Religion, power, and money – The Comfort of Tawney

11/03/2025 / 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

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.

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.

The author could produce the scalpel.

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’.

But is there no limit?

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.

The same question arises for government.

Only an Englishman could have said that.

But were Luther or Calvin any better?

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.

Haffner on Hitler

09/03/2025 / 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

03/03/2025 / 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

02/03/202502/03/2025 / 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.

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.
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.

Villains – and evil

27/02/2025 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

[This was posted before the recent U S election. It is set out again because every word bears on how our worst fears have been realised since Trump took office. In The New York Times, Thomas Friedman said the question is whether Trump is the dupe of Putin or a Mafia don running a protection racket.]

There is no such thing as evil. It is not something that you can sprinkle on or detect in your fish and chips. Rather, it is a label that we attach to some forms of conduct. And what we usually have in mind are people who are ready, willing and able to hurt or kill other people for the sake of it – or, as the saying goes, for the hell of it. There may be no other apparent motive. The pickpocket, the drug dealer, the rapist, the blackmailer, the vengeful husband, the neo-Nazi – they all have a motive. But the villain?

At the beginning of his lecture on Richard III, W H Auden said there is a difference between a criminal and what we call a villain. ‘The villain is an extremely conscious person and commits a crime consciously and for its own sake.’ The leading examples in Shakespeare, apart from Richard III, are Aaron in Titus Andronicus, and Iago in Othello.

In ordinary language, an evil person is one who wants to do wrong by others. Such a person gets called a villain. That word has apparently come down to us from villein, the equivalent of the serf at the bottom of the medieval social ladder. Brewer (Dictionary of Phrase and Fable) says that the notion of ‘rascality, wickedness and worthlessness now associated with villainis a result of aristocratic condescension and sense of superiority’. That is very English. (The editor cites a passage from the opening scene of As You Like It, where both meanings are in play in the one sentence.)

There is, at least in our literature, another type of villain, if I may be permitted that term. Some characters are so made that they cannot stand goodness. When in Paradise Lost, Satan comes across Adam and Eve, he ‘felt how awful goodness is’. (And if Satan is not entitled to have a view on evil, no one is.) Iago saw in Cassio a kind of ‘daily beauty’ that unsettled him. The most gross example is John Claggart in Billy Budd – especially in the libretto of the opera. Claggart is unmanned by the simple goodness of Billy.

O beauty, o handsomeness, goodness!
Would that I never encountered you!
Would that I lived in my own world always,
in that depravity to which I was born.
There I found peace of a sort, there I established
an order such as reigns in Hell…….
Having seen you, what choice remains to me?
None, none! I’m doomed to annihilate you,
I’m vowed to your destruction. ….
No, you cannot escape!
With hate and envy, I’m stronger than love….

There is more.

But when we come to look at Richard III, we will see that some bad actors are driven by pure envy in looking at what others get in life that is certainly denied to them. Iago drove Othello to be jealous of what he thought Cassio was up to with his wife, but Iago envied Cassio for his good fortune and success in life. In the grizzly argot of our time, Iago, a man of ‘other ranks’ bitterly resented the elites.

In papers called Richard and Adolf and The Seduction of Seduction, I have looked at some of these issues, but here I wish to focus on what the play Richard III may tell us now about the phenomenon of Donald Trump.

But, first, I want to say something about the best-known character of Shakespeare – Sir John Falstaff. Not in any order, Falstaff is a coward, a liar, a fraud, a womaniser, a drunk, and a rotten fat skunk. And he is this playwright’s most popular and enduring character. One reason is that he said things and did things to offend and upset the Establishment in ways that we would like to be able to do. He put the boot into knighthood and chivalry as surely as Cervantes did with Don Quixote. He was the champion of those who had missed out.

Well, if you go to a MAGA rally, you will not find too many people successful in a profession, government, academe, or business. (Nor will you find any at the bottom of the scale, sleeping rough.)

And we might here telegraph a warning about the significance of Falstaff. Dr Johnson said the character was loaded with faults, ‘and with those faults that naturally produce contempt.’ But he concluded his remarks:

The moral to be drawn from this representation is that no man is more dangerous that he that with a will to corrupt hath the power to please; and that neither wit nor honesty ought to think themselves safe with such a companion when they see Henry seduced by Falstaff. (My emphasis.)

I see the seduction as the other way around, but the point remains. What is it that attracts us to some complete ratbags? How do we get sucked in – conned?

In discussing Richard III, Dr Johnson said that Shakespeare was careful to suggest that the wickedness of Richard proceeded from his deformity – and from the ‘envy that rose at the comparison of his own person with others, and which incited him to disturb the pleasures that he could not enjoy’. There is a lot of that in the Austrian corporal who was rejected by both Vienna and the German High Command. But at the beginning of Richard III, in his opening speech, Richard says that with all his obvious defects, he is ‘determined to prove a villain.’ The author had paved the way in the prior play (Henry VI, Part III, 3.2 and 5.6), when Richard told us that he can smile and murder while he smiles – which he later does while stabbing a king to death, while saying that he has ‘neither, pity, love, nor fear…. I am myself alone.’ By the end of the preceding play, Richard had happily compared himself to Judas – and you can’t go lower than that.

