We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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Ten men acting together can make a hundred thousand tremble apart.
Three weeks ago Saturday, the FBI were out in undercover force at the ‘JusticeForJan6th’ rally – and looking lonely, since everyone from Trump to the proud boys had worked out it was a false flag operation. But precisely because the ‘demonstrators’ physically present were so overwhelmingly and obviously fake, the large virtual attendance in cyberspace was much entertained, with more mirth being had at the expense of some (overt) police who were a bit slow to realise that the guy they were arresting was yet another under(not-very-much)cover Fed.
None of which alters the fact that that the right “peaceably to assemble” for political protest is bifurcating. One side knows it need only be ‘mostly peaceful’ while the other knows that assembling at all can bring speedy arrest followed by long-delayed trial.
Ten oh-so-obvious undercover FBI agents are good for a laugh, but they still made those who mocked them laugh apart. Chanting “F*** Joe Biden” (“Let’s Go Brandon” 🙂 ) in a sports stadium is one way to laugh together, but it reminds me of the chariot racing clubs in the Roman and Byzantine empires – those ancient ‘blues’ and ‘greens’ chariot fans acquired strong political overtones because assembling for an overtly political purpose was forbidden.
“They literally know nothing” was what Obama advisor Ben Rhodes said about the Obama-worshipping journalists he fooled into repeating his Iran-deal talking points. But those guys are left standing by Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of ‘The 1619 Project’.
“it’s also hard to look at countries that didn’t have large institutions of slavery and compare them to the United States.”
Most people noticed her statement because of the immediately following sentence:
“If you want to see the most equal multi-racial democ… — it’s not a democracy — the most equal multi-racial country in our hemisphere, it would be Cuba,” Hannah-Jones said.
She knew enough to avoid (just!) going on record as calling communist Cuba a democracy – but she did not know enough to avoid talking about “countries that didn’t have large institutions of slavery” compared to the United States.
I saw from the start that some of Nikole’s 1619 rubbish merely exposed her utter ignorance of her subject. The blacks whom the Virginians bought from a Portuguese slave trader in 1619 were treated like whites – that is, they were treated as indentured servants who after 10 years were freed, given some farm tools, pointed at a plot of land and left to get on with it. (Some of them got on so well that before mid-century they were buying white and black indentured servants themselves to work their expanding acreages.)
One could justly say these early-arriving blacks were not treated exactly like poor English whites who – unless convicted of a crime – had always chosen to sign their ten-year indenture, to pay for transport across the Atlantic and survival while they found their feet. The closer analogy is to some Scottish whites. More than one clan chief sold some clansmen on indentures across the Atlantic when funds were low, and in 1707 a leading Scottish parliamentarian informed his peers that there was no need for them to fix the disastrous financial situation by accepting the English payment and voting their own abolition – Scotland’s elite could keep their separate parliament and avoid national bankruptcy by selling enough poor Scots to the Americas instead.
When the Portuguese offered to sell black slaves, those 1619 Virginians could only buy them as ten-year-indentured servants. They were still wholly under English common law and Lord Mansfield’s 1770s ruling merely echoed a two-centuries earlier ruling of Elizabethan judges that English common law knew no such state as slavery. It took the Virginians decades to start even questioning this and almost a century to unlearn it fully. As late as the 1690s, a black man who petitioned the Virginia council that his white master had made him serve not for ten years but for twelve “contrarie to all right and justice”, was freed by their order. If Nikole had called it the 1705 project, I’d have thought she at least knew something about the actual faults of the country whose history she was travestying. Only positive statute law can override English common law’s aversion to slavery, said Lord Mansfield – and 1705 was the year the Virginia legislature completed providing it. I knew from the start that Nikole was not just lying about all that, not just indifferent to the truth of all that – she was also pretty clueless about it.
But now it emerges she knows nothing about other countries either! “Countries that didn’t have large institutions of slavery”, she says. Which countries would that be, I wonder?
– Certainly not Cuba before Columbus or Cuba after Columbus (or Cuba under communism – you have to know nothing not to know that communism always reintroduces slavery).
– Certainly not Brazil before or after the Portuguese ruled it, or after it ruled itself – Brazil was the very last new-world country to abolish the slave trade (it needed an undeclared war from the Royal Navy to persuade them) and then slavery itself (they needed a bit of persuasion there too).
