TERROR AND THE POLICE STATE: CHAPTER 5

06/11/2017 / 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.]

The Instruments of Terror

When it comes to the application of terror in France, Russia, and Germany, the abandonment of the rule of law consists in large part of creating no-fly zones for the law at each end of the process – you deny all rights to the targets and the victims, and you create not just privileges but absolute immunities for the government agents of the terror. They are all outside the general law at either end. It’s like Anglo-Saxon outlawry or apartheid.

The guillotine was invented by a French doctor as a humane replacement for death by hanging, firing squad, or the axe. Death was the main instrument of the French Terror, and the guillotine became the prime symbol of its inhumanity. Unlike Russia or Germany, the French had no substantial police force, or at least nothing like the Gestapo or NKVD, and no concentration camps, Siberia, or gulag. For an infringement of laws made during the Terror, the penalty was usually death. For the most part at its start, the Convention kept some right of control over the Revolutionary Tribunal, but there was nothing like a judiciary that was either independent, or professional, and the prosecutor was not easily distinguished from the executioner. The Terror lasted less than two years in France; about twelve years in Germany; and about forty years off and on in Russia. If around 16,000 passed under the blade in the nine months from the death of Marie-Antoinette to the death of Robespierre, the toll in both Germany and Russia is beyond our understanding.

But the horrors of the twentieth century cannot obscure the horror of the French Terror. The Tricoteuses (knitting-women) of the sisterhood sat beneath the the sharp female called La Guillotine and calmly counted off the number as each head fell into the sack, or into a bucket that on a big day overflowed. Imagine the impact of terrorists killing 16,000 people in France in two years in our time.

Lenin had a Rousseau-like schizophrenia in his affection for humanity. Maxim Gorky said: ‘Lenin is a leader and a Russian nobleman, not without certain psychological traits of this extinct class, and therefore he can consider himself justified with performing for the Russian people a cruel experiment which is doomed to failure.’

Through a series of accidents and coups, the Bolsheviks found themselves in charge. At the head of affairs, they put all power in the hands of the party, and then used terror to wipe out all political opposition. Fourteen years before this, Trotsky had warned that when the party got control, the Central Committee would take over, and a single dictator would then take over from the Committee. How else would a country that had so little experience in self-government be governed? You can see a similar descent in France with the Committee of Public Safety and Robespierre. It is a natural descent in times of disorder and violence.

The Bolsheviks went through a form of election, but they only got about half of what the Nazis would get – and the Nazis never got 50%. The Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC) therefore arrested the electoral commissioners. The Bolshevik leaders set about a kind of civil war on a whole social class. A cult of violence arose. Trotsky said that ‘There is nothing immoral in the proletariat finishing off a class that is collapsing: that is its right.’ Gorky said: ‘I am especially distrustful of a Russian when he gets power into his hands. Not long ago a slave, he becomes the most unbridled despot as soon as he has the chance to become his neighbour’s master.’ The Communists clothed mob trials with a garb of government. The People’s Courts had twelve judges. They had no training. They were to be guided by their ‘revolutionary conscience.’ When you extend the law by saying that anyone outside the true sentiment of the people is outside the protection of their laws, you are getting close to the heart of the police state.

When the Germans invaded Russia, Lenin issued the decree of ‘The Socialist Fatherland in Danger!’ The Revolutionary Tribunals were ordered to shoot suspects on the spot. The Cheka did not look for proof. ‘First you must ask what class he belongs, what his social origin is, his education and profession. These are the questions that must determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning of the Red Terror.’

Revolutionaries develop a halo, a feeling of purity. They think that things will turn out for the best, but they are just as selfish as the rest of us. They look forward to their own Utopia, but it is a simple fact of history that a state that acquires these powers does not want to give them up.