Here then is the triumph of the ego in the ultimate smiling assassin. Now, that is a title that we would award to Vladimir Putin rather than Donald Trump, but that does not mean that we may not get some guidance on how to deal with the latter, from the insights into our humanity of the greatest playwright the world has known.

Here are some points of resemblance and distinction.

Each comes from a background that is on any view ‘privileged’ – and each knows little about the rest of the world, and each cares even less. Neither really cares for anybody else. The self is all in all.

Each is in his own way childlike. Each has a view of the world that is at best superficial. Neither could imagine a world without himself. Nothing in the world is relevant unless it relates to him. Somehow. the ordinary rules do not apply to him.

Each disdains anything remotely resembling book learning.

Richard, like Trump, did not care for others, but he could seduce them. In this they both resemble Don Giovanni. The seducer is amoral and it’s as if their victims had some sort of death wish. If these seducers have any conscience, and it is a real issue for both, it just does not work.

Conscience is but a word that cowards use,

Devised at first to keep the strong in awe;

Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law! (Richard III, 5.3.310-312)

That is the credo of the fascist.

People rarely get close or remain close to either of them. They are mostly front. Their egos do not allow much time out for others. If someone breaks through, it is just a matter of time before they are ejected – with extreme prejudice. Buckingham was Richard’s most loyal supporter in winning the crown. When he feels the rift, he is ‘off while my fearful head is on’ (4.2.121). With Trump, the rift comes when the lackey gets caught, and Trump drops him cold – and in the slammer.

You could not reason with either. They create their own reality. Both resemble spoiled children who never learned better, or grown up.

They enjoy the game of plotting to get power. They are born gamblers. Why not? They take huge risks because they don’t mind if others get hurt. But they are very bad on the job when they get it. They were not made for responsibility in government – or anything else. In this and other respects, they are like spoiled children who have not known what it is to be accountable.

Revenge for them is very personal. This is because the loyalty they expect is very personal. People owe loyalty not to the office or the nation, but to the leader personally. This was the great error of the German High Command in dealing with Adolf Hitler, and it is the beginning of the shredding of anything like the rule of law. What you get is personal power of someone above the law. The old term was ‘tyrant’.

There was a beautiful example with the singer, Taylor Swift. She was a threat because she might prove more popular than Trump. And she had backed the other side. Trump said there was ‘no way she could endorse Crooked Joe Biden’ and would never be ‘disloyal to the man who made her so much money’. Congress had passed an act giving financial aid to singers, but to Trump, it never gets above the personal. In Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler, the last chapter is headed ‘The Grammatical Fiction.’ There is no such thing as ‘I’. In the world of Donald Trump – and Richard III – it is the other way around. There is ego – and that is that. The Oxford English Dictionary happily defines egomania as ‘the insanity of self-exaltation’.

The personal nature of the rule, and the grubby means by which these people come to power, feeds on and promotes division and conflict, and simple hate. They are a form of cancer on the community. Indeed, that is the underlying thread of these plays leading to and from the Wars of the Roses. Trump just went one further by denying that he had ever lost power.

These people appeal to those who feel they have missed out in the race of life. This is more Trump’s schtick than that of Richard. The scenes where Richard says that he has to be enlisted for the benefit of the common weal are frankly comical – but, in truth, no more incredible than what Trump’s ‘base’ salutes him for. His followers think that they have been treated unfairly, and that this gives them a moral right to seek retribution. And they are quick to identify those who they think should answer for their ill treatment – although they do not use the word ‘scapegoats.’ Their leaders go along with this. It brings the loudest cheers at the rallies. This is more like Jack Cade than Richard. The oppressed believe that their leader is the one to look after them, and preserve what they have managed to retain from the wreckage wrought by their opponents.

They both play rough. They know no other way. They just ride roughshod over any doubter or opponent who gets in their way. Bluff is built into their persona. And if you are going to lie, lie big. It is as if there is nothing left solid in the relative ether, and people have always preferred fiction to history. This braggadocio is just another part of the intimidation, and it is always the scheme of the dictator to involve as many as possible in the dirty work, so that they get locked in by their own complicity. There is the sleight of hand of those we used to call mountebanks. 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.

That description brings us from the post-medieval morality plays and commedia dell’arte to Richard III – and it is also very apt for a MAGA rally.

Now for some differences.

