Us and the U S – Chapter 3

07/05/2018 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Us and the US

[The extracts that follow under this gravely ungrammatical title précis a book published in 2014 called ‘A Tale of Two Nations; Uncle Sam from Down Under’. That book sought to compare the key phases of history of the two nations under fourteen headings. That format will be followed in the précis. The chapter headings are Foreword;1 Motherland; 2 Conception; 3 Birth; 4 Natives; 5 Frontiers; 6 Laws; 7 Revolution; 8 Migration; 9 Government; 10 Wars; 11 Race; 12 Wealth; 13 God; 14 Findings; Afterword. Each chapter is about 1400 words.]

Birth

The Mayflower arrived off Cape Cod in November 1620. There were forty-one families and they were what we call Puritans. These very religious people thought that the Church of England was too much like the Church of Rome. We might now call them fanatics, or fundamentalists. They wanted a religion free of abstraction in thought and hierarchy in action. God was over all, but no mere mortal could be superior to another. They had been persecuted because they were dissenters. In the New World they could start a new life and they would have the numbers. Their country would be God’s own country because they were God’s chosen people. As John Winthrop said, ‘Wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill…. we shall be… a by-word throughout out the world.’

On their way over, they entered into a written covenant. The critical words are ‘combine ourselves together in a civil body politic.’ We may owe allegiance to an English king, but it is we who will combine to make our new world. If that combination comes into effect with the blessing of God, well, then, how can we fail? These boat people brought to the New World God, conviction, strength, and a contract. They set out as families and for good reason thought that they were exceptional. They were nothing if not American.

In 1606, the Virginia Company was formed to recover for Christ ‘a number of poure and miserable souls wrapt up into death in almost invincible ignorance.’ Well, it was unlikely that the colony set up at Jamestown could survive on the conversion of the Indians. There was capital was riding on this venture. This was not the work of government – people had sunk their own money into the company. The colony started to take hold when investors were offered land in return for their capital. Later settlers were offered land in return for labour.

The colony at Chesapeake Bay nearly went the same way as the first Virginia settlement. It was saved by the enterprise of a mercenary called Captain John Smith. Smith was candid. ‘For I am not so simple as to think that any other motive than wealth will ever erect there a Commonweale’. He wondered about people ‘making religion their colour when all their aim was nothing but present profit.’ Tobacco would do for Virginia what wool would do for Australia. The company also said the colonists would have ‘the rights of Englishmen’, and the first General Assembly of Virginia met.

Rhode Island arose for those who had had enough of the Brethren. So did Maine, parts of which had been dominated by the French. Salem was settled and The Massachusetts Bay Company was formed in 1629. Later, John Winthrop, a Cambridge man trained at Gray’s Inn, arrived. He rejoiced that the Indians had been wiped out by smallpox. Winthrop was in truth a dictator, and Salem was more intolerant than England ever had been. The purges of alleged witches at Salem are a lasting stain on the nation and a reminder of the threat that religious fanatics pose to others. They prefigured Senator McCarthy.

Maryland was named after a Catholic queen. New York was named after James II, the Duke of York, after it was changed from the Dutch New Amsterdam. William Penn arrived in Delaware for what was to be Pennsylvania. This future state was handed over for the release of a debt of £16,000. Penn was settling for the benefit of the Quakers who had been shockingly mistreated in the other settlements. Quakers from the Rhineland settled at Germanopolos. Philadelphia would be the birthplace of the American Declaration of Independence.

In the meantime, people from across Europe were settling. The American colonies were from the start far more middle class and cosmopolitan than the Australian colonies, and they were always much better equipped to lose any sense of dependence on the Mother Country.

***

The coming of the white man to Australia was not attended by any romance at all. The First Fleet assembled at Portsmouth. There were two warships, six transports, and three store ships; there were nineteen officers, eight drummers, one hundred and sixty privates, thirty wives and twelve children. There were more than seven hundred convicts, about a quarter of them women. Assembly and provisioning took months amid chaos, squalor and despair; the shopkeepers at Portsmouth lowered their shutters, while slatternly female convicts lolled on the decks with such clothing as they had.

They dropped anchor at Botany Bay on 20 January 1788, after a journey of more than eight months. They arrived a year and a half before the fall of the Bastille, a signature prison of the Old World and Ancien Régime. They did not like what they saw, now blasted by a summer heat. They found a better spot, Sydney Harbour, one as gorgeous as the two they had stopped at on the way – Rio de Janeiro (also built by convict labour) and Cape Town (whose Robben Island is now a shrine to the imprisonment of the great Nelson Mandela). On 26 January 1788 the white people hoisted an English flag. That day is celebrated by some annually as Australia Day. It does not have quite the same élan as Bastille Day or Independence Day.

Shortly afterwards, fourteen couples were joined in marriage; the colony had to be peopled. The Protestant Ascendancy also had to be preserved. On 13 February, Captain Phillip swore an oath about the real presence. There had been trouble a few days before when the women had finally been released from their ships. Some of the sailors got into the rum with the women, and there were appalling scenes of debauchery. But somehow the colony survived until the second fleet arrived two and a half years later. The financial drain might for a while have been a concern to London.

What were the convicts like? Manning Clark said: ‘When these men and women spoke for themselves before their judges, they seemed to be liars, drunkards, and cheats, flash and vulgar in dress, cheeky when addressing their jailers when on top, but quick to cringe and whine when retribution struck… they were men and women who aroused their contemporaries to disgust and apprehension, but rarely to compassion, and never to hope’.

There may have been a limit of, say seven years on their term of imprisonment, but for most it was a one way ticket – for the reason that they could never afford a return ticket. By 1800, about two thirds of the colonists at New South Wales were free. Transportation ended on the east coast in 1850. More than 160,000 convicts were transported to Australia. But free immigration was on the rise.

A Scottish military man was sent out with his own regiment after a kind of rebellion, and over a period of twelve years, Governor Macquarie encouraged emancipation. He even offered land to aborigines. A London commissioner recommended injecting terror back into transportation. This suited the sheep farmers who were squatting on crown land and becoming rich off the sheep’s back. Some of them even fancied their own kind of aristocracy. The squatters were the big hitters in the first century of the white people down under.

So, one nation started with free enterprise and the better people seeking God and their fortune; the other was a government job to get the dregs off-shore. One started with liberation and hope; the other with imprisonment and despair. That is one hell of a difference. One nation craved independence and won it; the other fears independence and ducks it.

Us and the US – Chapter 1

30/04/2018 / Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

[The extracts that follow under this gravely ungrammatical title précis a book published in 2014 called ‘A Tale of Two Nations; Uncle Sam from Down Under’. That book sought to compare the key phases of history of the two nations under fourteen headings. That format will be followed in the précis. The chapter headings are Foreword;1 Motherland; 2 Conception;3 Birth; 4 Natives; 5 Frontiers; 6 Laws; 7 Revolution; 8 Migration; 9 Government; 10 Wars; 11 Race; 12 Wealth; 13 God; 14 Findings; Afterword. Each chapter is about 1400 words.]

Motherland

Our two nations, Australia and the U S, have a common parent. America was commenced by colonists from England. Australia was commenced by colonists from Great Britain – the nation of Great Britain had come about by the union of England and Scotland during the nearly two hundred years that separated the first sustained English settlements in America in 1606, and the British settlement of Australia in 1788.

Historians broadly agree that the English nation and language were founded by Germans (Anglo-Saxons) in the six hundred years or so before the Norman Conquest. They left almost nothing of the remains of the Romans or the native inhabitants who were there before the Romans came. The Anglo-Saxons brought the institution of hereditary kingship, a tradition of popular assembly, and a system of incidental laws (or dooms or decrees) to supplement or articulate existing customs. They made no attempt to codify all their laws.

