Can a poet capture war experience? Here is Wilfred Owen:

The Sentry

We’d found an old Boche dug out, and he knew
And gave us hell: for shell on frantic shell
Lit full on top, but never quite burst through.
Rain guttering down in waterfalls of slime,
Kept slush waist-high and rising hour by hour,
And choked the steps too thick with clay to climb.
What mark of air remained stank old, and sour
With fumes from whizbangs, and the smell of men
Who’d lived there years, and left their curse in the den,
If not their corpses …
                                       There we herded from the blast
Of whizbangs; but one found our door at last, -
And thud! flump! thud! down the steps came thumping
And splashing in the flood, deluging muck,
The sentry’s body; then his rifle, handles
Of old Boche bombs, and mud in ruck on ruck.
We dredged it up for dead, until he whined
‘O sir – my eyes, I’m blind, - I’m blind,   I’m blind.
Coaxing, I held a flame against his lids
And said if he could see the least blurred light
He was not blind; in time they’d get all right.
I can’t he sobbed.  Eyeballs, huge-bulged like squids
Watch my dreams still, - yet I forgot him there
In posting Next for duty, and sending a scout
To beg a stretcher somewhere, and floundering about
To other posts under the shrieking air
                                     ***
Those other wretches, how they bled and spewed,
And no one would have drowned himself for good.
I try not to remember those things now,
Half listening to the sentry’s moans and jumps,
And the wild chattering of his shivered teeth,
Renewed most horribly whenever crumps
Pummelled the roof and slogged the air beneath,
Through the dense din, I say, we heard him shout
‘I see your lights!’  But ours had long gone out.

Wilfred Owen (Mar. 18, 1893 – Nov. 4, 1918)

Source: Jon Silken, ed., The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, 2^nd ed., (London: Penguin, 1996), pp. 208-209.

The role of pandemics and the rise of authoritarianism

The study of history offers many lessons, as do pandemics, and if we look to pandemics of the past. we may begin to see some patterns.  The period of the Spanish Influenza (circa. 1919), that of the Black Death (or bubonic plague) from 1350 to 1450, and more recently the Covid-19 pandemic, were all followed by a significant increase in political authoritarianism.  Trump’s triumph at the polls in America, and the rise of Right everywhere across today’s globe, can be attributed in some part to the impact of the Covid pandemic.

However, the rise of “fascism” in the early twentieth century cannot be considered apart from the particular additive of the soldier’s experience during the First World War, what was known – in German terms - as the Community of the Front, or Frontsgemeinschaft.  Mussolini called it the “trenchocracy”.[1]  On the other hand, the fact that Trump apparently wants to end (at least some) wars invites once again a liberal constellation of peace and tolerance, which seems uncharacteristic – and yet to be seen.

Returning to my central point, allow me to quote from an introductory textbook used in university history classes in order to consider what happened to some Italian city-states following the Black Death:

The political experimentation in the northern Italian city-states can usefully, if only roughly, be divided into two periods: the first (1300-1450) marked by the defense of republicanism, and the second (1450-1550) by the triumph of despotism.  By the end of the twelfth century the city states had adopted a fairly uniform pattern of republican self-government built around the office of chief magistrate.  Elected by the citizens on the basis of a broad franchise, he rules with the advice of two councils – a large public one and a small secret one.  His powers were tightly circumscribed by the constitution; with his term of office restricted ordinarily to six months, he could be removed from government or punished at the end of his tenure.

The city-states not only developed republican institutions; they also devised important theories to defend their liberty and self-government in the face of their external enemies, the papacy and the empire. …

However, given their internal instability and their rivalry, the republicanism of the city-states proved precarious.  During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the republican institutions in one city after another toppled in favor of despotic rule.  Three conditions were responsible for this development.  First, class war between rich merchants and nobles caused one group or the other, or both, to seek a resolution of the crisis by turning to one-man rule.  Second, the economic disasters, famine, and disease of the period from 1350- to 1450 encouraged a drift toward despotism.  The citizenry lost faith in the ability of short-term republican governments to cope with such emergencies and put its trust in long-term, one-man rule.  Third, and perhaps most important, the city-states, in wars with their rivals, had come to rely on mercenary troops.  The leaders of those troops, the notorious condottieri –- unschooled in and owing no loyalty to the republican tradition –- simply seized power during emergencies.[2]

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[1] Jan-Werner Müller, Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 100.

