Author: Geoffrey Gibson

Terror and the Police State – Chapter 3

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

[This is a short version of a book ‘Terror and the Police State; Punishment as a Measure of Despair’, published in 2015.  The book focussed on France after 1789, Russia after 1917, and Germany after 1933.  The instalments will follow the 21 chapter headings that are as follows: 1 Terms of Engagement; 2 Enduring emergency; 3 Righteousness; 4 Good bye to the law; 5 Instruments of terror; 6 Civil war; 7 Waves of terror; 8 Degradation; 9 Secret police; 10 Surveillance; 11 Denunciation; 12 Fear; 13 Popular courts and show trials; 14 Scapegoats, suspicion and proof; 15 Gulags; 16 Propaganda, religion, and cults; 17 Surrealism and banality; 19 The horror; 20 The meaning?; 21 Justification.  The short version is about one quarter the length of the original.  Each instalment is about 1200 words.]

3

Righteousness

Great wrongs are often done to secure what are seen as great rights.  If you subscribe to that lethal view that the ends justify the means, then you may invoke righteousness to justify terrorism.  Just think of the righteousness of John brown on slavery.  The problem then is – how do you distinguish the righteousness of John Wilkes Booth on slavery?

The French Revolution was supported and applauded from the beginning by people like Kant, Beethoven, and Wordsworth – and the majority of the enlightened people and uncrowned or unrobed heads in all Europe.  It was a colossal blow against caste and privilege, and an elevating insight into the claims of the rights of man.  Macaulay said that the only event to compare to the Reformation was the French Revolution.  Both involved people rising up against caste.  The Terror and Napoleon would put many off – Napoleon for his imperial throne and his aristocracy as much as for his wars – but the massive sense of liberation would endure.  Those championing the revolution claimed the moral high ground at the start, and they have never relinquished it.

Their decision to go to war to defend the revolution was a large part of what produced the Terror, but it did a lot more than merely change the face of war.  The old regimes of Europe, with their kings and nobles, would never have armed the people.  There was a change in the ideas of change in politics.  Professor Doyle said:

In other words, it was a profound cultural transformation.  The writers of the Enlightenment, so revered by the intelligentsia who made the Revolution, had always believed it could be done if men dared to seize control of their own destiny.  The men of 1789 did so, in a rare moment of courage, altruism, and idealism which took away the breath of educated Europe.

Righteousness is not a term to endear people to those professing to have it, and the moving forces in this revolution were full of it.  There was the sense that so many in the nation had suffered too long under a just sense of grievance caused by privilege, and this privilege was the foundation of the inequality against which the revolutionaries were fighting.  Being a champion of liberty and equality was to be a moral hero.  This is precisely the moral ground claimed today by the champions of civil or human rights, although not as many have to put their lives on the line as the men and women of 1789.

The essential dignity of each of us is the notion that crowns Kant’s moral philosophy.  He held that dignity (or worthiness) is beyond price, and that humanity so far as it is capable of morality alone has dignity.  A friend of Kant said this of his reaction to the French Revolution: ‘He lived and moved in it; and, in spite of all the terror, he held on to his hopes so much that when he heard the declaration of the republic, he called out with excitement: ‘Now let your servant go in peace to his grave, for I have seen the glory of the world.’’

Then the righteousness of the revolutionaries showed itself in the way that they defended their gains, and their nation.  There was of course faction and rebellion and civil war, and foreign nations that were intent on restoring the monarchy and punishing those who had reviled and then killed their king.  The French only had to look at what happened to the killers of Charles I in England when Charles II was restored – after an interregnum of almost a generation.  So, political idealism became fused with personal courage and love for the nation.  True revolutionaries were true patriots – who else could be?

It is hardly surprising that in extremis people took to extreme measures whether they were part of government or not.  What we call the Terror was the culmination of those forces.  The people of France were going where no one had been before.  They were trying to build a system of government after the old one had collapsed under the weight of its own inanity and brutality.  They had not had much if any experience of either governing or trying to build government.  At the same time, foreign enemies and their supporters within were threatening this young new nation with death and destruction.  You cannot just step out and go and buy a text-book that tells you what to do in a case like that.

Arthur Young was a man of birth, property, and position who knew what it meant to farm the land.  He was uniquely placed to give a balanced view on the excesses of the revolution.

It is impossible to justify the excesses of the people in their taking up arms; they were certainly guilty of cruelties; it is idle to deny the facts, for they have been proved too clearly to admit of a doubt.  But is it really the people to whom we are to impute the whole? – Or to their oppressors who had kept them so long in a state of bondage?  He who chooses to be served by slaves, and by ill-treated slaves, must know that he holds both his property and life by a tenure far different from those who prefer the service of well-treated freemen; and he who dines to the music of groaning sufferers must not, in the moment of insurrection, complain that his daughters are ravished and then destroyed, and that his sons’ throats are cut.  When such evils happen, they are surely more imputable to the tyranny of the master than to the cruelty of the servant. 

The wish to see like cases treated alike underwrites all our notions of justice.  If you contend that people are equal, and that they should be treated equally, the old caste system was a very cruel travesty and a very unjust imposition.  The hatred of the aristocracy – the owners of the burnt chateaux – was fuelled by the revulsion of privilege, and privilege is by definition in contempt of the rule of law as we know it, since one essential principle is that all people are equal before the law.

There is little point in looking for anything like righteousness behind the police states or terror practised in Germany or Russia.  The German nation had a just grievance at the behaviour of the Allies after the Great War.  No one stated that grievance better than John Maynard Keynes, but neither Versailles nor anything else could justify the Nazi revolution or terror.

The suffering of the Russian people from oppression at the bottom in about 1917 was probably not significantly less than that of the French people in 1789, but the Bolsheviks (Communists) lived in a moral and political world all of their own.  The Russian people would have to pay for the intellectual conceit of Marx in thinking that his mind was powerful enough to dictate logically verifiable answers to the human condition, and the insatiable craving for power of Lenin led him to insist on departing from the blueprint of Marx to suit his own ego and timetable.  The Russian police state now seems to us to be an inevitable product of a totalitarian kind of government that Communism prescribed, but the full ghastly flowering of the terror in Russia owed much to the personal insecurity and cruelty of Stalin.

The French would spend the next century in learning that it is hard to legislate ideals into law, but in committing itself to the Rights of Man in 1789, France was adopting as a nation a faith or aspiration that would be utterly contradicted by those regimes that we least admire, such as those of Russia or Germany when they generated their reigns of terror.

Here and there – Getting a fright – and feeling desperately mortal

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

 

The wonderful film Dunkirk shows young men knowing real fear.  They may be shot and wounded or killed.  They may be shot in the worst possible way.  In the back –retreating.  So that if they get back home, it will be as part of defeated army.  (We know about that here in Australia.  This movie is at its most moving when it shows some men getting back home and fearing their rejection as losers.)  We see young men dying – it’s all down to chance.  Randomness is all about them.  Their fate is out of their hands.  There is a sense of helplessness.  Is this the ultimate insult to our human dignity – that we become powerless in the hands of others?

