.  Haffner may have added the frenzy of Wagner, Hitler’s pin-up boy.  The poet said, or meant to say, that comparisons are odious, but the whole fabric of our law turns on learning from the past. 

Finally, fans of the poet, and Coriolanus, will love the reference to a people’s tribune risen to absolute power.  In the hands of a genius, you don’t know who is more dangerous – the hero, or the jealous tribunes claiming to stand for that fiction called the people.

THE MEANING OF HITLER

Sebastian Haffner

Folio Society, 2011.  Translated by Ewald Osers and introduced by Mark Roseman. Illustrated.

The author was born in Berlin in 1907 as Raimund Pretzel.  He therefore came of age under the Nazis.  He qualified as a lawyer, but he left Germany in 1938 because of his relationship with a Jewish woman.  Before leaving, he wrote a manuscript of a book that would be published posthumously only in 1992 under the title Defying Hitler.  He was in a law library when the brown shirts came in to round up the Jews.  He joined the staff of the Observer in 1942 and began writing for publication. 

The present book was first published in 1978.  Haffner chose the name ‘Sebastian,’ because it was Bach’s middle name, and ‘Haffner’ after a Mozart sonata.  His writing style is pithy and laconic, and the book was written before the works of Ian Kershaw and Richard Evans were published.

Defying Hitler caused a sensation when it came out.  Here was direct eye witness evidence of the Terror before the Holocaust began – and by someone so well qualified to comment.  It caused me to see a lot of things differently.  In it, Haffner said:

The only thing that is missing is what in animals is called ‘breeding’.  This is a solid inner kernel that cannot be shaken by external pressures and forces, something noble and steely, a reserve of pride, principle and dignity to be drawn on in the hour of trial….  At the moment of truth, when other nations rise spontaneously to the occasion, the Germans collectively and limply collapsed.  They yielded and capitulated, and suffered a nervous breakdown….  The Kammergericht [superior court] toed the line.  No Frederick the Great was needed, not even Hitler had to intervene.  All that was required was a few Amtsgerichtsrats [judges] with a deficient knowledge of the law. 

We might pause to note what a biographer of Mussolini had to say as it applies to Hitler word for word.

Mussolini still needed their [the moderates’] help, for most of the liberal parliamentarians would look to them for a lead.  He also took careful note that chaos had been caused in Russia when representatives of the old order were defenestrated en masse during the revolution:  fascism could hardly have survived if the police, the magistrates, the army leaders and the civil service had not continued to work just as before, and the complicity of these older politicians was eagerly sought and helped to preserve the important illusion that nothing had changed.

The liberals failed to use the leverage afforded by his need for their approbation.  Most of them saw some good in fascism as a way of defending social order and thought Italians too intelligent and civilised to permit the establishment of a complete dictatorship.  Above all, there was the very persuasive argument that the only alternative was to return to the anarchy and parliamentary stalemate they remembered….Mussolini had convincingly proved that he was the most effective politician of them all: he alone could have asked parliament for full powers and been given what he asked; he alone provided a defence against, and an alternative to, socialism.  And of course the old parliamentarians still hoped to capture and absorb him into their own system in the long run; their optimism was encouraged by the fact that his fascist collaborators were so second-rate. 

In the present work, Haffner says of Hitler (in the second page):

His life lacked – before and after – everything that normally lends warmth, weight and dignity to a human life: education, occupation, love and friendship, marriage, parenthood.  Apart from politics and political passion, his was an empty life and hence one which was certainly not happy, was strangely lightweight, and lightly discarded.  A continuous readiness for suicide accompanied Hitler throughout his political career.  And, at its end, almost as a matter of course, stood real suicide….Hitler had no friends.  He enjoyed sitting for hours on end with subordinate staff  – drivers, bodyguards, secretaries – but he alone did all the talking….His character was fixed at an early age – perhaps a better word would be arrested – and remains astonishingly consistent…His positive characteristics – resolution, boldness, courage, perseverance – lie all on the ‘hard’ side.  The negative ones even more so: ruthlessness, vindictiveness, faithlessness and cruelty.  Added to these, moreover, from the very start was a total lack of capacity for self-criticism.

Here, then, is a writer who gets to the heart of the matter.  Hitler relied on charisma and terror, hope and fear, the populist trademark.

That ability for mass hypnotism was Hitler’s first, and for a long time his only, political capital……On the whole, the management and dosage of terror during the first years must be described as a masterly psychological achievement by Hitler.