Hitler knew that he had engineered a revolution. He told the faithful that the Nazi revolution had succeeded, and that power was theirs alone. He said: ‘Revolution is not a permanent condition. It must not develop into a permanent condition. The stream of revolution… must be channelled into the secure bed of evolution … A second revolution can only direct itself against the first one.’ This political insight was sure. Hitler instigated the murderous purge called the Night of the Long Knives to avoid a German second revolution like that of 10 August 1792 in France.

Hitler got his emergency powers. He signed the army up to personal loyalty. His word was law – The Law for the Guarantees of the Unity of Party and State. He set up the Geheime Staatspolizei, Secret State Police, or Gestapo. . When Himmler was put in charge of all German police, he put Reinhard Heydrich in charge of the Gestapo and SS Security Service. Heydrich was therefore in charge of the instruments of terror in a police state run on terror. He may well have been the most feared man alive, a title he would have dreamed of. In February 1936, the German people made a law that took the Gestapo out of the jurisdiction of the courts. This was part of the pact that the German people were entering into with the Devil, but they were too far gone to pull out.

The Schutzstaffel or SS, the ‘Protection Squad’, began as the private bodyguard of Hitler, and ended as the prime agent of the Final Solution, and with its leaders sticking their Lugers into their mouths and blowing their brains out in final fealty to their oath to the Fuhrer. They were like Spartans – fanatically, self-annihilatingly disciplined, puritanical, racially pure, and exquisitely Teutonic – and bereft of conscience or humanity.

A People’s Court was set up in April 1934 – the Germans were in every way so much swifter and more focussed than the French had been 140 years ago. This court was to deal with treason cases – that meant any kind of political case. The objective was to ensure that no one person could stand in the way of the State – and that meant, as night follows day, that everyone was subordinate to the State. The police state puts people in boxes and characterise them – to brand them. Then it visits every person in that box with the same legal consequences – the state refuses to see each case being treated on its own merits, to treat you or me as individuals each having our own worth or dignity. The individual simply ceases to exist. In March 1933, Goebbels uttered a frightful truth that could have been written by Orwell or Koestler: ‘On 30 January, the era of individualism died … The individual will be replaced by the community of the people.’

TERROR AND THE POLICE STATE: CHAPTER 4

28/10/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

4 Goodbye to law

Before the English went into their century of change, they had experienced three phases of revolution or evolution in the previous four centuries that had not occurred in France. First, the then aristocracy, the barons, had effectively put the English crown under contract with the Great Charter of 1215. This was the foundation of the rule of law, because the king too was said to be under the law. Secondly, the English had terminated their ties to Rome. They declared religious Home Rule and repatriated their church. They did so through the king speaking through the Parliament, so that the royal succession and the headship of the English church derived from the Parliament. When they came to settle with their king, their aristocracy was on side, and they did not have to worry about Rome or priests. Thirdly, the English were able to deal with their king through their parliament, which did represent all orders in the nation, and had had hundreds of years’ experience. When Louis summoned the Estates General, it had not met for a century, and it was moribund. The French nobles and bishops, and indeed the crown itself, were not used to negotiating about their place, and they were unwilling and unable to do so. Fourthly, the English had developed a fiercely independent group of lawyers and judges who were capable of acting against the crown, and as often as not, were more than happy to do so. Landed squires were trained in the law in the Inns of Court, proficient in the political arts required in the House of Commons, capable of translating political gains into binding legal compacts, ready to lead a citizen army if required, and religious fanatics who were utterly incorruptible and prepared to die rather than to give in to royal power.

Those promoting the Terror in France could at least claim to come from the moral high ground. That is very difficult with the Russian version and impossible with the German. The Nazi Party was made of thugs, by thugs and for thugs, and terror was part of what we would now call its DNA. The Russian Communists may not have started out that way, but they got there soon enough by the ineluctable logic of the proposition that all power corrupts.

