As we commemorate the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the Second World War, with Germany’s unprovoked invasion of Poland on 2nd September, and Britain and France’s declaration of war on Germany the day after, let us bow our heads for the victims of Nazism.
The term ‘Holocaust’ generally refers to the systematic and industrialized mass murder of the Jewish people in German-occupied Europe – called the Shoah or ‘catastrophe’ by Jews. But the Nazis also murdered unimaginable numbers of non-Jewish people considered subhuman – Untermenschen (the Nazis had a way with words!) – or undesirable.
Non-Jewish victims of Nazism included Slavs who occupied the Reich’s ostensible lebensraum – living space, or more bluntly, land grab (Russians – some seven million – Poles, another two – Ukrainians, Serbs and others in Eastern Europe caught in the Wehrmacht mincer; Roma (gypsies); homosexuals; the mentally or physically disabled, and mentally ill; Soviet POWs who died in their tens of thousands; Roman Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox Christians who defied the regime; Jehovah’s Witnesses and Freemasons; Muslims; Spanish Republicans who had fled to France after the civil war; people of colour, especially the Afro-German Mischlinge, called “Rhineland Bastards” by Hitler and the Nazi regime; leftists, including communists, trade unionists, social democrats, socialists, and anarchists; capitalists, even, who antagonized the regime; and indeed every minority or dissident not considered Aryan (‘herrenvolk’ or part of the “master race”); French, Belgians, Luxemburgers, Dutch, Danes, Norwegians, Albanians, Yugoslavs, Albanians, and, after 1943, Italians, men, women and young people alike, involved with the resistance movements or simply caught up in reprisals; and anyone else who opposed or disagreed with the Nazi regime. See below, Ina Friedman’s The Other Victims of the Nazis and also, Wikipedia’s Victims of the Holocaust
The Nazis, with a little help from their allies and collaborators, murdered (there is no other word) an estimated six million Jews and 11 million others In camps and jails, reprisals and roundups, on the streets of cities, towns and villages, in fields and in forests, and in prison cells and torture chambers. And in the fog of war, the dearth of accurate records, and the vagaries of historical memory, the actual number is doubtless higher – much higher.
Lest we forget …
Worldwide, over seventy million souls perished during World War II. We’ll never know just how many …
Fifty years after the end of World War II, few people are aware that Jews were not the only victims of the Nazis. In addition to six million Jews, more than five million non-Jews were murdered under the Nazi regime. Among them were Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, blacks, the physically and mentally disabled, political opponents of the Nazis, including Communists and Social Democrats, dissenting clergy, resistance fighters, prisoners of war, Slavic peoples, and many individuals from the artistic communities whose opinions and works Hitler condemned.1
The Nazis’ justification for genocide was the ancient claim, passed down through Nordic legends, that Germans were superior to all other groups and constituted a “master race.”
Who constituted this “master race?” Blue-eyed, blond-haired people of Nordic stock, or “Aryans.” As such, they had the right to declare who was worthy of life and who was not, who was to be maimed by sterilization or experimented upon in the interest of attaining racial purity, and who was to be used as slave labor to further the Nazi empire.
In the world the Nazis wished to create, Jews and Gypsies were to be eliminated as racially, socially, and physically defective. The deaf, the blind, the physically disabled, homosexuals, the mentally ill, and alcoholics were either to be sterilized or killed simply because they were viewed as “genetically defective.” Slavic people, though labeled racially inferior by the Germans, would be allowed to exist as slaves in order to supply the Nazis with free labor. Criminals, political enemies of the state, and homosexuals were pronounced socially undesirable and subject to the will of the Nazis.
Barely two months after attaining power, the Nazis laid the constitutional foundation for Hitler’s dictatorship with the passage of the Enabling Act on March 24, 1933. This legislation was subtitled “The Law to Remove Stress from the People and State.” It gave Hitler the right to pass any law without the approval of the Reichstag. In effect, the implementation of this law allowed the Nazis to completely ignore the civil and human rights previously guaranteed by the German constitution.
In addition to passing laws legalizing their denial of human rights, the Nazis began a press and radio propaganda campaign to portray their intended victims as rats, vermin, and Untermenschen (subhumans). Inmates of concentration camps were listed as Stuecks (pieces), with assigned numbers, rather than being permitted the dignity of a name. If a German gave these victims a thought, he was to think of them as animals.
Although belief in the theory that one race was superior to others was not unique to Hitler and the Nazis, the enthusiastic support given to Nazis by all facets of German society, particularly the scientific community, was unique.2 Geneticists, scientists, doctors, and anthropologists from the internationally acclaimed Kaiser Wilhelm Institute cooperated in the process of experimenting on human beings to prove the theory of a master race. Spurious experiments to “show” the inferiority of non-Nordic groups such as blacks, Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and others were conducted. Teachers embarrassed Jewish and Gypsy children by directing so-called scientific efforts that included measuring the sizes of their heads in order to prove so-called “mental deficiencies.” Other efforts by the scientific community included certifying that sterilization or annihilation was necessary for “undesirable groups.”
In 1943, Professor Eugen Fischer, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics, wrote to a German newspaper: “It is a rare and special good fortune for a theoretical scientist to flourish at a time when the prevailing ideology welcomes it, and its findings immediately serve the policy of the state.”3 Professor Fischer’s “good fortune” included creating an environment that allowed Dr. Mengele and others who took the Hippocratic oath the right to experiment on human beings and to murder them in the “interest” of science. This included the experiments Mengele performed on Jewish and Gypsy twins in Auschwitz, injecting them with chemicals and germs. If one twin died, the other twin was murdered to compare their physiognomy.
In efforts to breed a master race, more than 300,000 German Aryans were sterilized and countless numbers were gassed, under a law passed on July 14, 1933, the “Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring.” In his book Murderous Science, Dr. Benno Mueller-Hill notes that the aforementioned statute provided for compulsory sterilization in cases of “congenital mental defects, schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis, hereditary epilepsy . . . and severe alcoholism.”4 This included the blind and the deaf, even those who became deaf or blind from illnesses such as scarlet fever or from accidents.
A few years ago, on a trip to Germany, I interviewed deaf people who had been sterilized by the Nazis. In one case, a nine year-old girl had been removed from her school and taken to a hospital by the principal for sterilization. “When I came to,” she said, “I found my parents by my bed weeping.” To prevent them from protesting, the state had not notified them beforehand.
The Nazis also had a significant impact on the lives of black children, who were the offspring of German women and African soldiers stationed in the Rhineland after World War I. Many of these so-called “Rhineland Bastards” were picked up from the streets or from classrooms and sterilized, often without anesthesia. Due to the application of the “Law for the Prevention of Off-spring with Hereditary Defects,” which was passed in 1933, approximately 400 of these children were deprived of their right to reproduce.
Homosexuals were often given the choice of sterilization, castration, or incarceration in a concentration camp. This treatment was “legaquot; because of a law passed in 1871, under paragraph 175 of the German penal code, making homosexuality a criminal offense.5 Under the Nazis, thousands of persons were persecuted and punished on the charge of homosexuality. Many were sent to concentration camps, where they had to wear a pink triangle (rosa Windel).
When the war broke out in 1939, Hitler ordered the elimination of the severely retarded because they were “useless eaters.”6 Operating from headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin, the “T-4” program took the retarded to extermination centers and gassed them with carbon monoxide. In two years, from 1939 to 1941, more than 50,000 persons were killed in this program. In 1941, the Bishop of Muenster protested these gassings, and they were stopped. However, the victims had served their purpose as guinea pigs in the refinement of the use of gas for the mass killing of Jews and Gypsies. The lessons learned in these earlier executions were used in the death camps.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler had made known his antipathy toward Christianity. Reverence would be shown to Hitler and not to the traditional symbols of Christianity. Statues of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary would be banished and, in their place, the Fuehrer’s photographs would be displayed. The Old Testament was to be discarded as “a Jew book full of lies,” and Mein Kampf would supersede the New Testament. In place of the banished cross would stand the swastika.
Both the priests and ministers who spoke out against the Nazis were labeled “political opponents,” and “enemies of the state.” Many of these dissenters were sent to Dachau concentration camp, where a special barracks was set aside for religious leaders. This isolation was to keep the clergy from giving solace or rites to the rest of the prisoners. In the camps, the clergy, like other inmates, were used as slave laborers and in medical experiments.7 Of the 2,270 priests and ministers from nineteen occupied countries who were interned in Dachau, 1,034 perished.
The handful of Catholic priests in Germany who protested the actions of the Nazis was also punished. For example, Provost Bernard Lichtenberg of St. Hedwig’s Cathedral in Berlin was arrested, imprisoned for two years, rearrested at the end of his sentence, and shipped to Dachau. He died en route.
In 1938, when Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber of Munich, a leader of the Catholic hierarchy, protested the persecution of Jews, the Nazis attempted to burn down his house.
Most clergymen either did not read Mein Kampf or ignored its foreshadowing of things to come, and thus the majority of Germany’s religious leaders supported Hitler’s nationalistic ambitions. Yet there were those among the religious community who did challenge the Nazis. Out of 17,000 Protestant clergy, three thousand were Evangelical Lutherans who opposed the Nazis. Some of the members of the group were arrested and sent to concentration camps-never to return. Others worked quietly in their opposition. Some spoke out because of Hitler’s attacks on the church, and a few because of his actions against the Jews.
Jehovah’s Witnesses, though few in number, also were seen as a threat to the Nazis. Not only did they oppose war and refuse to fight, but they also urged others not to serve. In addition, Witnesses refused to salute the flag or to say “Heil Hitler.” To a Jehovah’s Witness, saluting the flag or any authority other than Jehovah God is the same as worshipping idols.
Along these lines, my book The Other Victims: First Person Stories of Non-Jews Persecuted by the Nazis relates the story of the Kusserow family. Not only the parents, but also their eleven children, were punished for being Jehovah’s Witnesses. In 1936, when the father, Franz Kusserow, refused to renounce his religion, he was put in jail until the end of the war. Two sons were executed because they refused induction into the army. Another son was incarcerated in Dachau, where he contracted tuberculosis and died shortly after the war. The three youngest children were sent to reform school for “re-education.” Mrs. Kusserow and the older girls were taken either to prison or to concentration camps.
The Gypsies, like the Jews, were condemned by the Nazis to complete annihilation for being racially impure, socially undesirable, and “mentally defective.”8 The persecution of Gypsies was not new in Germany. A “Central Office for the Fighting of the Gypsy Menace” had been established in 1899. In 1933, a plan to put thirty thousand Gypsies aboard ships and sink the ships in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean was abandoned, but many Gypsies were sterilized under a law that permitted the sterilization of “mental defectives.” In Dachau, Gypsies were used in experiments to test the amount of salt water an individual could drink before death occurred. At least half a million Gypsies were murdered by the Germans in the gas chambers, in experiments, or in general round-ups.