Richard was a worthy soldier in battle, and prepared to do his own murders. But Richard does not delude himself as Trump appears to do. On the contrary, he takes great pride in his machinations and the pure malice that drives them. When he seduces Anne, a process that is revolting, he challenges the audience to come with him. He is celebrating a win for the misfits. ‘And yet to win her, all the world to nothing’ (1.2.237) Auden said (in 1946) of the opening monologue of Richard that it was ‘not unlike Adolf Hitler’s speech to his General Staff on 23 August 1939 in its utter lack of self-deception.’ That is a remarkable analogy. Some were more than troubled by the apocalyptic and brazen tripe of Trump in his (first) inaugural. Was this the same nation that gave the world Abraham Lincoln?

Auden also said that Richard was not ambitious in the ordinary sense of that term. ‘He’s not interested in becoming king for the position of power, but because becoming king is so difficult.’ Well, others might put differently that description of the pursuit of the prize.

But we come now to the bad news. Dr Johnson, as we saw, warned against the dangers in succumbing to the whiles of Falstaff. Sir Anthony Quayle played Falstaff and fairly described him as ‘frankly vicious.’ Why do we fall for him?

The problem is that Richard takes the audience with him and at least in part seduces the audience. I referred above to the old morality plays. They appeared in England in the 15^th and 16^th centuries – to set up the triumph of virtue over vice. Vice was a central character – generally named after a particular vice, like pride or greed, who wore a cap with asses’ ears (so prefiguring Bottom).

Richard expressly makes a reference to Vice. ‘Thus, like the formal Vice, Iniquity, I moralise two meanings in one word’ (3.1.82-83). I need to set out what Tony Tanner says here in full.

The Vice was the self-avowed mischief-maker, if not chaos-bringer, and we should remember that one of his Satanic privileges was to inveigle the audience into laughing at evil. The figure of the Vice was clearly invaluable to Shakespeare when it came to depicting inexplicable evil, evil which seems gratuitous, unmotivated, simply for its own sake. From any point of view, Richard’s behaviour is profoundly irrational, and is finally both horrifying and incomprehensible even to his closest accomplices (in fact, no one is close to him at all; simply some accompany him further into his evils than others.) Richard is, as he has told us, an expert Machiavel; he is also a Senecan tyrant and a Marlovian villain (closest to Barabbas in The Jew of Malta). But he is primarily a Vice. However – and this is crucial – he is a Vice who acquires (no matter how foully) the legitimate robes of a king.

Those insights round off this discussion. ‘Chaos-bringer’ is so apt. And remember just how vicious, how horrifying, Richard is. The murderer of the children is unmanned by this ‘most arch deed of piteous massacre’ (4.3.2). The king can hardly wait until after supper to hear ‘the process of their death.’

It is then that we recall that the playwright has subjected us to hours of flirtation with our taste for violence and deceit. It is followed by a set piece of our theatre – the judgment of the Furies, the mother and two wronged queens, one of whom is a world authority on cursing. We need to remember that Richard got to the crown not by guile or rebellion, but by murder in cold blood. It makes The Godfather look pale – but we get a kick out of that, too.

So, as we watch in trepidation the possible revival of Donald Trump, despite all his offences against humanity, we should ask again – just why do we fall for some kinds of ratbag?

And while doing so, we might recall that it does not require anything like the incandescent genius of Shakespeare, or the craftiness of Satan, to induce our undoing. And despite his trysts with the ghosts, Richard goes down swinging, like Don Giovanni, but sans cheval. And there were some in the cinema who cheered him on even there.

May I finally say something about the condition of the United States now? In discussing Julius Caesar, Auden said that Rome was not doomed by the passions of selfish individuals, but ‘by an intellectual and spiritual failure of nerve that made the society incapable of dealing with its situation’ Angela Merkel said that ‘Sometimes my greatest fear is that we have somehow lost the inner strength to stand up for our way of life’. The phrase ‘inner strength’ catches the eye. A German man called Stephen Haffner lived through the twenties and thirties and the rise of Hitler. He described the failure of Germany in very simple terms as a kind of ‘nervous breakdown’ that flowed from the want of a ‘solid inner kernel.’

That is just how major battles and sporting events are won and lost. Sadly, it does not help either us or the U S that we have seen it all before.

Passing Bull 401 – Equal dignity?

19/02/2025 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Are we all born with equal dignity arising merely from the fact that we are human – as Kant said?

Not according to Stalin.

‘The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic’.

Nor according to Tom Stoppard (in the script for The Russia House).

‘If I behave like a hero, can you behave like a merely decent human being?’

Nor according to Pasternak.

‘To belong to a type is the end of a man, his condemnation. If he doesn’t fall into any category, if he’s not representative, half of what is demanded of him is there. He’s free of himself. He’s achieved a grain of immortality.’

Nor according to Edith Durham (who wrote extensively about the Balkans).

‘When a Muslim kills a Muslim, that does not count. When a Christian kills a Muslim, it is a righteous act. When a Christian kills a Christian, it is an error of judgment. It is only when a Muslim kills a Christian that we arrive at a full-blown atrocity.’