Until the declaration of the republic in France, there was a more or less recognisable structure of government, even if it was tied up and inept. When you destroy an absolute monarchy, you may get an absolute void. There had been nothing like our police force or standing army. The driving political force of the revolution came from clubs like the Jacobins and Cordeliers in Paris, and their affiliates outside. There would be tension between Paris and the provinces and lethal civil wars with major centres like Lyons, and the Vendée. There were divisions in the priesthood before and after the Vatican revealed a hostility to the revolution that matched that of other foreign powers. The Commune in Paris was what we might call the Paris City Council and it claimed to exercise powers and give commands. Then each Section in Paris claimed its own rights. The National Guard was not as powerful politically as the Praetorian Guard in Rome or the SS in Nazi Germany, but the centre of armed force always attracts adherents. There was no real tradition of independent legislators or judges in the English model, and a time of crisis of threats from outside and inside was not a time to learn how to live with factions. (Since a faction indicated dissent, they were proscribed in Communist Russia and Nazi Germany, but some of the coldest killings in the French Terror were the final acts of factional feuds and vendettas.) The very absence of a complete and authoritative central power contributed to the general sense of insecurity and unease that made something like the Terror seem inevitable.

Some of the key phases of the descent of legal civilisation in France are as follows. The Assembly announces the state of emergency – the Fatherland is in danger. An insurrectionary commune is established in Paris – power to the people (or the mob or la foule). The Convention abolishes the monarchy. The king is executed. The Revolutionary Tribunal is established, with no review or appeal. Committees of Surveillance are established – an essential part of the police state. Deputies (our MPs) lose their immunity – faction fighting gets terminal. The mob demands the death of a whole faction in the Convention. Representatives on mission are given dictatorial powers. Military service becomes general. The Law of Suspects is introduced. All government is revolutionary – all under the Committee of Public Safety. A series of laws obliterate the rights of the accused. The ‘trials’ are mockeries. Government is an instrument of factional and personal revenge. The Terror ends when Deputies work up the courage to kill Robespierre before he kills them.

A small revolutionary tribunal will, almost by definition, contradict every part of the rule of law. One of the great objections to the old regime was that the king could take some action – like issuing a lettre de cachet (a royal command to detain someone) – and, when asked why, say ‘reasons of state’, raison d’état. The revolutionary government soon had the same process – and worse. The Convention slipped slowly into a cycle of factional vendettas and the Committees and the Tribunal executed the judgment of the ruling clique from time to time until the vicious circular regress ran out of willing blood, and the nation of France heaved a sigh of relief and disgust.

Adolf Hitler came to power with less than half the vote, but once he got his foot in the door, he kicked the door out and remade the house to suit him. He had never sought to conceal his ambition to clear away the trappings of a failed state. In 1931, the then Chancellor had said to Hitler with complete truth: ‘When a man declares that once he has achieved power by legal means, he will break through the barriers, he is not really adhering to legality’. Hitler responded with equal truth: ‘Herr Chancellor, if the German Nation once empowers the National Socialist Movement to introduce a constitution other than that which we have today, you cannot stop it….When a constitution proves itself to be useless for its life, the nation does not die – the constitution is altered.’

Part of the deal was that the new government would consent to an enabling act giving Hitler Emergency Powers. This was Peisistratus in overdrive. The day he was appointed, Hitler alerted the Berlin Brownshirts to go on to the streets. He then assembled the Cabinet and told them that the Reichstag would be dissolved and new elections held to give him the emergency powers necessary to deal with the crisis. Two days later, General Ludendorff wrote to the aged President: ‘I solemnly prophesy to you that this damnable man will plunge our Reich into the abyss and bring inconceivable misery down upon our nation. Coming generations will curse you in your grave because of this action.’

The people of Russia have had only fleeting contact with the rule of law or civil rights since that nation came to be known under that name. Those who would become revolutionaries were brought up to deal with the vicious police state of the Tsars. They were trained in and by it. The first leader of the Cheka, the Soviet secret police, had spent most of his adult life in exile or prison. They were seasoned haters, drained of humanity, but competent in their methods of degradation and torture. Flaubert once remarked that ‘inside every revolutionary, there is a policeman.’ If the Tsars were not troubled by questions of legality, Lenin was even less troubled, and Stalin had a preference for murder plain and simple

Terror and the Police State – Chapter 3

20/10/201720/10/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

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.