[2] Marvin Perry, et al., Western Civilization: Ideas, Politics, and Society, 6^th ed., (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), p. 303,304.

My Reaction on Reaction: Not the brightest chapters in human history to come

 

Liberalism died on November 5^th, 2024. At its core is the belief in rational human autonomy.  Among the major issues on the ballot in the US election, from the Harris perspective, was the right of half the population to control their own bodies - and their reproductive rights.  This went out the window.  Maybe it never really mattered. Instead, it was American men who have found for themselves a form of voluntary servitude, a return to feudalism even though America was never feudal, save for the slave-owning states in the ante-bellum South.  In today’s revival of the master-slave relationship, now at the feet of Donald J. Trump, the rest of the world will tremble, as the saying goes, with endless fear and loathing.

Liberalism flourished in a global sense during the period following 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, and following the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Empire.  At the time, it was considered all-too-naively as the “end of history”.  Officially one nation (again) by October 1990, the process of reunifying Germany – East and West – began in 1989, thus reigniting nationalist sentiments exactly a century following the birth, in 1889, of a man named Hitler and his philosopher-king Martin Heidegger.  Not so incidentally, both of these men were born exactly a century after the start of the French Revolution in 1789 – and both expressed overwhelming desire to negate the legacy of the Rights of Man. Again, not so incidentally, when Berlin returned to being the capital city of Germany, history was ripe for revisionism - on the Right.  The period when Bonn was the capital of democratic West Germany could now be looked upon as some form of an aberration.

The reunification of East and West also had geo-political implications abroad: Germany was a much greater political and economic entity when it was united rather than when it was divided.  A consolidated Germany within the European Union could also be perceived as a threat to other member nations, for example Britain, thus giving impetus to the campaign for Brexit, and the rise of populist figures like Boris Johnson.

Today, Donald Trump is far more dangerous than Bumbling Boris ever was, and far more dangerous than during his previous term of office as president.  Interestingly, these two men are of German extraction.  In the mythology of the ancient Greeks, there is the story of the Hydra, a hideous snake-like monster from the underworld with multiple heads.  Each time a head is cut off, two would return.  Only Hercules was able to slay the Hydra.  Perhaps we are in need of such Greek myths to answer this disquieting sense of being alone in a political wilderness, outside the call for unreasoned nationalistic reaction.

Maybe liberalism, too, needs a hero like Hercules, but certainly not the hero many perceive in Trump.  It was the German sociologist, Max Weber, who put it best as he concluded his famous lecture “Politics as a Vocation” in 1919, amid a pandemic and following the defeat of the First World War, calling for political hero – as opposed to one who has been mythologized:

Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.  It takes both passion and perspective.  Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth – that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible.  But to do that a man must be a leader, and not only a leader but a hero as well, in a very sober sense of the word.  And even those who are neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves with the steadfastness of heart which can brave even the crumbling of all hopes.  This is necessary right now, or else men will not be able to attain even that which is possible today.  Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he will not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or too base for what he wants to offer.  Only he who in the face of all this can say ‘In spite of all!’ has the calling for politics.[1]

 

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[1] Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, tr. and ed., H.H. Girth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 128.

Word of the Day: Confabulate

To fabricate imaginary experiences as compensation for the loss of memory.

 

Source: Canadian Oxford Dictionary, 2^nd edition (2004)

Read Orwell. It’s called Fascism. We’ve seen it before

When I was about 5 years old, I believed I could control the weather.  Each day I would enter the clothes closet off my bedroom where I had an upside-down cardboard box with plastic knobs and other thingamajigs inserted into it. Depending on the weather I wanted for the day, I would turn the knobs this way and that.  If I didn’t like these predictions, I would take a reverse course of action, twisting the other way.  As you can imagine, climate change was nowhere near my radar – or anyone else’s for that matter -- so it was an easy job dealing with my imaginary daily task at hand.

Not so nowadays. I am glad nothing became of my early interest in meteorology, because I am not fond of death threats.  The absurdity of Trump and company falsely accusing meteorologists - and even President Biden - of conspiracies to manipulate the weather is mind boggling. That hurricane Helene pummeled six states is fact.  That hurricane Milton pounded Florida is also fact. (Sidenote: Hurricanes are identified by a list of given names – not surnames, so there is no hidden reference to John Milton’s “Paradise Lost”).  That man-made greenhouse gases cause climate change and are behind the increase in power and frequency of such hurricanes is also fact.  Apparently for Trump and fellow retroactive clowns, there is no “truth”, which, if you read Orwell, puts him in the same league with Fascists.  Again, if you read Orwell below, you will see that he too was familiar with the idea of ‘weather decrees’ (but not climate change).  Reading Orwell even further suggests a possible affinity, in his mind, between Fascism and ancient slavery.