Last Saturday morning, I was working here at this desk in the way I am now – typing and looking out over meadows and gumtrees.  I had experienced some shortness of breath that morning and the previous morning, but nothing much.  (This is about my condition of emphysema, not lung cancer.)  At about 11.20, I started, to feel a chill.  Then I felt aches in the legs.  Then I got short of breath changing rooms.  I felt even chillier and suspected an onset of flue.  When I went to put a large log on the fire, I fell to one knee, and seemed to lose my breathing completely.  This all happened so fast.

At about 11.45, I rang the clinic at Kyneton and said I was very distressed and on my way.  I cannot recall thinking about ringing 000 then.  I do recall thinking the trip to Kyneton – about ten k’s on the freeway – might be tricky for me, but that if I had collapsed, I could have rung 000 from there.  It’s hard reconstructing these things after the event.  The trouble is that you feel like you are running out of time – but you don’t know how much time is left.  It’s like being on time-on in the last quarter.

I made it to the clinic.  I just presented my bedraggled self and was soon on oxygen.  I can recall the fever was so bad that when they pulled a sleeve up, I pulled it down again because the chill to the exposed skin was physically painful.  (Is this what Don Giovanni felt at the end?  )I was looked after by a young doctor who is an extremely competent professional person.  The nursing staff acted on my instructions to get some good neighbours to look after Wolf.  I was taken by ambulance to Bendigo.  The paramedics were also very professional and kind.

After about four hours in casualty – monitored to the hilt – I was cleared of influenza, X-rayed, and told I wasn’t go to die – at least from this infection of the lung.  After a long delay caused by a bus crash outside Ballarat, I was taken to St John of God.  I had a long discussion with Lilly, a 48 year old Malaysian lady, about cooking and climate.  (‘It’s bloody hot there all the time, Mate.’)  I had similarly diverting discussion with many members of a dedicated staff, and after only minimal untruths, I secured my release after two nights.  The kind neighbour who looks after my garden had looked after Wolf.  She collected me and drove me back with him.  I’m determinedly resilient one day later.

But for about thirty minutes on Saturday, I knew real fear.  It was that sense of randomness of helplessness, that fear of the unknown, and loss of dignity.  The image that came to mind was of a fly on its back heading in diminishing oval slurries to the bath plug hole.  There does after all obviously have to be an end sometime.  Timing is all.

I think I can say that death itself doesn’t worry me.  What’s the point?  It has to happen.  Wittgenstein taught me years ago that you don’t live to see your own death.  That is axiomatic.  (Someone at Oxford told me a Greek had said just this 2,500 years ago.)  Descartes started modern philosophy by saying ‘I think, therefore I am.’  At about 4.30 this morning I thought for the first time of a kind of obverse.  ‘I’m dead, therefore I don’t think.’  (If you think that’s silly, it may suggest a problem in the first proposition.)

When the lights go out, that’s it.  There are no replays or appeals to the third umpire.  But we may wish to have some say in how the lights get turned off.

I hadn’t thought I had ever been so scared.  But when I thought about it, I recalled one time in the ‘60s.  During each vacation I worked with a small outfit called C & I Cleaning.  (That stood for ‘Commercial and Industrial’ – you can imagine the men’s version.)  The work was dirty and often dangerous.  Employers got away with things that would now draw jail time – big jail time.  There was no union involved.  It was never even discussed.  I used to think about it, but instinctively felt I would not have a job if I did anything about it.  More importantly, the permanents had families to support, and they were not interested.

We used to do jobs that these people were not qualified to do.  We did a job cleaning the outside of what was the Graham Hotel in Swanston Street between Flinders Street and Collins Street.  We did our own rigging of what were called needles, that is, girders, over the top of the building from which to suspend the slings, called painters’ slings.  These needles went over the parapet under a steel fence and then had concrete davits holding them down.  The whole arrangement looked to me to be amateurish.  I was involved in setting it up.  You may as well have asked me to do surgery. There was no Department of Labour and Industry inspection.  In truth, the needles were wrongly set.

At about midnight, we started winching up the slings.  There were three of us on each of two slings.  I was winching one, at the end nearest the Town Hall.  The site beside me was vacant and there was a north wind giving a bit of a sway to the sling as we went up.  About every ten feet or so my ratchet would give a slight click and just drop.  It was very, very unnerving.  It was also damned hard work.

We got to the top of the sixth floor and the little click became a run and the thing went down so that we were sort of hanging there with the sling at a 60 degree angle.  Someone or others of us were shaking so much that the whole sling was shaking.  It was seven minutes to four in the morning according to the Town Hall clock.  I can remember saying to Dickie Roberts that we were up a bit.  Dickie was an Englishman (who lived with a hooker who did interesting things with Cadbury’s chocolates).  I liked Dickie.  He said ‘You don’t fucking bounce’ in an accent that was thick for more than one reason.

A young night porter came to the window and turned white.  He said he could not handle the window.  We told him to kick the fucking thing in – and the air conditioner as well.  We made our escape at about 4am.  About seven minutes of swaying terror.  When I first read Measure for Measure, years later I thought I knew just what Shakespeare meant by the phrase ‘desperately mortal’.

Someone gave me a brandy.  It was a huge balloon glass.  I drained it and did not feel a thing.  I was blind with anger.  I wanted to get my hands on those management bastards who had been standing down there looking up hopefully with their feet on the ground.  When we got to them they asked if we would go up on the other sling.  Looking back on it, I think it may have been as well if one or another of us had hit one of them.  Dickie could have been just the boy for the job – he was brawny and he had pictures and I was sure he had been inside.  It is not so much that those men were greedy – it was that they did not care: they were worse than careless.  They were in truth bloody dangerous.

None of this came to me last Saturday.  The two cases are very different – not least because of my age.  But there was the same sense of randomness and helplessness – and fear of the unknown.

At least three things are clear to me after two trips to casualty by ambulance.

First, while we have mostly lost the old independent civil service we used to know, we are very well provided for by our doctors, nurses and paramedics.  I spent a lot time in the last few days talking to many of them, including many trainees and Latrobe students.  All of them – all of them – impressed me by their professionalism.  If you spend time in casualty, and see what life’s like at the bottom, you know that these people are not there for the money.  This is vocation, and God bless them.

And God bless their variety.  The last nurse I spoke to was a student from Zimbabwe called Lana.  She had the natural dignity of tall African women, and speaking to her, I realised the advantage that black women have over whites – their eyes flash naturally.

Secondly, there is another group who should spend time in casualty in a public hospital.  Those vicious idiots who want to loosen our gun laws should listen to people screaming obscene hate in public – whether through drugs, including alcohol, or dementia – in hospitals that now employ permanent security staff, and where PA’s announce impending mayhem by ‘Code Grey’, and their end by ‘Stand down.’  It is straight out of Nineteen Eighty-four.  It is worse than madness to suggest that we should loosen gun laws in pursuit of a vane mantra about ‘freedom.’  We will have to learn better how to deal with these nasty, cruel, cranks – I’m talking about the ratbag politicians, not the poor bastards in casualty.

Thirdly, I don’t want to go into labels about dying, but I may have to look again at some of the issues.  The trick, as it seems to me, is to be allowed to go out with as much dignity as possible and as little pain to those close to you.  Can we not manage to set up such a regime?  The issue looks to me a bit like that of marriage equality.  People should be left free to do as they decently want to as long as they don’t hurt others.  Isn’t that what we are supposed to be about?