Terror and the Police State: II

13/10/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

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?

12/10/2017 / 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.

Terror and the Police State 1

07/10/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

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.]

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.

Why history? 10 Explosions

26/09/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

EXPLOSIONS

Australian babyboomers have no conception of the horror and carnage of the first half of the twentieth century. After the failure of diplomacy of rotten inbred ruling classes across Europe, millions of common men were rammed into the boiler of death. About eight million died. The horror was beyond description. The Allies then put in motion the start of a sequence that would lead to another world war by punishing Germany with the Treaty of Versailles. The U S was drawn into the conflict and with its massive resources now became a world power. The English had completed their way to full democracy but were exhausted. Russia looked to be Stalin’s black hole.

The flowering of the arts seemed to slow. The novel was pre-eminent in literature, but the best known poem was The Waste Land. The new contribution to art was the jazz of Black America. Classical music and painting were not as popular as they had been with Mozart and Turner.

Capitalism, faith in money, dominated the shallow Jazz Age. That faith was destroyed in the Great Depression starting in 1929. That misery shook two generations. There was room again for the strong man and the fanatic. Roosevelt was good for the U S and the world, but Mussolini and Hitler were disasters for their nations and the world. Germany had a grudge and Japan needed trading space. The Nazis were consumed by fear, hatred and envy of the Jews. To purify their race, they murdered six million Jews. The descendants of the Hun nomads who had sacked Rome, who had given us Goethe, Beethoven and Kant, reminded us that we are all only 400 generations from the primeval savage. Churchill said that this was ‘a new Dark Age made more sinister by the lights of perverted science.’ About 40 million perished. The USSR alone lost 20 million and exacted brutal revenge first on Germany and then over Eastern Europe. The war ended with the detonation of the first atom bomb in war. We learned that what started with a bang might finish with a bang.

After the war, there was another attempt to impose order by the creation of the United Nations. The empires of the Europeans were dissolved. The Jews returned to the Holy Land. They had U N approval, but native resistance continues. Conflict between Muslims and Jews and between different kinds of Muslims are now the major threat to world peace.

There was a changing of the guard in world powers. The U S and USSR fought a cold war which ended with the bankruptcy and collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. Russia at last repudiated Stalin. China has been gaining in power by embracing capitalist methods while retaining Communist repression. India has a huge economy but massive poverty. The U S is ceding ground to China through failed wars in Vietnam and the Middle East and most recently by the election as President of a vainglorious oaf who wants to turn his back on Europe and the world.

The West is mainly democratic. Africa, South America, and a lot of Asia have not been able to follow the Western model. Most are sinking in debt and corruption, and many are ruled by dictators. Putin is a sullen, brutal, rich thug who murders opponents.

Women have turned some corners in the West, but are not doing well elsewhere. Millions die of starvation in what we call the Third World, and the blind faith in progress has been lost. Many nations are still afflicted by Caste. Transport and communication – on earth and in space – are such that people with money can go anywhere and other people can find out where you are. We speak of the global village, but demagogues have made a dirty word out of globalisation. Television dulled minds, computers replaced the, and man landed on the moon.

As I write this (2017), the west faces many grave issues. Three of them are as follows, and they are related. First, there is a massive problem with inequality of wealth and income. What does a bank teller think when her boss gets paid one hundred times what she gets in return for firing people like her? If capitalism can’t fix this problem, our prospects are worse than bleak. We will be like France in 1789 and Russia in 1917.

Secondly, we are yet to come to political and social terms with the technological revolution we are going through or with the globalisation of commerce. It is commonly said that two out of five jobs will go in the next ten years. What are we going to do about that?