I know that it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway.  I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.  In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that “the facts” existed and were more or less discoverable.  And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone.  If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the Encyclopedia Britannica, you will find that a respectable amount of the material is drawn from German sources.  A British and German historian would disagree deeply on many things, even in fundamentals, but there would still be that body of, as it were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other.  It is just this common basis of agreement that such a thing as “the truth” exists.  There is, for instance, no such thing as “science”.  There is only “German science”, “Jewish science” etc.  The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past.  If the Leader says of such and such event, “It never happened” – well, it never happened.  If he says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five.  This prospect frightens me much more than bombs – and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement.

But is it perhaps childish or morbid to terrify oneself with visions of a totalitarian future?  Before writing off the totalitarian world as a nightmare that can’t come true, just remember that in 1925 the world of today would have seemed a nightmare that couldn’t come true.  Against the shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white tomorrow and yesterday’s weather can be changed by decree, you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently can’t violate it in ways that impair military efficiency.  The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the liberal tradition can be kept alive.  Let Fascism, or possibly even a combination of several Fascisms, conquer the whole world, and those two conditions no longer exist.  We in England underrate the danger of this kind of thing, because our traditions and past security have given us a sentimental belief that it all comes right in the end and the thing that you most fear never really happens.  Nourished for hundreds of years on a literature in which Right invariably triumphs in the last chapter, we believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run.  Pacifism, for instance, is founded largely on this belief.  Don’t resist evil, and it will somehow destroy itself.  But why should it?  What evidence is there that it does?  And what instance is there of a modern industrialized state collapsing unless conquered from the outside by military force?

Consider for instance the re-institution of slavery.  Who could have imagined twenty years ago that slavery would return to Europe?  Well, slavery has been restored under our noses.  The forced-labour camps all over Europe and North Africa where Poles, Russians, Jews, and political prisoners of every race toil at road-making or swamp-draining for their bare rations, are simply chattel slavery.  The most one can say is that the buying and selling of slaves by individuals is not yet permitted.  In other ways – the breaking up of families, for instance –the conditions are probably worse than they were on the American cotton plantations.  There is no need for thinking that this state of affairs will change while any totalitarian domination endures.  We don’t grasp its full implications, because in our mystical way we feel that a régime founded on slavery must collapse.  But it is worth comparing the duration of the slave empires of antiquity with that of any modern state.  Civilizations founded on slavery have lasted for such periods as four thousand years.

When I think of antiquity, the detail that frightens me is that those hundreds of millions of slaves on whose backs civilization rested generation after generation have left behind them no record what-ever.  We do not even know their names.  In the whole of Greek and Roman history, how many slaves’ names are known to you?  I can think of two, or possibly three.  One is Spartacus and the other is Epictetus.  Also in the Roman room at the British Museum there is a glass jar with the maker’s name inscribed on the bottom, “Felix fecit”.  I have a vivid mental picture of poor Felix (a Gaul with red hair and a metal collar round his neck), but in fact he may not have been a slave; so there are only two slaves whose names I definitely know, and probably few people can remember more.  The rest have gone into utter silence.[1]

George Orwell, My Country Right or Left, 1940-1943 (1968)

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[1] George Orwell, “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4 vols. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968), vol. 2, pp. 258-260.

Trump Thumps “God Bless the USA” Bibles printed in China

Thousands of copies of Donald Trump’s “God Bless the USA” Bible were printed in a country that the former president has repeatedly accused of stealing American jobs and engaging in unfair trade practices: China.

Global trade records reviewed by The Associated Press show a printing company in China’s eastern city of Hangzhou shipped close to 120,000 of the Bibles to the United States earlier this year.

The estimated value of the three separate shipments was $342,000, or less than $3 per Bible, according to databases that track exports and imports. The minimum price for the Trump-backed Bible is $59.99, putting the potential sales revenue at about $7 million.

The Trump Bible’s connection to China reveals a deep divide between the former president’s harsh anti-China rhetoric and his efforts to raise cash while campaigning.

The Trump campaign did not respond to emails and calls seeking comment.