Déjà vu

18/02/2025 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The biography of Josef Fouché by Stefan Zweig that is noted below is one of the most compelling books I have ever read. It is a model of biography – there is hardly one citation, much less a footnote. It reads like a play that is a page turner. And the characters are hugely larger than life – apart from the subject you have Robespierre, Talleyrand, and Napoleon. A squad that would make a bloody taipan blanch.

The book reminds me so much of the biography of Disraeli by André Maurois. Like Zweig, Maurois believed that biography is an art form. ‘The search for historical truth is the work of the scholar; the search for the expression of personality is rather the work of the artist.’ Thank heaven for both of them.

If you read the note below, you will find this extract, which is just one of so many that leads to a sense of déjà vu that runs through the whole book and brings to mind the current travails, if not collapse, of the United States.

By the inexorable law of gravity, each execution dragged others in its train. Those who had begun the game with no more than ferocious mouthings, now tried to surpass one another in bloody deeds. Not from frenzied passion and still less from stern resolution were so many victims sacrificed. Irresolution, rather, was at work; the irresolution of politicians who lacked courage to withstand the mob. In the last analysis, cowardice was to blame. For, alas, history is not only (as we are so often told) the history of human courage, but also the history of human faintheartedness; and politics is not (as politicians would fain have us believe) the guidance of public opinion, but a servile bowing of the knee by the so-called leaders before the demons they have themselves created.

Elsewhere, this author says Fouché had ‘a contempt for mankind’ and that the most characteristic part of his make-up was his ‘effrontery’.

He is indifferent to what his former associates may think of him or say about him; he cares not a jot for public opinion. His only concern is to be on the winning side. In the suddenness of his changes of front, in the infinite modifications of role, he displays an impudence which stuns us, as it were, and arouses involuntary admiration. [Richard III?] ……He does not steadfastly pursue an idea, but marches with the times, and the swifter their march, the more quickly must he walk to keep up with them.

Compare the breathtaking effrontery of Vance in Munich or Trump on extinguishing territories he has no time for or need of.

Robespierre’s tenacity of purpose was his finest quality, but also his greatest weakness. For, intoxicated by the sense of his own incorruptibility and clad as he was in an armour of stubborn dogmatism, he considered that divergences of opinion were treasonable, and with the cold cruelty of a grand inquisitor [compare El Greco and Dostoevsky] he was ready to regard as heretics all those who differed from him and send them to a heretic’s doom……The lack of communicable warmth, of contagious humanity, deprived his actions of procreative energy. His strength lay exclusively in his stubbornness; his power in his unyielding severity. His dictatorship had become for him the entire substance and all-engrossing form of his life. Unless he could stamp his own ego on the revolution, that ego would be shattered.

The ego of Trump or Vance may not allow for such conviction, but Elon Musk is in a different category – invincibly heartless and showing a contempt for mankind. This portrait savors more of Lenin – and the mass murderer who followed him.

Ironically enough, when Napoleon took over by an armed coup, Fouché, as Minister for Police, put out a lying statement that Napoleon ‘had narrowly missed becoming the victim of an assassin’s blow. But the genius of the Republic saved the General.’ Well, at least the French were past thanking God for saving their savior.

It is worth reading the book again and again for the comparisons of Fouché and Talleyrand. (You will get a similar picture in Duff Cooper’s Talleyrand, but without the brushwork.)

Both are sober-minded realists, lucid thinkers, cynics, and whole-hearted disciples of Machiavelli. They were both schooled in the church and subsequently annealed in the fires of the revolution; they are characterized by the same cold-blooded unscrupulousness in matters of money and honour; and both of them serve with the same conscienceless disloyalty……and just because they are of the same spiritual caliber and because kindred diplomatic roles are assigned to them, they hate one another with the clear-sighted coolness and pertinacity of rivals who know one another through and through. Both of them are of a perfectly amoral type, and this accounts for their lightness of character, whereas the differences between them depend upon differences in origin…..Talleyrand finds the game of diplomacy an agreeable and stimulating past-time; but he detests work….he will not weary himself with the labour of investigation, being satisfied with the intuition which enables him at lightning speed to effect a comprehensive survey of the most involved situations…..His specialties are bold changes of front, swift flashes of insight, supple expedients in moments of danger; and he contemptuously leaves to others the detail work, the grunting and sweating under heavy loads, the heat and burden of the day……No playwright could have invented two such perfect counterparts…as history has staged for us in the slothful and brilliant extemporizer Talleyrand and the argus-eyed unsleeping calculator Fouché – has staged beside Napoleon, besides the all round genius who combines the talents of both, wide range of view and insight into details near at had , aquiline passion and ant-like industry, world-knowledge and world-vision.

Well – they don’t write books like that anymore. And don’t worry – Zweig traces Napoleon’s addiction to la guerre éternelle to his succumbing to his own ‘great man’ theory – a failure sadly picked up by certain recent British historians who should know better.