The Normans, a tough northern breed that had come down into France, brought a strong central government. They opened the way for royal justice and a law that was common to all England. This is what they and we would call the ‘common law’ (la loi commune). The Normans also brought the jury, at first mainly as a tool of government, but later as a mode of trial that the English and Americans would come to regard as an essential plank in their constitution. Although the Normans came after the Germans, and although their conquest was complete, they did not contribute as much to the growth of English law as the Germans. One great American scholar said that ‘the English law is more German than the law of Germany itself’. Germany would later adopt Roman law – as had France and most of Europe. England never did so.

So, the first point about our common parent is fundamental. England’s laws and constitution – their constitution grew out of the common law – were entirely home grown. Unlike most of Europe, the English never adopted the Roman model. They were always determined to go their own way. You can now better see the differences between England and the Continent to this day. Had either nation been created by France, Germany, Spain or Italy, the result would have been unimaginably different.

The period called the Middle Ages was characterised by feudalism. The Roman Empire had maintained order. When it collapsed, Europe entered a dark phase of disorder and violence called the Dark Ages. People looked to a strong man for protection. He gave that in return for loyal service. The vassal paid homage to his lord by taking the hand of the lord between his own and affirming that ‘I am your man’. This feudal bond was tied to the land and it worked up to the king. Lords held land from the king and common people held land from a lord and they owed obligations to that lord. Medieval people loved hierarchies.

Now, most wealth came from the possession of land and ownership rested with a ruling caste. The land was worked by peasants who were tied to the land. The power of government cascaded down through intermediaries. These feudal ties and differences in caste were very prominent in the French and Russian Revolutions. Six hundred years before the Russians cremated feudalism in a nation–breaking conflagration, the English king in his parliament had made a law that represented a political compromise between the nobility that held the land and those who actually managed the land. It was a law that cut clean across the whole idea of what we call ‘feudalism’.

Here is the second fundamental point about our common parent. By the time that England became a colonising force and then an imperial power, feudalism had ceased to matter to it. The English were very far advanced in the destruction of caste and the promotion of the ideal of legal equality. Things were very different on the Continent.

Before England founded either of our two nations, it had undergone two cataclysms that we now see as being essential to its nature. To resolve a civil war, the barons forced King John to agree to the terms of what is known as the Great Charter, or Magna Carta. We see it as England’s first statute. It is revered as much in the U S as it is in the U K. What it showed was that the king had had to negotiate if he wanted to keep his crown and that he had had to agree to accept express limitations on his powers. The king also had to accept his general obligation to obey the law. The fact that the king had been driven to negotiate is at least as important as the two most famous clauses: ‘No man shall be taken or imprisoned … except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. To none will we sell, to none will we deny or delay right or justice.’ If the king, too, had to negotiate, then he too was a politician. Most importantly, the people through the lawyers – the common lawyers – could now say that the king was under the law because the law made the king. This is the real beginning of what we call the rule of law. That is central to England’s view of itself and is the third elemental difference between it and other colonising powers.

The other cataclysm, the Reformation, was nominally about religion but was really about politics. Henry VIII wanted an heir but because of a conflict of interest, the pope refused to give him a divorce. The English revolted. They gave themselves religious home rule. They would run their own church free from interference from another power. They did this through their parliament, so greatly enhancing its power. This is the fourth huge difference between England and other colonial powers – just look at the role of religion in the French and Russian revolutions. And the lawyers were into this ruckus up to their necks. How many of the failings of governments in Spain, France, Italy and Greece were due to their failures to tame their church?

So, by the time that we get to the two English revolutions of the 17^th century, the English had put clear and reasonably firm limits on the supremacy of the crown, and they had broken the supremacy of the church. A strong legal profession had destroyed the clergy’s monopoly of learning. There was broad agreement that only the parliament could make laws and that the judiciary had to be independent. The battleground was to be the distribution of the executive and revenue powers between the crown and the parliament. That issue led to two revolutions in England, and then one in America.

It was put to bed, finally, during the 17^th century. The conflicts with the Stuart kings were resolved in favour of parliament in the Bill of Rights. This is the platform of the English constitution as it stands today. It provided the basis of the American Declaration of Independence, and Australia’s Constitution would be set out in the schedule to an English Act of Parliament.

The fifth defining element of England as our parent was its subscription to representative government through parliament, and a reverence for the healing and binding powers of the law. Things were very, very different across the Channel.

Us and the US

24/04/2018 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Foreword

If you want to understand something, it may help if you compare it to something else. If you want to come to terms with what it means to be a dog, you can look hard at what it may mean to be a cat. There is more to this than just looking at a portrait from different angles, or looking at a sculpture in the round. By comparing one case to another, we get a cleaner view of the essential attributes of each – what distinguishes one from another is part of what defines each.

I should say of course that this notion is not new. At some time many millennia ago, some of our earthly ancestors noticed that a stone moved faster downhill if it was smooth and round than if it was uneven and jagged. Comparing one case to another to identify its properties is a process that it is at the heart of our experimental or scientific method, and the process that has underlay the development of the laws in England, America and Australia over more than one thousand years.

So if you want to try to see what makes one nation tick, as we say, it may help to look at it compared to another nation. And a good way to start that process is by looking at aspects of the histories of the two nations that are being compared. That is what this book seeks to do with the two nations that we know as America and Australia – to compare the two of them by looking at key aspects of the evolution of both of them.

This is not a potted history of either, but a collection of snapshots of each taken side by side as these nations negotiated some of the principal stepping stones in their progress across the stream of history. I have the pious hope that what passes for the subject matter of the snapshots may be uncontroversial if not prosaic, leaving discussion only for the inferences to be drawn and comments that might be made, but experience suggests that such a hope is likely to be illusory and hardly pious.

Both America and Australia started out as refuges for rejected boat people, two terms of abuse now in some quarters, but although they share an original common ancestor, their stories are very different. How, and why, is this the case?

I should disclose my more significant sources of prejudice. I am an Australian white male, middle class professional, who is much closer to death than birth. I have no political affiliation, but I have a mistrust of government in general, and politicians and their parties in particular. My perfect government is one that has as little to do with me as is decently possible – especially the part that hands out speeding tickets. I have made a handsome living from a profession that we in this country derive from England. I have an unlimited sense of admiration for the contribution that England has made to the civilization of the West and to the history and character of both America and Australia, and an almost equally unlimited frustration at the inability of my nation to cut what I see as apron strings tying Australia to England, and to stand on its own two feet. A dark cloud hangs over my descent to the dust – that I shall leave this earth before my country gets what I regard as its independence. I have no belief in a personal God, but I believe that the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount are a little like cutlery – they are what distinguish us from the gorillas. As the white people took America and Australia, they committed crimes against the native peoples of those lands in ways that violated every part of the great religious laws that I have mentioned, but in common with most other people, I have no real idea of what to do about those wrongs now.

Doubtless other of my prejudices will become apparent to you as you go through this book, which I hope that you will enjoy.

Here and there – Gallipoli by Les Carlyon

24/04/2018 / Geoffrey Gibson / 4 Comments

When I visited Gallipoli nearly twenty years ago, my guide, a most affable former naval officer, was proud to show me the gun emplacements on the Asian side where ‘the sick man of Europe’ had stopped the greatest navy in the world – in circumstances that still excite misgivings and bad feelings, and not just down here. I can’t recall now whether Ali said that the Turks were lucky that the British navy stopped the fight after only one day of its concerted attack, because the Turks were dangerously low on ammunition. This would not be the last time in that war that the British pride in their navy operated to make them duck putting a critical battle to the issue. That’s exactly what Lord Denning thought Jellicoe had done at Jutland, and Denning never forgave him.

We looked at those guns on our way to Troy. Then, after a night at Cannakale, we returned to the European side. We then spent about five hours going around the major sites, such as Anzac Cove and Lone Pine. When we got to the summit of the ridge called Chunuk Bair, we could see the narrows of the Dardanelles. My guide told me that the New Zealanders had taken this peak, and that if the Allied forces had been able to hold it, they could well have broken through and gone on to Constantinople. In light of all the human misery and inanity I had been looking at that day, this hypothetical was hardly comforting.

Well, as Les Carlyon remarks more than once in his book Gallipoli (2001), the battles around Gallipoli, like those of the Trojan War, were full of ‘what ifs’ or ‘if onlys.’