– Certainly not Mexico under the Aztecs, or Peru and Chile under the Incas, or any of them under the Spaniards (the absolute Spanish King could in time announce that slavery should end without needing to consult any tedious parliaments – and his unconsulted subjects in the distant Americas could pay the unvoted law little attention as they carried on buying black slaves from the Portuguese).
– Certainly not any of the western sub-Saharan African states, who sold the surplus they had left after the Dahomans had celebrated their murder spectacle, the Bemba had blinded enough singers to entertain them, the various cannibal tribes had eaten their fill, etc.
– Certainly not any of the eastern sub-Saharan African states, where the tribes raided each other and the Swahili worked for the Arabs, who found slave-raiding cheaper than slave-trading.
– Certainly not the Arab world. Historians who know what they are talking about speak of “the abolition of slavery” in the west and “the decline of slavery” (under intense western pressure) in the Arab world.
– Certainly not many other places. In 1776, Adam Smith accurately noted that slavery was almost universal, being absent only from western and parts of central Europe.
So what countries in 1619 – or a good deal later – could be giving her this problem of lacking historical “institutions of slavery” on US timescales. England? France (had serfdom for much of the period, but not slavery)? … It’s not that long a list (and it’s a bit white!). And I don’t think any of the countries she was thinking of are on it. “Ignorance is Strength”, said Orwell’s 1984. It’s certainly hers.
It’s a pity, because the real history of how the Virginians gradually retreated from a custom of freedom that they’d started with is well worth studying. And the spectacle of a community with a custom of freedom slowly losing it holds a lesson for today.
In the 1970s, the BBC screened a dramatised documentary series about the fight to abolish the slave trade. Even a year of the virus limiting new series, at a time of great BBC eagerness to talk about racism, has not made them screen it again.
– I see one reason why they have not: the series displayed sleazy white slave traders and abusive white slave owners prominently, but it also showed white people eager to end the slave trade and (much worse) black people eager to continue it. One episode included the king of Dahomey’s threat: “if you do not allow me to sell you my slaves, their fate will be a great deal worse” (a very brief scene of the Dahomey murder spectacle lent meaning to his remark). After abolition was voted, it showed a white slave trader assuring the Dahomans, as a drug dealer might his suppliers, “It is one thing for parliament to pass a law …”, hinting at the Royal Navy’s long and hard campaign to enforce it.
– Only recently did I spot another reason why they would not want to show it again – the scene in which a corrupt old white slave trader warns his young colleague that “it’s more than your life’s worth” to doubt the ability of their slave-selling hosts to count very accurately the quantity of trade goods being handed over in exchange, and to assess their quality knowledgeably. The traders well knew that Africans counted two plus two as four, just as they did. Any trader who imagined that black ability to add diverged enough from white to enable an attempt to short-change them had learned otherwise long before the 1780s.
– The southern Confederacy thought the same. Until its death throes, it forbade enlisting a southern black as a Confederate soldier because, as one Confederate senator put it, “If blacks can make good soldiers then our whole theory of slavery is wrong.” (Perhaps also because even southern white Democrats realised that southern black desire to fight against blacks being freed was likely to be a very minority taste.) But there was one exception. Every regiment had its regimental band, which played to set the pace at the start and end of marches, used trumpets to signal commands in battle – and fought when other duties did not supervene. From its start to its end, Confederate law said any black could enlist as bandsman, with the same pay and perquisites as a white – a very rare example of formal legal equality. (Playing music requires the ability to count time. For the woke, ‘dismantling the legacy of the Confederacy’ apparently includes dismantling its realisation – shared by the Victorian composer Dvorak – that blacks often excelled in music so much as to overcome prejudice against black ability. Today, it’s ‘racist’ to value instrumental skill.)
‘Politically correct’ has meant ‘actually wrong’ ever since the first commissar explained to the first party comrade that it was neither socialist nor prudent to notice a factual error in the party line. ‘Structurally racist’ is PC’s modern companion. No longer are the woke content merely to imply (“mathematics is racist“, “punctuality is racist“, “politeness is racist“) that blacks can’t count, can’t tell the time and can only behave crudely. They’re starting to say it in words of fewer syllables.