Millions upon millions of people died for that ego of Napoleon. The German people do not succumb to Romance in the face of such carnage. You will never see a tourist site in Berlin of Hitler’s tomb. And when lecturing the Germans and other Europeans upon history, Mr Vance may have forgotten that he had compared his current leader – he is flexible – to Adolf Hitler. Not many people who are being bayoneted or raped pause to inquire of the ideological drivers of their assailant.

Somehow, I find some comfort in these reflections when I look at the ratbag motley in Washington that is dragging down the U S. The proper word for these populists is vulgar, a word lovingly bestowed on us by the Romans.

For that I will be accused of snobbery – or, worse, that weasel term elitism. Well, critics of the populists of last century were not so dismissed. Perhaps I may be allowed to cite views I expressed on these elsewhere.

The Germans cannot be heard to say that they had not been warned precisely of the terrors and moral horrors that would come with Hitler. They cannot be heard to say that they did not know he was intent on annihilating both the Russians and the Jews. It was all there in chapter and verse in Mein Kampf. But, while Hitler was getting results, decent Germans, or enough of them, were prepared to look the other way. For whatever reason, the Germans did not take Mein Kampf seriously. For probably similar reasons, Europe chose not to take Keynes seriously, although the forecasts of both Keynes and Hitler were all ruinously fulfilled.

The failure of decent, sane people in Europe to respond to dictators like Mussolini, Hitler or Franco in a way that we would regard now as sensible or responsible is uncomfortably reflected in the fact that the pope, a guardian of the religion of the West, found a way to come to terms and live with each of those dictators through deals called Concordats. Each dictator – and only Franco had any sort of religion and anything but contempt for Christ – regarded his deal with the pope as an essential plank in his political platform.

The failure of educated Germans to deal with Hitler led to a kind of national nervous breakdown that was summed up by Sebastian Haffner, who was a law student in Berlin when the Brownshirts evicted the Jews from the law library, in the terms that we have seen.

What might be described as the failure of the better people of Italy has been described by a biographer of Mussolini in terms that could be transposed word for word to the Germans and Hitler.

‘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.’

Does that not seem to be word for word a correct rendition of how decent Germans probably reacted to Hitler? Still today you will find Christian apologists for Franco, and not just in Spain, who say that his fascism was preferable to republican socialism. Mussolini had the other advantage that for reasons we now regard as obvious, no one outside Italy could take Mussolini seriously. As his biographer reminds us, Mussolini was, rather like Berlusconi, seen as an ‘absurd little man’, a ‘second-rate cinema actor and someone who could not continue in power for long’, a ‘César de carnaval’, a ‘braggart and an actor’, and possibly ‘slightly off his head.’ Churchill always took Hitler seriously; he could never do that with that Italian buffoon. The Fuhrer would betray his nation and kill himself and his mistress; the Italians would revolt from and then murder their Duce and his mistress, and hang them upside down in public. (The Italians have never had any idea of political stability or succession.)

Once war was declared, the German people felt an overwhelming need to support their fighting men and their Fatherland.

For whatever reason, the middle classes and those above them in Germany, Italy or Spain, and the popes, did not realise that they had a tiger by the tail with Hitler, Mussolini, or Franco until it was far, far too late.

Well, that brings me back to the book of Stefan Zweig. The U S never adopted the Westminster system after 1776, and many of the problems it faces now can be traced to that decision. (The other big difference is slavery.) Those of us who still affect to follow it are struggling with a descent into mediocrity, but we have nothing like the problems that Americans have with medicare, guns, ideology, race, and corrupted religion – and now a full-on assault on the rule of law.

And I have never heard of a dying man walking into a hospital and saying: ‘In the name of God, don’t give me one of your best surgeons – the elite – any mediocre guy will do. I supported the Red Guards when they took over maternity wards, and I think the press has been most unkind to them since.’

These are very troubled times and we need the insights of great minds like Stefan Zweig to see through the fire, the smoke, and the mist.

One thing is clear. If Americans believe that Trump, Musk, Vance and others are in there for ordinary Americans, they believe in Santa Claus and fairies at the bottom of the garden. They will get the government they asked for and deserve. That is no comfort for people in Gaza or the Ukraine, or those who once looked up to the United States before it fell.

THE PORTRAIT OF A POLITICIAN

Joseph Fouché

Viking Press, 1930; translated by Eden and Cedar Paul. Rebound in quarter in burgundy quarter leather with blue labels and boards

This is the life of Fouché, a terrorist in the Revolution, who survived Robespierre and then Napoleon – a cold blooded killer who became the ultimate survivor.

Some politicians get by with luck and grit, and not a lot more. Perhaps that is all that it takes for most of them – as it tends to be for the rest of us. One such politician was Joseph Fouché who was active during the French Revolution and who, as the Duke of Otranto, was Minister of Police for the Emperor Napoleon.