Thirdly, in the space of one generation, there has been a collapse in faith in the political system in many countries, and certainly in the U S, the U K, and Australia. The Westminster system is based on party politics. People have lost faith in the parties and the system. Their politicians make it worse by behaving badly, by looking only at the short term, and by being devoid of principle, especially when in opposition. Once you start killing conventions and customs, it gets easier. Apparently as a result, electors are voting for people who look unfit for any form of office, but who lie well enough to con enough votes – and leave the system even worse off. That in turn makes it harder to attract half decent people into the bear pit. That is a very ugly cycle that we will not get out of easily.

This is not what’s called upbeat, but it leads to our final question.

(Next week will see the final instalment of this series. Terror and the Police State will follow.)

Why history? 9 – Revolutions

15/09/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

In 1765 Watt made a steam engine. This led to more travel, and the world shrank. Factories were built. These required both capital and labour. The craftsman was on the way out. Workers were brutally treated. This was the Industrial Revolution.

The English sought to tax the American colonies without giving them representation. The Americans reacted to George III as the English had to the Stuarts. This was the American Revolution. In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson said that the compact between America and the English Crown had been broken, and that all men were equal. This was a bare-faced lie because slaves were anything but equal.

The French had supported the American rebels and went broke doing so. Louis XVI had to convene an ancient assembly to ask for money. When this process was threatened, the mob stormed the Bastille for arms on 14 July 1789. This was the start of the French Revolution. The French king and nobility had not been conditioned to negotiate as they had been in England and they were annihilated. But the peasants had not been relieved of most of their feudal burdens, as they were now, and the middle class had little experience in government. There was chaos and a reign of terror. The way was open for the strong man, but no one could have predicted Napoleon, a military and administrative genius. Ideals got lost and an emperor replaced the king. The attempt by Napoleon to force people to be free only ended at Waterloo in 1815. More than five million had died in wars driven by his ego. The great poets of the Romantic Revolution – Keats, Shelley, and Byron – had celebrated the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, but Beethoven renounced Napoleon when he became Emperor. It took France a century to recover.

There were more uprisings and revolutions in 1848. Garibaldi led the emergence of Italy and Bismarck led the formation of Germany. Europe at large carved up the continent of Africa while trading in slaves. Africa still feels the wounds.

It was slavery that led to the American Civil War. The Southern states depended on it, although it had been declared illegal at common law and trading was outlawed by statute in England. This was modern war, more lethal than the Napoleonic Wars. The Americans lost more in it than they have lost in all other wars. The political genius of Abraham Lincoln saved the union. At Gettysburg, Lincoln spoke of government of the people, by the people, for the people.

The Russian Revolution erupted finally in 1917. Lenin misapplied Marx’s theory and left the succession to Stalin, a grisly dictator who ruled by terror for decades and killed many, many millions of Russians. In Asia, Japan was awakened from its slumbers and defeated Russia in a war. China began to throw out European intruders.

The lot of ordinary people improved in Europe and the U S. Electricity and the phone improved communal life. Governments accepted responsibility for education. Workers formed trade unions. The goal of socialism was to break down the class system and involve government in distributing wealth and looking after ordinary people – from cradle to grave. The great novelists – like Balzac, Flaubert, Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy – threw light on our condition.

One Englishman and three German Jews revolutionised the way we think. Darwin said that all nature was evolving, that man was descended from the ape, and that only the fittest survived. The Church went mad; people said God was dead; others wondered who were the fittest. Karl Marx was an anti-Semitic Jew who never set foot in a factory. He developed an elaborate theory that said that capitalism would end when the workers took control (the dictatorship of the proletariat), private property was abolished, and we all would live happily ever after. Religion had failed to impose world order – now it was the turn of the atheist. Just look at Cuba or North Korea. Sigmund Freud analysed hysterical women and explored the subconscious of bourgeois Vienna. He saw sex everywhere, but now the analyst could challenge the priest for the confessional. Albert Einstein rewrote the laws of physics. His Theory of Relativity rattled science. His shattering insights put science beyond our reach – as religion had sought to do – and led to the splitting of the atom. It looked like the future was here. He died in my tenth year.