Or again:

Hitlerism has at least one thing in common with Marxism – the claim to be able to explain the whole of world history from a single point of view….For there is no denying the voluntarist trait in Hitler’s view of the world: he saw the world as he wanted to see it….To Hitler, the emergency was the norm; the state was there in order to wage war.  And that is where he was wrong.

As a cartographer of evil, Haffner is in my view up there with Hannah Arendt.  This book ends this way.

For German history does not end with Hitler.  Anyone believing that it does, and possibly even rejoicing at it, does not realise just how much he is thereby fulfilling Hitler’s last will and testament.

Passing Bull 402 – The Trump Court402

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The Princely Courts of Europe 1500-1750 by John Adamson (Editor) arrived today.  I wanted a better understanding of the heart of government in Europe to see why England was so different. 

In his Introduction, John Adamson, whom I regard highly, says:

For all their diversity, however, the popular stereotype of the court favourite remained strikingly consistent in form, from the sixteenth through to the eighteenth centuries.  Whether in plays, ballads, histories, or learned treatises, the characteristics remain the same: a manipulative arriviste, ‘basely born’, who usurps powers of patronage that should rightfully go to the hereditary grandees, and exploits office, not for the good of the realm, but to feather his own nest.  Warranted or not, most of the ‘new men’ who acquired extensive influence as a consequence of personal royal favour – from Wolsey to Mazarin – found themselves assimilated to this opprobrious stereotype…. The loyalty of a parvenu or lowly born favourite was thought to be doubly assured.  Not only were they inherently more grateful for their promotions, but they also knew that if they ever forfeited their monarch’s favour, there was usually a posse of hostile court grandees ready and waiting for the moment to bring them down.

That is a useful picture of King Donald and what passes for his Cabinet.  And none of them would ever have heard of Wolsey or Mazarin.

And while we are on their obvious intellectual limitations, how many of those criticizing President Zelensky speak a second language as well as he speaks English?

A mugging in Washington

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Three men are involved in conflicts that affect the whole world – Putin, Netanyahu, and Trump.  They look to me to have one thing in common – a contempt for humanity, or at least some parts of it.  It is impossible to believe that any of them accepts what Kant said – that every human being has his or her worth or dignity, which derives merely from the fact that each of us is human – and not some animal.  Each of them is happy to treat humans they regard as different as being inferior.

Russia began a brutal war against Ukraine.  This is not the first act of Russian aggression here, and Russia has defaulted on previous attempts to bring peace.  Putin denies that Ukraine exists as a distinct national entity.

Those who claim to be in charge of Gaza (Hamas) launched a brutal attack on Israel.  Gaza has a long and painful history – as does the whole of the Holy Land going back to prehistory.  Hamas wants to destroy the state of Israel.  Israel stands in the way of Gaza acquiring statehood.

In the course of its attack on Israel, Hamas took hostages – about 250, I think.  In the course of its war against Ukraine, Russia has forcibly kidnapped children – a war crime perpetrated by the Nazis.  (Bear in mind that Russia refuses to acknowledge that there is a war.)  Estimates of the number of childhood victims vary – but there is no doubt that thousands have been taken, up to say, 20,000. 

There is inevitably something heartless about this exercise in statistics about the denial of human worth.  That dedicated mass murderer called Stalin knew this.  The death of one person is a tragedy.  The death of a million is a statistic.  Shakespeare of course had seen this.

I am in blood
Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o’er.  (Macbeth) 3.4.142–144)

(When his wife chided him, Macbeth replied: ‘We are but young in deed.’  Murdering, it would seem, is like making millions – it gets easier as you go.)

We here in Australia stand outside these calamities.  The discussion of the Gaza war is here coloured by the fact that we have here people who identify with either side – it is difficult to imagine any Australian taking the side of Russia.  Or wanting to have anything to do with a nation perpetrating war crimes like those of Hitler and the Nazis.  What decent human being would want to do anything like that?  And we are speaking of a war crime predicated on race, or perhaps worse, caste.

And here it looks like we are all complicit in a denial of the principle of humanity.  International news programs are full of live accounts of the return of hostages in Gaza staged in a manner that is as bizarre as it is brutal.  But we do not hear that much about the deaths of people in either war, and we get next to nothing about the fate of thousands of children who have been kidnapped.