The man who led the charge to the summit of Chunuk Bair was a New Zealander commanding soldiers from around Wellington and Otago, Colonel William George Malone. He certainly looks the part – one of those solid, square-jawed six-footers that you see in the forward pack of the All Blacks, a man apparently born to lead. (Some of the Maori units performed the haka before battle, to the bemusement of the locals.) As well as being a land agent and solicitor with five offices, Malone was a farmer. He had about 2000 acres around Stratford. This is what Carlyon says of this farmer turned warrior.

Malone, tall and straight-backed, didn’t fit any of the stereotypes. He was born near London but saw himself as a New Zealander. He was of Irish descent and the temper of his adopted land was Scottish. He spoke French and loved classical music. He liked soldiering but was never going to make general: he was ambitious but not in the sense that he was prepared to win promotions over the bodies of his men; he was always going to be more popular with his men than with his superiors. He was bossy and petty, a man of tidy habits that bordered on fetishes, yet his men loved him. Sixty years after Chunuk Bair, old men who had served with ‘Molly Malone’ spoke of him with reverence. He was their father; he had looked after them.

If that is right, Malone was everything that most of his English commanding officers at Gallipoli were not.

Three days before his last on this earth, Malone wrote the following letter to his wife.

I expect to go through all right but, dear wife, if anything untoward happens to me there are our dear children to be brought up. You know how I love and have loved you…..If at any time in the past I seemed absorbed in ‘affairs’, it was that I might make proper provision for you and the children….It is true perhaps that I overdid it somewhat. I believe now that I did, but did not see it at the time. I regret very much now that it was so and that I lost more happiness than I need have done. You must forgive me; forgive also anything unkindly or hard that I may have said or done in the past….I have made a will and it is in the office in Stratford….I am prepared for death and hope that God will have forgiven me all my sins.

Malone woke his batman at 3 am on 8 August 1915 and gave him the address of his wife in case he got killed. He shook hands with the man and said ‘Goodbye.’

The Wellingtons advanced sixteen abreast and got to the summit of Chunuk Bair with relative ease. They were to be joined later by Gloucesters and Welsh Pioneers. As Carlyon says, ‘thoughts of victory teased.’ But they also saw that the summit would be hard to defend. In the area were Sikhs, Australians, Gurkhas and New Army boys. Monash, Australia’s best general, was having what Charles Bean, the military historian, called ‘one of those black days’. The young Kiwis astride Chunuk Bair were about to be put to the test that no sane man wants to face.

Some New Zealanders who fought on Chunuk Bair never saw the Narrows. Malone didn’t stare at them for long. He was a practical man; he knew that looking at the narrows was not the same as owning them. He had to hold this awkwardly shaped summit; that was the first thing. And after 5 am, when the haze lifted and the Turkish riflemen could see their targets, clinging to that summit became one of the epics of the Gallipoli campaign. ….By 5 am the Turks were starting to pick off the Wellingtons. The Gloucesters and Welsh Pioneers were shot down as they came up to reinforce Malone. The Gloucesters on Malone’s left broke as they tried to dig in…. The Turks could creep to within twenty yards of the Wellingtons before being seen. The front trench, which was too shallow anyway, became clogged with dead and wounded. By 6.30 am, Malone was running a tremendous battle….The New Zealanders’ rifles became too hot to hold.

Even by the standards of Gallipoli and Troy, this was hell made flesh. One Kiwi took a Turkish trench, and ended up standing on the dead and wounded. He said the colour of the earth was blood. The Wellingtons made short bayonet charges at the advancing Turks. Malone himself used a bayonet. It was buckled by a bullet. An officer told Malone a man of his rank should not lead such charges. Malone replied: ‘You’re only a kid – I’m an old man – get out yourself!’ A reporter on the beach later met a New Zealander with ten bayonet wounds.

Malone moved about all day amid this carnage trying to hold morale. At about 5pm Malone was hit by a misdirected shrapnel burst that had come from either an Anzac battery or a warship. He fell to friendly fire.

So died one of the grand and original figures of the Gallipoli campaign, a free spirit who could stretch his mind beyond the clubby world …and would stretch his integrity for no man. It seems unconscionable that he received no posthumous decoration for his day on Chunuk Bair. By the standards set at Lone Pine, he should have received the Victoria Cross. In death, as in life, Malone was not much loved by those in authority. He was always going to be an outsider. Mater [his wife] took her three children to England during the war and never returned to New Zealand. Malone’s farms were sold and his large family home burned down. His son Edmond died of wounds in France in 1918.

The vast tragedy that engulfed the House of Malone could have come straight out of Homer. It is within my personal knowledge that the Australians who fought in that war held two lifelong gripes against the English officer class – their incompetence or heartlessness in the field, and their lousiness in accepting the courage and competence of the colonials. If medals are given to those who carry out their duty over a sustained period of time while facing probable death or mutilation, then in a just world, every one of those poor bastards on Chunuk Bair should have got a Victoria Cross, dead or alive. Of the 760 Wellingtons who had arrived on the crest that morning, only two officers and 47 men remained unwounded.

They looked like the nightshift leaving a clandestine abattoir. Their uniforms were torn and spattered with blood. They had drunk no water since dawn and barely slept for two days. According to Bean, they talked in whispers, trembled and cried. Some bled to death and others went mad with thirst. Some asked when the stretcher-bearers were coming and were told they weren’t. Others prayed or hallucinated or passed out…..Some of the wounded from August 8 took three days to travel down…, attacked by flies the whole way, thirsty the whole way, covered in dust with bloody clothes stuck to their bodies.

The New Zealanders left on the summit were relieved later that day by British New Army Battalions. They were swept off the summit on 10 August by an attack led personally by Mustafa Kemal in what Carlyon calls ‘death by avalanche.’ The Australian war historian Charles Bean dropped his guard at a time when people did not blush to use the word ‘race’. ‘The truth is that after 100 years of breeding in slums, the British race is not the same….It is breeding one fine class at the expense of all the rest.’ Good God, did the descendants of convicts see themselves as ethnically superior to the stock of the Mother Country? Well, putting race to one side, the nemesis of the British had intervened once again to save his nation from defeat at the hands of accursed infidels.

One Victoria Cross was awarded to the immortally brave New Zealanders who took Chunuk Bair and held it until they were relieved. It was given to Corporal Cyril Bassett, a signaller. Carlyon said that Bassett knew the truth about Chunuk Bair. ‘All my mates ever got were wooden crosses.’

By contrast, seven Australians won the Victoria Cross at Lone Pine, two of them posthumously. The British saw Lone Pine as a win. Chunuk Bair was a loss. We must suspect that the British were laying the seeds of what has become a vicious trait in the Australian psyche. We don’t like soldiers who lose. We turned our back on those returning from Vietnam, and we are now giving the same treatment to those who fought for us in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The French lost more soldiers than Australia did at Gallipoli, but they were not a young nation in quest of a legend. And statistics can be demeaning. They can rob a story of its moral horror. To understand that horror, and the ghastly sense of chance and waste, we need to be reminded of the story of Molly Malone and his men. That story is worth more than all the charts and graphs on earth.

It looks to me that Carlyon told the story of Gallipoli as it should be told and that he is very sensible and fair in looking at those responsible. Churchill’s conception was at best romantic – his family said he was always dangerous with a map in his hand – but his powers of persuasion turned the heads of those who should have known better. Fisher was sceptical but erratic. Kitchener was aloof and out of date, but the others walked in fear of him. The command at home was divided and the overall strategy bears an uncomely resemblance to that of the English and Americans in Iraq. Hamilton was literate and urbane, but they are not the qualities you need in an abattoir, and he walked in fear of his betters. The original plan was to have the navy do the job, but the navy got timid, and Plan B was not thought through. Then there was the incompetence or cruelty of the officers on the ground.