So how does one avoid being a racist when cancel culture calls it ‘racist’ to expect any black man you meet to be able to add? First, decide which you would rather oppose: ‘structural racism’ or actual racism. If the latter, then decide whether you have the courage to do more than dislike it in the privacy of your own mind. The BBC series showed the voyage of the Zong, when the captain threw many slaves overboard to check a pandemic onboard – or was it just to convert them into insurance losses? The scene was directed to imply that some officers did not entirely like doing this – but it would not have helped anyone’s career to have refused. Only in a metaphorical sense will white intellectuals today throw overboard an off-message black colleague. Perhaps the Zong’s crew consoled themselves that, after all, it was only black people being thrown overboard. Perhaps woke whites today console themselves that, after all, as Joe Biden put it, if you don’t vote Democrat then “you ain’t black”. Besides, if
“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” (George Orwell, 1984)
then clearly it is the duty of Critical Race Theory to ensure that is not granted.
This too shall pass. Years ago, the left decided that Stalin in Russia was “not real socialism”, nor Mugabe in Zimbabwe, nor Chavez in Venezuela – but only long after Orwell, and the year 1984, and the Soviet Union itself, had died. One day, the woke will decide that it is “not real anti-racism” to claim that black people have open minds on whether 2+2=4. Later still, they might decide it was “not real anti-racism”. But for now, just as it was once an insult to “the workers’ state” to mention how many workers Stalin killed, so we are still well into the period when asking how many black people were murdered in Ferguson or Minneapolis by the riots, or since the riots, is as ‘racist’ as classical music, mentioning the holocaust during a class discussion of racism, skiing, cheese, advising persons of colour to exercise, camping, quantum theory, acronyms, alfresco seating, grammar, beer, snow ploughs, evergreen trees, praising the fund-raising efforts of Captain Tom, individualism, interracial–marriage or questioning the existence of structural racism.
I had a very much longer list of increasingly bizarre things that exemplify structural racism – none of them repeated from my last list – but as I typed links to the structural racism of such innate features of the human condition as time and sleep, I reflected that the first was passing, and soon I should start doing the second.
[ADDED LATER: there’s no need to go to university to not-learn maths. Not-learning maths is coming to a school near you – if you live in Ontario. The Ontario Grade 9 curriculum’s “decolonial, anti-racist approach to mathematics education makes visible its historical roots and social constructions”. Education Minister Stephen Lecce says math is “subjective” and “used to normalize racism and marginalization of non-eurocentric mathematical knowledges.” This will come as a surprise to anyone who thought that teaching the use of ‘Arabic’ (actually Hindu) numbers, plus the huge Hindu invention of the zero, is the very reverse of normalising ‘eurocentric’ Roman numerals – but I guess, to the woke, II + II = IV in any other notation is just as oppressive.]
1909: “Socialism … It’s a grand scheme. You work for the equal distribution of property and you start by collaring all you can and sitting on it.” P.G.Wodehouse (comic author), ‘Mike and Psmith’.
2021: “I practice Marxism by getting rich and supporting my family.” Patrisse Khan-Cullors (BLM co-founder), TV Interview
‘Buy Large Mansions‘ was not something I expected to see added so soon to ‘Black Lives Murdered‘, ‘Bullshit Marxist Lies‘ and other clarifications of the acronym. It was obvious from the start that Chavez and his family would become stinking rich as Venezuelans starved, that Mugabe’s wealth would grow as his country’s vanished, but usually the socialists themselves say it openly only a good many years after seizing all power, not just a few months after stealing an election.
I think it was de Toqueville who said of nineteenth-century French revolutionaries: “I had the impression they were play-acting the French revolution much more than continuing it.” The same impression led Karl Marx, echoing Hegel, to write that history happens twice: “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” In that sense, Patrisse is indeed realising Marx’s vision.
She is also embodying P.G.Wodehouse’ joke. Foreseeable, avoidable tragedy is farcical. National Socialism conquered Germany, then Europe, before being pulled down by almost all the combined strength of the remainder of the world – and that was shameful, Hannah Arendt pointed out, because it was also ridiculous. The current state of the western world is less grave (as yet), but it is already shameful – because it is already ridiculous.
Goering (shouting): “Why did you not kill 200 Jews instead of destroying so many valuables!”
Heydrich (defensively): “36 Jews were killed.”
[Words uttered during ministerial discussion with a representative of the German insurance industry after Kristallnacht.]
Kristallnacht was pretty-well the last of the Nazi’s anti-Jewish exercises that were more incentivised than directly commanded and supervised. They had learned the habit in their pre-power days. As the party court (the Uschla) reported afterwards, old party comrades understood that “certain hints meant more than their mere verbal contents”, so when told that “von Rath’s murder was a crime of Jewry as a whole … every party comrade should know what to do”, they went out and – to the great annoyance of Goering when he realised the economic impact – did a fantastic amount of property damage while only killing, by later standards, a derisory number of Jews.