Although the Nazis declared Polish people Untermenschen, or subhumans, thousands of Polish children who were blond haired and blue eyed were separated from their families and sent to Germany to be raised in German homes as Aryans. The dark-haired, dark-eyed sisters and brothers remaining in Poland were to be taught only simple arithmetic, to sign their names, and to offer obedience to their German masters. Their purpose in life was to serve as slaves for the German empire. Anyone caught trying to give further instruction to Polish children was to be punished. Despite the ban on education, secret schools flourished in attics and basements.
Because of the ideological and racial antipathy toward Russian Communism, between two and three million Russian prisoners of war were purposely starved to death by the Nazis. Others were shipped in cattle cars to concentration or extermination camps. Most died of disease, exhaustion, or starvation.
No article on the non-Jewish victims would be complete without mentioning the first opponents of the Nazis: Germans who happened to be Communists or Social Democrats, judges and lawyers, or editors and journalists who had opposed the Nazis. They were the first to be arrested.
As soon as the Nazis came to power, the goal of eliminating all opposition took primacy. Trucks and police vans raced up and down the streets arresting any threat to Nazi rule, including those members of the artistic community who demanded cultural freedom. Books were burned. Authors and artists were either imprisoned or purposely denied the ability to earn a livelihood.
Even telling a joke about Hitler could lead to a death sentence. The evening before he was to give a concert, pianist Robert Kreitin remarked to the woman with whom he was staying, “You won’t have to keep Hitler’s picture over your mantle much longer. Germany’s losing the war.” The woman reported him to the Gestapo. The day of the concert, he was arrested and executed.
A few years ago, I conducted interviews in Germany for a biography, Flying Against The Wind: The Story of a Young Woman Who Defied the Nazis. The young woman, Cato Bontjes van Beek, was one of the few Germans to resist the Nazis. While she opposed the regime, her favorite cousin, Ulrich, supported Hitler and joined the Storm Troopers. Everyone I talked to described her blond-haired, blue-eyed cousin as “a sweet and sensitive person, an artist and a poet.”
“How was it possible,” I asked Cato’s mother, “that Ulrich was so fanatical about Hitler? He came from the same background as Cato.”
“When Ulrich looked in the mirror,” she said, “he saw the Master Race.”
It was people like Ulrich, along with the scientists and the judges who administered Nazi “justice,” who gave Hitler the manpower and the consent to murder six million Jews and five million non-Jews.
Although Hitler is dead, the theories that he espoused remain alive. With the modern tools being developed by biologists and other scientists, it is important for young people to be made aware that knowledge can be manipulated and turned into tools of destruction.
In every generation, educating the young is an awesome task. Today, with new scientific advances, the rapid spread of knowledge through computer networks, and the ability to alter the material being transmitted, it is more important than ever that students learn to think for themselves. Part of that learning process should include the devastating effects of prejudice. A true understanding of the history of the Holocaust would make that lesson clear.
Notes
1Susan Bachrach, Tell Them We Remember: The Story of the Holocaust (Boston: Little Brown, 1995), 20.
2 Nora Levin, The Holocaust. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968), 11-15
3 Eugen Fischer, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (Germany) March 28, 1943.
4 Benno Mueller-Hill, Murderous Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 28.
5 Richard Plant, The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals (New York: Holt, 1986), 211-19.
6 Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 46.
7 Barbara Distel, Dachau (Bruxelles: Comité International de Dachau, 1985), 11.
8 Ian Hancock, The Pariah Syndrome (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Karoma Publishers, 1987), 63-6
9. BibliographyBethge, Eberhard. Costly Grace: An Illustrated Biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. New York: Harper & Row, 1979.Forman, James. The Traitor. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1970.Friedman, Ina. The Other Victims: First Person Stories of Non-Jews Persecuted by the Nazis. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990.—–. Flying Against the Wind: The Story of a Young Woman Who Defied the Nazis. Brookline: Lodgepole Press, 1995.Hancock, Ian. The Pariah Syndrome: An Account of Gypsy Slavery and Persecution. Ann Arbor: Karoma, Inc., 1986.Hanser, Richard. A Noble Treason: The Revolt of the Munich Students Against Hitler. New York: Putnam, 1979.Kanfer, Stefan. The Eighth Sin. New York: Random House, 1978.Lukas, Richard C., ed. Out of the Inferno: Poles Remember the Holocaust. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1989.Mueller-Hill, Benno. Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others. Germany 1933-1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.Plant, Richard. The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals. New York: Holt, 1986.Ramati, Alexander. And the Violins Stopped Playing: A Story of the Gypsy Holocaust. New York: Watts, 1986.Snyder, L. Louis. Hitler’s German Enemies: Portraits of Heroes Who Fought the Nazis. New York: Hippocrene Press, 1990.Wise, Robert. The Pastors’ Barracks. Wheaton, Illinois: Victor Books, 1986.
Ina R. Friedman is the author of The Other Victims: First Person Stories of Non-Jews Persecuted by the Nazis (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990), which was cited in 1991 as one of the “Best Books” of the American Library Association-Young Adult Division. Her latest book, Flying Against the Wind: The Story of a Young Woman Who Defied the Nazis, is a biography of a German Christian who resisted the Nazis (Brookline, Massachusetts: Lodgepole Press, 1995).
There was a checkpoint Charlie He didn’t crack a smile But it’s no laughing party When you’ve been on the murder mile Only takes one itchy trigger One more widow, one less white nigger Oliver’s army is here to stay Oliver’s army are on their way And I would rather be anywhere else But here today
Elvis Costello 1979
As Britain and the European Union agonise and argue over the terms of the Brexit divorce and “the Irish backstop”, we recall the fiftieth anniversary of “the battle of the Bogside”.
Historical memory is like a sieve. Give it a good shake and only the big chunks are left, and as Patrick Cockburn and other British commentators note with anguish, for many on mainland Britain, mired in the Brexit morass, Ireland is not one of these. These commentators, who often possess Irish roots or connections and are veteran correspondents with decades of experience in the volatile Middle East, lament how many people in mainland Britain are ignorant of, or worse, indifferent to Northern Ireland and to the centuries-old conflict that burst into fierce flames half a century ago.
The conflict was never primarily about the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, but about the civil and economic rights of the Roman Catholic minority in the north in relation to the Protestant majority. Had the Ulster Protestants shared power and privilege equitably with the Catholics, things might have turned out much differently.
Though nationalism and religion had been irrevocably and often violently intertwined for hundreds of years, Britain and Ireland’s entry into the EU arguably provided a catalyst for peaceful political change which led in time to the Good Friday Peace Agreementof April 1998.
It might seem unthinkable that anyone should willfully reignite a conflict never that was never really extinguished but merely reduced to a simmer. And yet, recent events in Derry – failed bombings and the New IRA’s murder of Lyra McKee, a working-class Catholic journalist and LGBT activist (during a riot that was apparently staged for a TV crew,), and political paralysis in Westminster over Brexit, including the controversial “backstop” to prevent the re-imposition of a “hard border”, have sparked fears that the centuries only Irish Question was not dead but only sleeping.
The problem of Ireland had never gone away – or was it, rather, the problem of England?
In 1921, Winston Churchill asked Parliament: “How is it that (Ireland) sways our councils, shakes our parties, and infects us with her bitterness, convulses our passions, and deranges our action? How is it she has forced generation after generation to stop the whole traffic of the British Empire, in order to debate her domestic affairs? … Whence does this mysterious power of Ireland come?”
He forgot – or never realized – that the reason for all of this Irish “bitterness” and “passion” was his country’s brutal legacy of colonialism beginning several hundred years prior, stretching at least as far back as the mid-1500s conquest of Ireland by King Henry VIII and the 1606 plantation colonization) of Ulster by King James I (whence the ancient town of Derry got its ‘London’ prefix – history can be reckless with place names), and all the way through Oliver Cromwell’s pogroms, the the ‘98, An Gorta Mór, and Padraic Pearse’s doomed intifada at Eastertide in 1916 and the Crown’s execution of the rebel leaders.
Just like the recent flare-ups in Kashmir over India’s unilateral rescission of its autonomy, and citizens in Hong Kong resisting tighter controls from China, the messy legacy of Britain’s colonial past continues to play out around the world.
Fifty years ago last October, a civil rights march in the historic city of Derry, the second largest city on Northern Ireland, was brutally attacked by police in front of the television cameras. It was the crucial moment in the rise of peaceful opposition to the one-party unionist state. When this failed to achieve its ends, the door was opened to violence and the rise of the Provisional IRA. It sparked widespread disorder and rioting across Northern Ireland.
By the end of the year, various ‘no-go’ areas had been established and walls built dividing major cities. Large population movement began that saw once mixed areas become exclusively one faith or another, polarizing not only people, but also opinions and attitudes. On both sides, paramilitary groups began to re-emerge, gaining in strength and status as widespread civil disorder quickly escalated into a bloody conflict that would last for nearly thirty years. With the police unable to cope with the scope and scale of the disturbances, the government decided to send in the British Army to restore order – the only ever peacetime deployment of British troops on British soil in modern times.
Increasing degrees of violence culminated in January 1969 when, in the aftermath of a march from Belfast to Derry, the Royal Ulster Constabulary rioted in the Bogside, assaulting Catholics in the streets and in their homes. Residents put up barricades and declared themselves citizens of Free Derry and outside the authority of the police.
In August, a much larger riot – the “Battle of the Bogside” – saw the police expelled from Free Derry by locals throwing petrol bombs, and nationalists and loyalists fighting hand-to-hand in the streets of the city they shared.
Just like flare-ups in Kashmir this week over autonomy and citizens in Hong Kong resisting tighter controls from China, the messy legacy of Britain’s colonial past continues to play out around the world.o, as nationalism and sectarianism dealt a coup de grace to Tito’s Yugoslavia; and in Baghdad as the ancient city sundered into confessional cantons.
Derry’s trials culminated in Bloody Sunday on January 30, 1972 when soldiers of the Parachute Regiment shot twenty eight unarmed civilians during a protest march against internment. Fourteen Catholics died: thirteen were killed outright, while the death of another man four months later was attributed to his injuries. Many were shot while fleeing from the soldiers, and some, while trying to help the wounded.
These were but a few of nearly four thousand people killed during the conflict, including some five hundred British soldiers, and some fifty thousand injured in ulster and on the British mainland in protests and firefights, executions and assassinations, beatings and bombings.