Two young nations sacrificed the flower of a whole generation in a great Imperial balls-up. When Kitchener finally got to Gallipoli, he was driven to a confession, although this old man may not have seen it that way. ‘The country is much more difficult than I imagined, and the Turkish positions….are natural fortresses, which, if not taken by surprise at first, could he held against very serious attacks by larger forces than have been engaged…..To gain what we hold has been a most remarkable feat of arms….Everyone has done wonders.’ Nothing ever surprised the Turks in this campaign. The Minister of War was therefore admitting that his ignorance had led to the unnecessary slaughter of thousands upon thousands over seven months in pursuit of what was obviously unattainable. When Kitchener told the ANZACS that the ‘King has asked me to tell you how splendidly he thinks you have done – you have done splendidly, better even than I thought you would’, those poor deluded remnants cheered him heartily.

Although I have made my pilgrimage to Gallipoli, and to the Western Front, the mystique of Anzac Day remains as impenetrable to me as that of the Holy Trinity. I wonder what that hard head Molly Malone and his men would have made of it. I can’t help wondering if their response might be: ‘Why in the name of God are you celebrating the campaign where good and brave men got slaughtered – and all for nothing?’

Carlyon closed his chapter on Lone Pine citing a letter home from a young soldier who wrote home to his parents in Hawthorn (Melbourne). Private James Martin had given his occupation as ‘farmhand’. He told his mum and dad that the troops had got a present from Lady Ferguson, the wife of the Governor-General – ‘2 fancy biscuits, half stick of Chocolate and 2 sardines each. I think I have told you all the news so I must draw to a close with Fondest love to all.’

Private Martin craved a letter. Across the top of his letter he scrawled: ‘Write soon. I have received no letters since I left Victoria and I have been writing often.’ A little over a fortnight later, he died from heart failure, probably caused by enteric fever, and was buried at sea.

His enlistment papers gave his age as 18. At the time of his death, he was 14 years and nine months. Among his effects was a scrap of red and white streamer that he had picked up as his troopship left Melbourne.

It sounds like the poor little bugger never made it off the boat. God only knows how his mum and dad took the news when the telegram arrived back at Hawthorn on the other side of the world.

Passing Bull 146 – Some bad rights

24/04/2018 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

If I agree to paint your house for a fee, and after I start the work, I make it clear that I will not perform my part of the contract, then the law says that you can put an end to the contract and make other arrangements free of any further obligation to me. If you do that, the law says I have ‘repudiated’ the contract, and that by ‘accepting’ that repudiation, you have brought the contract to an end – by the operation of the law.

In broad terms, that is what happened in the English Revolution in 1689, the American Revolution in 1776, and the French Revolution in 1789 and later. The people said to their king, with the force of arms – ‘You have broken your word and you have not done your job. We dismiss you and we will set up a new form of government.’ Indeed, the great French historian Marc Bloch said that the contract between a feudal lord and his vassal was a genuine contract to the same effect. ‘If the lord failed to fulfil his engagements, he lost his rights.’ Bloch foresaw how this doctrine might be applied in the political sphere – ‘it was reinforced by the very ancient notions which held the king responsible in a mystical way for the welfare of his subjects and deserving of punishment in the event of public calamity.’

During the course of events that we label the French Revolution, the French had a go at defining what they called the rights of man. They did it in 1789 and again in 1793. People now generally go the 1789 model, when hope and innocence reigned. By 1793, France and the world had seen the terrorism of the Jacobins. They had to face the familiar problem of those who come to power by force: how do you stop others doing the same to you?

Article 25 of the 1793 French Declaration of the Rights of Man says:

When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is for the people and for each portion of the people the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties.

This provision was not in the original version. History suggests that it was most unwise to purport to give a legal formulation and blessing to a right of insurrection – the right to revolt. Who will rule on the issue of whether the right has crystallized? The answer can only be force of arms – if you win, you are the government; if you lose, you get executed for treason.

But some kind of claim to a right of insurrection was instrumental in a string of revolutions that cruelly bedevilled France for a century after 1789. And it still works to stand in the way of reform in France. Industrial action there is a form of insurrection. Social positions get entrenched as matters of status to an extent that is medieval – or even feudal. That was not what the revolution was about. The result? The public sector consumes 56% of GDP in France; train drivers can retire at 50; and the nation braces itself for more insurrection against the reforms of President Macron.

A century beforehand, the English had used a different tack. Article 6 of the Declaration of Rights prohibits the raising of a standing army except with the consent of parliament. If it is hard for a king to drive a program without money, it was even harder for the king to conduct a coup without an army. The king had been neutralised, as history has since shown. But the Declaration goes further than ensuring that the king would have no army. In Magna Carta, the barons were in a position to dictate that the king would sign up for a truly life-threatening security clause that could be invoked if he were to misbehave. The barons could in effect appoint themselves receivers to enter into and seize crown property. Well, that would hardly do nearly five hundred years later, and William and Mary were in a much stronger negotiating position than King John. Besides, English lords or knights from the shires would hardly have had any interest in or any capacity to take over affairs on Chesapeake Bay, or from the Begums of Oudh. So, Article 7 provided, and still does, that ‘the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law’. .

The incoming king was an experienced man of arms and a seasoned man of affairs. There can be no doubt that he appreciated the inevitable consequence of Articles 6 and 7 of the Declaration of Rights. ‘Your Majesty shall have no army unless we agree, but we shall remain armed whether you agree or not. If there is a disagreement about how you discharge your obligations, and we cannot resolve that disagreement by negotiation in good faith, and our differences have to be resolved by the arbitrament of arms, we shall prevail and you shall lose. Your best option then will be exile.’ If they had been in a mordant frame of mind, they may have given Prince William a sketch of the shed where they kept the axe.

Sir Jack Plumb said: ‘The Bill of Rights had its sanctions clauses – there was to be no standing army and Protestant gentlemen were to be allowed arms; the right of rebellion is implicit.’ The phrase ‘right of rebellion’ may make constitutional lawyers blush, but Sir Jack may have had in mind the right of the innocent party to accept the conduct of a guilty party as the repudiation of a contract, so bringing it to an end. Plumb had also said that: ‘the power of the 17^th century gentry was sanctioned by violence’ and that ‘by 1688, violence in politics was an Englishman’s birth-right’.

Or course, now that English political society has ceased to treat violence as its ultimate sanction, these constitutional provisions have become a dead letter, as they clearly should be so regarded in any civilised society. This is not so across the Atlantic, where the American version of the right to bear arms serves to keep the United States in the race for the title of the murder capital of the world. There they have, but refuse to confront, the problem facing the French after 1789. A right simply to bear arms is useless unless the citizen can lawfully claim to use them. Who decides that? The lethal American answer is the gun.

What is the point? Declaring rights broadly is bloody dangerous.

Bloopers

‘Qantas objecting to what Folau is saying about homosexuality is beyond laughable. I don’t agree with Israel but I’ve told him most explicitly that he must not back down.’

The Australian, 13 April 2018

Alan Jones with his characteristic humility.

Speaking later with reporters aboard Air Force One as Mr. Trump headed to Florida, Ms. Sanders added that ‘the president has been clear that he’s going to be tough on Russia, but at the same time he’d still like to have a good relationship with them.’

Another White House official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations, said Mr. Trump had decided not to go forward with the sanctions. Mr. Trump concluded that they were unnecessary because Moscow’s response to the airstrike was mainly bluster, the official said.

The New York Times, 17 April, 2018.

Well, he can recognise bluster when he sees it.

TERROR AND THE POLICE STATE: CHAPTER 22

09/04/2018 / 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; 18 The numbers; 19 The horror; 20 The meaning?; 21 Common features; 22 Justification: Epilogue. The short version is about one quarter the length of the original. Each instalment is about 1200 words.]

Justification?

If a revolution is a successful revolt, the historical justification of violence in a revolution is its success in overthrowing the old regime – plus some kind of judgment that the bloodshed and killing have all been worth it. A revolution is merely a revolt that has succeeded. If those who are revolting fail, they are liable to be executed for treason; if they are successful, they are ensainted as liberators and they form or provide the first government under the new regime.