BLM operate the same way. The stormtroopers broke glass and smashed things up, only burning Jewish property when they had fire engines standing by, because fire could spread to ‘aryan’ properties, whereas BLM don’t care if black-owned businesses burn. But with the exception of that very peculiar way of not making racial distinctions, BLM have shown the same common tendency of an incentivised but loosely-commanded Western/European mob to do a lot of property damage for each life they take.
Inflation adjusted, I think the direct financial cost of Kristallnacht far exceeded that of all BLM’s destruction to date. On the other hand, by murdering the eight-year-old black girl Secoriea Turner, the black man David Dorn and various others, it looks like BLM can get into the ballpark of Heydrich’s figure just in killing ‘Lives That Matter (TM)’ – and if you also count lives that don’t matter then maybe they can compete with the higher number that were actually murdered during 9-10 November 1938.
However, BLM needed many nights of rioting to achieve this, whereas ‘Crystal Night’ was done in a day and a night. So I leave it to readers to decide “the point of precedence between a louse and a flea” – or to take Dr Johnson’s advice not to bother – as my focus here is on the specific similarities of technique I’ve mentioned.
(Just a ‘seasonal’ thought prompted by the time of year. I apologise to any who are distressed by the very dark humour of this ‘Godzilla versus King Kong’-style comparison.)
“Our task is the protection of socialist achievements. … Those who do not respect our borders will feel the bullet.” (1970s Socialist Unity Party speech to Berlin Wall guards – video excerpts shown in The Secret Life of the Berlin Wall)
The Socialist Unity Party meant that people who disrespected socialism by trying to escape it were to “feel the bullet”. So I guess there’s no point telling modern socialists that it’s socialist to make people who do not respect borders “feel the bullet” – or even just the hardness of Trump’s wall. They would reply that trying to prevent people from entering your country is ‘not real socialism’ – and they’d be absolutely right. 🙂
The Berlin Wall fell in November, 31 years ago.
And why, you may be asking, do I think it is like a ‘performance bond’ (whatever that may be)? Here is a historical analogy:
The symbolic gesture of obeisance to Germany, made by Hungary [in winter 1938-9] but refused by Poland, was adherence to the Anti-Comintern Pact. … It was, of course, known in Berlin that the Hungarian, like the Polish, leaders of the time were vehemently, even violently, anti-communist; adherence to a German-sponsored Anti-Comintern Pact could not make them any more so. It could however be recognised as a sign of willingness to take orders from Berlin – and it was so regarded at the time. … this pact had become for the Germans a sort of performance bond to be exacted as a test of distance from the Western Powers and subordination to herself. (‘A World At Arms’, Gerhard L. Weinberg)
The Dean of Nursing at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, Dr Leslie Neal-Boylan, has been fired for this:
I am writing to express my concern and condemnation of the recent (and past) acts of violence against people of color. Recent events recall a tragic history of racism and bias that continue to thrive in this country. I despair for our future as a nation if we do not stand up against violence against anyone. BLACK LIVES MATTER,
If she’d stopped there, she’d still have her job – but she persisted:
but also, EVERYONE’S LIFE MATTERS. No one should have to live in fear that they will be targeted for how they look or what they believe.
It is, of course, known in the University that the ex-Dean is vehemently (though not violently) anti-racist (when she was hired a few months ago, a now deleted University website page praised her ‘visonary’ advocacy of diversity and inclusivity, especially of the disabled in the nursing field). Making her say ‘black lives matter’ and not say ‘all lives matter’ could not make her any more so. On the contrary, just as signing the anti-comintern pact meant the signers would acquiese in Hitler’s alliance with Stalin a few months later (only the Japanese, ignorant of European mores, protested against Germany’s “outrageous violation of the pact” in August 1939), so demanding the Dean say “black lives matter” but not “all lives matter” was precisely to assure her acquiescence in theories that discriminate by race and in deeds that cost black (and other) lives.
A Facebook friend of mine put this on her timeline, and after asking, she said I could post this here. I am sure Samizdata readers will appreciate the sentiments.
Since banning and toppling is now the lockdown activity de rigeur, I didn’t want to be left out, so have decided to add to the list:
– The Colosseum – hotbed of slave suffering and anti-Christian persecution. Turn it in to a car park, I say. Whilst we’re at it, the Pyramids and Acropolis didn’t build themselves, so send in the JCBs.