I republish below poignant and gripping feature by Australian journalist and author Mark Dapin about that day. It is a timely reminder that Northern Ireland is a knot that refuses to be untangled, and that for the families of the victims of the conflict, the wounds have never closed let alone healed.
Author’s Note
Whilst I do not have skin in the Ulster game, I do have a connection. My father was a protestant from the town of Castlederg, County Tyrone, just south of Derry and east of the Irish border. He married a catholic from Enniscorthy, County Wexford, and I was born and baptized catholic in Birmingham, England – neutral territory. I used to sing the Clancys’ The Orange and the Green back in my old folkie days, and loved The Old Orange Flute. Serendipitously, a good friend and tradesman of choice in in our small Australian country town is from Castlederg, from a large catholic family. He learnt his trade on the building sites of Belfast and experienced the latter years of The Troubles first hand, including the dangers of working on protestant-only worksites. Another acquaintance on our coast is a protestant from Belfast. He too has many stories of those dangerous time, including how he would visit an actively paramilitary friend who had been banged up in the notorious Maze prison (where catholic and protestant prisoners would be segregated into separate wings.
Patrick Cockburn, The Independent 9th August 2019.
Fifty years ago, the Battle of the Bogside in Derry between Catholics and police, combined with the attacks on Catholic areas of Belfast by Protestants, led to two crucial developments that were to define the political landscape for decades: the arrival of the British army and the creation of the Provisional IRA.
An eruption in Northern Ireland was always likely after half a century of undiluted Protestant and unionist party hegemony over the Catholics. But its extreme militarisation and length was largely determined by what happened in August 1969.
An exact rerun of this violent past is improbable, but the next few months could be equally decisive in determining the political direction of Northern Ireland. The Brexit crisis is reopening all the old questions about the balance of power between Catholics and Protestants and relations with Britain and the Irish Republic that the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) of 1998 had provided answers with which everybody could live.
The occasion which led to the battle of the Bogside came on 12 August when the Apprentice Boys, a fraternity memorialising the successful Protestant defence of Derry against Catholic besiegers in the 17th century, held their annual march. Tensions were already high in Derry and Belfast because the unionist government and its overwhelmingly Protestant police force was trying to reassert its authority, battered and under threat since the first civil rights marches in 1968.
What followed was closer to an unarmed uprising than a riot as the people of the Bogside barricaded their streets and threw stones and petrol bombs to drive back attacks by hundreds of policemen using batons and CS gas. In 48 hours of fighting, a thousand rioters were treated for injuries and the police suffered unsustainable casualties, but they had failed to gain control of the Bogside.
Its defenders called for protests in other parts of the North to show solidarity with their struggle and to overstretch the depleted Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). In Belfast, Protestants stormed into the main Catholic enclave in the west of the city, burning houses and forcing Catholics to flee. The RUC stood by or actively aided the attacks. The local MP Paddy Devlin estimated that 650 families were burned out in a single night, many taking refuge in the Irish Republic
I was in Bombay Street, where all the houses were burned on the night of 14-15 August, earlier this year. The street was long ago rebuilt but still has a feeling of abnormality and menace because it is only a few feet from the “peace line” with its high wall and higher wire mesh to stop missiles being thrown over the top from the Protestant district next door.
The most striking feature of Bombay Street is the large memorial garden, though it is more like a religious shrine, to martyrs both military and civilian from the district who have been killed by political violence since 1916. A high proportion of these were members of the Provisional IRA who died in the fighting during the 30 years of warfare after Bombay Street was burned.
The memorial is a reminder of the connection between what many local people see as an anti-Catholic pogrom in 1969 and the rise of the Provisional IRA. It split away from what became known as the official IRA because the latter had failed to defend Catholic districts.
Pictures of the ruins of Bombay Street on the morning of 15 August show local people giving British soldiers cups of tea. But this brief amity was never going to last because the unionist government in Stormont had asked the prime minister of day, Harold Wilson, to send in the troops not to defend Catholics but to reinforce its authority.
It was the role the British army were to play in one way or another for the next 30 years. It was one which was bound not only to fail but to be counterproductive. So long as the soldiers were there in support of a Protestant and unionist political and military establishment, the IRA were always going to have enough popular support to stay in business.
British governments at the time never got a grip on the political realities of the North. Soon after the troops were first sent there, the cabinet minister Richard Crossman blithely recorded in his diary that “we have now got ourselves into something which we can hardly mismanage”. But mismanage it they did and on a grotesque scale. The Provisionals were initially thin on the ground, but army raids and arrests acted as their constant recruiting sergeant. Internment without trial introduced on 9 August 1971, the anniversary of which falls today, was another boost as were the hunger strikes of 1981 which turned Sinn Fein into a significant political force.
What are the similarities between the situation today and 50 years ago? In many respects, it is transformed because there is no Protestant unionist state backed by the British army. The Provisional IRA no longer exists. The GFA has worked astonishingly well in allowing Protestants and Catholics to have their separate identities and, on occasion though less effectively, to share power.
Brexit and the Conservative Party dependence on the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) for its parliamentary majority since 2017 has thrown all these gains into the air. DUP activists admit privately that they want a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic because they have never liked the GFA and would like to gut it. Sinn Fein, which gets about 70 per cent of the Catholic/nationalist vote these days, is pleased that the partition of Ireland is once again at the top of the political agenda.
“I am grappling with the idea of a hard border which I would call a Second Partition of Ireland,” Tom Hartley, a Sinn Fein veteran and former lord mayor of Belfast, told me. He is baffled by British actions that appear so much against their interests, saying that “they had parked the Irish problem, but now Ireland has moved once again into the centre of British politics”.
Would Boris Johnson’s enthusiasm to get rid of “the backstop” evaporate if he wins or loses a general election and the Conservatives are no longer dependent on the DUP for their majority? Possibly, but his right-wing government has plenty of members who never liked the GFA and their speeches show them to be even more ignorant about Northern Ireland politics than their predecessors in Harold Wilson’s cabinet half a century ago.
Ireland is not to blame for the disaster of Brexit
An example of this is their oft-declared belief that some magical gadget will be found to monitor the border by remote means. But any such device will be rapidly torn down and smashed where the border runs through nationalist majority parts of the border.
Northern Ireland may be at peace, but in a border area like strongly Republican South Armagh, the police only move in convoys of three vehicles and carry rifles, even if they are only delivering a parking ticket.
Catholics are no longer the victims of economic discrimination, though Derry still has the highest unemployment of any city in the UK. There has been levelling down as well as levelling up: Harland and Wolff, the great shipyard that once employed much of the population of Protestant east Belfast, went into administration this week.
Irish unity is being discussed as a practical, though highly polarising, proposition once again. Political and economic turmoil is back in a deeply divided and fragile society in which the binds holding it together are easily unstitched
Mark Dapin, Sydney Morning Herald, 3rd August 2019
Every week of every month of every year, Paul Doherty takes tourists on a journey around the death of his father, who was killed by the British Parachute Regiment (“the Paras”) on Bloody Sunday in Derry, the second-largest city in Northern Ireland, on January 30, 1972.
But this year, things are different. This month, Doherty hopes, a murderer will at last be held to account. He has already looked into the eyes of his father’s killer, and he hates him.
“I have a hatred for what the Paras did on Bloody Sunday,” says Doherty, 55, “and also a hatred for the individual soldier.”
He knows he’s not supposed to say that (and he also hates the British Army officers and British government of the day) but Derry is built on the banks of the River Foyle, one of the fastest flowing rivers in Europe, and the torrent of Doherty’s conversation far outpaces the waterway. He speaks like two people, one interrupting to annotate the other – “They do a good pint of Guinness in there, aye” – and push him to clarify his opinion in the rare moments he might seem guarded or vague. Doherty says his tour is “political” but not “politically correct”.
Derry is officially called Londonderry, although the “London” has been spray-painted out of many road signs (just as the “no” has disappeared from no-smoking signs). London has rarely been popular in a place where three-quarters of the population are Catholic, most of them republicans who would rather see their home part of the Republic of Ireland than the United Kingdom. After the Bloody Sunday massacre, Derry saw 26 years of concentrated shootings and bombings, until the Good Friday Agreement of April 1998 began to draw the euphemistically named “Troubles” to a close with its newly codified recognition of both British and Irish interests in Northern Ireland. The Provisional IRA and the Ulster Volunteer Force, among other militia, eventually decommissioned their weapons – but in Derry there were always a handful of hardmen who wanted to keep killing for a united Ireland.
Some of these “dissident republicans” had already helped to form the so-called New IRA, which has admitted responsibility for thedeath in April this year of the young journalist Lyra McKee, who was shot by a sniper during an apparently staged-for-TV riot in Derry. Doherty has a bit to say about that, too.
When Patrick Doherty was shot from behind by a British soldier on Bloody Sunday, Paddy Walsh bravely stayed in the open with him.CREDIT:GILES PERESS/MAGNUM PHOTOS/SNAPPER IMAGES
Paul Doherty is a cheery man. He’s thickset and stocky and likes to make jokes – can’t help himself, really – and runs perhaps the least romantically named travel business in the world, Bogside History Tours. It takes a surprisingly large number of visitors (between two and 40 per tour) on twice-daily guided walks through Derry to the Bogside, a neighbourhood in the city’s west, where the ghosts of Bloody Sunday’s dead still march alongside his father, on murals the size of houses.
Paul’s younger brother, Gleann Doherty, is leading the walk on the morning I arrive, and Paul offers me a more exclusive “taxi tour”. It begins with an eccentric industrial history of Derry, whose docks were established before the famous shipyards of Belfast, where the passenger liner RMS Titanic was constructed by a largely Protestant workforce.
“The most celebrated ship in the world, the Titanic, never completed a journey,” says Doherty. “People say, ‘Why did it never complete a journey?’
“I don’t know,” he continues, “but people suspect it was because it was built by Protestants. There were very few Catholics building the Titanic. Someone asked me the other day, ‘What were the Catholics doing?’ I said, ‘We were building icebergs.’”
Doherty talks about the 17th-century Plantation of Ulster, in which Protestants from England and Scotland, who were loyal to the British Crown (“loyalists”) were settled in the north of Catholic Ireland, usurping Irish landowners and ultimately exercising political power through gerrymandered voting and a system which, until 1968, allowed (largely Protestant) business owners an extra vote in local elections while (often Catholic) renters had no local vote at all.