Let me then go back to Dunkirk.  I hardly saw any TV at St John of God.  But I turned on SBS to watch their Sunday news.  I got the end of the Battle of Jutland.  This was the great naval battle of the Great War.  It was at best a draw.  Neither side risked its whole fleet.  It is still very controversial.  But many ships went down and thousands died.  The horror came as some British ships limped home – to be met by people heaving coal at them from bridges.  The fearfully uninformed were abusing their servicemen for cowardice.  This is sickening to see.  Have ever men been worse treated?  As I said, we know all about that here.  In the name of God, we are such awkward boxes of good and bad.

Passing Bull 124 – Bull about respect

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If, having fetched a pale of water, Jack said to Jill ‘I respect you’, what might he mean?  The Oxford English Dictionary has for the verb ‘to treat or regard with deference, esteem or honour; to feel or show respect for; to esteem, prize or value a thing’, or person.  Jack is saying that he has a good opinion of Jill, or that he thinks well of her.

What if Jack says that he respects the flag?  Well, he is not talking about the cloth that is the symbol.  He is talking about the people, nation, or political entity for which the flag is a symbol.  And all those entities, involving tens of millions of people, all of whom are entitled to their own respect, are far more abstract than the little girl called Jill.  And there may be a lot more room to discuss just what are the aspects of, say, the nation that causes Jack to respect it.  Jack may not be of the ‘my nation right or wrong’ faction.  To use the distinctions of the OED, the question may also arise whether Jack regards the nation with deference, or whether he merely treats it that way; whether Jack feels respect for the nation, or whether he just shows it.

We are talking about a ritual performed before a symbol – like a lawyer bowing in court, or a believer genuflecting in church.  There may be many shades of meaning behind the ritual or the belief of the person making it to the ideas of those for whom the symbol represents.

Some American footballers chose a different form of that ritual to protest about one aspect of the governance of the nation.  That was their right.  Their president claimed the right to abuse them.  He wanted them punished by being fired.  He did not specify what law or contract had been broken.  He would be equally ignorant of both.  But he showed his lack of respect for his fellow citizens when he offended and insulted them by the vulgar locker room banter that is his stock in verbal trade.  Well, we are used to that with Trump.  He is a bad stupid man who thrives on conflict.

But his unctuous vice-president – who, unlike the president, has God, and has Him written all over his face –feigned a tantrum, and staged a walk-out, at God knows what expense to the American taxpayer.  Mr Pence said:

I left today’s Colts game because President Trump and I will not dignify any event that disrespects our soldiers, our flag, or our national anthem.

What would Jack and Jill know about the concluding trinity?  It’s hard to say something good about  a nation that seeks to cast out anyone who does not think well of it.  It’s just as hard to think of anything good to say of a leader of such a nation who turns his back on someone who does not think well of it.  They are marks of regimes that we least respect.

We are having this discussion while looking at a massive lack of respect in the best known industry of the U S – Hollywood.  Mr Weinstein sounds evil to the core.  He reminds me of Mr Strauss-Kahn.  Their vice is identical.  They are predatory bullies who abuse their power to exploit those beneath them in pursuit of their own self-gratification.

So does Donald Trump.  He shows no respect for those beneath him.  He shows no respect for what the flag or anthem stand for – the Constitution, Congress, the judiciary, or the office of President.  The President has no idea about the Bill of Rights, except for the current fallacies about guns.  He is a true abuser of power, and not just because of his celebrated curbside opinion about pussy-grabbing.  The difference between Trump and people like Strauss-Kahn and Weinstein is one of degree.

These thoughts came up as I read an article in the Financial Times.  It referred to an article entitled Why the assholes are winning.  Its author, a Stanford professor, said that leaders who create ‘toxic and hellish work environments’ are often admired nonetheless: ‘It seemingly doesn’t matter what an individual or a company does … as long as they are sufficiently rich and successful.’

The Financial Times went on:

In ‘Down and Dirty Pictures’, his book about Miramax, Peter Biskind described the Weinstein brothers’ reputation ‘for brilliance but also for malice and brutality’.

Another study of the traits of dominant people noted that greater power triggers ‘disinhibited behaviour’. In other words, leaders who are allowed to do whatever they want can end up behaving very badly. The powerful ‘more frequently act on their desires in a socially inappropriate way’, the authors concluded.

Over-eating, over-aggression and predatory sexual behaviour were among syndromes they described for ‘high status, powerful individuals’ whose moods swing from irritability into mania.  When personal patronage is the surest route from obscurity to glamour, danger lurks.

The references to ‘disinhibited behaviour’ and ‘personal patronage’ may or may not reflect what happens in the Murdoch empire, but the whole piece looks to describe the current white House – word for word.  Leaders who get away with doing what they want end up behaving badly – very badly.

Poet of the Month

Andy’s gone with cattle

Our Andy’s gone to battle now

‘Gainst Drought, the red marauder;

Our Andy’s gone with cattle now

Across the Queensland border.

He’s left us in dejection now;

Our hearts with him are roving.

It’s dull on this selection now,

Since Andy went a-droving.

Who now shall wear the cheerful face

In times when things are slackest?

And who shall whistle round the place

When Fortune frowns her blackest?

Oh, who shall cheek the squatter now

When he comes round us snarling?

His tongue is growing hotter now

Since Andy cross’d the Darling. T

he gates are out of order now,

In storms the `riders’ rattle;

For far across the border now Our Andy’s gone with cattle.

Poor Aunty’s looking thin and white;

And Uncle’s cross with worry;

And poor old Blucher howls all night

Since Andy left Macquarie.

Oh, may the showers in torrents fall,

And all the tanks run over;

And may the grass grow green and tall

In pathways of the drover;

And may good angels send the rain

On desert stretches sandy;

And when the summer comes again

God grant ’twill bring us Andy.

Terror and the Police State: II

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

[This is a short version of a book ‘Terror and the Police State; Punishment as a Measure of Despair’, published in 2015.  The book focussed on France after 1789, Russia after 1917, and Germany after 1933.  The instalments will follow the 21 chapter headings that are as follows: 1 Terms of Engagement; 2 Enduring emergency; 3 Righteousness; 4 Good bye to the law; 5 Instruments of terror; 6 Civil war; 7 Waves of terror; 8 Degradation; 9 Secret police; 10 Surveillance; 11 Denunciation; 12 Fear; 13 Popular courts and show trials; 14 Scapegoats, suspicion and proof; 15 Gulags; 16 Propaganda, religion, and cults; 17 Surrealism and banality; 19 The horror; 20 The meaning?; 21 Justification.  The short version is about one quarter the length of the original.  Each instalment is about 1200 words.]

2

Enduring Emergency

During the seventh century before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, at a time of economic strife and depression, Solon was appointed arbiter and given the job of restructuring the constitution of Athens.  He annulled debts, but he could not ban envy or greed.  Those primal emotions translate into faction in politics.  A man called Peisistratus had been a friend of Solon.  He organised a faction of the Hill, mostly poorer people and others who had lost out under Solon, although Peisistratus himself was aristocratic.  Peisistratus wanted to take over as the ruler of Athens, to become what we call a tyrant.  Peisistratus made himself tyrant of Athens by a stunt that might fairly be called textbook.  It is described by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus as follows.