– The Guardian newspaper – founded by a man whose fortune was made on the back of the slave-intense cotton trade. Naughty.
– The Labour party – one of the founding organisations was the Fabian society, which, in the early 1900s called for eugenics and forced sterilisation. Off with your heads.
– Jeeves and Wooster – we all remember how they blacked up as minstrels in one of their episodes? Silence them.
– Most of Southern Spain – conquered and occupied by the Moors for over 300 years, around 1 million white Europeans were sold IN to the African slave trade (well before European colonialisation, Africa had booming slave markets). The historical legacy is everywhere, not least in those colonial place names (Al-Andalus, Al-Meria, Qurtoba) – abolish the lot.
– Scandinavians – what were they up to, sending their vikings over and enslaving our tribes? Actually, add the bloody Normans to that too.
– Mongolia – rapist-in-chief warlord, who had more slaves in his tenure than ever existed in the Western colonial slave trade, and killed 40 million people during his rampages. Apparently, there are 16,000,000 living direct descendants of his wayward penis. No yurts for you.
– Ghandi – Had a few unsavoury things to say about black Africans. No more blacked-up Ben Kingsley for you.
– All of us – that’s right, there is virtually no one alive today who is not the product of what is today considered paedophilia. Women were often married off as children, and started giving birth at 12 or 13, so we should no-platform ourselves and our ancestors.
OR
We could just grow the fuck up and consider that man has evolved faster in the last 3,000 years than any other species on this planet. We have gone from cave dwellers to sending humans in to space in a period of time that is barely a blink in the cosmic scale.
To apply our 21st century morality on our ancestors is so completely ridiculous, as to defy morality or reason. To educate our youth fairly and equitably on our progression is a far more powerful tool than to deny our pasts. This attempt to pretend that Britain has a history only to be ashamed of is not only factually incorrect, but so counter-productive and divisive, that we will make whatever problems we think we have, far, far worse.
Everyone calm down.
“Are you able to condemn absolutely?”
“No – but surely that is not necessary?”
“It is not – though the situation is very bad. But testimony without reservation is the only testimony I will give – so I will give no testimony in support of your testimony.”
Ostensibly, these two characters at the start of Albert Camus’ The Plague are talking about the health situation of Algerian natives under French colonial rule. But The Plague is not actually about an outbreak of the black death in Oran. It is about France under Nazi occupation, recast as a description of French behaviour in an epidemic. The plague represents the Nazis: deadly, relentless, reigning in terror for a time and then gone. The book’s interest is in how people act when a thing like that sweeps over them; about the scum it brings to the top; about who decides to resist and when and why; about Vichy and freedom and the human heart.
By setting the book in Oran, Camus gave himself an advantage: he could describe the city he grew up in very well (and the ostensible event – an outbreak of plague – was more likely). But he also gave himself a problem. France was under the Nazis but Oran was under the French colonial authorities. The French readers of Camus’ book are like the French readers of the newspaper whose journalist “cannot condemn absolutely”. So Camus explains – very exactly, in terms of his analogy – that he will say nothing, and from that point on, the book focusses only on how the ethnically-French inhabitants of Oran behave.
I have been a little surprised never to see mention of The Plague in my recent web browsing. (Only a little surprised – the amount that is on the web and not noticed by me is vast.) That an epidemic can be like an invasion, empowering Vichy-like petty tyrants and harming freedom, would seem topical at this time. I’m no great fan of Camus (though, like anyone honest, I greatly prefer him to Sartre and suchlike) and it is from old memory that I provide the quote heading the post. But some people think highly of him, and I’ll grant that, even in translation, a certain quality of the prose shines through. The left did not welcome his post-WWII advice that what they needed most was “pitiless criticism”, but they never managed to push him all the way down the memory hole.
In the UK and the US, I’ve seen criticism of the lockdown that I thought very fair – and other criticism I thought OTT, as if it were rational to think Boris and Trump really loved lockdowns and wanted them to last forever. The cruel absurdity I see in France seems to belong in the pages of The Plague.
Not long ago, I posted that events in the UK distantly echoed
“the cruel absurdity of the Roman princes, unable to protect their subjects against the public enemy, unwilling to trust them with arms for their own defence” (‘The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’, Edward Gibbon)
But events in France offer more than an echo.