We drive over Craigavon Bridge, named for James Craig, the first PM of Northern Ireland and founder in 1912 of the Ulster Volunteer Force – “A modern-day terrorist and drug-racketeering operation; beside that, they’re okay,” says Doherty – to a lookout over a walled city of cathedral spires, council houses and dozens of boxy, repurposed shirt factories. We motor down from the hills and back into town, where Doherty’s taxi cruises the close, stony streets, stopping at corners that paid witness to the events that led to the death of his father: the rise of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) whose demands included an end to anti-Catholic discrimination; one man, one vote; and the reform of the heavily Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), the country’s then police force.
Peaceful civil rights demonstrations were attacked by loyalists and the RUC with increasing degrees of violence until January 1969 when, in the aftermath of a march from Belfast to Derry, the RUC rioted in the Bogside, assaulting Catholics in the streets and in their homes. Residents put up barricades and declared themselves citizens of Free Derry and outside the authority of the police. In August, a much larger riot – the “Battle of the Bogside” – saw the police expelled from Free Derry by locals throwing petrol bombs, and nationalists and loyalists fighting hand-to-hand in the streets of the city they shared.
An end-terrace house, which had become famous internationally when its side wall was painted with the slogan “You are now entering Free Derry”, still stands as Free Derry Corner in the Bogside, although the other homes in the terrace have been demolished. “They were gonna redevelop the Bogside and build a roadway,” says Doherty. “They were gonna move the [Free Derry] wall and take the wall away, but the negotiations were very skilful: ‘Touch the wall and you’re gonna be disappeared yourself.’ So that was the end of that.”
After the Battle of the Bogside, British troops – including Paras – were dispatched from the mainland to restore law and order. The soldiers were widely seen to favour the loyalists and quickly became targets for a resurgent IRA, an organisation whose glory days were thought to have ended in the 1920s. The republicans particularly feared the Paras, the shock troops of the British Army, a death that falls from the sky.
I grew up in England in the 1970s, near the base of the Parachute Regiment. When I arrived in Northern Ireland recently, I was puzzled to see what looked like the regiment’s flag flying in parts of Belfast. I thought the outspread wings must stand for something else on this side of the Irish Sea. They don’t. Doherty says the flag was also raised a few weeks ago in The Fountain estate, a loyalist enclave near the heart of Derry, “in support of Soldier F”. (Soldier F is the man who shot Doherty’s father.)
Murals in Derry’s Bogside depict the victims of the British soldiers’ rampage.CREDIT:AAP
“The people who want to do it must have sick minds,” he says. “In 2019, 400 yards [370 metres] from where the massacre of Bloody Sunday happened, these people feel the need to fly the flag of the Parachute Regiment, celebrating the murder of 14 innocent people in the Bogside in 1972.” To Doherty, it’s as if his neighbours are celebrating the killing. “There’s negotiations at the minute to bring [the flag] down,” he says. “The negotiations were begun by ourselves – the [Bloody Sunday] families – through our member of parliament and the loyalist terror and paramilitary groups here. They don’t seem to be working. So if you hear it was taken down in the middle of the night, by some guy on a ladder, it’ll be me that did it. And I mean that sincerely.”
It’s a very short drive to The Fountain, where every lamppost is painted red, white and blue, and the Paras’ flag hangs limp on a windless morning. Doherty scowls. “That’s hurtful,” he says. “It’s wrong. It degrades this community. So I’m just going to see what type of ladder we’ll need.” Mentally, he measures the distance between the banner and the ground. “We’ll need a 16- or 18-foot ladder,” he decides, eventually. “We’ll go up and get that down.”
Doherty does not believe anyone could truly support Soldier F, if they knew the facts. “I’ll tell you what Soldier F did in the Bogside …”
On Sunday January 30, 1972, the NICRA held a march through Derry, even though all marches and parades had been banned. In the month before, two RUC had been killed in Derry, and the British Army believed the planned demonstration would provide cover for the IRA. The 1st Battalion Parachute Regiment was brought in to Derry to police the demonstration and arrest rioters. They ended up shooting 28 Catholic civilians, of whom 14 were killed, 13 on the day and one later. A British tribunal set up in the immediate aftermath of the killings found that the Paras had been fired upon first, and largely accepted claims that the dead marchers were gunmen and nail bombers. The families of the dead refused to accept the findings and for decades argued that peaceful protesters had been massacred.
In 1998, in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement, the British government established the Saville Inquiry, which culminated 12 years later with a 10-volume, 5000-page report. Saville found that the Paras had shot first and without warning; their victims had been all but unarmed and helpless, and posed no significant threat; that the IRA had maintained only a small, shadowy presence and loosed off a few ineffective shots; and that the Paras had lied.
It is this story, more or less, that Doherty tells at the Creggan estate among the heavily muralised roads around Free Derry Corner. While the area remains a working-class Catholic republican stronghold, the streetscape has changed: buildings have been demolished, whole blocks torn down. Doherty reaches into the past, to point to where things used to be, as he describes the last moments in the life of his father, Patrick Doherty, a 31-year-old plumber’s mate and member of NICRA, who joined the march from the Creggan.
The protesters set off mid-afternoon and were diverted from their chosen route by army barricades. Angry youths threw stones at the soldiers, who replied with tear gas and water cannons. The march organisers redirected the rally towards Free Derry Corner, and a group of soldiers fired live rounds in the direction of the rioters. Wounded men began to fall. Two civilians were knocked down by armoured cars. Soldiers broke through their own barriers to arrest the stone-throwers.
As the firing continued, the marchers ran for cover. There were already seven dead when Patrick Doherty sought safety around a small square named Glenfada Park, where today stand his son, Paul, and I. As the death toll mounted, the Paras’ brigade headquarters ordered the soldiers to cease fire. A radio operator – now dubbed Soldier 027 – passed on the order to men known at the Saville Inquiry as Soldiers E, F, G and H, but they ignored the command and set about hunting down and killing Catholics. “In here,” says Doherty, “in Glenfada Park they murdered four.”
He knows the ground where each man fell. “William McKinney was in a crowd running from here, across here,” says Doherty. “He was trying to escape right over here. And Soldier F, disobeying orders, went up that street, and he murdered William McKinney about here. Willy was shot in the back. The bullet raced through his body and went into the body of a teenager called Joseph Mahon. Joseph Mahon played dead when Soldier F touched him with a rifle to his head. Soldier F walked away thinking he’d killed him, and he shot Jim Wray in the back. Jim Wray hit the ground with such force that he didn’t get his hands in front of him.
“Soldier G walks towards him,” he continues. “Jim Wray was shouting, ‘Somebody help me! I can’t move my legs! Somebody help me!’ and G shoots him in the back again, executes him, then turns to his friend and says, ‘There, I got another one.’
“And F came out,” says Doherty, “knelt down at that lamppost right there and murdered my dad.”
Patrick Doherty was shot from behind as he tried to crawl away. A bullet drove into his buttock and ripped out of his chest. On its way through his body, it lacerated his aorta, diaphragm and left lung, tore his colon and bowel attachments, and fractured two of his ribs. “Soldier F knelt down there,” says Doherty, “observed by hundreds of people, killing my dad, and then very clearly watching a man walking towards him with a white handkerchief in his hand. Barney [Bernard] McGuigan said to him, ‘Don’t shoot’ and Soldier F shot him.”
There were six children in the Doherty family. Paul was eight years old. “We were home,” he says. “With my brother and my friends, we were all outside playing marbles. Our home suddenly filled up with people, and then a young guy came up and joined in with the marbles for about 10 minutes and said, ‘Oh, by the way, your dad’s dead. I seen him get taken into an ambulance over here.’ And my mum then came and told us he was killed.”
I have to ask Doherty how their lives changed, although I know it’s a stupid question. “It is,” he agrees, as is his way. “The death of a parent’s one thing, the murder of a parent’s another thing. I wouldn’t like to relive that in the heart of a child. We sort of individualised ourselves as a family. My mum was on medication. My sister had to really look after the two [youngest] children. And we all had to adapt to a different type of life. My dad was very regimentist [sic]. We had to do certain chores every morning: somebody had to do the dishes and somebody had to shine the shoes. It was a good way of being brought up. The discipline – that all went out the window. Education went out the window as well.”
Their loss affected them each in different ways. Doherty’s older brother, Tony, joined the IRA and spent four years in prison. Today, Tony’s the author of two well-received, lyrical memoirs. There was turmoil for all the children but, “We’re all very successful in what we’re doing now,” says Doherty.
Most of the Saville Inquiry’s hearings were held in Derry but certain witnesses, including Soldier F, were permitted to testify in London. Doherty travelled to London with his family and watched Soldier F on the stand. What was it like, ask I – the master of the dullard’s query – to be in the same room as his father’s killer? “Aye, it was strange,” says Doherty. “I can’t describe it. It just put a face to an armed thug who had no care for himself or his community he came from, and he came into this community and just shot it to bits.”
Soldier F confessed to nothing but a poor memory. Five hundred and seventy times, according to Doherty, he answered questions with “I can’t recall”. But Soldier 027 – speaking from behind a screen to protect him from being identified – said the soldiers had killed innocent people for no operational reason, and called their actions “unspeakable”. Soldier 027 had been trying to confess for years. “We were getting telephone calls in the late 1980s from a soldier who was crying down the phone,” says Doherty. “He left the Army, hit the drink, and then he told the truth.” As for Soldier F, “If there was any kind of remorse, you would have to deal with that, but there was no remorse at all. And, again, forgiveness – you can’t forgive anybody who doesn’t ask for it. They shouldn’t get it.”
Did Soldier F know who Doherty was? “He would’ve been made aware of who we were,” says Doherty. “I’m not sure if he would’ve individualised us. We gave him a wee stare every time he went past us, so he probably would have. He was 53, he’s got a tan, athletic, small, stocky. He looked like he looked after himself. He has a very light-spoken voice. But obviously he had killing in his DNA.”
Saville found Soldier F had shot dead Patrick Doherty and Bernard McGuigan – but, under the terms of the inquiry, any evidence heard was inadmissible in any subsequent prosecution. A separate police investigation led to Soldier F being charged in May only with the murders of James Wray and William McKinney and the attempted murders of four others.
The families are bitter that only one man, Soldier F – a lance corporal – will be charged over Bloody Sunday. In the years since the massacre, Soldiers E and G have died, and the Northern Ireland Public Prosecution Service has said there is insufficient admissible evidence to provide a reasonable prospect of convicting other soldiers: dead bodies are not enough.
“We’ve heard since that the Public Prosecution Service were split on whether they should charge anybody,” says Doherty. “So we think they gave us a token. We wanted the remaining soldiers charged in a joint enterprise. We wanted the officers – some of whom are still alive – but you don’t get that.”