Gathering together a band of partisans, and giving himself out for the protector of the Highlanders, he contrived the following stratagem.  He wounded himself and his mules, and then drove his chariot into the market-place, professing just to have escaped an attack of his enemies, who had attempted his life as he was on his way to the country.  He besought the people to assign him a guard to protect his person … The Athenians, deceived by his story, appointed him a band of citizens to serve as a guard who were to carry clubs instead of spears, and to accompany him wherever he went.  So strengthened, Peisistratus broke into revolt and seized the citadel.  In this way, he acquired the sovereignty of Athens …

There in microcosm you see the rise of many later tyrants, such as Mussolini and Hitler – an exaggerated threat; an ‘emergency’ response; and the seizure of power, which is not relinquished.  The notion of emergency or crisis or threat to personal or general security that was so glibly exploited more than two thousand five hundred years ago is close to the centre of the reigns of terror in France, Russia, and Germany.

The sense of emergency was real throughout the five years in France from July 1789 to July 1794.  A lot happened during this time, but three things did not happen:  France did not achieve a settled constitution; France did not establish a settled and adequate food supply for all her people; and France was never freed of the threat from inside and out from people who wanted to deprive France of the benefits of the revolution so far.  For the most part, people were living in anarchy, and many of them lived in constant fear and hunger.  We have to bear these things steadily in mind as we watch the nation descend into a cycle of violence and vendetta, and then a degradation of the human spirit that may come when all legal order is gone, and the lid is lifted off to reveal all of the worst that humanity can show or do.

The fall of the Bastille was followed by the Great Fear – the whole nation lived in dark fear of robbers and brigands as the violence of the uprising launched the French people into the political unknown.  The foreign reactions soon began to harden.  Aristocrats plotted from abroad.  The Pope condemned the reorganisation of the French church.  Then the king and his family tried to escape, and were brought back to Paris, effectively as prisoners.  In 1792, the National Assembly issued a declaration, ‘La Patrie est en dangère’.  A state of emergency was proclaimed.  All Frenchmen capable of bearing arms were called up for national service.  This emergency was real.

Europe threatened the ‘total destruction’ of Paris if the royal family were not respected and protected.  Five hundred patriots marched from Marseilles to Paris.  They sang a song written for the army of the Rhine by a man called Rouget de Lisle.  This is probably the best known anthem in the world, but not many people know just how ferocious the lyrics are.  The danger facing France was the reason for the ferocity.  In August 1792, there was a further revolution, when the commune of Paris was set up.  The king was not deposed but merely suspended.  Government was fragmented even further.  The sense that the patrie was really en dangère – which risks the heads of those found on the wrong side – led to the ghastly eruptions known as the September Massacres.  The Paris mob gave a frightening glimpse of Hell.

In March 1793, the Revolutionary Tribunal and the Committee of Public Safety were set up.  The period from then to July 1794 when Robespierre fell is generally seen as the time of the Terror in France.

In short, for the whole of the time of the main events of what we call the French Revolution, France went from one violent episode to another while it had no effective central government and when it was entering into wars which would when extended under Napoleon consume Europe for a generation.  There was a general and continuing sense of crisis and emergency before Napoleon; he pacified France and then he detonated the world.

Government under the Tsars had broken down, but after the revolution in 1917, there was worse anarchy and civil war than even France had experienced.  Stalin was in power for decades.  The party had the machinery for a police state from the beginning, and one that might be structured on lines that some might call scientific, but for the most part the Terror under Stalin was not practised in any sense of crisis or emergency, but because some very cruel people had never been educated to see any other way.  Stalin and his aides were also morally empty.

Hitler would be another emperor-like figure for whom war would be eternal, but the process to get to that result was very different.  The reign of Terror was commenced in France when those leading and defending the revolution had good reason to fear for the survival of the political results that had been obtained, and the freedom that had been earned, and many of them had fear for their very lives if the Monarchists returned.  The existence of the nation itself was threatened.  This was never the case for the Nazis.

Hitler and the Nazis never got fifty per cent of the vote.  They came to power in 1933 by a combination of terror, deceit, and seduction.  The terror came at first with the rough-house bullying of the Brownshirts which when they got into power would become the lethal brutality of the Blackshirts – the Gestapo and the SS.  The steps between Kristallnacht and Auschwitz were not that great or steep.  The deception did not come in holding back on their long term aims.  Hitler in Mein Kampf was open about his intention of eliminating the Jews and enslaving the Poles and the Russians, even if he had a confused way of saying things, and a manner that would put any sane person off reading the book – or, perhaps, taking it seriously.

The deception came because Hitler and his aides were morally empty.  They had no principles or decency, none at all.  They could not be taken at their word, or trusted in anything.  The Terror was with Hitler and his Nazis from the beginning to the end.  The only contribution to a sense of emergency from outside came with the burning down of the Reichstag which led to a propaganda extravaganza which is still exercising historians and scholars.  It was this incident that gave the Nazis the pretext to scrap what was left of the rule of law and turn Germany, which fifty years ago had been the foremost liberal democracy on the planet, into a police state that was far more powerful and horrific than anything seen before.

Here and there – Is any nation civilised?

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

If you read Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, you will probably find more references to Italy than any other nation.  He was not talking about what some call the glory of ancient Rome.  Clark started after the fall of Rome.  But he dwelt lovingly on Italy, which did not then exist as nation, in the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation – even if governance in Italy stank and governance in the Church of Rome was so bad that it led to the unending schism.  There would be general agreement that Italy is a civilised nation, or at least as much entitled to make that claim as others.  Who wouldn’t say that of a people that gave the world Dante, Raphael, Da Vinci, and Verdi?

In 2012, the Italians unveiled a monument built with public money on a picturesque village near Rome.  The monument was to a general, Rodolfo Graziani.  Well, the nation that gave us Michelangelo and Bernini may wish to celebrate one of its heroes.  But to a general of Mussolini, such a stupid and cruel duce that the Italians killed and hung upside down?  Well, some might see here an error of taste or judgment, but hardly evidence in itself of a failure of civilisation.

General Graziani was a dedicated fascist and a lifelong supporter of Mussolini.  He commanded some of the Italian troops who invaded Ethiopia after 1935 under the reported slogan ‘Il Duce will have Ethiopia, with or without the Ethiopians.’  He became the Viceroy of Ethiopia in Mussolini’s pathetic attempt to create an empire.  What follows is mostly taken from a review in The Economist of the book The Addis Ababa Massacre: Italy’s National Shame, by Ian Campbell.

The Ethiopians did not wish to be invaded.  Few people do.  One of them tried to kill the leader of the invasion.  The bloody revenge of the Blackshirts lasted three days.  Mussolini’s paramilitaries were officially given carta blanca.  They were joined by regular soldiers, carabinieri, and the local Italian community.  In this frightful massacre, witnesses reported crushed babies, disembowelled pregnant women and the burning of whole families.  Graziani became known as ‘the butcher.’  Mr Campbell says 20,000 may have died.  Italy puts the figure at 600 to 2000.  Ethiopia says 30,000 died.  On any view, it makes the German annihilation of Lidice, in response to the assassination of Heydrich, look meek.  Doubtless most of the murderers saw themselves as good Christian inheritors of the civilisation of the West.