The justification of terror or the police state must be more ongoing. In the end, the regime says that it is justified in inflicting death pain or loss of liberty on some people in order to advance the interests of the people as a whole. This will ultimately come down to a moral judgment – there are shades of a judgment that might be called political, but the ultimate criterion will be what we describe as a moral view.

For example, most countries in the West now do not believe that it is right to execute people who are found guilty of committing certain crimes – or any crimes. At bottom, this aversion comes from a view about the sanctity of human life that is part of what might be called the culture of the West, and which is at least in part derived from the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount. It is no coincidence that the aversion to capital punishment does not run in many states where those creeds do not run, such as China or many Islamic nations.

On the other hand, the Western aversion to killing criminals is not absolute. It is a simple fact of political life that the Americans were not going to try Osama bin Laden, or that if they had tried him, they would have convicted him and they would have executed him. Hitler may have been tried – Churchill was against having any war trials – but all those major German war criminals knew what their end would be – and, we may be sure, they had known that for many years.

It follows that opinions about the French Terror and the Russian will change from person to person and from time to time. Those who were prepared to stand up for Stalin were thinned down when Khrushchev disowned him, and they just about disappeared with the collapse of the empire that is now so lamented by Mr Putin. For those outside Russia, the judgment of Solzhenitsyn was terminal. The Communists had expressly adopted the Jacobins as their models. The Russians had views about making a new beginning and being in the vanguard. This led François Furet to make some observations (in 1978) that have since provoked discussion.

But these two notions – of a new beginning and of a vanguard nation – are now giving way. Solzhenitsyn’s work has become the basic Soviet reference for the Soviet experience, ineluctably locating the issue of the Gulag at the very core of the revolutionary endeavour. Once that happened, the Russian example was bound to turn around like a boomerang to strike its French ‘origin’…. Today the Gulag is leading to a rethinking of the Terror precisely because the two undertakings are seen as identical’. In the first reign of terror, thousands were killed; in the second, it was millions. And in each case, to what extent did the justification being offered on behalf of the killers improve on the proposition that ‘I need to kill you so that I and others can have a better life’?

One problem for those who justify terror in the name of the state is the same for those who justify killing in the name of the state – where do you draw the line? It is like the problem that haunts all revolutionary regimes – if we could seize power by violence, what stops you from doing the same to us? Bloodshed, we know, tends to breed bloodshed. Is it the same with breaking the law? History suggests that it is. Each of the American, French and Russian revolutions led to frightful civil wars, as had the first revolution in England in the seventeenth century; the combination of violence and terror offered by the Nazis was in this and other ways unique, and no sane person seeks to justify any aspect of the Third Reich. When you destroy the source of the law, you let in lawlessness.

It is not enough to say that Robespierre was in pursuit of a political ideal called liberty, whatever that might mean, or that Osama bin Laden was in pursuit of a spiritual ideal of one true faith – or that his pilots were driving into the arms of seventy-two black eyed virgins. Something more than slogans and abstractions is required. The facts are rather less clear or virtuous than the theories. When the French Terror ended with the killings, as part of that same process, of Robespierre, Couthon and Saint-Just, it was in the hands of three professional revolutionaries, all three trained as lawyers, who had always been longer on intellect than humanity, and whose driven didactic virtue was fast going down the drain of a murderous amour propre. Indeed, young Saint-Just was burying his memories of a misspent youth in a relentless hatred of the enemy that had turned him into a cold killing machine. That kind of end calls for some human response other than justification.

Nor were you likely to take any comfort from any justification of the French Terror offered by the old school who liked to write history about a ‘class war’ that for all we know only existed in their imagination. Albert Soboul accepted Robespierre’s proposition that ‘virtue’ as a fundamental principle of democratic or popular government ‘provides the guarantee that Revolutionary Government does not turn into despotism’ Soboul then said that the Terror purged the nation of groups considered to be ‘socially unassimilable, either because of their aristocratic origin or because they had thrown in their lot with the aristocracy’ or that ‘the Terror had the effect of cutting off from the rest of the nation elements incapable of being assimilated into society, either because they were aristocratic or because they had attached themselves to the aristocracy.’

The first proposition is falsified by all history, not least that of Robespierre; the second is falsified by the evidence and is morally revolting. ‘If your membership of a group means that in our judgment you cannot live with us, you will be liquidated’ is a maxim that could not have been improved on by Stalin. It would be in bad taste to refer to Hitler, but he did seek precisely to implement that world view. Nor is it surprising to find Robespierre tersely noting that ‘the word virtue made Danton laugh.’

It remains, then, to say something about those who were responsible for our three reigns of terror, in France, Russia, and Germany. Is it too simplistic to say that Stalin and Hitler were evil but that the French terrorists were not? Those driving what we call the Communist Revolution may or may not have had altruistic notions about working for others, but before Lenin died, the basis of Stalin’s regime was set, and most now agree that the original scheme was flawed in any event. Both Lenin and Stalin were in truth guilty of appalling crimes against humanity – Lenin possibly being the more morally culpable on the ground of hypocrisy alone – and their reputations are not as bad as they might have been mainly because Hitler and Mao would prove to be even more murderous. The only thing that can be said in favour of Hitler is that he entered into a pact with Stalin which Hitler broke and for which Stalin killed him.

Here and there – Being a Conservative

09/04/2018 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The word ‘conservative’ is sadly abused. Nasty people claim it. So do fakes. So, when the English conservative philosopher Roger Scruton writes a book called ‘How to be a Conservative’, we sit up and take notice.

First, some caveats. On the very first page, we get this about ‘ordinary conservatives’:

Their honest attempts to live by their lights, raising families, enjoying communities, worshipping their gods, and adopting a settled and affirmative culture – these attempts are scorned and ridiculed by the Guardian class.

Don’t ordinary liberals or socialists, if there any left, want to raise families and enjoy communities? Are there people around who scorn and ridicule people who do? And is not the reference to the Guardian class an indication that the author may have succumbed to tribalism? Does he stand for the Spectator class? Then, a few pages later, Scruton tells us that he got his cultural conservatism ‘from the literary critic F R Leavis, from T S Eliot, whose Four Quartets and literary essays entered all our hearts at school…..’ Can I say that I have never met a man whose heart was so entered – at school, or at all? As well as a tribal war, we may have a class or culture war on our hands.

But to business – Scruton refers to what might be the Conservative bible, Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution. Burke did not believe politics could be reduced to a plan – he was opposed to ‘a politics that proposed a rational goal, and a collective procedure for achieving it, and which mobilised the whole of society behind the resulting program. Burke saw society as an association of the dead, the living and the unborn.’ That is a very English position and a useful introduction to being a Conservative. It’s a view I share – with other views, of course.

Burke was appalled at the popular revolt – in France or anywhere else. Eventually, most of the world joined him in that revulsion. When government fails, things get out of hand. That’s why I cannot understand how people who claim to be Conservatives support popular revolts – the position that we now call ‘populism’. How can someone who claims to follow Edmund Burke also claim to follow Farage, Hanson, or Trump? God only knows what Burke may have said (and Burke was not short-winded).

Then we get eight chapters seeking to find the truth in eight –isms. Did anything good ever come out of an –ism? Are we comfortable with a search for truth in abstractions like Liberalism or Environmentalism? If we are going to find truth in each of these –isms, of which Conservatism is the last, then are we not in for long journey in political or ideological Multiculturalism –another of the eight – isms? For example, under the truth in Socialism we get:

But socialism means, for most of its advocates, a political program designed to secure for all citizens an equal chance of a fulfilling life….That idea of social justice may not be coherent. But it speaks to sentiments that we share….Hence British conservatives in the nineteenth century frequently acknowledged common cause with the Chartists, and the greatest conservative thinker of the Victorian age, John Ruskin, addressed many of his homilies to the urban working class. Disraeli was not the inventor of ‘One Nation’ Toryism, but he certainly made clear….that the conservative cause would be lost if it did not also appeal to the new migrants to the industrial towns, and if it did not take their position seriously. A believable conservatism has to suggest ways of spreading the benefit of social membership to those who have not succeeded for themselves.