The case is scheduled to begin this month in the imposing, neoclassical Bishop Street courthouse, which Doherty identifies as the most bombed building in Derry. In January, Doherty pointed this out to four young Dutch women on a taxi tour. “And the next thing, it was blown up by the New IRA,” says Doherty. “I met them down the street, and I said, ‘Aye, it was blown up last night.’ ”
The most recent bomb caused little damage, and the New IRA are seen by many republicans as bumbling clowns who cannot even blow up a courthouse. But the joke turned acrid, as Irish jokes are wont to do, when a New IRA sniper shot dead the highly regarded Lyra McKee, a working-class Catholic journalist and LGBT activist, during a riot that Doherty says was staged for a TV crew. Apparently, McKee was not targeted as a journalist. She was simply standing too close to a police van. The New IRA admitted responsibility and apologised.
“The statement that they came out with then, trying to defend this, was adding insult to injury: that the girl was ‘standing behind enemy lines’ and ‘ground forces’ and this. That’s a relic from the past. They will say, ‘Well, the IRA did this type of thing as well.’ Well, we can’t argue that for ever and ever. Sometimes you’ve got to say, ‘There was a time for war and a time for peace.’ But the dissidents have no support, they’ve got no strategy, they won’t debate with anybody, they won’t talk to anyone, and they get young guys into the ranks of their organisation and tell them they could be heroes for Ireland.
“Well,” says Doherty, “the heroes for Ireland are all lined up in the cemetery.”
Police have arrested four suspects for the shooting of McKee, including a 15-year-old boy.
Paul Doherty (centre, holding a picture of Bernard McGuigan, with his niece, Caitlin, to his right) on a protest march for justice for Bloody Sunday victims.CREDIT:GETTY IMAGES
The demonstrators who died on Bloody Sunday were never forgotten. In some ways, their memory has grown larger over the years. Huge murals in the Creggan, painted between 1996 and 2008, bear their portraits and those of the men who braved bullets to rush to help them. “These people were heroes,” says Doherty, “because they could’ve jumped over them, ran away, but they didn’t. They stayed with them. They comforted them until they died. The guy who helped my dad until he died was called Paddy Walsh – he crawled out to my dad, the bullets were flying over his head as he stayed with him.”
On display in the nearby Museum of Free Derry is a famous photograph of Paddy Walsh crawling over to the corpse of Patrick Doherty. It looks as if Walsh has lent his own head to Doherty’s broken body. A simple monument and garden dedicated to the victims of Bloody Sunday stands close to the museum.
“The garden was paid for by lawyers and barristers for the families,” says Doherty. “We asked them for money – and they were making plenty of money – so they gave us the money to do this garden. It’s lovely. Mostly old neighbours used to look after it, but most of them are dead now, so now and then we come over ourselves and do a bit of weeding.”
This isn’t my story – far from it. I’m just a journalist who asks stupid questions, tramples on hearts, trespasses on grief. But I went to school in Aldershot, England, the home of the British Army and – in those days – the base of the Parachute Regiment. We moved to the town because it was cheap, because nobody wanted to live alongside the Army. It was in Aldershot that the IRA planned to extract revenge for Bloody Sunday with a bomb attack on the officers’ mess of 16 Parachute Brigade. The attack was supposed to kill and maim the men – or perhaps just the kind of men – who ordered their troops to open fire in the Bogside.
Instead, a time bomb in a stolen car exploded outside the building at 12.40pm on February 22, 1972 and tore apart the bodies of a Catholic British Army chaplain, a civilian gardener, and five local women variously described as kitchen workers, waitresses and cleaners. One of the women was the mother of a boy who was eight years old – the same age as Paul Doherty on Bloody Sunday. There was so little left of her that she could not immediately be recognised from her remains. Eventually, she was identified by a tattoo.
I moved to Aldershot three years after that attack. The disappeared woman’s son was in the year below me at school. I knew him very slightly. I never knowingly met any of the families of the other victims, but another boy whose mother was murdered that day – Karl Bosley – signed up with the Paras (“with anger and hatred in my heart,” he said later) – just as Tony Doherty joined the IRA. Apparently, Bosley was not permitted to serve with the regiment in Northern Ireland.
The Troubles in Northern Ireland continued throughout my schooling, and the Paras were a fierce and terrible presence in the town. They departed for tours of the province and returned with fury in their eyes, prowling the streets like the jungle cats tattooed on their hamhock forearms, at war with the world. And, of course, some of them never made it back. In an ambush near Warrenpoint in County Down in August 1979, the IRA killed 18 British soldiers, 16 of them Paras.
In Aldershot, the survivors policed their own pubs. Most of the town centre was a no-go area for civilians, and the Paras’ pubs around the high street were “airborne” only. Even other soldiers – “crap hats” – copped a kicking if they walked into the Pegasus, the Queen or the Trafalgar. You wouldn’t send the Paras overseas to police a demonstration. You’d dispatch them to destroy it. There are no pictures of the body of the eight-year-old’s mum, because there was nothing left to photograph. A small memorial at the site of the bombing is hardly visited by people outside the families, and when I went back to Aldershot a couple of years ago, I couldn’t even find it. Apparently, the area is going to be redeveloped, and the new houses will look down upon a memorial garden.
While the Irish may have long memories, it sometimes seems as if the English remember nothing at all. There are no tours to retrace the last journeys of the cleaners, as they came from the council estates to the garrison to work for a wage. And there is fierce feeling in England today that men like Soldier F should be left alone, that the post-Good Friday justice system let many imprisoned IRA “volunteers” off the hook and the same courtesy should be due to every British soldier – although the provisions of the agreement specifically excluded the perpetrators of crimes that had not yet been prosecuted.
And anyway, prosecution will only open old wounds, claim those who cannot understand that in Derry – and in Aldershot – for the families of the murder victims, those wounds never for a moment closed.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
WB Yeats, Easter 1916
On the morning of August 5th 1939 thirteen young women were put against the walls of Madrid’s La Almudena Cemetery and shot…
They were: Carmen Barrero Aguado (age 24), Martina Barroso García (age 22), Blanca Brissac Vázquez (age 29), Pilar Bueno Ibáñez (age 27), Julia Conesa Conesa (age 19), Adelina García Casillas (age 19), Elena Gil Olaya (age 20), Virtudes González García (age 18), Ana López Gallego (age 21), Joaquina López Laffite (age 23), Dionisia Manzanero Salas (age 20), Victoria Muñoz García (age 19), and Luisa Rodríguez de la Fuente (age 18).
They sang the “Youthful Guardsmen,” the anthem of the JSU, as they were taken from the prison they shared with other members of the organization to the cemetery.
Eighty years ago this month, the Spanish cities of Madrid and Valencia fell to the nationalist forces of Francisco Franco. Victory was proclaimed as Franco placed his sword to rest upon the altar of a church declaring that he wouldn’t raise the blade again until Spain was in peril. The Spanish Civil War that had claimed hundreds of thousands of lives (upwards of half a million, possibly up to two) was at an end; the long march of the generalissimo was over and the reign of the Caudillo had begun. It endured until his death in 1975.
The Spanish Civil War was long, brutal and bloody, and medieval in its savagery. It was a war of armies and of militias, of men and women, of skirmishes and set-piece battles, of massacres and reprisals, and of wars within wars. It saw cities besieged and starved into surrender and towns destroyed by bombers and heavy artillery. It cut a swathe across the country leaving scars that endure to this day.
It became a proxy war for three dictators – Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin – who dispatched men and machines to fight under false flags in what would appear in retrospect to be a rehearsal for wars to come. It was a magnet for idealists and activists of disparate political creeds and from many lands who were to fight and die on both sides, including the celebrated International Brigades. It lured writers and poets who were to chronicle its confusion and carnage, including Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, WH Auden, André Malraux and Arthur Koastler. Many perished, the most famous being the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, murdered by Nationalist militia and buried in an unmarked grave, one of many unquiet graves scattered throughout the land.
Since Franco’s death, successive Spanish governments have endeavoured to heal the wounds of the war and the dictatorship by condoning what could be described as historical amnesia. And yet, such official forgetfulness, well-intentioned as it might be, is often suborned by our species’ instinctive need to remember and to memorialize our dearly departed.
Valle de los Caidos, the Valley of the Fallen, in the Sierra de Guadarrama mountains near Madrid, is one such monument. This grandiose necropolis hosts a mass grave of some 34,000 war dead of all sides, as well as the tombs of an embalmed Franco and of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the fascist Falange Española. It is a shrine and a place of pilgrimage for nationalists andFalangists old and young, and a bitter reminder for the families and friends of the vanquished.
The current socialist government has shattered the deafening silence. it is determined to move Franco’s remains out the basilica and to make the Valley of the Fallen a more neutral place to honour the victims of the war and its vengeful aftermath.
The mass graves of Spain’s civil war victims is a live issue as the nation comes to terms with its history. Even the weather compels the soil to give up its dead, revealingthe scale and the savagery of the slaughter that followed the victory of Franco’s Nationalists. Recent storms have swept away soil in an area of Madrid’s La Almudena public cemetery, exposing the bones of three thousand people executed on the orders of Francoist military courts in the five years after Spain’s civil war ended in 1939. They include, it is believed, the remains of Las Treces Rosas, the Thirteen Roses.
Outside the history books and the stories, songs and folk memories of ageing socialists and anarchists, there is but limited interest, knowledge and understanding of the causes, chronology and consequences of the civil war – and I am not about to rectify that in this post. Click here to and hereto read reasonable synopses.
Rather, I will take the opportunity to publish a story about the war – one tragedy among so many – that illustrates its systematic ruthlessness. Here is the story of those thirteen young victims.
By Rafael Narbona. Translation by Diarmuid Breatnach; original version published in Spanish in Rafael Narbona’s blog August 2013, also republished by kind permission in Rebel Breeze.
On the morning of August 5th 1939 thirteen women were shot dead against the walls of Madrid’s La Almudena Cemetery.
Nine were minors, because at that time the age of majority was not reached until twenty-one. Ranging in age from 18 to 29, all had been brought from the Sales women’s prison, a prison that was designed for 450 people and in 1939 contained 4,000. Apart from Brisac Blanca Vazquez, all belonged to the Unified Socialist Youth (JSU) or PCE (Communist Party of Spain). Although they had not participated in the attack that killed Isaac Gabaldon, commander of the Civil Guard, they were charged with being involved and conspiring against the “social and legal order of the new Spain”.
The trial was held on August 3rd and 56 death sentences were issued, including the perpetrators of the attack. The Thirteen Roses went to their execution hoping to be reunited with their JSU comrades. In some cases it would have meant a boyfriend or husband but their hopes crumbled upon learning that the men had been shot already.