Mr Campbell says Graziani was personally responsible and that he was seeking to eliminate the Ethiopian nobility and intelligentsia.  The term is ethnic cleansing.  Two of the many black holes in Africa, Ethiopia and Libya, are the products of Mussolini’s mindless imperialism.  Italy has a lot to answer for.

What say the Italians?  This was no more than a typical European colonial atrocity – no worse than the British slaughter at Amritsar.  Few historians have looked at it.  Those who did were denounced as unpatriotic.  The film Lion in the Desert was banned for ‘damaging the honour of the Italian army.’  It had no honour, and this stupid pretense goes to the heart of the problem.  School children are not taught of the massacre.

Graziani evaded prosecution for war crimes.  They were blocked by Italy and, I’m sorry to say, England.  An Italian court sentenced him to 19 years for collaborating with the Nazis, but in the best traditions of Italian justice and governance, he served only four months.  Some say his lawyers said he had ‘received orders.’  Haven’t the Italians heard of the precedent set at Nuremberg?  No, the butcher now has his own monument.

Germany has come to terms with its past.  Italy, Japan, and Turkey have not.  The cancer of fascism is still alive in Italy.  While it remains so, and while Italy stays blind to its crimes, Italy may claim some mantle from its past of civilisation, but it is hard to see it as either a mature or decent nation.

Passing Bull 123 – Freedom and guns

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To most people outside the U S, it sounds at best silly to say that the failure of the U S to make sane laws about guns is a necessary incident of freedom. .  Thousands die each year in America, including thousands of veterans, because of this ideological glitch.  It is fed by the corruption of the NRA, the gullibility of its supporters, a Hollywood view of America’s attachment to violence, and an American preference for self-help over sensible government intervention.

In the result, you get bullshit like this from the disgraced Bill O’Reilly, late of Fox News.

Once again, the big downside of American freedom is on gruesome display. A psychotic gunman in Las Vegas has committed the worst mass murder in US history.  Public safety demands logical gun laws but the issue is so polarising and emotional that little will be accomplished as there is no common ground.  The NRA and its supporters want easy access to weapons, while the left wants them banned.  This is the price of freedom.  Violent nuts are allowed to roam free until they do damage, no matter how threatening they are.

For us, that is odious rubbish.  But the NRA parrots it.  They said some of their members were shot and killed in Las Vegas.

Any law affects our freedom.  To oppose a law on the ground that it limits our freedom is to miss the point.  We have laws prohibiting your using a gun to hurt or threaten someone.  We have laws prohibiting carrying guns in public.  It would be absurd to oppose those laws on the ground that they limit our freedom.  To repeat, all laws affect our freedom.  The issue is whether that inevitable result is warranted in the public interest.  Do the benefits of these laws warrant their restrictions on our freedom?  Who wants to be free to walk up Collins Street with a rifle that can kill someone at the MCG?  If there are some people who feel aggrieved at this loss of ‘freedom’, that’s their bad luck, because the numbers are squarely against them.

Clearly, then, we are not ‘free’ to aim bullets at people to hurt them.  Should we be free to aim words at people to hurt them?  Some people object to these laws on the ground that they limit our freedom.  For the reasons given, that does not advance the discussion at all.

Take a law that prohibits one person from publicly insulting another person on the ground of their race.  That law was made to stop people inflicting one form of harm on other people, and because the prohibited behaviour can lead to a breach of the peace – which the law is there to protect.  Those are valid considerations in the public interest.  What ‘freedom’ does this law limit?  The freedom to publicly insult another person on the ground of their race.

Again, if there are some people who feel aggrieved at this loss of ‘freedom’, that’s their bad luck, because the numbers are squarely against them.

But in either case, it’s just bullshit to complain that the law affects our freedoms.

Poet of the month: Emily Dickinson

How fits his Umber Coat

The Tailor of the Nut?

Combined without a seam

Like Raiment of a Dream –

Who spun the Auburn Cloth?

Computed how the girth?

The Chestnut aged grows

In those primeval Clothes –

We know that we are wise –

Accomplished in Surprise –

Yet by this Countryman –

This nature – how undone!

Terror and the Police State 1

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TERROR AND THE POLICE STATE

[This is a short version of a book ‘Terror and the Police State; Punishment as a Measure of Despair’, published in 2015.  The book focussed on France after 1789, Russia after 1917, and Germany after 1933.  The instalments will follow the 21 chapter headings which are as follows: 1 Terms of Engagement; 2 Enduring emergency; 3 Righteousness; 4 Good bye to the law; 5 Instruments of terror; 6 Civil war; 7 Waves of terror; 8 Degradation; 9 Secret police; 10 Surveillance; 11 Denunciation; 12 Fear; 13 Popular courts and show trials; 14 Scapegoats, suspicion and proof; 15 Gulags; 16 Propaganda, religion, and cults; 17 Surrealism and banality; 19 The horror; 20 The meaning?; 21 Justification.  The short version is about one quarter the length of the original.  Each instalment is about 1200 words.]

1

Terms of engagement

What is terror?  Terror is extreme fear.  If I feel terror, I feel an intense form of fear.  When we talk of ‘the reign of terror’, we speak of a government that engages in terrorism – it pursues terror (or extreme fear) – for political purposes.  Some people think that terrorism has only recently become a big issue.  They are dead wrong.  It is as old as humanity.  The book of Genesis is full of it, with God taking an active part in many forms of terror and with terrifying results, as you would expect from a being that is all powerful.  The Oxford English Dictionary says that terrorism is ‘government by intimidation’ and a ‘policy intended to strike with terror those against whom it is adopted’.  The first instance of terrorist in the Oxford is ‘applied to the Jacobins and their agents and partisans in the French Revolution’.   All the terrorists we look at were in government.

Except for a limited form in a black hole like North Korea, we do not see terrorism much in government now, at least not in a form that governments own up to.  We still plainly see terrorism in those who try to bring governments down and in religious fanatics who want to achieve either that objective or some religious purpose.  At the time of writing – in mid‑2014 – some fanatics under the label IS are pursuing terrorism to create an Islamic state.  One of their ways of inducing extreme fear is by cutting people’s heads off in public.  This was the preferred mode of terrorism employed by the Jacobin government in France just a few years after the white people from England set up their first colony here as a jail.

What we see now is people who kill for a belief.  These beliefs confer total certainty and demand total obedience.  These killers kill for a belief that excludes tolerance for any contrary belief and any diversion or softening on other moral grounds.  ‘I believe – therefore I kill’.  Credo ergo caedo. Credo killers are prepared to kill and die for a belief because that belief means more to them than life itself – or at least this life.  The promise of eternal life is a real killer.  How do you deal with a religious fanatic who wants to die and who gets worse in prison?

What is a police state?  It is a nation or state in which government claims the right to control all aspects of public and private life.  The government is all powerful – there is no rule of law to check it.  The executive makes law by its actions.  Any purported legislature or judiciary is sad and toothless.  The most feared arm is the secret police.  Sparta was the ancient model.  1984 is the fictional model.  The Deutsche Democratische Republik was one of its most fearful modern examples.