Why history? 8 Kings

11/09/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

KINGS

The English had traditions of popular councils and judgment by the people (trial by jury) going back to Anglo-Saxon times. Their kings also reigned before the Norman Conquest in 1066. In 1215, the barons extracted a promise from their king to rule by law. They sought a government of laws rather than of men. This was the Great Charter or Magna Carta. It has many meanings, but the English said it meant that as the law made the king, the king was under the law – not above it. This document is hugely important for the rule of law.

We saw that the Tudor King Henry VIII went to his parliament to be free of the Pope. The seventeenth century saw a long contest for pre-eminence between the Stuart kings and their parliaments. Parliament claimed the sole right to raise revenue. If you control the purse strings, you are in control. Charles I sought to raise money outside parliament. This led to Civil War, the execution of the king, in 1649, and to the rise and dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell.

But England was not ready for a parliamentary republic, especially one led by bigoted Puritans who wanted to shut down pubs. There was accordingly a peaceful restoration of the Stuart monarchy. But the Stuarts never learned. James II picked fights with his parliaments – this time over religion. James was Catholic and he wanted to share the love. This led to the Glorious Revolution. The Dutch intervened and installed William of Orange as king and his wife, a daughter of James II, as queen. The English stitched their new monarchy up under terms of a service agreement like that entered into by a CEO of a public company. This was the Bill of Rights of 1689, which still forms part of the law of the State of Victoria. It settled the issue between the Crown and parliament in favour of the parliament. It is still the basis of England’s parliamentary monarchy. A few years later the parliament granted life tenure to the judges, and the platform of the English constitution was securely in place.

What did this platform stand on? It stood on a body of case or judge made law going back to the time of Magna Carta. If you wanted the court to intervene you had to persuade the court to command your adversary to appear before it. This command was called a writ. You had to persuade the court that the facts that you alleged came within the record of a prior intervention by the court. In other words, you had to find a precedent. These arguments about writs are the start of the judge made law that came to be called the common law. It is difficult to overstate the importance of this development, for it was the common law that eventually would underlie the whole English constitution. Why? Because the judges acknowledged that parliament was supreme, and could override the common law.

The development of a strong legal profession and judiciary was essential for the history of England as we know it. First it challenged the intellectual monopoly of the church. Then it gave backing to the process and statutes of the parliament. The Inns of Court that made up the bar became a kind of finishing school for the ruling class. They supplied king breakers from hell to bring the Stuarts to heel. Most importantly, they resisted applying Roman law. All these factors made England very different to Europe. The English look to go by trial and error, and rationalise it later if they must. Europeans like to work out a theory and seek to apply it. It’s the empirical against the rationalist approach. One gives us the common law. The other gives us the Code Napoléon. They are as alike as Venus and Mars, as Europe is out finding again.

In France, the divine right of kings went unchallenged. Louis XIV had far more power than any English king, but he moved his court to Versailles. The Holy Roman Empire spread over much of Europe as the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Its emperors, the Habsburgs at Vienna, also enjoyed supreme power. So did the Russian Tsars – more so. Peter the Great tried to move from their Asian past by building St Petersburg and moving his capital there from the Kremlin.

The Church presided over the divvying up of South America by Portugal and Spain. The Dutch, a powerful trading nation, went into Africa and Indonesia. Christian Europe traded in slaves from Africa.

Philosophy found new life after Descartes, and it was applied. Authority came to be questioned by people like Voltaire. The geniuses of Spinoza and Kant sought to build a whole world view, including a complete code of ethics, independently of religion. Both were reproached. Rousseau got starry eyed about the social contract and the dream of a noble savage. This would be called the Age of Reason, or the Enlightenment. Science was respected, and medicine would become respectable. The classical European sensibility reached its peak with Mozart. Beethoven struck out on a brave new course. This was what would be called the Romantic Movement. Little of this mattered to most people who had little power, wealth or knowledge.