That last proposition is just a fact of political life – at least in Australia and England. (The U S is very different.) Much later we get –

….civil society depends on the attachments that must be renewed and, in modern circumstances, these attachments cannot be renewed without the collective provision of welfare.

Well, given that we do have and will continue to have the welfare state, is there not some Socialism and Conservatism in all of us – and is not the rest of the discussion just bargaining or posturing about the margins?

Scruton spends a lot of time on the zero sum game fallacy. ‘The great socialist illusion’ is that ‘the poor are poor because the rich are rich.’ That statement does look rather large – but how would I know? I can’t recall meeting a Socialist, at least recently, outside the National Party – and I think I would remember. (I should say that I haven’t met Jeremy Corbyn.)

The author must be right to say that we cannot condemn Nationalism just because it can be abused, and he is right to say that people are entitled to protect their national character against invading religions. It would be shocking to permit the practice of Sharia law in an open society. My own view is that historians and philosophers have underquoted on the liberation inherent in the Reformation.

When God makes the laws, the law becomes as mysterious as God is. When we make the laws, and make them for our purposes, we can be certain what they mean. The only question is ‘Who are we’?

Now, that statement about our being certain about what we mean is sadly unwarranted, and the other question is how do we know which laws were made by God and which by men? We only get the laws of God from the mouths of men.

The truth in Capitalism is that ‘private ownership and free exchange are necessary features in any large scale economy – any economy in which people depend for their survival and prosperity on the activities of strangers.’ But we are told that ‘Socialists don’t in their hearts accept this.’ Well, Socialists may not, but the people of China and Russia plainly do. They have both seen the starvation that otherwise comes about. Perhaps the professor had in mind Cuba or perhaps he foresaw the fate of Venezuela.

Under the heading Liberalism, there is a very good discussion about the two differing concepts of liberty – the positive and negative. Scruton is in my view plainly right when he says:

For the search for liberty has gone hand in hand with a countervailing search for ‘empowerment’….Hence egalitarians have begun to insert more positive rights into the list of negative freedoms, supplementing the liberty rights specified by the various international conventions with rights that do not merely demand non-encroachment from others, but which impose on them a positive duty.

The author refers to Article 22 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Its terms are unsettlingly wide and they bear the hallmarks of people who may not have had to get their hands too dirty to make a living. It’s hard to write Kant’s concept of dignity into an international covenant – and be taken seriously.

There are also some helpful remarks on the ‘down with us mentality’ in the discussion of Multiculturalism. Writing in 2014, Scruton said ‘The dethroning of reason goes hand in hand with a disbelief in objective truth’. He was certainly a prophet new inspired.

But the book is worth the price for the chapter on Environmentalism. Why don’t Conservatives want to conserve the earth?

…the love of home lends itself to the environmental cause, and it is astonishing that the many conservative parties in the English-speaking world have not seized hold of that cause as their own.

At last – someone who shares my astonishment! Scruton gives two reasons for the conservative heresy – the ascendancy of economics in the thinking of modern politicians and the agitated propaganda of the other side. We certainly have seen both here, but are we to remain prisoners of history while we ruin Earth for those who come after us? Later Scruton says (again, in 2014) that the only nation in the world who can lead it out of the crisis is the U S. God only knows what he thinks of the U S now.

Under Internationalism, we are told that once again ‘a fundamental truth has been captured by people with an agenda.’ We see this throughout the book – and the writer himself has an agenda. As someone who has spent a lot of time in universities, Scruton may find it hard to recall too many people who don’t have an agenda. We see it again on gay marriage. ‘Only someone with nothing to lose can venture to discuss the issue with the measure of circumspection it invites, and politicians do not figure among the class of people with nothing to lose.’

Later we get another entertaining look at the impact of religion on our communal life. The French revolutionaries were for the most part manically anti-church. ‘The Revolutionaries wanted to possess the souls that the Church had recruited…’ That is I think the case. It’s a theme that recurs in revolutions.

Subsequent revolutions have in like manner regarded the Church as Public Enemy number 1, precisely because it creates a realm of value and authority outside the reach of the state. It is necessary, in the revolutionary consciousness, to enter that realm and steel its magic.

In the hands of Robespierre, the attempted theft was low farce, but the effort was there. Burke stated the view that we and England adhere to – ‘that government must hold religion at a distance if it is to maintain civil peace.’ Scruton makes a droll observation on the fact that a majority of English people still put down ‘C of E’ as their religious affiliation.

But that did not imply that they attended an Anglican church – only that they were so far indifferent in the matter as to believe that God would not object to their pretending that they did.

When we finally get to Conservatism, we get a reference to Hegel – which in my view is a heroic flirtation with eternity – and we then get:

What emerges from it is the view of human beings as accountable to each other, bound in associations of mutual responsibility and finding fulfilment in the family and the life of civil society.

If that’s what makes a Conservative, how is he or she different to me or the rest of us?

Well, all these labels are suspect, but in the intellectual desert of Conservatism in Australia this book comes up at us like a Ballarat gold nugget.

Here and there – Shakespeare and the mob – and Trump

02/04/2018 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

When the Three Estates convened at Versailles in 1789, the Nobility and the Clergy played hard to get with the rest of France – the Third Estate. Its delegates then wished to constitute themselves as the body representing the nation of France. What should it call itself? Assemblée Nationale or Représentants du people? But if the latter, who were the ‘people’? Many feared that the King and the Court and the Clergy would regard the peuple as the plebs rather than the populus, or, as Michelet framed it, le peuple inférieur. So, they went for the name Assemblée Nationale.

Similar questions arise when you ask who is in the populus that populists appeal to? If you answer that they are the plebs or the ‘inferior people,’ you may get into trouble, if not a fight. Even the terms ‘commoner’ or ‘common people’ are tricky in a nation that claims to prize equality.

For the purposes of this note, I will say that the ‘people’ that Donald Trump appeals to are those who welcome his pardoning of a government officer who boasted of running a concentration camp for people who he thought were ethnically inferior, who ran up a bill for the people of Arizona of $70 million in defending his racial profiling, and who was then sentenced to jail for defying a court order. The ‘people’ that Farage appeals to were those who loved that photo of their leader grinning in front of a large poster with a long line of towel-heads threatening to inundate the Fatherland. These folks didn’t think the poster was racist, and would turn more nastily against those whom they call ‘elite’ if anyone dares to say so. With Pauline Hanson, you have a smorgasbord, but for Australia generally, you might say that the ‘people’ that someone like Cory Bernardi might appeal to are those who think that Peter Dutton is a good Minister of the Crown and a man worthy to be Prime Minister of this great nation.

What did our greatest playwright have to say about the ‘people’? Quite a lot – and it is hard to find anything favourable either to the people or those who appeal to them.

In a book I wrote some years ago, I said:

When Banjo Paterson came to stigmatize mindless youth in the then equivalent of our outer suburbs, he referred to gilded youths who sat along the wall:

‘Their eyes were dull, their heads were flat, they had no brains at all’.

This is a recurrent nightmare for us now, made worse on our trains and buses by sullen looks coming from vacant spaces between iPod exit points. It is not that education has failed them– they have rejected education. There is nothing going on at all there. What might happen if that lot got into government? The nightmare would be made real.

You can make up your own mind whether you think that that nightmare has become real in the U S or elsewhere, but the figure of Jack Cade in Act 4 of Henry VI Part II does look frighteningly prescient.

Cade is a demagogue from Kent. We see him first as a pawn of a faction leader in the Wars of the Roses. Cade appeals to the mob, but he has ideas of his own. He thinks he can be king. (He is no democrat, but dictators rarely are.) Although he says that he is waging a class war, he still wants to be king. But like Hitler, the ascent of Cade is by carrot and stick: give the masses what they want and purify the rest by terror by killing anyone who gets in the way. ‘Let’s kill all the lawyers.’ (4.2.75) and ‘make it a felony to drink small beer’ (4.2.66).