Put the numbers to one side.  Let’s say that there are only 250 children kidnapped.  (Does not the word ‘only’ chill the blood?)  No, let’s say just a dozen, or even a pair, or just one child is involved.  Would the conversation be the same if that one child was a citizen of the US or Israel?

Of course not – and we are all complicit in this denial of universal humanity.  We should be ashamed of ourselves, but the whole history of the world is full of stories of otherwise decent people just lying down before dictators.

That brings me to that recent dreadful scene in the White House.  There was obviously no time to refer to the fate of children there.  It is hard to know what is worse – the conduct of those at the time, or the nonsense offered by sycophants later.

We might look at three words.  Lindsey Graham, the archetypal poodle, said Zelensky should not have taken the ‘bait’.  A bait is something you offer to someone to induce them to act to their detriment.  Why would people negotiating in good faith want to do that to Zelensky?  Well, they were just there to complete a shakedown of a man and a nation on their knees.  They were making an offer they thought Zelensky could not refuse.  I cannot recall any public international conduct as disgraceful as that.  It makes me feel sick.

Many say Vance led the attack.  But Trump commented on the attire of Zelensky immediately he arrived, and one of his goons from the press he favours began the press conference by asking Zelensky why he was not wearing a suit. 

Here again is one of those moments from the Marx Brothers.  The goon said many Americans thought Zelensky showed a lack of respect in turning up like that.  Trump was not surprised by the question and looked mildly quizzical about the answer.  The offended Americans don’t spend most nights in a bomb shelter.  And the goon looks like a drunk out of luck whose idea of decorum is to wear tan sneakers under a suit of the revolting blue favoured by Trump, a man notorious for his lack of taste.  And then of course there is his mate Elon, who turns up at the Oval Office with a silly hat on his head, and a child on his shoulders.  Groucho Marx may have looked cross-eyed at the whole lot of them.

Then there is the issue of ‘respect’.  Some Americans have actually asked Zelensky to apologise for his lack of respect.  According to my Compact OED above this desk, the two primary meanings of that term are ‘a feeling of admiration for someone or something because of their qualities or achievements’ and ‘consideration for the feelings or rights of others.’  You can decide who showed a lack of respect to whom in either sense.  Even at Fox News, does anyone outside the boondocks respect either Trump or Vance?

Finally, Vance, who had once compared his leader to Hitler, deployed his zeal as a convert to bad mouth previous presidents of the U S.  That is appalling misconduct in public, and Vance has never been to the Ukraine – he prefers his laptop.  In his gushing premeditated arrogance, Vance decided to offer his guest a patronising lecture on diplomacy.  According to the same dictionary, ‘diplomacy’ means ‘the profession, activity or skill of managing international relations’ or ‘skill and tact in dealing with people.’  Vance and his boss know nothing of either.  It is impossible to imagine a greater failure of diplomacy.

So, putting to one side the contribution of US armaments to the rubble in Gaza, a one-time New York property developer, now an illiterate convict and the President of the United States, wants to drive out the residents of Gaza and engage in a property development, and then extract wealth from the Ukraine when it has been brought to its knees by his mate and fellow victim of a witch hunt, Vladimir Putin. 

And then, like Richard III, he can say ‘I am myself alone.’ 

And the people of America would be advised to stay home.  They have not a friend in the world.

These were some reflections when in horror yesterday I wrote the following.

Two things seem clear enough.

  1. Trump is aligned with Putin and if necessary will drop Ukraine and NATO.  Either Putin has something over Trump, or they have a common view on the world order.  We are looking at a Trump/Putin axis.
  2. Neither we nor anyone else can ever take the US at its word again.  Trump has the morals of a Mafia don and the US has lost all respect and trust.

We kept saying all this the first time Trump was President, but it is hard to see the U S sinking any lower. 

And the whole nation will have to accept full political responsibility – something they have not been good at since the Puritans arrived and set about cleansing the land of the Indians.  And then offering thanks to their God.  Then they bought slaves.  Then they lied about that in their Declaration. Then the losers in the Civil War did not accept the judgment.  They have not cleared themselves of the stain of slavery.  But then they behaved heroically by rebuilding world order after Hiroshima.  But they have not won a war since.

Now, worst of all, the old Uncle Sam is back in all his arrogance – and, in the full sense of that term, with a ‘vengeance.’

Only someone with an intellect as tortured as that of Vance could think that any of his position is compatible with the teaching of the Jewish Hasid who said we should suffer the little children to come unto him.