What is a revolution?  We are here talking of revolutions in government.  The Oxford English Dictionary defines a political ‘revolution’ as ‘a complete overthrow of the establishment in any country or state by those who were previously subject to it; a forcible substitution of a new ruler or form of government’.  The short definition for our purposes is a ‘forcible substitution of a new form of government’.  When we speak of a coup d’état (‘a blow at the State’) we are usually referring to a forcible change in the personnel at the top of the government, and not in the system of government itself.

Historians have been reluctant to describe the accession to power in Germany by the Nazis as a ‘revolution’.  There is, however, no doubt that force, both applied and threatened, was an essential part of their winning of power, and that the consequences were on any view revolutionary, in at least the popular sense of that term.

Revolutions like wars have two sides.  What the revolutionary process looks like will depend on what side you are on.  Nelson Mandela was once a terrorist, but since his side won, we are allowed to accept him, and properly so, as one of the most revered statesmen of the world.  The terrorists of Northern Ireland did not win and are still seen by many as terrorists.  One man’s insurgent or terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, liberator, servant of God, or martyr.  Which side the Taliban or IS may come down on will turn on the results of their wars and from what side you are looking at them.

Since a police state violates what we know as the rule of law, we should say what we mean by that term.  The English jurist A.V. Dicey identified three elements.  The first element of the rule of law was the absolute supremacy of regular law over arbitrary power.  This was the supremacy of law over people.  The second aspect was equality before the law, or the equal subjection of all classes to the ordinary laws of the land.  The third part is characteristic of what we call the common law.  Those brought up in the English tradition of laws being derived from precedents found in previous cases – the common law – see the constitution as resulting from that process that has made the ordinary law of the land.  The constitution is not the source, but the consequence, of the rights of individuals.  The constitution is itself part of the common law.  The Europeans tend to see it the other way around – they see private rights deriving from public institutions.

You can see how offensive a police state is to someone brought up in the Anglo-American tradition.  A police state is a living violation of the rule of law that underwrites western civilisation, and we will see that the first thing to be done by those wishing to set up a police state is to scrap the rule of law.  The stakes are unbelievably high.  The police state is the ultimate threat to the dignity of the individual.  Russia and two of Europe’s most civilised nations at one time lapsed into a rule of terror in a police state.  They were then anything but civilised.  Immanuel Kant said:

Something that relates to our needs or wants has a market price; something that meets our taste or whim has a fancy price; but a quality that is the only basis of that which is an end in itself has more than a relative worth or price – it has intrinsic worth, that is, it has dignity … Morality, and mankind as capable of it, is the only thing which has dignity.

Hannah Arendt said:

The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses.  Its victory may coincide with the destruction of humanity; wherever it has ruled it has begun to destroy the essence of man.  Yet to turn our backs on the destructive forces of the century is of little avail …. We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion.  The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition.  This is the reality in which we live.  And this is why all efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are vain.

Here and there – The politics of identity and identity politics

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The German nationalist party AfD pledged to ‘take back our country and our people.’  Who might ‘our people’ be?  The party did very well in Saxony – that had been part of East Germany.  Many young people left there for jobs in the west.  A Dresden observer said that in the east, the church wasn’t strong, and families had splintered.  The state was not seen to represent these people.  By saying that it will take back these people, AfD was giving them a sense of identity.

Giving people a sense of identity is the traditional model for all nationalist parties.  Their supporters feel neglected if not rejected.  The party offers them self-respect by allowing them to identify with the nation.  Symbols like the flag and the anthem become not just more valued, but sacred.  Citizenship means so much to these people.  It’s their most cherished asset.  So, they are fiercely opposed to diluting it by offering it to others.

It’s a curious word, ‘identity.’  The OED relevantly has the ‘quality or condition of being the same’ and ‘individuality, personality, individual existence.’  Your identity is what enables others to identify you – say who you are.  You don’t want to be taken for someone else, or, worse, not be identified at all.  Being not identified is tragically close to being not recognised.

Political parties like One Nation and AfD say that they fear that their nation is losing its identity.  For both, the main threats come from immigration and Islam.  These parties talk a lot about ‘sovereignty’ and national pride.  They are against any foreign relations that may diminish either.  It was exactly the same with both Farage and Trump.  They went head to head in exploiting popular prejudice against Muslims.

One Nation is full of nonsense about what it stands for, like:

Australian values include honesty and speaking openly, directly and respectfully with complete freedom of speech and expression to ensure integrity and accountability. 

But the party is very open about the fact that it appeals to life’s losers and victims:

We believe that our country’s future wealth and the prosperity of all Australians can be assured only through listening and then caring enough to openly address the problems that Liberal-Labor-Nationals-Greens created politically and continue to make. We listen and we care enough to speak for the voiceless and the powerless.

One Nation is not just against Islam, but embarrassingly for many Christians, the party claims to stand for a Christian nation.

We are a Christian country with one law for all…..

One Nation supports the refugee programme, but we must have a say in who comes in. We must be mindful of taking people that are Christian, and genuine refugees.  

If a nation is in some unspecified way a Christian nation, where does that leave Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and atheists?  Or Muslims?

The AfD is, like One Nation, against Islam.

Islam does not belong to Germany.  Its expansion and the ever-increasing number of Muslims in the country are viewed by the AfD as a danger to our state, our society, and our values.

Naturally, both these parties believe that climate change is a myth.

It’s curious that people like Hanson, Farage and Trump are so preoccupied with religion, and saying that they want to protect their nation from one faith in particular, when nothing about their history, demeanour or conduct suggests that they have ever had more than passing contact with anything even remotely resembling God, and they do this in nations that purport to cherish religious freedom and neutrality.  This is another facet of the sad fact that nationalist parties inevitably, it seems, provoke conflict in their nations.

Now, all parties target groups – analysts speak of ‘focus groups’ – but nationalists specifically target those who feel ‘voiceless and powerless.’  It’s the same for Farage and Trump, as well as Hanson.  They trade on resentment and jealousy.  The cliché is ‘politics of envy.’  They are big on attack but rotten at building.  (Farage didn’t even bother to hang around to try to build.  His job was done with the detonation.)  In discussing the collapse of the Republican Party, Bret Stephens referred to ‘fury factories’ like Fox and Breitbart, and said:

Opinion journalism is meant to influence and inflame, and it does. Especially in an age in which civics is taught poorly (and, increasingly, rarely), people are politically suggestible.  Bill O’Reilly is now the right’s historian, Mark Levin its go-to legal expert, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham its moral conscience.  These are not ideas guys.  They’re anger guys.  Their specialty is the communication of rage to an audience prone to histrionics.  It can feel awfully good to be awfully mad.

People who aren’t familiar with Fox News or Sky don’t know how vicious and predatory they can be.  The ‘fury factories’ share and incite anger.  The problem is that feeling ‘awfully mad’ does not of itself get ‘politically suggestible’ people anywhere.  Nor does it get them representatives who have the training or patience to negotiate laws that will work for their supporters.

So, nationalists take aim at groups within the community.  You might, if you were that way disposed, say that they were engaging in ‘identity politics’.  But that term is one of abuse for those in Australia who admire Trump or Farage.  They get very worked up when people agitate politically based on common interests held by people of a particular sex, sexuality, faith, colour, class, or age.  I have had some trouble understanding why in a free country it is not good for people to seek to advance their common interests.  Was it wrong for the Quakers to campaign against slavery?