Fouché was the ultimate survivor. The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, who was an immensely popular novelist in the 1930’s, called Fouché ‘the most perfect Machiavel of modern times’ – ‘a leader of every party in turn and unique in surviving the destruction of them all.’. Here was a ‘man of the same skin and hair who was in 1790 a priestly schoolmaster, and by 1792 already a plunderer of the Church; was in 1793 a communist, five years later a multimillionaire and ten years after that the Duke of Otranto.’ Fouché therefore was not just a survivor – he was a winner.

In introducing his book about ‘this thoroughly amoral personality’, Joseph Fouché, The Portrait of a Politician, Stefan Zweig said this:

Alike in 1914 and 1918 [the book was written in 1929] we learned to our cost that the issues of the war and the peace, issues of far-reaching historical significance, were not the outcome of a high sense of intelligence and exceptional responsibility, but were determined by obscure individuals of questionable character and endowed with little understanding. Again and again since then it has become apparent that in the equivocal and often rascally game of politics, to which with touching faith the nations continue to entrust their children and their future, the winners are not men of wide moral grasp and firm conviction, but those professional gamesters whom we style diplomatists – glib talkers with light fingers and a cold heart.

Those observations have the timelessness of truth.

Joseph Fouché was born in the seaport town of Nantes to a seafaring mercantile family. The great places were reserved for the nobility, so Joseph went into the Church. He went to the Oratorians who were in charge of Catholic education after the expulsion of the Jesuits. He becomes a tonsured teacher, not a priest. ‘Not even to God, let alone to men, will Joseph Fouché give a pledge of lifelong fidelity.’ Three of the most powerful French political thinkers then – Talleyrand, Sieyès, and Fouché – come from an institution that the Revolution will be bent on destroying, the Church.

Joseph became friendly with a young lawyer named Robespierre. There was even talk that he might marry Robespierre’s sister, and when the young Maximilien was elected to the Estates General at Versailles, it was Joseph who lent him the money for a new suit of clothes.

Fouché is always cool and under control. He has no vices and he is a loyal husband, but he will be an ‘inexorable puritan’ and invincibly cold blooded, at his best working in the shadows as an unseen second to the limelighters. He prefers the reality of power to its insignia, but with ‘his resolute freedom from convictions’, he is quite capable of repudiating a leader who has gone too far. ‘He knows that a revolution never bestows its fruits on those who begin it, but only on those who bring it to an end and are therefore in a position to seize the booty.’

The çi devant Oratorian declares war on the Church ‘to substitute the worship of the Republic and of morality for that of ancient superstitions.’ This is the phase of dechristianization, far, far more brutal than the Reformation in England.

But we also speak of the Terror that leads Stefan Zweig to this most remarkable judgment, which still speaks so clearly to us at a time of a collapse in public life.

By the inexorable law of gravity, each execution dragged others in its train. Those who had begun the game with no more than ferocious mouthings, now tried to surpass one another in bloody deeds. Not from frenzied passion and still less from stern resolution were so many victims sacrificed. Irresolution, rather, was at work; the irresolution of politicians who lacked courage to withstand the mob. In the last analysis, cowardice was to blame. For, alas, history is not only (as we are so often told) the history of human courage, but also the history of human faintheartedness; and politics is not (as politicians would fain have us believe) the guidance of public opinion, but a servile bowing of the knee by the so-called leaders before the demons they have themselves created……the moderates know that at this juncture, moderation needs a thousand times as much courage as ostensible resolution.

With those words, which reek of Thucydides, Stefan Zweig justified not only this whole book, but his whole life. The words ‘the irresolution of politicians who lacked courage to withstand the mob’ should be put up in neon lights in every parliamentary and government office, and in the booth of every shock jock, poll taker, and sound-bite grabber, and that of any other predatory bludger, urger, or racecourse tout.

The depravity is described by Zweig in these terms:

Early that morning sixty young fellows are taken out of prison and fettered together in couples. Since, as Fouché puts it, the guillotine works ‘too slowly’, they are taken to the plain of Brotteaux, on the other side of the Rhone. Two parallel trenches, hastily dug to receive their corpses, show the victims what is to be their fate, and the cannon ranged ten paces away indicate the manner of their execution. The defenceless creatures are huddled and bound together into a screaming, trembling, raging, and vainly resisting mass of human despair. A word of command and the guns loaded with slugs are ‘fired into the brown’. The range is murderously close and yet the first volley does not finish them off. Some have only had an arm or leg blown away; others have had their bellies torn open but are still alive; a few, as luck would have it, are uninjured. But while blood is making runnels of itself down into the trenches, at a second order, cavalrymen armed with sabres and pistols fling themselves on those who are yet alive, slashing into and firing into this helpless heard, of groaning, twitching and yelling fellow mortals until the last raucous voice is hushed. As a reward for their ghastly work, the butchers are then allowed to strip clothing and shoes from the sixty warm bodies before these are cast naked into the fosses which await them.