English Puritans settled North America. There they were the majority, and it showed. Through a trading company, the English displaced the Moguls of India. Russian Cossacks spread east so that Russia reached the Pacific. Captain Cook opened up the whole Pacific, and the English could empty their jails on the vastness of Australia. White settlers would start to rob and kill Stone Age people who had been there for a period about 200 times that of white settlement since.

Why history? 7 – Rebirth

02/09/201702/09/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

At the end of the epoch called the Middle Ages, Europe could have succumbed to the Muslims or the Mongols. It did not. From the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, it went through a period of rebirth (Renaissance) and reformation that for better or worse led Europe to dominate the world.

Medieval thought was closed and religious. St Augustine and St Aquinas built huge theories on Greek philosophy that had nothing to do with the Sermon on the Mount. The ancient learning was kept alive in Arab universities and Christian monasteries. Some religious leaders began to assert rights of the people. People got more interested in this world than the next. They sought to live in hope rather than fear. Paper had been developed in China and by the Arabs and its arrival in Europe, together with that of printing, led to explosions of knowledge.

Copernicus said that the earth moved around the sun. Galileo proved it. He destroyed doctrine by observation and experiment. The world was no longer the centre of the universe. The Church made Galileo retract. Some say he said e pur si muove. In the seventeenth century, the genius of Newton set out the bases of modern physics.

The artistic and scientific rebirth started in large European towns, principally Florence, Venice and Rome. The Medici were vicious and corrupt, but they were patrons of the arts. Michelangelo, Da Vinci and Raphael revived classical forms and gave the world masterpieces it still marvels at. Their work would be carried on by artists like Titian and Durer and, much later, Turner. The Divine Comedy of Dante and the remarkably bourgeois Canterbury Tales of Chaucer had ensured that great writing would survive. Writers like Montaigne and Rabelais created new forms. Machiavelli wrote of realpolitik. In Don Quixote, Cervantes gave the world its first novel. Many think that it is still the best. No one will ever get near Shakespeare. The break from narrow ways of thinking dominated by the Church led to claims for human rights summed up under the word ‘humanism’.

As well as being intellectually closed, the Church was hopelessly corrupt and unfaithful to the life and teaching of the son of the carpenter. Many popes behaved more like princes than priests. The Renaissance popes were shockingly degenerate. The Church sold religious rites. Five hundred years ago this year (2017) a German priest announced his protest against sales meant to fund a rebuilding of St Peter’s. His protest would split the Church, and his movement would be called the Protestant Church. Their aim was to go back to the bible and let people go to God without the intervention of a priest.

This reform movement in Europe was religious or spiritual. In England it was entirely political. Henry VIII needed a divorce to secure the succession – the first duty of a king. The Pope could not agree – he had a conflict of interest involving the Holy Roman Empire. England therefore broke with Rome. It did so by acts of its parliament, one of which said ‘this realm is an empire.’ This course strengthened the parliament and guaranteed independence to England.

As with most reactions, there was a lot of nastiness. Luther said too much, and he could be quoted to support actions against the Jews and the peasants. The Germans were the wrong people to be told to keep religion out of politics. The cold blooded Swiss Calvin spoke of predestination. At least Luther was human. Churches were defaced by Protestant fanatics. The English locked in the gentry by giving them the confiscated monasteries. But Macaulay said that only the French Revolution could be compared to the Reformation. Each was ‘a revolt of reason against Caste.’

Geographic horizons broadened as much as the artistic and intellectual. Portuguese sailors rounded the horn of Africa, and in 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed to America. Then Magellan sailed around the world. Spain took the Cross and the sword to the natives in the Americas in search of gold. Cortez found and looted the Aztecs. Pizarro found and looted the Incas. Wherever they went, the Europeans treated the first inhabitants as savages. This did nothing to alleviate the superiority complex they felt over people less advanced or less fortunate than themselves. And as often as not, they thought that their superiority was a gift from God.

With Compliments

Geoffrey Gibson

History