Well people on Sky or at The Australian get very worked up about ‘identity politics.’  Steve Bannon said he could crush the Democrats if they persisted with identity politics.  But that is just how Trump and Farage and Hanson operate.  What is the difference between people coming together to say bad things about Muslims and to seek to hold them back, and people coming to say good things about Lesbian women or married men and seeking to move them forward?

All this suggests that we could drop the word ‘identity’ from politics either as an appeal or as a rebuke.  It’s another instance of our intellectual wooliness.

Why history? Civilisation- Are we there yet?

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

Sir Lewis Namier was a great historian.  In one of his books, he said that ‘England knows not democracy as a doctrine, but has always practised it as a fine art.’  Later, he said ‘Restraint, coupled with the tolerance which it implies and with plain human kindness, is much more valuable in politics than ideas which are ahead of their time…’

Now, those observations are rather large, but as I look about me here in Australia, what I miss is ‘plain human kindness’ and ‘restraint’.  These of course can’t be measured, much less prescribed.  Nor would they appear in many definitions of ‘civilisation’. But might we not hope that civilisation is favourable to kindness and restraint?

Earlier I said why I think that neither ancient nor medieval Europe was civilised.  Rather, I see the germ of Western civilisation in the respect for the dignity of life in both parts of the bible and then in the fumbling efforts of medieval lawyers in England to grope toward the notion of the rule of law.  That may be the bias of a lawyer; Kenneth Clark had a natural bias as an art critic.  Then I see the loosening of the shackles of the priesthood across Europe; the English parliament’s victory over its kings; the espousal of human dignity by Kant and others in the Enlightenment; the Declaration of the Rights of Man in France (at a frightful cost to it and Europe); and finally, and perhaps most importantly, there is the abolition of slavery in England, and the victory of the North in the American Civil War.  If I had to nominate landmarks in the arts, and I’m not sure why I should, I would start with Cervantes, Shakespeare, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven.  But if you take the view that a nation cannot be said to be civilised if it tolerates the ultimate Caste of slavery, then civilisation has only become possible in the last two hundred years.

In my view, in order to qualify as civilised, a people or nation should satisfy the following criteria.

  • It has a moral code that respects the dignity and the right to property of each person in the group.
  • It has a mature and stable form of government that is able to enforce those rights, and to preserve its own structure.
  • It observes the rule of law – the government is under the law and all people are equal before it.
  • Its working is not clogged or threatened by corruption.
  • It seeks to provide for the subsistence of its members and allow them to have sufficient leisure to pursue happiness or improvement in such ways as they may choose, provided that they do not harm others.

Put differently, a group of people may be said to be ‘civilised’ to the extent that people are ‘civil’ to each other. Some would want to say something about people who have got on giving back to the community that nourished them, and looking after the aged, the sick, and the unemployed, and refugees, but I fear that these aspirations are too plastic here.

It is hard to see many nations outside Western Europe and the U K and its former colonies qualifying as ‘civilised’.  Japan for example has big trouble with corruption, and Indonesia has nothing like an independent judiciary; each is at best marginal on the status of women.  Depending on your views on the death penalty, the U S may be disqualified.  China fails on the rule of law and India fails on caste.  Russia in my view has never come even close to being civilised – even if it has produced some of the finest artists in the world.  Public opinion in the West has moved on since Auschwitz and Hiroshima.  We now attach more weight to the protection of human rights and dignity, and from our own annihilation, than some impossibly enlightened and refined works of art whose real secrets are not revealed to the unwashed.

And the fact that you have reached civilisation does not preclude your falling out of it.  France and Germany were and are among the most civilised nations on earth, but each has descended into the bowels of humanity, the first after 1789, and the second after 1933 – with frightful results for their neighbours in each case.  All these thoughts put big holes in any idea that mankind is always on the assent – especially as we see democracy, capitalism and Christianity appearing to collapse under their own weight.  And no one has got close to finding an alternative for any of them.  As for art, we look in vain for the staying power of Dante, El Greco or Beethoven.

This brings me back to ‘restraint, coupled with the tolerance which it implies and with plain human kindness.’  Yes, we probably can’t use these as criteria for ‘civilisation’, but we may surely notice that their absence suggests a problem with the one that we claim. Just look at us here and our rejection of refugees.

The one thing I’m clear on is that I don’t see either restraint or kindness in the David of Michelangelo.  What I see there is Adolf Hitler in drag.  And it’s not just in the eyes.

 

Here and there – Who’s in the crowd?

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One reason why the word ‘populist’ is so dodgy is that people get coy about saying who makes up the ‘populus’ – or who are in the crowd?  Everyone standing for election in a democracy appeals to the people.  All candidates are therefore in some sense ‘populist’, unless you whittle down the reach of that term.

You get a similar puzzle with another weasel word – the ‘elite’.  In a representative democracy, the people are governed by those elected or appointed for that purpose – the chosen, or the elect, or the elite.  If you seek election because you are opposed to the ‘elite’, what happens when you join the elite?  This is a real question for at least one faith.  How do you establish a church on the life and teaching of a man whose whole mission was to blow the establishment to kingdom come?

To be a true ‘populist’, then, you can only appeal to some of the people.  Hanson, Farage, and Trump are popularly described as ‘populists’.  What sorts of the people do they appeal to?

Well, if we look at the people who attend Trump’s rallies, we may get some idea.  It’s a fair inference that Trump appeals to them and that they appeal to him.  He basks in their adulation and he gets that smarmy beatific smile that may remind older readers of Liberace on the other side of the candelabra on the grand piano.

The first question is why is the president holding rallies at all while he is in office?  Why isn’t he governing the country?  Why is he more interested in kneeling footballers than the misery of people on Puerto Rico?  (Well, he did take time to Tweet that they would have to repay Wall Street.  That was sensible and kind of him.)  The answer is that Trump holds these rallies because he is only in the job for what he can get out if it, and not for what he can do for his country.  His ego needs stroking.  He could not pass a Kelvinator without opening the door to feel the light shine upon him.  He has to feed the Fox.

And he is lazy and weak.  He much prefers the safety of his faithful to doing the hard work needed to implement hard decisions.  He is so obviously a spoiled child that it’s embarrassing.  Chuck and Nancy know that they only have to drop in for a bite, and their president will roll over like a sated schnauzer.  Someone remarked that Trump’s book may have to be renamed – The art of lying down.  When Trump fails, which he does nearly all the time now, he just picks up his bat and ball and retires behind the moat of his appalling Fifth Avenue castle.

Assuming that people who attend these rallies of Trump are of average intelligence, they must understand all this.  The first thing to say about them, therefore, is that they are prepared to go along with a charade to boost or sedate their president.

The next thing is that they are keen – ever so keen – to get in on the show.  They look like they love being part of this exalted form of live TV show.  They giggle all the time.  They can’t wait to tell the folks at home.  They are integral to the entertainment – and the sustenance of their leader.  Their role is to follow him devoutly, if not blindly.  They look like they have been worked up beforehand.  (Stephen Miller had that gig during the campaign.)  They cheer and clap when they should.  They growl and boo on cue.