The descent into Fantasyland is immediate: ‘Strike off his head’ (4.7.112). This was the short answer of Robespierre, but at least Robespierre, who was a lawyer, was not terrified of writing. Jack Cade will kill those who can write: only one who has to apply his mark may be considered an ‘honest plain-dealing man’ (4.2.100). The Nazis went further and burnt books, but by and large these did not exist at the time of Jack Cade. How often do we see this victimhood on the part of the mindless, pretending that only they are pure? It’s as if you have to be a victim to be good. And Cade can link class vindication to ideological cant:

And you that love the commons, follow me.

Now show yourselves men; ‘tis for liberty.

We will not leave one lord, one gentleman,

Spare none but such as go in clouted shoon. (4.2.180-184)

‘Clouted shoon’ means hobnailed boots. This is Romper Stomper six centuries ago. Our nightmare was alive back then. The reference to ‘liberty’ is moonshine. Cade is in this only for himself. He even wants the droit de seigneur (4.7.120-125). But almost immediately, the fickle mob drops him and he is dispatched – unconvincingly – by another more orthodox son of Kentish soil. ‘Was ever feather so lightly blown to and fro, as this multitude?’(4.8.56-59).

Cade loathes literacy. That and his capacity to hide behind a joke if he gets caught is something else Trump has in common with Cade. In the destruction of the Savoy and the Inns of Court, and the burning of the records of the realm, Cade prefigures the mob in Paris in and after 1789.

Jack Cade then is the template for the loud, stupid, selfish populism of the Trump brand. We see the mob being seduced in Richard III; Richard II is worried about the appeal of Bolingbroke to the mob; Henry IV lectures his son on how to present to them; and Joan of Arc has a popular appeal that Henry VI could not even dream of; but I shall confine my remarks to the Roman plays.

The gross political naivety of Brutus and the duplicity of Antony enabled the latter to convert and then unleash the mob in possibly the most famous speech for the stage in Julius Caesar, Act I Scene 2. Brutus was silly not to have taken out Antony with his patron. He was sillier to allow a disciple of Caesar to open his mouth in public about the murder. Then he was even sillier to accept Antony’s promise not to ‘blame us’ (3.1.245). Within minutes, Antony is speaking of letting slip the dogs of war. The speech plays on the words ‘honorable’ and ‘ambition’ – lethally. Then this masterpiece of political deceit plays on the word ‘mutiny’ – three times. Inciting mutiny was of course Antony’s sole purpose in making the speech, and Brutus and the other killers would pay with their lives for their political innocence.

Many of those who are familiar with this speech forget its aftermath. In the next scene, the hysterical mob becomes a lynch mob, and then we are shown the big hitters sharing the spoils of revenge. They calmly decide which of their families will have to die. Act 4 Scene 1 commences with Antony saying ‘These many men shall die; their names are pricked.’ Octavius responds ‘Your brother too must die; consent you, Lepidus?’ The murderous cold-bloodedness of these power brokers might remind you of a passage in Antony and Cleopatra. When the world beaters are getting drunk doing their big deal to split up the world, the aide to Pompey asks him if he would be lord of the whole world. He then offers this amazing but sober proposal:

These three world-sharers, these competitors,

Are in thy vessel. Let me cut the cable;

And when we are put off, fall to their throats.

All there is thine. (2.7.73-74)

These rulers not only play with the mob – they kill them as if for sport.

The action in Coriolanus takes place during the class wars that sickened ancient Rome for so long. We still are inclined to label some people ‘patrician’ and some ‘plebeian’ after the Latin terms for the two classes who were at each other’s throats in Rome. Neither now is a term of affection.

Coriolanus was as patrician as you could get. He loathed the plebeians – and he could not help himself from revealing his loathing – indeed, reveling in it. If you regard the ‘people’ with contempt, and if you are happy to show them that contempt, you can hardly expect to achieve political success if the constitution decrees that you must appear before the people and obtain their assent to your appointment to the office you seek. Since that’s what the Roman constitution provided, the play Coriolanus is inevitably a tragedy.

A dramatic high point comes when our hero erupts astoundingly when a tribune says ‘shall’ – a plebeian being imperative to a noble! (3.1.87). Coriolanus spits the word ‘shall’ back at them four times. The man who takes Coriolanus in and then turns on him knows what the word ‘boy’ will do (5.6.101). The representatives of the ‘people’ are the ‘tribunes.’ They get a shocking press in this play. They are like union organizers – Jesuitical or communist, depending on your phobia or fancy. The film reeks of 1789. ‘What is the city but the people?’ and ‘The people are the city.’ (3.1.198-9). That is pure Robespierre. The tribunes are cold blooded, self-interested, manipulative cowards. Here is how they go about their work in steering the populus.

To the’ Capitol come

We shall be there before the stream o’ th’ people;

And this shall seem, as partly ‘tis, their own,

Which we have goaded onward. (2.3.267-271)

Coriolanus is a sustained hatchet job of the puppeteers of the populus. And it is another reason why we regard this playwright so highly for his insight into our politics. The main lesson from this play for us in seeking to understand Trump is that if a person comes into political office with a character that makes him unfit for that office, you are kidding yourself if you think he might change character on the job. Indeed, the likelihood is that he will only get worse the longer he stays in the job. Power rarely improves people it and never makes them humble.

Tony Tanner referred to Plutarch speaking of Coriolanus and saying how an education might lead a man who was ‘rude and rough of nature’ to be ‘civil and courteous.’ He went on:

During the Renaissance, there was much discussion concerning the proper education, duties, and responsibilities of the good prince or governor – what qualified a person to exercise ‘the speciality of rule’. As Plutarch stresses, it is precisely these qualifications which Coriolanus so signally lacks: he is a prime example of what Renaissance thinkers regarded as the ill-educated prince, a man from the governing classes who is, by nature, temperament, and upbringing, unfitted and unfit to rule.

That is Donald Trump word for word. From Rome to Washington, and from Plutarch to the New York Times, there is nothing new under the political sun.

TERROR AND THE POLICE STATE: CHAPTER 21

02/04/201802/04/2018 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Common features

Here then are some of the features, for better or worse, of our three regimes.

Triumphalism

Each of France – under the Terror or under Napoleon – Communist Russia, and Nazi Germany had something more than mere righteousness, or self-righteousness. Each of them believed, and was convinced, that their way was the way of the future. France and Russia hoped and believed the rest of the world would follow their lead. Hitler had no such delusion.

Absolutism

One result of this triumphalism, this splendid newness and hard-won sanctity, was a kind of absolutism that promoted intolerance. Saint-Just, a true fanatic, said: ‘Since the French people has manifested its will, everything opposed to it is outside the sovereign. Whatever is outside the sovereign is an enemy.’ This was an invocation of Rousseau’s Social Contract to justify the Terror. These notions are inherently vicious over and above their waffly foundation of an abstraction of ‘the people.’ The people of France rose up in 1789 against privilege.

Ungodliness

Napoleon and Mussolini manipulated religion as a tool of government and to keep the hordes content. In the course of their revolutions, both the French and the Russians took the opposite view. The objection was not to the teaching of Christ. They were objecting in a way to what the Roman emperors were attracted to – the role of the church as a part of governing.

Inexperience

The French and the Russians were taking over from autocrats. Those leading the revolutions had little or no experience in government, and they were not inclined to trust any of the machinery of their predecessors. And just as importantly, Louis and Nicholas had no experience in politics or negotiation.

Anxiety

In neither France nor in Germany did the regime as a whole ever feel at peace or at rest. France went from being threatened by all around them to something close to perpetual war and the defeat of Napoleon brought no settlement. Lenin’s personal need to short-circuit Marx meant that the Russian process was off-keel from the start. The New Economic Policy showed that they were making it up as they went.

Intolerance

Anxiety and intolerance were mutually self-supporting. Professor Furet said: ‘As early as 1789, the French Revolution could envisage resistance – real or imaginary – only as a gigantic and permanent conspiracy, which it must ceaselessly crush… Its political repertoire had never given the slightest opening to expressions of disagreement, let alone conflict: the people had appropriated the absolutist heritage and taken the place of the king.’