In a March 26 video posted on his Truth Social platform, Trump announced a partnership with country singer Lee Greenwood to hawk the Bibles, inspired by Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” hit song.

In the video, Trump blended religion with his campaign message as he urged viewers to buy the Bible, which includes copies of the U.S. Constitution, Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights and Pledge of Allegiance.

“This Bible is a reminder that the biggest thing we have to bring back in America, and to make America great again, is our religion,” Trump said.

Trump didn’t say where the “God Bless the USA” Bibles are printed, what they cost or how much he earns per sale. A version of the $59.99 Bible memorializes the July 13 assassination attempt on the former president in Pennsylvania. Trump’s name is stamped on the cover above the phrase, “The Day God Intervened.”

The Bibles are sold exclusively through a website that states it is not affiliated with any political campaign nor is it owned or controlled by Trump.

The website states that Trump’s name and image are used under a paid license from CIC Ventures, a company Trump reported owning in a financial disclosure released in August. CIC Ventures earned $300,000 in Bible sales royalties, according to the disclosure. It’s unclear if Trump has received additional payments.

AP received no response to questions sent to the Bible website and to a publicist for Greenwood.

For years, Trump has castigated Beijing as an obstacle to America’s economic success, slapping hefty tariffs on Chinese imports while president and threatening even more stringent measures if he’s elected again. He blamed China for the COVID-19 outbreak and recently suggested, without evidence, that Chinese immigrants are flooding the U.S. to build an “army” and attack America.

But Trump also has an eye on his personal finances. Pitching Bibles is one of a dizzying number of for-profit ventures he’s launched or promoted, including diamond-encrusted watches, sneakers, photo books, cryptocurrency and digital trading cards.

The web of enterprises has stoked conflict of interest concerns. Selling products at prices that exceed their value may be considered a campaign contribution, said Claire Finkelstein, founder of the nonpartisan Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law and a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

“You have to assume that everything that the individual does is being done as a candidate and so that any money that flows through to him benefits him as a candidate,” Finkelstein said. “Suppose Vladimir Putin were to buy a Trump watch. Is that a campaign finance violation? I would think so.”

There’s a potentially lucrative opportunity for Trump to sell 55,000 of the Bibles to Oklahoma after the state’s education department ordered public schools to incorporate Scripture into lessons. Oklahoma plans to buy Bibles that initially matched Trump’s edition: a King James Version that contains the U.S. founding documents. The request was revised Monday to allow the U.S. historical documents to be bound with the Bible or provided separately.

The first delivery of Trump Bibles was labeled “God Bless USA,” according to the information from the Panjiva and Import Genius databases. The other two were described as “Bibles.” All the books were shipped by New Ade Cultural Media, a printing company in Hangzhou, to Freedom Park Design, a company in Alabama that databases identified as the importer of the Bibles.

Tammy Tang, a sales representative for New Ade, told AP all three shipments were “God Bless the USA” Bibles. She said New Ade received the orders from Freedom Park Design via the WhatsApp messaging service. The books were printed on presses near the company’s office, she said.

Freedom Park Design was incorporated in Florida on March 1. An aspiring country singer named Jared Ashley is the company’s president. He also co-founded 16 Creative, a marketing firm that uses the same Gulf Shores address and processes online orders for branded merchandise.

Ashley hung up on a reporter who called to ask about the Bibles. Greenwood is a client of 16 Creative, according to the firm’s website. He launched the American-flag emblazoned Bible in 2021.

Religious scholars have denounced the merger of Scripture and government documents as a “toxic mix” that would fuel Christian nationalism, a movement that fuses American and Christian values, symbols and identity and seeks to privilege Christianity in public life. Other critics have called the Trump Bible blasphemous.

Tim Wildsmith, a Baptist minister who reviews Bibles on his YouTube channel, said he quickly noticed the signs of a cheaply made book when his “God Bless the USA” Bible arrived in the mail.

It had a faux leather cover, and words were jammed together on the pages, making it hard to read. He also found sticky pages that ripped when pulled apart, and there was no copyright page or information about who printed the Bible, or where.

“I was shocked by how poor the quality of it was,” Wildsmith said. “It says to me that it’s more about the love of money than it is the love of our country.”

Source: Richard Lardner and Dake Kang, authors with Associated Press. Available online PBS News October 9, 2024.

J.D. Vance: “Tim, I’m focused on the future.”