They clearly want to believe.  Anyone who believed Trump’s promise to build the wall and get Mexico to pay for it is at best credulous.  (The other word is ‘gullible’, for which the OED has ‘easily duped.’)  Most people turn off snake oil salesmen, but those who don’t are evidently willing to take what’s on offer – with no intervention from any critical faculty.  If someone bought the house next door to you, and said that they would build a great wall but get you to pay for it – who would you consult first, your lawyer or your shrink?

The suspension of the critical faculty is fundamental.  You don’t go to one of these spruikers to get analytical.  You go because you like the show the spruiker puts on.  It’s all a big show, but you remain part of a cause.  Your attachment to that cause is emotional, not intellectual.  You have no interest at all in a detached consideration of evidence that may lead to what other people outside your circle call truth.

These followers mostly get their news filtered for them by Facebook, that vast mind-numbing ogre.  The Internet usually spares them from material critical of their leader.  His slogan of ‘fake news’- any news he doesn’t like – is silly enough, but for his loyal followers, his close cadre, it perfectly sums up any source that disparages their leader – and that includes all the mainstream press – except that State Owned Television called Fox.  ‘Truth’ isn’t just relative.  It’s dead.

The people who rally to Trump are big on boxes and labels and classes.  In their eyes, the problems of the world are simply sourced.  The world is split in two.  Us v Them.  Good Guys v Bad Guys.  You’re with us or you’re against us.  Conflict and division are central to the world view of these people.  You can hear it in the cheering and booing of the mob at the rallies.  This mob makes George W Bush look like a contemplative intellectual.

Now the rally starts to go from being just silly to being plain ugly.  Trump embraces and embodies this division and conflict.  Someone pleasingly called him a social pyromaniac.  He channels the fears and hopes of the crowd.  And he exploits them.  He is a walking incendiary when he is priming what is called his ‘base’.

People who resort to snake oil salesmen are not generally among life’s winners.  The winners don’t have to stoop, intellectually or morally, to find some form of uplift in their lives.  The losers feel like they need to do just that.  They in some ways resemble dying cancer victims.  They will pledge their faith in any course, however strange or derided, that offers them any prospect at all of getting better.

Trump says that he understands the concerns of his base.  He persuades his followers that their resentment – this chip on their communal shoulder that evokes your memory of flying over the Grand Canyon – is justified.  He tells them that their grievances are real; that he can identify the causes of those grievances; and that he will eliminate those causes of their ills.  He then banishes all thought by wrapping up these messianic promises in preposterous nostrums – like drain the swamp, build the wall, and make America great again.  And the faithful show their faith by parroting this nonsense.

Now, this is where the rally gets really nasty.  When people like Trump say that they have found the source of unhappiness of their followers, what they are doing is getting ready to put out their scapegoats.  Trump knows very little history, but even he knows the central role of scapegoats of the leading populists of the twentieth century.  A scapegoat is a person who is blamed for the wrongs or mistakes of others.  The process is usually intellectually inane and morally vicious.

Scapegoats are no different for Trump, except that he uses a scattergun.  A key feature of his mode of operation is his immoderation.  He knows neither moderation nor shame, and he is in your face like a terrorist.  It’s his main shock tactic – after his divorce from truth and reality.  This man has no conscience and he does not know shame.  It’s all there in his upbringing.

Trump’s scapegoats include – every previous government, but especially President Obama; all the security services, especially the CIA, FBI and James Comey; as of recently, most of the Congress; all the ‘mainstream media’ (again except Fox); immigrants; Latinos; China; international trade and treaties; and any form of internationalism.

Trump also believes that African Americans are inferior.  He is a little cagier about how he shows this, but it is there.  For example, he was so struck by the grace of the writing of Obama’s memoire that he said that Obama couldn’t have written it.  He had to pin it on a white man.  That was of course a lie. Just like all his nonsense about Obama’s birth.  By contrast, the man who did write The Art of the Deal said Trump did not write one word of it.

I omitted Muslims from that list of scapegoats.  Trump was not all coy about his disdain for Muslims.  You can say the same for Farage and Hanson, but the brash vulgarity of Trump will do him no good in court on this issue.

Can anyone point to a decent leader who leaned so heavily on scapegoats?

If this picture is fair, it is certainly not pretty.  The truth is that these Trump rallies are frightening.  The rant after Charlottesville was terrifying.  Even less pretty is the way the Murdoch press and Fox and Sky TV both feed and manipulate this mob.

There was a very sad instance of just how nasty this mob can be at a rally the other day.  Trump resembles medieval kings in that he believes that he can do no wrong.  This means that he has to find new scapegoats all the time.  His latest attempt to disempower if not kill off the poor came with the latest attempt to kill the loathed Obama’s affordable health care – something that the rest of the West takes for granted.

Again John McCain was like the boy who stood on the burning deck.  He therefore was responsible for frustrating Trump.  He therefore had to be the latest scapegoat.  So Trump gave the mob their cue and they booed John McCain.  At the invitation of their leader, who has given every proof that he is utterly unfit for this office, this cruel and ugly crowd booed a decent Republican senator; an American who had fought for his country in Vietnam (for which he was publicly insulted by this president, who had evaded such service); John McCain is a man visibly fighting cancer in the brain; and as it happens, he is about the last man standing between this president and the members of this mob losing their rights to affordable health care.  When the mob gets this nasty, they resemble the Klan – an evil group that this president thought contained ‘some very fine people’.

If these are the sorts of people that support ‘populists’, what good could ever come of it?  It’s sad melange of inanity, greed, jealousy and malice.  There is an obvious resemblance to other grotesque ‘populists’ in the past, but what good ever came from any of them?  For that matter, what good ever came from any nationalist – apart, perhaps, from Boadicea and Joan of Arc?

It’s much the same with Hanson and Farage.  Their scapegoating of Muslims is overt; their promises could most politely be described as promiscuous; and those who follow them cling to the narrowest possible definition of citizenship.  It’s as if their nationalism is all that they have in life.

And if you even dare to hint that those who follow these people may be stupid, you will immediately be branded as one of the – yes, you guessed it – ‘elite’.  This preoccupation with those people who are qualified to run a country is truly wondrous.  If someone is serious about getting rid of all those who know how to run a country and its institutions, they should have the courage of the Red Guards.  They insisted that they should run the maternity ward rather than trained nurses.  The cruelty and misery were beyond description.

Here is a bar room poser for you.  Out of Hanson, Farage and Trump, who is the more personally revolting?  My choice would be Farage.  Trump is an overblown spoiled child who is a mindless bully divorced from truth.  Hanson may just believe some of what she says, and at least she has come up the hard way.  The other two come from backgrounds of unimaginable privilege, which just makes their hypocrisy so much more nauseating.

But the deceptions of Farage look to me to be far more calculated.  He loves toying with minds.  It’s the only thing he’s ever succeeded in.  He recently endorsed the AfD in Germany and introduced Steve Bannon as the leading political thinker in the western hemisphere.  (Who would be his main challengers in the East?)  Farage took off as soon as his horse crossed the line, and he left it to the others to do the hard part.

In AFL terms, Farage could parachute out of a worm’s bum.  If there is such a thing as a ‘populist’ politician, Farage is its Platonic idea.  I can’t work out why some people are happy that some other people believe in Farage.  But, then again, you can turn on Sky TV most nights and find some commentators who claim to admire Donald Trump.  How did it ever come to this?