The brick wall clearly showed the bullet holes and the earth had been turned dark by blood. Some days, the death toll exceeded two hundred and machine guns were used to facilitate the work. Between 1939 and 1945, four thousand people were shot in the Eastern Cemetery, including Julián Zugazagoitia, Minister of the Interior with Juan Negrín and remarkable writer and socialist politician.
According to Maria Teresa Igual, prison officer and eyewitness, the Thirteen Roses died with fortitude. There were no screams or pleas. In an eerie half-silence, only the steps of the firing squad were heard, the sound of the guns striking the straps and the voice of the commanding officer. Lined up shoulder to shoulder, after the shooting all received the coup de grace, which was clearly heard in the Sales women’s prison. Apparently, one of the condemned (whether Anita or Blanca is not known), did not die immediately and had shouted, “Am I not to be killed?”
Antonia Torre Yela was spared execution by a typing error. In transcribing her name, the letters danced and became Antonio Torres Yera. The error only postponed death for Antonia, a member of the JSU and only 18. She was shot on February 19th, 1940, becoming the 14th Rose. In her farewell letter, Julia Conesa, nineteen and member of the JSU, wrote: “Let my name not be erased from history.” Her name and that of her comrades has not been forgotten, unlike those of their tormentors, who enjoyed impunity for 38 years of dictatorship and a shameful amnesty which only helped to deepen the hurt suffered by all victims of Francoism.
The PSOE (main social-democratic party — DB) tried to appropriate the Thirteen Roses, concealing that at the time of the executions the PSOE had split from the JSU to found the Socialist Youth of Spain (JSE), with the purpose of clearly distancing themselves from the Communist Party of Spain (PCE). In fact, the Law of Historical Memory of Zapatero’s government (the first PSOE government after Franco — DB) did not even consider overturning the dictatorship’s judicial verdicts. It should be remembered that nearly fifty men were also shot dead that sad August 5th, the “43 Carnations”. Franco showed the same ruthlessness to men and women.
A hell
Sales jail was a hell, with children, elderly and mothers with children huddled in hallways, stairs, patios and bathrooms. Manuela and Teresa Basanta Guerra were the first women executed against the walls of the Eastern Cemetery. They shot them on June 29th 1939 along with a hundred men. Some historians claim that other women preceded them but their names were not recorded in the cemetery’s files. Like others on death row, the Thirteen Roses could only write to their families after receiving confession. If they did not take confession, they gave up the opportunity to say goodbye to their loved ones.
Brisac Blanca was the eldest of the thirteen and active in no political organization. Catholic and one who voted for the Right, she nevertheless fell in love with a musician who belonged to the PCE, Enrique Garcia Mazas. They married and had a son. Both were arrested and sentenced to death in the same trial. In fact, Enrique was in Porlier prison and would be shot a few hours before her. Blanca wrote a letter to her son Enrique, asking him not to harbour ill-will towards those responsible for her death and to become a good and hardworking man.
In postwar Madrid there was vicious persecution and resentment of any citizen suspected of “joining the rebellion”, the technicality that was used to reverse the law, accusing supporters of the Second Republic of violating the law in force. Only the military, the clergy, the Falange and the Carlists could breathe easily. No one dared to walk around in workers’ overalls or wearing the traditional local bandanna (worn by men around the neck and by women as a kerchief around the head, it is still worn today at festival in Madrid — DB).
The city was a huge prison where “hunt the red” was taking place. The earlier militia-women aroused particular animosity. The Arriba newspaper edition of May 16th 1939, featured an article by José Vicente Puente in which his contempt does not mince words: “One of the greatest tortures of the hot and drunk Madrid were the militia-women parading openly in overalls, lank-haired, with sour voice and rifle ready to shoot down and end lives upon a whim to satiate her sadism. With their shameless gestures, the primitive and wild, dirty and dishevelled militiawomen had something of atavism, mental and educational. … …. They were ugly, low, knock-kneed, lacking the great treasure of an inner life, without the shelter of religion, within them femininity was all at once extinguished.”
In this climate of hatred and revenge, denunciations proliferated — they were the best means of demonstrating loyalty to the fascist Movement.
The interrogations …. copied Gestapo tortures
The interrogations in police stations copied Gestapo tortures: electric shock on the eyes and genitals, the “bathtub”, removing fingernails with pliers, mock executions. Women suffered especially because the torture was compounded by sexual abuse, castor oil and hair cut down to the scalp. In some cases they even shaved eyebrows to further depersonalize. Rapes were commonplace. The testimony of Antonia Garcia, sixteen, “Antoñita” is particularly chilling: “They wanted to put electric currents on my nipples but since I had no chest they just put them in my ears and burst my eardrums. I knew no more. When I came to I was in jail. I spent a month in madness”.
Among those responsible for the interrogations was General Gutierrez Mellado, hero of the Transition and Captain in the Information Service of the Military Police (CPIS ) during the toughest years following the war. He regularly attended executions, seeking last-minute confessions. On August 6th 1939 he pulled Cavada Sinesio Guisado, nicknamed “Pioneer”, military chief of the JSU after the war, out of the execution line. “Pioneer” had been lined up against the Eastern Cemetery wall and was awaiting the discharge of lead along with the rest of his comrades. Gutiérrez Mellado stepped forward and ordered his release. He forced him to witness the executions and asked for more information about PCE clandestine activity. Although he was cooperative and diligent, he was shot in the end on September 15th. Some claim that Gutierrez Mellado witnessed the execution of the Thirteen Roses but I was not able to verify the data.
The women’s prison in Sales was run by Carmen Castro. Her inflexibility and lack of humanity found expression in the conditions of life of the children in prison with their mothers. No soap or hygienic facilities — almost all had ringworm, lice and scabies. Many died and were placed in a room where the rats were trying to devour the remains. Adelaida Abarca, JSU activist, said the bodies were only skin and bones, almost skeletons, for hunger had consumed them slowly. Another prisoner said: “The situation of the children was maddening. They were also dying and dying with dreadful suffering. Their glances, their sunken eyes, their continuous moans and stench are branded on my memory.” (Testimony given to Giuliana Di Febo in Resistance and the Women’s Movement in Spain [1936-1976] , Barcelona 1979).
The prisoners lived within the shadow of the “pit”, the death penalty. Since the execution of the Basanta Guerra sisters, they knew that the regime would have no mercy on women. On the morning when the Thirteen Roses were shot, Virtudes Gonzalez ‘s mother was at the jail doorway. When she saw her daughter climbing into the truck that was carrying prisoners to the cemetery walls, she began shouting: “Bastards ! Murderers ! Leave my daughter alone!” She chased the truck and fell. Alerted by the commotion, the Sales jail officers went outside and picked her off the ground, taking her into the prison. She was kept inside as yet another prisoner.
“If I had been sixteen they would have shot me too”
No less dramatic were Enrique’s repeated attempts to find out the whereabouts of his parents, Blanca and Enrique Garcia Brisac Mazas. In an interview with journalist Carlos Fonseca , author of the historical essay Thirteen Red Roses ( Madrid, 2005 ), Enrique gave his bitter account: “I was eleven years old when they shot my parents and my relatives tried to conceal it. They said they had been transferred to another prison and therefore we could not go to see them, until one day I decided to go to Salesas and there a Civil Guard Brigadier told me they had been shot and that if I had been sixteen they would have shot me too, because weeds had to be pulled up by the roots.
My grandmother and my aunts, my mother’s sisters, who had fallen out with my mother, ended up telling me that if Franco had killed my parents it would be because they were criminals. They even concealed my mother’s farewell letter for nearly twenty years.”
I will not end this article by invoking reconciliation, because the Transition was not based on repairing the pain of the victims, but rather on the acquittal of the executioners. In fact, the reform of the criminal dictatorship was designed by those as low as Manuel Fraga, Rodolfo Martín Villa and José María de Areilza. Martín Villa concealed and destroyed documents to bury the crimes of Francoism and the dirty war he organized against anarchist and pro-independence activists of the Basque, Catalan and Canaries areas, from his post as Minister of the Interior between 1976 and 1979. Among his achievements one should list the Scala case (an attack that killed four workers, which was blamed on the CNT), the attempted assassination of Canaries independence leader Antonio Cubillo, the machine-gunning of Juan Jose Etxabe, historic leader of ETA and his wife Rosario Arregui (who died from eleven bullet wounds), also the murder of José Miguel Beñaran Ordeñana, “Argala”.
The impunity of the perpetrators
He is now a successful businessman, who gets excited talking about his role in the Transition. He lives quietly and no one has called for his prosecution. His example is an eloquent one of the impunity of the perpetrators, who continue to write the narrative while demonizing those who dared to stand against the miseries of the dictatorship and false democratic normalization.
No justice has been done. So it is absurd to talk of reconciliation, because nobody has apologized and repaired the damage. Franco committed genocide but today Manuel Gonzalez Capón, Mayor of Baralla (Lugo), of the Partido Popular (the main right-wing party), dares to declare that “those who were sentenced to death by Franco deserved it.” The Biographical Dictionary of the Royal Academy of History, funded with nearly seven billion euros of public funds, says Franco “set up an authoritarian but not totalitarian regime”, although in his speech in Vitoria/ Gastheiz, Franco himself said that “a totalitarian state in Spain harmonises the functioning of all abilities and energies of the country …”. The current scenario is not a reconciliation but instead is a humiliation of the victims and society, obscenely manipulated by a media (ABC, El País , El Mundo, La Razón), playing a similar role to newspapers of the dictatorship (ABC, Arriba, Ya, Pueblo, Informaciones, El Alcázar), covering up and justifying torture cases and applauding antisocial measures that continue reducing working class rights.
Let us not remember the Thirteen Roses as passive and submissive but instead for their courage and determination. With the exception of Blanca, trapped by circumstances, all chose to fight for the socialist revolution and the liberation of women. I think that if they were able to speak out today, they would not talk of indignation and peaceful disobedience, but would ask for a rifle to stand in the vanguard of a new anti-fascist front, able to stop the crimes of neo-liberalism. Let us not betray their example, forgetting their revolutionary status, they who sacrificed their lives for another world, one less unjust and unequal.
Postscript
Just as the Civil War stirs Spain’s historical memory, so the spectre of the Paris Commune of 1870 haunts still the French soul. One can walk through the centre of modern Paris from the Louvre to the celebrated Père Lachaise cemetary Père Lachaise retracing the steps of defeated communardes as retreated to to last stand among the tombstones. It was there, in front of laMurdes Fédérés that the bloodied and ragged survivors were lined up and shot.