France’s general population remains under extremely strict lockdown; the police have been ordered to enforce the rules ruthlessly. Permits to leave one’s home were limited to 60 minutes, once a day, and no farther than half a mile. … more than 915,000 citations have been handed out; 15.5 million persons have been stopped and checked …
People living in no-go zones [zones-urbaines-sensibles “sensitive urban zones”] are treated differently. Police officers have been told by the government not to stop them at all and to avoid as much as possible going near where they live.
(Excerpted from France’s No-Go Zones: The Riots Return. Read the whole thing.)
The ‘zones sensibles’ of Gothic immigrants in the dying western Roman empire were not ‘urbaines’ but they enjoyed the same cruel absurdity of being exempt from the harsh laws Rome enforced on the areas it still effectively controlled. They showed the same pattern of growth too. In 2005 there were less than 100 zones urbaines sensibles; today, France has more than 750 zones where the absence of lockdown casts the growing reality into stark relief.
The evolution of ruling attitudes makes another parallel.
In 2005, the police tried to quell the riots, unsuccessfully. For three weeks, the country seemed on the verge of a civil war. Today, because members of the government seem to believe that if riots occur, a civil war really could happen, the police are asked not to intervene and to stand aside until the destruction stops.
In ancient times, a similar period takes us from the Battle of Adrianople (378 AD) when the empire tried and failed to quell ‘rioting’ Gothic immigrants, to that of Frigidius (394) where the emperor used a Gothic army to defeat his internal rivals. The Goths lost heavily in that battle, which probably did not bother the emperor – but also did not slow much the speed with which they rotted the empire. I doubt Macron will lose sleep if the ‘zones urbaines sensibles’ lose people to the virus through ignoring his lockdown – which they won’t much, certainly not enough to slow their rate of growth much.
A similar number of years then takes us from Frigidius to the fall of Rome in 410. One day soon, France may do something sensible about the ‘zones urbaines sensibles’. Or, one day, France may do something horrible because for too long political correctness forbade her doing something sensible. Or Paris may ‘fall’ – may become one big zone urbaine sensible.
Meanwhile, I find it a disturbing symptom that the French government seems so acclimatised to the cruel absurdity of enforcing laws that take liberty from natives who obey you, while allowing exemptions that give liberties to immigrants who don’t. I can dislike a law yet dislike its arbitrary enforcement more. I do not care for this ‘lockdown pour nous, mais non pour vous’. Between 2005 and 2020, a kind of degeneration has taken place.
“The Romans were blinded to what was happening to them by the very perfection of the material culture which they had created. All around them was solidity and comfort, a material existence which was the very antithesis of barbarism. How could they foresee the day when the Norman chronicler would marvel over the broken hypocausts of Caerleon? How could they imagine that anything so solid might conceivably disappear? Their roads grew better as their statesmanship grew worse and central heating triumphed as civilization fell.” (Eileen Power essay on the fall of the Roman Empire, written in the winter of 1938-9.)
“History does not repeat itself, but it sometimes rhymes.” (attributed to Mark Twain)
It happened in Thessalonika near the end of the Roman Empire.
The empire had been in trouble for some time. It was not reproducing itself – “The human harvest was bad” (Seeley). ‘Agri Deserti’ – once-cultivated lands now abandoned for lack of people to till them – could be found in every province.
Internally, the empire tried its usual solution: more government, more laws, more force. Legislation to reward large families and tax bachelors was kept on the statute books for centuries although “successful it was not” (Power). As the empire waned, laws to deal with the consequence of this failure were added: binding cultivators to the soil (the origin of serfdom) was merely the most common example of assigning a hereditary obligation to more and more of the professions the state relied on as soon as a shortfall appeared in them, legally punishing any son who did not follow in his father’s footsteps. To draft and regulate these laws, the numbers and privileges of bureaucrats ballooned from Rome’s former proportion (small in numbers by our standards, but when human productivity was less, each unproductive mouth cost more).
Successful all these laws were not – so, externally, the empire addressed its chronic shortage of manpower by immigration,
to dose it with barbarian vigour. Just a small injection to begin with and then more and more
Goths arrived, first as recruits to Roman army units, then as foederate units under their own leaders, growing like a cancer within the armed forces until an Egyptian mother quite naturally wrote the emperor to return her citizen son who “has gone off with the barbarians” – by which she meant he had joined the ‘Roman’ army.
Emperor Theodosius made the Goths obey him, but his was an insecure authority over them. He used Gothic troops in battles where pyrrhic victories may have been welcome. As one summary of the costly victory of Frigidius (394 AD) puts it,
The loss of 10,000 Goths cannot have distressed Theodosius unduly.