All this was done in front of a crowd of appreciative onlookers. The next batch was enlarged to two hundred ‘head of cattle marched to the slaughter’ and this time the avengers of the nation dispensed with the graves. The corpses were thrown into the Rhone as a lesson to the folks downstream.

There, surely, you have a preview of all the madness and cant that will underlie the evil that befalls mankind in the next century. And you don’t hear much about it on Bastille Day.

It is hard to imagine our story, for that in part is what it is, being told better than Stefan Zweig tells it in this wonderful book. The author moves so easily from one graceful insight to the next, and like a true champion he makes it all look so easy and so natural.

And as our author leaves his subject, he leaves us with the question that Shakespeare leaves to us with various bastards, in the proper sense of that word, and Richard III and Falstaff – why are we so taken with the life and character of such an absolute villain?

He also leaves us with the same old problem – ‘glib talkers with light fingers and a cold heart.’

Sam Kerr

13/02/2025 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Some people have a lust to sit in judgment on others – especially those people who have achieved more in life than their accusers. Australians are appalling at it. Notwithstanding her acquittal, some people still want to go after Sam Kerr. In case, someone suggests she should not captain Australia, they might reflect on the record of the current English cricket captain. A BBC report is below. Did Stokes bring the game into disrepute?

Cricketer Ben Stokes found not guilty of affray

Ben Stokes’ defence barrister told the jury he had acted “to defend himself or in defence of another”

England cricketer Ben Stokes has been found not guilty of affray after a fight near a Bristol nightclub.

The Durham all-rounder, 27, denied the charge following the fracas between a group of men last September.

His lawyer Paul Lunt said it was “the end of an 11-month ordeal” for Mr Stokes, who was “keen to get back to cricket being his sole focus”.

Ryan Ali, 28 – who was knocked unconscious in the brawl – was also found not guilty of the same charge.

The fight happened several hours after England had played a one-day international against the West Indies at the County Ground in the city.

Mr Stokes and Mr Ali shook hands on leaving the dock.

The cricketer’s wife, Clare, cried when the not guilty verdicts were returned while her husband closed his eyes with relief and then looked up.

Ryan Ali has been cleared of affray

During the six-day trial, Bristol Crown Court heard the incident described as “a sustained episode of significant violence” from Mr Stokes – of Castle Eden in Durham – who had “lost control”.

The prosecution said he was “drunk and enraged” after being refused entry back into Mbargo nightclub at 02:00 BST on 25 September.

But Mr Stokes told the jury he had “stepped in” to defend two gay men who were being verbally abused, and then had to defend himself from Mr Ali – of Forest Road in Bristol – and Ryan Hale, 27, who were threatening violence

Mr Hale, of Burghill Road in Westbury-on-Trym, was acquitted of the same charge last week.

Speaking to ITV after the trial, Kai Barry and William O’Connor – the couple Mr Stokes defended – said they were thankful for what he had done.

Mr Barry said: “I thought he was just a normal lad sticking up for someone that was obviously weaker than he was.

“When I realised who he was I thought, fair play, because obviously he put his career at risk for someone that he never knew.”

Mr Ali, who works for the emergency services, suffered a fractured eye socket in the brawl while Mr Hale, a former soldier, was left with concussion.

As Mr Ali left court, smiling, he told BBC Sport editor Dan Roan he was “relieved it’s all over” and said he had no further comment to make.

Ben Stokes’ lawyer, Paul Lunt, said the jury’s decision fairly reflected the truth of what happened in Bristol that night.

Outside court, two cricket fans from Bristol – who were part of the crowd awaiting the outcome – said they were pleased with the verdict.

Arthur Davis, 30, said: “He’s a great player although not in form and maybe this will change that.”

And Javen Rahiman, 26, said: “I’m pretty pleased but it’s not the best example he’s setting, especially as the evening of the fight was after such a good victory.

“I hope it’s a kick up the backside for him and he can focus more on the game now with no distractions.”

The BBC’s cricket correspondent, Jonathan Agnew, said Mr Stokes would now face an ECB independent disciplinary committee, likely charged with bringing the game into disrepute.

Alternative facts and the death of truth

11/02/2025 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

A woman named Belle Gibson said she would deal with terminal cancer in her own way. She developed the concept of ‘wellness’ online and became something of a cult figure. She collected a lot of money – for charity, she said. It was all a lie and thousands were left hurt and betrayed. Some big names in business – Apple and Penguin – just looked inept and greedy.

The story is very competently told by two journalists who know the implications of this shambles for their profession, Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano in the just published The Woman Who Fooled the World, The True Story of Wellness Guru Belle Gibson. It is well worth reading for at least three reasons.

First, a retired lawyer who is nearly eighty has no experience – none – with social media. But he has seen the impact of children living secluded in a virtual world and wonders if it is illegal to be seen in Yarraville not working an iPhone – especially if you are crossing a busy intersection. And then there is the disaster of the pioneer of alternative facts – Donald Trump. It is hard to say which is worse about his Gaza raving – its lunacy or savagery. This book details how easily people are deluded. There is more than one born every minute. It is, frankly, terrifying. We are losing our capacity for outrage, and being conditioned to accept obvious duplicity.