The beautiful church of Sacre Coeur was built as a penance for, and a solemn reminder of the bloodletting of what is aptly called la semaine sanglante – in much the same way as Justinian raised the glorious Hagia Sophia in Constantinople as a form of contrition after the Nika Riots when his soldiers slaughtered tens of thousands of his rebellious citizens and buried their bodies under the Hippodrome.
80 years ago today in 1939, as the world waited with bated breathon Hitler’s next move in Central Europe, in Spain, with the help of allies within the city, Madrid fell to the Nationalist forces of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. The next day, beleaguered Valencia would also fall and a few days after that victory was proclaimed as Franco placed his sword to rest upon the altar of a church declaring not to raise the blade again until Spain was imperiled. The Spanish Civil War that had claimed hundreds of thousands of lives was thus at an end, and the reign of the Caudillo had begun in earnest that was to last until his death in 1975.
Born in 1892 in Galicia, Franco belonged to a devoutly Catholic upper class family with a long tradition of serving in the Spanish navy. Unable to follow in the footsteps of his forefathers, Franco had chosen the army instead at the age of 14 and conducted himself with disciplined excellence from the outset, swiftly gaining a reputation as a highly professional and trusted leader of fighting men at a time when the Royal Spanish army was characterized by a general sloppiness and lack of discipline. A severe and austere man who placed his faith in tradition, Catholicism, and the monarchy, Franco had risen up through the ranks as the youngest officer in the army in Spain’s colonial wars in Morocco as an example to them all. When the Spanish monarchy was abolished in 1931 Franco was disgusted, not least because shortly afterwards the new republic laid him off and placed him on the inactive list. Franco accepted his fate like a soldier and patiently waited until a conservative government came to power and he was called back to service, jumping back into military life with alacrity as Spain’s political system steadily disintegrated. By 1936 however he could stand by no longer and watch his country fall apart, after much hesitation he joined with his fellow officers and rebelled against the Republic, marching an army into Spain from North Africa and starting the long and bloody struggle against the Republicans supported by the USSR and the International Brigades whilst Franco received aid from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. With the death of all the other major military leaders by late 1936, Franco was chosen as the man to lead the Nationalists to victory and as the war drew to a close his government was recognised by the British and French governments.
Despite popular depictions of him as a Fascist dictator akin to Hitler and Mussolini, Franco in truth had little time for Fascism. While he certainly presided over a one-party state, unlike in Italy and Germany, the party firstly was not on a par with the state and secondly only a component of it, the Phalange, were Fascists, the rest were Carlist monarchists, traditionalists and conservatives. As a committed Catholic and monarchist, Franco had no time for the esotericism and mysticism of National Socialism and Fascism. While Hitler and Mussolini both had experience of war along with much of their inner circle, they were not of the upper officer echelons as Franco was. He was a military dictator, not a messianic god-like figure of a mass movement. The characterization of his regime as totalitarian is also problematic too since totalitarian would imply that he ruled through terror, annihilating segments of the population beyond those who were openly opposed to his regime. Tens of thousands did indeed perish under his regime with summary executions in the White Terror that followed his Civil War victory coupled with the brutal campaigns against sporadic rebellions and expressions of dissent in subsequent years, however he did not go beyond crushing those he did not need to to stay in power, he did not seek out a helpless ‘objective enemy’ that was to be continuously exterminated as was the case in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. His interest was not a radical reshaping of the world but as might be expected of a man of his background and career, order, stability, and a restoration of traditional norms.
That all being said he was undoubtedly predisposed towards the Axis powers due to his hatred of Communism and no doubt a certain degree of debt he owed to them after their help in the Civil War. Despite his country having gone through three hellish years of war he was more than eager to join the Axis after the Fall of France in 1940. He envisioned the formation of a Latin Bloc to dominate the Mediterranean consisting of Spain, Italy, the Vatican, Vichy France, and Portugal. That year he met Hitler in Hendaye to discuss this possibility. At this meeting between the Caudillo and the Führer, Franco laid down his conditions: he wanted food, fuel and supplies for his country in the event of an Allied naval blockade, in expectation of Britain’s defeat he wanted Gibraltar along with French Morocco, a portion of Algeria and the colony of Cameroon. This proved too high a price to pay, the demand on Cameroon was especially jarring to Hitler since this had been a German colony prior to 1919. Mussolini moreover had his eye on Algeria. In the end the three dictators could not reconcile themselves to one another and Spain remained neutral though volunteers were sent to aid the Axis against the USSR in the form of the Blue Division. Franco likewise refused any prospect of the Wehrmacht being allowed to march through Spain to take Gibraltar themselves, a move which had it been made could have crippled the British position in the Mediterranean and altered the course of the war completely. Spain remained independent, remaining friendly with the Axis but not so much as to be roped into their ungodly self-destruction. During the war he was credited by having given sanctuary to tens of thousands of Jews fleeing the Nazi Empire.
Spain found itself isolated in the immediate aftermath of the war and was excluded from the Marshall Plan. With the mounting tensions of the Cold War however the Western powers slowly started to align themselves with the conservative anti-communist military dictator. In 1953 President Eisenhower visited the country and concluded the Pact of Madrid which brought Spain out of isolation and eventually led to the country joining NATO. Many of the old guard in charge of the economy were replaced by technocrats who brought in a free market economy. By the 1960s economic growth rocketed upwards, resulting in the Spanish Miracle, giving rise to a new middle class. The colonial empire moreover which Franco had so passionately fought for in the past was steadily let go of with both Morocco and Equatorial Guinea let go of by the end of the 1960s. Behind this economic prosperity however the regime remained as traditional as ever, with strict Catholic morality on abortion, divorce, homosexuality and prostitution holding sway in both law and society. Women were confined to the home and had practically no rights, their financial affairs managed by their fathers and husbands. Any languages or traditions not considered Spanish enough were systemically suppressed. When university students protested in the 1960s and the 1970s against the regime, Franco resorted to his old ways and crushed them.
The Caudillo was an old man now though and by the early 1970s he recognised that death was moving upon him. Before death could claim him he decided to restore the monarchy – even though the country had always officially been a monarchy since he had taken power. Though he initially offered the throne to Otto von Habsburg, the last Crown Prince of Austria-Hungary, in a bid to restore Spain to her Habsburg Golden Age and to avoid another Carlist War of succession. In the end however he gave it to the Carlist pretender, Juan Carlos of the House of Bourbon. Franco died in late 1975. His regime was swiftly converted to a democracy with the help of the new king.l
Out came the thick thick blood, out came the thin Out came the bonny heart’s blood till there was none within She threw him in the old draw well fifty fathoms deep
Little Sir Hugh
On a visit to Lincoln Cathedral a few years back, we chanced upon a small memorial in the South Choir Aisle commemorating the long-dead ‘Little Saint Hugh’, the subject, I recalled, of a gothic folk-song resuscitated during the British folk revival and popularized by Steeleye Span back in the seventies. Little Sir Hugh, a tale of the death of a young lad at the hands of a mysterious lady, had been shorn of its true context – a fabricated ‘blood libel’ that led to the trial and execution of nineteen Lincoln Jews. It is believed that high churchmen exploited the incident to lure a profitable flow of pilgrims to the shrine of a martyr and saint. The mystery surrounding the boy’s demise was the first time that the English Crown gave credence to ritual child murder allegations with the direct intervention of Henry III. As a consequence, unlike other English blood libels – and there were many – the story entered the historical record, medieval literature and popular ballads that circulated until the twentieth century as the folk-rock song demonstrated. Read more here. See also below, in the last segment of this blog.
That northern summer, we’d spent a month in the historic northern city of York where we visited Clifford’s Tower, the remnant of a thirteenth century castle on the old city walls, and the site of a medieval pogrom. The English Heritage sign at the gate recalls how in 1190, 150 Jewish men, women and children fled thence to escape townspeople’s wrath, and when the latter had set the tower alight, chose to do a Masada rather than surrender to the bloodthirsty mob (the Masada analogy is my own – the iconic Jewish narrative was unknown in the twelfth century). The tourist spiel, reluctant to disturb the squeamish, does not call it out as murder – but the stone walls do, as does the city’s historical narrative: English Heritage; History of York.
In November 2019, the Times Of Israel reported on how after over eight hundred years, a Jewish community has re-established itself in York – it was as if there existed an unspoken herem or boycott on the city on account of what our indigenous people here in Australia would call “sorry business”. The article includes a good account of the deadly pogrom.
In the words of Taylor Swift, history often comes in flashbacks and echoes: an intriguing BBC programme called History Cold Case reveals how seventeen bodies of men, women and children had been discovered at the bottom of a well in Norwich. The findings of the forensic anthropologists were both tragic and terrifying.
Mother mother make my bed Make for me a winding sheet Wrap me up in a cloak of gold See if I can sleep
Little Sir Hugh
The devil that never dies
England has long had an ambivalent, discriminatory, and often deadly relationship with its Jewish people, from medieval days to the present, as illustration, there is an arguably apocryphal story of how in 1290, when Edward 1 ordered the expulsion of all Jews from England, a sea captain taking a boatload of Jews to France, asked them to walk with him on the sand whilst the tide was out. He deliberately deserted them, swiped their stuff, and scarpered back to his ship before the tide came in, leaving them to a watery fate.
Oliver Cromwell allowed Jews to return to England in 1657; the Lord Protector saw no difference between Judaism and any other faith of ‘the Book’. But it took another two hundred years for male Jews in Britain to be granted equal civil rights, including the right to enter Oxford and Cambridge Universities, to join the public service, run for municipal office, and eventually, to stand for parliament. Just as catholics had to wait some three hundred years for emancipation, for jews, it was indeed a slow train coming …
But even thereafter, the living wasn’t easy. In the Nineteen Thirties, there were running battles as Oswald Mosley’s Nazi-styled Blackshirts marched through the Jewish neighbourhoods of East London. During the hot, austerity-pinched summer of 1947, there anti-Jewish riots throughout England following the hanging of two British sergeants in Palestine by the Jewish terrorist Irgun in response to the hanging of three of its members by the British Mandate authorities. Manchester witnessed its own mini-Kristalnacht. Ironically, one of the sergeants was Jewish.
I recall walking through London’s cosmopolitan Notting Hill with an Israeli friend in the summer of 1976. There were big swastikas daubed on a wall. “That is why we have Israel”, Miri said. A few weeks later, these very streets became a war zone as racial tensions escalated into violence as the August Bank Holiday Notting Hill Carnival gave way to running street battles.
Today, the British Labour Party is tying itself in literal and figurative Gordian knots with accusations and counter-accusations of antisemitism (whilst the US Democratic Party is likewise tossing and turning over the badly thought-through, naive comments of an ingenue congresswomen). Meanwhile, the transparent xenophobes and antisemites of the alt- and ofttimes mainstream right hide in plain sight in the corridors of power and preen on streets and social media.