Theodosius also had little choice but to use some of their leaders as governors. Mostly, the empire’s soldiers were also its police – so the leaders of those who were now increasingly providing those soldiers had to be both rewarded by, and used in, such posts. Thus did Butheric the Goth became governor (magister militum) over Illyricum, which included Thessalonika.
The urban elite of Thessalonika were university-educated Greeks.
It would be hard to imagine an education less suited to help them understand the dangers they faced. The study of rhetoric, its links with reality long severed, …
So Eileen Power described the ‘learned’ of the dying Roman world. (Today, 8 decades after she wrote those sentences, it is easier to imagine an education even less suited to helping elite intellectuals understand the dangers facing them, one whose links with reality are even more completely severed.) In the empire’s second century, Hadrian had dispersed those Jews he did not kill around the empire, confident they’d soon lose their primitive prejudices and assimilate to being broad-minded Graeco-Roman intellectuals like himself. Fourth/fifth century Graeco-Roman intellectuals thought the same of the immigrants. Sidonius Appolinaris wrote a ‘good-natured’ description of the “embarrassing friendliness” of the new barbarian neighbours he encountered on a fifth-century visit to Lyons:
“How can he be expected to compose six-foot metres”, [Sidonius] asks, “with so many seven-foot patrons all around him, all singing and all expecting him to admire their uncouth stream of non-Latin words.”
The shrug of the shoulders, the genial contempt of one conscious of an infinite superiority – how familiar it all seems.
Perhaps the Thessalonikan city leaders greeted their new governor in this spirit, as sure as Hadrian was about the Jews that this uncouth Goth would soon lose his barbaric prejudices.
There was in Thessalonika a popular charioteer. As Ganymede was charioteer to the god Zeus and also his catamite, so the Thessalonikan charioteer had strong wrists on the race track and Ganymede’s tastes in the bedroom. On the one hand, knowing Graeco-Roman culture of the time, there is nothing remotely surprising in the idea that the charioteer abused slaves, minors or other victims worse than some Hollywood celebrity of our day (Butheric accused him of assaulting a cupbearer). On the other hand, knowing the culture of the Goths in such matters, same-sex liaisons that were as consenting-adults-only as the sternest MeToo advocate could demand might still have disgusted a Goth.
The sophisticated Thessalonikans were at least as disgusted with their governor. If this uncultured Goth had not yet cured himself of his vile homophobia, had not yet been assimilated to their superior way of thinking, he could at least avoid displaying it in public.
The governor refused to back down. It might be he was very opinionated in such matters even for a fourth-century Goth. It might be he indeed knew there was a real abused victim in this particular case. Or maybe he was like many a governor then and now – challenging his authority only made him the more determined to assert it.
The Thessalonikans refused to back down. Maybe they were genuine advocates for sexual liberty (or for the taking of sexual liberties). Maybe they were full of Gothophobic prejudice (despite – or perhaps because of – the imperial government’s formal endorsement of these rapidly multiplying Gothic immigrants, there was plenty of it about). Or maybe they were infuriated at the way their Gothic governor treated the elaborate expensively-learned rhetorical style of their addresses to him as artificial, boring and silly. Whatever the reason, they cancel-cultured Butheric all right – they killed him.
(Gibbon notes, as the empire died,
“the cruel absurdity of the Roman princes, unable to protect their subjects against the public enemy, unwilling to trust them with arms for their own defence”
but it would seem Thessalonika’s civilians were not forbidden to carry knives.)
Perhaps precisely because of the tensions in his relationship with the Goths, Theodosius had a tetchy first reaction to news of this. By the time the less stern commands of his cooler second thoughts reached Thessalonika, some 7,000 Thessalonikan aficionados of chariot racing were as dead as their late governor.
We know about this – just barely enough to part-reconstruct, part-guess the rest as I have described above (in anachronistic terms) – because of what happened next. Saint Ambrose banned the emperor from receiving Christian communion until he repented his violence to the Thessalonikans. Theodosius yielded and did public penance. He also proclaimed a law: imperial orders for mass slaughter were not to be carried out until after 30 days had elapsed – just in case the emperor calmed down again. (Whether Butheric’s Gothic soldiers-cum-police would have paid attention to it is another matter.)