Secondly, the authors know the implications for their profession. Journalists have professional obligations on how they report allegations against people – quite apart from the law of defamation. Frauds like Belle Gibson take flight online where there are few if any such rules. The role of gatekeeper just goes. So, they release the story in two parts – the failure to pass money on to charity; then the allegation that it was all a lie anyway. It is very unsettling to see how this unfolds before those who cannot tolerate doubt.

Thirdly, I have always had real misgivings about our criminal law, especially imprisonment as punishment – someone said that punishment is a measure of despair – but this woman was engaged in preying on people at their weakest moment and robbing them. She brazenly set herself up in a position of trust and then cruelly betrayed that trust. Psychiatrists have a term for the syndrome, but it is not suggested that she could plead insanity.

Why was she not charged and, upon conviction, jailed? The matter was dealt with by the civil service – the Department of Consumer Affairs. In my experience, they are even more toothless than ASIC. But the police opted out early.

……it’s understood that authorities favoured civil charges because that meant it could also hold Gibson’s publisher to account. Consumer Affairs considers gaining industry-wide change to be a bigger win than claiming the scalp of one rogue operator. It was a two birds one-stone scenario: Gibson would be charged, and a warning shot would be fired across the bows of the publishing industry.

In the result, Gibson did not turn up to the Federal Court, and was fined amounts which she has no capacity to pay, while she waves cheerily to her chagrined neighbours in Northcote. You and I pick up a big tab. And the law looks an ass.

I commend the book.

Sam Kerr

08/02/2025 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

It is hard to believe that this trial alleging ‘racially aggravated harassment’ against Sam Kerr is going on.

I need hardly declare my bias, which will be shared by most Australians, and followers of sport. Sam Kerr is one of the best footballers I have seen, and something of a national idol.

For a start, it had not occurred to me that Sam was of a different race to me. If I had wondered about her complexion, I may have repeated the error I had made with Stan Grant about twenty years ago – until I was corrected, I thought he had spent too much time in a solarium. But, then, in the 1950’s, when this nation’s traditional racism was at its peak, a federal MP asked whether Italians or Greeks – wogs or dagoes – were truly white.

It all shows how careful we must be – it appears to be accepted that a reference to the colour of a person is a reference to that person’s race.

The accused was obviously drunk, and police are trained and paid to deal with problems that that condition might lead to. It is remarkable that a whiter copper can be hurt actionably under the criminal law by a drunk referring to the colour of his skin while she abused him. What if she had added that he was a ‘he’, and a straight one to boot? Could he get some furlough to recover his composure and become whole again? The copper could not claim to have been hurt as a member of an oppressed minority.

It gets worse. The court has been told that the informant did not allege personal hurt when the charge was first formulated. He only did so after he got knocked back by the officers of the Crown. As a lawyer, I would feel uncomfortable in presenting such a case. It had enough whiskers on it already.

Then the charge is one of ‘harassment’. On my reading of the dictionaries – Oxford and Macquarie – that involves repetition or persistence. I do not see that hear.

And all this is not being dealt with by a magistrate in a morning. It is being heard by a judge and jury in a trial lasting more than a week.

Yet I keep hearing on Sky News UK that the criminal justice system in the UK is hopelessly out of control. Are real victims of sexual violence not getting the protection they desperately need because a drunken woman has ruffled the sensitivities of a male copper?

What politics could drive this oddity? Surely at some stage there was a polite high-level phone call. ‘Do your members really want this? Is it good for their standing – what people call ‘optics’? This could be seen as a ‘test case’ and front-page news here and elsewhere. During the war, the trains carried a message: ‘Is this journey really necessary’? Even the Palace might be interested. A conviction would be a real shot in the arm for republicans in Australia.’

It is not hard to imagine at least some on the jury busting to ask the judge: ‘On the off chance we decide to pot this woman – and God knows I have done a lot worse with a skin full – can you give us an assurance you will not put her inside?’

This and the Federal Court case against the ABC arising from comments made about Gaza show how tricky and dicey it is to make laws about what we can and cannot say in public about issues we are wont to call ‘sensitive’. If you push the law too far, you degrade it.

The one thing that is clear to me is that cases like that involving Sam Kerr are blood to a tiger to people like Nigel Farage, Peta Credlin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Peter Dutton. It’s hard to imagine a Queensland copper taking any of this seriously, but Pete will do what he can do for the team.

Put to one side all that bumpf about freedom of speech – making penal laws to enforce manners that you regard as appropriate demeans the law, and gives a free kick to vacuous, malicious, ideologues.

With Compliments

Geoffrey Gibson

Author: Geoffrey Gibson

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Passing Bull 401 – Equal dignity?

Déjà vu

Sam Kerr

Alternative facts and the death of truth

Sam Kerr