Immoderation

You can see this need for absolutism all the time during the French Revolution. It is as if moderation had been banned. Everything is over the top – someone said that the whole Third Reich was just one long, bad opera. Robespierre wrote to Danton, one of those whose death he would compass: ‘I love you more than ever. I love you until death. At this moment, I am you.’ That could have come from Wuthering Heights.

Conflict

Armed insurrection became something of a habit for the French, and barricades became moveable parts of municipal furniture. Some kind of civil war was inevitable. Napoleon convulsed Europe for about a generation, and five million died. The Russian Revolution was based on received dogma of inevitable and universal class wars, and led to a civil war more frightful than anything the French had known

Intellectualism

Mein Kampf is a flat denial of thought. But at least some in the lead of the French Revolution, and almost all those in the vanguard of the Russian Revolution, claimed some intellectual background to their violence. This was not helpful in either case. Intellectualism has never been a problem in England.

Nationalism

The nationalism inherent in the Nazi regime is obvious from its name and nature – an attempt to win living room and to conquer at least Europe. But it very soon also emerged with the revolutions in France and Russia, and in ways that were equally obnoxious and lethal to the neighbours.

Patriotism

Patriotism now has an aura very different to what it had in 1789, and even then it varied greatly from one nation to the next. Its history is in part linked to that of nationalism. It too is a dirty word. Both the French and Russian revolutions saw aggressive nationalism which achieved its nadir under Hitler.

Exclusivism

When people revolt against a system of government, they commonly want to transfer shares of power down the ladder, but they hardly ever want to go all the way down. If you had suggested to those behind the English Revolution of 1689 or the American Revolution in 1776 that they were democrats, they would have been scandalised.

Rumour

Nowadays, the opposition to repressive regimes is facilitated by communication over the internet. The reverse problems obtained in much of France, and even Paris, and even in some of Germany. The absence of quick and reliable communication encouraged rumour, suspicion, and fear, the lifeblood of the mob. Ignorance can lead to almost a cult of suspicion. Now social media enables others to manipulate elections and to murder the very idea of truth.

Unreality

All these people were going where no man had been before, and most of them did not know what they were doing – but only the French understood that. Ignorance deterred none of them.

Degradation

We all know that all power corrupts. Robespierre was incorruptible financially but his political success, the adulation of a crowd, and a belief in his own nonsense about the Supreme Being turned his head. He was one of those responsible for the execution of hundreds or thousands of enemies of the people. Before that, he had been opposed to capital punishment

TERROR AND THE POLICE STATE: CHAPTER 20

25/03/2018 / 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; 18 The numbers; 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 meaning?

It is obvious that there is no such thing as a revolution. ‘Revolution’ is a label that we apply to a series of events. Some people like to use abstract or group nouns to categorise the kinds of people taking part in the violent changes. These categories have bedevilled discussion of the French and Russian revolutions. The notorious terms are bourgeoisie, class, elite, kulaks, masses, peasants, proletariat and sans-culottes. It is obvious that these very loose and broad labels may involve unproductive word-games. How do you define the criteria for membership? How do you apply those criteria? What on earth is a plutocrat?

If you take as given that each of us has an inner worth or dignity merely because we are human, the police state will inevitably work against that dignity, and be opposed to our humanity. It does so in at least two ways. It says that the state is more important than the individual – that the government means more than either you or me – and that therefore the individual has to give way to the state. It goes further and says that if there is doubt, the issue must be resolved in favour of the state.

The other way that the police state is against our dignity is that it judges or assesses people not by their own worth, but merely by the fact of their being a member of a group. In doing that, it engages in the kind of word-game that we have just looked at.

Both of those failings derive from a kind of arrogance. Those behind the police state believe that they have used the power of their minds to find an answer to our social problems. Since they believe that their answer is demonstrably true, if not logically necessary, they believe that they have the answer. It follows that those who do not accept that answer are demonstrably wrong, and, equally demonstrably, that they are acting against the interests of the whole community, by standing in the way of the implementation of the answer the acceptance of which will benefit everyone. But, and this is also fundamental to the police state, it follows that the state is entitled to use force to implement the answer because in doing so it will be acting to benefit the community as a whole.

We might recall the two first pillars of the rule of law. First, the law is supreme over government and any one person or arm of government – government derives from the law, and not vice versa. Secondly, and relatedly, everyone is equal before the law. Obviously, rule by one man or the police or simply by ‘government’ above the law contravenes the first, and any regime that adjusts rights by political belief or membership of a group contravenes the second. .

The first way that the police state puts us down is by putting the state over any one person and therefore over everyone. It prefers an abstraction to real people. That is the hallmark of the totalitarian state. That state must be all-powerful and therefore it cannot give way to any man: no rights of an individual can stand in its way. The people pushing this line tend to see the rights of individuals deriving from the state, rather than seeing the state as some kind of construct permitted under conditions by the people.

Intellectuals are prey to this kind of thinking, because they put too much faith in the power of their own thinking. What is critical is the state of mind that says that when in doubt, the individual must give way to the state. That is not the way that decent states try to proceed. They think that it is better that some wrongdoers go free than that anyone innocent is imprisoned.

The second affront to humanity comes from a smallness of mind and meanness of spirit that is sadly common enough to be part of all of us. It is, if you like, our dark side. This is our attachment to prejudice – it is the refusal or failure to treat each person on their merits, but our readiness to deal with them merely as a member of a group, where such membership warrants certain treatment by the state irrespective of the merits of any one person in that group.

Examples of kinds of group that are the basis of prejudice seen in this book are class (aristocrats or bourgeois), office (priests and bishops), economic standing (kulaks or other capitalists), nationality (foreigners), religion (Protestants, Catholics, or atheists), politics (royalists or fascist or communists), sex and sexuality (women and homosexuals), infirm (aged or retarded) and race (gypsies). These groupings have all been used to disadvantage the members of those groups. When those disadvantages derive from the law, the discrimination contravenes the rule of law by expressly denying the principle of equality before the law.

Sometimes a regime will seek to ascribe dangerous attributes to members of such classes in order to give some warrant to a kind of block condemnation, but ultimately that is not necessary – the whole purpose of the prejudice is to relieve us of the task of facing one person and treating them on their merits. The disadvantaged are objects of either contempt or fear or both in a failure not just of the mind but of character. This failure is found more among people whose ignorance comes from a lack of intelligence or education and whose edge comes from a lack of recognition. This weakness is then exploited by political leaders or their functionaries and their camp followers in the press. The grossest modern examples are called shock jocks, parts of the Murdoch press, Sky TV, and fringe political parties that exploit fear of strangers like migrants or refugees or those following minority faiths.

The worst part is the evident pleasure that these people take in kicking someone when they are down – this somehow serves to redeem them from their own mediocrity and to comfort them in their frailty. It is a kind of revenge on the world. You get the impression that nothing could make them happier than a good clean lynching.

Unhappily the gorilla called prejudice lurks in us all – it is just that some are graced with a better capacity to keep the iron gates shut and stop the gorilla from coming out. (Someone once said that that the major difference between us and the gorillas is cutlery. The proposition is instructive. It may be that the iron gates are properly called courtesy or manners, and that people get these at home rather than at school – or not at all.)

The police state has a circular process under which anyone who denies its maxims or who questions the authority of the current regime is without more an enemy of the people, and an enemy of the people is anyone showing any such behaviour. The result of this circularity is that the accused cannot, and the accuser does not have to, identify any conduct the proof which would found a finding of a discrete breach of the criminal law. Because the regime is above the law, it is commonly enough as a matter of fact for the state to act against someone on the ground that that person is suspected of showing such behaviour or otherwise being an enemy of the people.

The phrase ‘enemy of the people’ is of course itself a lie. An ‘enemy of the people’ is in truth merely an ‘opponent or possible opponent of the regime’ and the regime does not represent the people. The two propositions are worlds apart, but they are conflated by pride and prejudice.