Theodosius was the very last emperor to rule from the British midlands to the Nile cataracts. In the fifth century, as the empire disintegrated, the educated Graeco-Roman elite acquired the familiar figure of Orosius, explaining that the Roman Empire was founded in blood and conquest, so could ill-afford to throw stones at the barbarians. Instead he advised:
“If the unhappy people they have despoiled will content themselves with the little that is left them, their conquerors will cherish them like friends and brothers.”
In the end, the rudely-awakened Sidonius did not find it so, though he did survive and even got freed from captivity – by composing a panegyric for his particular barbarian conqueror. However the confident so-superior intellectual of earlier years doesn’t seem to have felt too pleased about it:
“O necessitas abjecta nascendi, vivendi misera, dura moriendi!” [O humiliating necessity of birth, sad necessity of living, hard necessity of dying!]
So much for ancient history. I cannot exactly tell you that “Those who do not remember history are condemned to relive it” after telling you that history does not repeat itself, it only sometimes rhymes or merely echoes. What was done in Rotherham is eclipsed by what Goths did between the battle of Adrianople and Theodosius regaining tenuous control over them, just as the total of British dead from jihadi terror is eclipsed by the dead of that battle alone. But there could be rhymes. Imagine an inner-city Labour-appointed London magistrate who thinks Sharia-law has insight in such matters confronting a bunch of university-credentialled (but hardy, in any flattering sense, educated) intellectuals without intellects (also Labour-voting). Avoiding islamophobia can trump acting or preaching against QUERTYphobia, but at other PC intersections echoes of Thessalonikan confrontations can be dimly heard.
The best way to avoid rhymes is to hear distant echoes while they are still distant (my less emphatic version of “Those who do not remember history are condemned to relive it”). If only political correctness did not deafen us. 🙁
Between Momentum activists complaining that Labour is
“not helped by the fact that the BBC has a lot of Jewish journalists“
and Corbyn saying the BBC
“has a bias towards saying that… Israel has a right to exist”
there seems to be a feeling in Labour circles that both Jews and their concerns are over-represented in the media.
This is not the first time round for such ideas. Complaints that the Germans were “a people with severed vocal chords”, that Berlin’s major newspapers were owned and/or edited by Jews, that “23 of 29 Berlin theatre managers were Jews” that “the barristers’ room in any Berlin state court was like a Jewish club” etc., were often made in the 1920s and 30s. Nazi statistics, even in the days when the press (Jewish-owned or otherwise) could still challenge them, were usually spun toward the high side – but aimed to persuade by describing areas where everyone knew Jews far exceeded their less-than-one-percent of Germany’s population. The Nazis would not have achieved anything by claiming that too many German farmers were Jews, or too many German generals. (It was the British empire, not Germany, that produced Sir John Monash.) In many a pre-power speech that Hitler gave, e.g. to students (students voted for him at twice the average German rate), he promised merely to remedy these disparate statistics and redress the historic injustices they revealed.
That’s the trouble with disparate-impact theory. Jews have often been victims of racism. But if the mere existence of racial disparities proves racism then a glance at many a country’s economic or cultural statistics will show, according to disparate-impact theory, how much more time Jews must have spent perpetrating racism. Percentages always sum to a hundred – so, even in countries where their fraction of the population is not much higher than in pre-war Germany or even lower, any Jewish higher-than-proportion achievement necessarily accompanies some lower-than-proportion percentages of other groups. Disparate-impact theory exists precisely to crush the racist excuses offered for such racist disparities.
And of course, this racism cannot remain confined within each country. Since there are fewer Jews in the world than there are citizens of Kazakhstan, disparate-impact theory makes Jews guilty of a lot of racism against Kazakhs (and almost everyone else) in Nobel prize awards. Even the evil of toxic whiteness, conveying disproportionate prosperity and prestige to caucasians, cannot quite compare statistically with Jewish disproportions, and if Jewish survivors of violent dispossession repeatedly arrived near-destitute in new places, but their descendants averaged more of such places’ increased fame and wealth than the indigenes, well, by disparate-impact theory that just proves how committed Jews must be to such racist behaviour. Don’t they understand that at some point you’ve made enough money and won enough awards – and that point is strict statistical parity with the locals.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is one reason why a movement that calls you a Nazi for arguing with it so often sounds like it is taking its lines from one of Adolf’s early-30’s addresses. The political world, like the real world, is a sphere: go too far ‘fighting racism’ and you’ll meet your alleged opposites round the far side – and after that you’ll be so far gone you’re coming back.
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[Nazi propaganda remarks quoted above are referenced in contemporary book ‘The House That Hitler Built’ by Stephen Roberts.]
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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