It has been said, with reason, that antisemitism is the devil that never dies. And yet, is antisemitism a unique and distinct form of racism, or a subset of a wider fear and loathing insofar as people who dislike Jews rarely dislike only Jews?
Fear of “the other” is a default position of our species wherein preconceptions, prejudice and politics intertwine – often side by side with ignorance and opportunism. it is no coincidence that what is regarded as a dangerous rise in antisemitism in Europe, among the extreme left as much as the extreme right, is being accompanied by an increase in Islamophobia, in racism against Roma people, and indeed, in prejudice in general, with an increase in hate-speech and incitement in the media and online, and hate-crimes.
We are seeing once again the rise of nationalism and populism, of isolationism and protectionism, of atavistic nativism and tribalism, of demagogic leaders, and of political movements wherein supporting your own kind supplants notions of equality and tolerance, and the acceptance of difference – the keystones of multicultural societies. It is as if people atomized, marginalized and disenfranchised by globalization, left behind by technological, social and cultural change, and marginalized by widening economic inequality, are, paradoxically, empowered, energized, and mobilized by social media echo-chambers, opportunistic politicians, and charismatic charlatans who assure them that payback time is at hand. These days, people want to build walls instead of bridges to hold back the perceived barbarians at the gates.
Lately, I have been working my way through British historian Peter Ackroyd’s six-volume History of England. I’ve enjoyed a re-acquaintance with half-remembered names and places, moments and movements from long-gone school and university history classes. Given his arduous brief – he’d resolved to recount the story of England from its birth in the Neolithic Age to the dawn of the Twentieth Century -it is relatively lightweight but informative, family friendly with the nasty and naughty bits toned down, and inspirational precedents and premises accentuated to illustrate evolution and progress, whether it be of language or lifestyle,ideologies or institutions. He wears his liberal heart prominently on his sleeve, whether it is in describing the casual cruelty of the slave trade or the plight of children in the “dark satanic mills” of the industrial revolution. A recurring leitmotif is England’s unique and intractable Irish Question, and particularly its responsibility for and response to An Gorta Mór, ‘The Great Hunger’. An he confronts England’s medieval Jewish Question head on, describing a not so happy and glorious period in its history.
When this article was posted on Facebook, it elicited the following comment. The questions raised will most certainly be checked out and appropriate changes will be made.
“A slightly problematic piece (though I’d had no idea that Peter Ackroyd had read Robert Stacey’s work so carefully). It’s worth noting, however, that the story of how the captain forced the Jews to walk on the sand is anything but apocryphal – said captain spent two years in a Sandwich gaol on Edward I’s explicit order as a result (and probably died at the end of that period). There were to many holes in the Norwich documentary for it to be taken seriously. And, as with the other ritual murder ‘saints’, Little St. Hugh was never a popular attraction – that accolade goes to St. Hugh of Avalon in the case of Lincoln. The small one was, at best a distraction and it’s clear that the Chapter tried to avoid him as much as possible”.
The Hammer
Peter Ackroyd, Foundation – The History Of England Volume 1, Chapter 20
King Edward 1 was known as ‘the hammer of the Scots’ but he could more pertinently be known as the hammer of die Jews. He exploited them and harassed them; finally he expelled them. Their crime was to become superfluous to his requirements. The history of the ]ews in medieval England is an unhappy and even bloody one. They had arrivedfrom Rouen, in the last decades of the eleventh century; they were first only settled in London across a broad band of nine parishes but in the course of the next few decades they also removed to York, Winchester, Bristol and other market towns. The previous rulers of England, in the ninth and tenth centuries, had not welcomed them; Jewish merchants would have provided too much competition for Anglo-Saxon traders.
William the Conqueror brought them to England because he had found that in Normandy they had been good for business; in particular they provided access to the silver of the Rhineland. The Jews of Rouen may also have helped to finance his invasion of England, in return for the chance to work in a country from which they had previously been barred. Another reason can be given for the favour they found with the king. Since Christians were not allowed to lend money at interest, some other group of merchants had to be created. The Jews became moneylenders by default, as it were, and as a result they were abused and despised in equal measure. But they did not only lend money; they were also money-changers and goldsmiths. money; they also exchanged plate for coin. They provided ready money, a commodity often in short supply.
The Norman kings of England, therefore, found them to be very useful. They could borrow from them but, more profitably, they could tax them. They could levy what what were known as ‘tallages’, and succeeding kings were able to take between a third and a quarter of the Jews’ total wealth at any one time. As a result the Jews, in the twelfth centurywere afforded royal protection. No Jew was allowed to become a citizen, or to hold land, but the neighbourhood of the Jewry was
like the royal forests exempt from common law; the Jews were simply the kings chattels, who owed life and property wholly to him. They were granted the protection of the royal courts, and thier binds were placed in a special chamber of the royal palace at . Westminster. A Jewish exchequer was established there, with its own clerks and justices.
In return for royal favour the Jews brought energy and prosperity to the business of the realm; their loans helped to make possible the great feats of Norman architecture, and the unique stone houses of Lincoln and Bury St Edmunds are credited to them. Jacob le Toruk had a grand stone house in Cannon Street, in the London parish of St Nicholas Acon. The Jews also introduced the more advanced forms of medical learning, and were able to serve as doctors even to the native community. Roger Bacon himself studied under rabbis at Oxford.
More dubious legal tactics were also enforced. William Rufus decreed, for example, that Jews could not be converted to Christianity; he did not want their number to fall. That may not have If) been a very Christian act but William Rufus was never a very good Christian. He supported the Jews partly because it offended the bishops; he enjoyed causing affront to his churchmen.
That royal protection did not necessarily extend very far. At the time of the coronation of Richard I in 1189, some Jews were beaten back from the front row of spectators; the crowd turned on them, and a riotous assault began upon the London quarters of fresh outrages as the of Jewry. The incident became the cause of fresh outrages as the news of the attack spread; it emboldened native hostility, and gave an excuse for further carnage. 500 Jews, with their families, took refuge in in thecastle at York where they were n besieged by the citizens; in desperation, the men killed their wives and children before killing themselves.
Richard 1 was even then malting preparations for his crusade to the Holy Land; violence and religious bigotry were in in the air. His successor, John, renewed his protection in exchange for large sums of money. In 1201 a formal charter was drawn up, giving the Jews their own court. They were allowed to live ‘freely and honorably’ in England, which meant that they were here to make money for the king. Nine years later John took overall the debts of the Jews, living or dead, and tried to extract the money from the debtors for his own benefit. It was another reason for the barons’ revolt that led to the sealing of the Magna Carta.
Antisemitism was part of the Christian condition throughout Europe. The Jewish people were abused for being the ‘killers of Christ’, with convenient forgetfulness of the fact that Jesus himself was Jew, but other more material reasons account d for the racial hatred. By the middle of the twelfth century, several prominent Jewish moneylenders had extended very large loans to some of the noblest men in the kingdom; men like th famous Aaron of Lincoln were the only ones with resources large enough to meet the obligations of the magnates. If they could be attacked or killed, and their bonds destroyed, then the great ones of the land would benefit. The myth that they were engaged in the ‘ritual murder of Christian infants became common at times of financial crisis when the populace could be incited to take sanguinary vengeance. It is a matter of historical record that England took the lead in the execration of the Jews.
The first rumour of a ritual crucifixion emerged In 1144, with the story of the death of William of Norwich, and thereafter the tales of ritual murder spread through Europe. England was also the first country to condemn all Jews as criminal ‘coin-clippers’, and the iconography of antisemitism is to be found n the west front of Lincoln Cathedral.
In 1239, during the reign of Henry III, a great census of the Jews and their debts was carried out. The representatives of all the Jews in England were then obliged to convene at Worcester and agree to pay over 20,000 marks to the king’s treasury. This measure effectively bankrupted some of them, which meant that their usefulness had come to an end. Fourteen years later, Henry III ordained a Statute of Jewry that enforced a number of disciplinary measures including the compulsory badge of identification, This was or tabula of yellow felt 3 by 6 inches (7.5 by 15 cm) to be worn on an outer garment. it was to be carriedby every Jew over the age of seven years. Two years later Henry investigated the death of a boy, Hugh, in Lincoln; he believed or professed to believe that this was a crime of ritual murder and as a result, 19 Jews from the city were executed and 100 dispatched to prison in the castle.
Edward I was even more ferocious. He ordered that certain Jews, who had been acquitted of the charge of ritual murder, be retried. In November 1278, 600 Jews were imprisoned in the Tower of London on charges of tampering with the currency. 269 of them were hanged six months later. In 1290 he expelled all of the remaining Jews from his kingdom; they were now approximately2,000. He did not take this step out of misplaced religious zeal; it was the measure demanded by the parliament house before they would agree to fresh taxation. In fact the expulsion was seen
by many chroniclers as one of the most important and enlightened acts of his reign. The antisemitism of the medieval English people is clear enough. Some have argued that in subtly modified forms it has continued to this day.
A unique form of religious persecution, the ‘Blood Libel’ or ‘ritual child murder allegation’, arose in England for the first time in Norwich in the 12th century when the body of a boy was found in the depths of Thorpe Woods outside of the city. Periodically, Medieval English Jews were falsely accused of ‘ritual child murder’ by local Christians. It was usually claimed they tortured and killed little Christian boys in a mockery of Christ’s crucifixion, and that they used their blood for magical purposes. The idea of Jews attacking children for blood may have been partly derived and adapted from East Anglian rural folklore, where evil fairies, called ‘Pharisees’, lived underground and sucked the blood of children. The children were probably the victims of accidents or lawless violence, while the accusers’ motives are now generally accepted to have been for financial, political, or religious gain. It set a pattern for future persecution.
In Lincoln, in 1255, ‘Little Hugh’ was found dead near the Lincoln Jewry. The Jews were accused of ritual child murder, not by popular hue and cry, but five weeks later at the instigation of John of Lexington, the brother of Bishop Robert Lexington (1254-58). He had traveled from the North, with the deeply impoverished King, who was desperately raising funds to pay to the Pope for his son Edmund to be crowned King of Sicily, partly by pardoning murderers for cash. Henry III was under threat of excommunication if he did not pay the money to the Pope. Lexington supported by the King secured a forced confession from Copin the Jew, who was then killed despite having been promised a pardon for his confession. In consequence 91 Jews were imprisoned in the Tower of London. Eighteen were summarily executed by the King, for the temerity of requesting a trial by Jury and not trusting the mercy of the King. The rest (including a convert to Judaism called John) were eventually released due to the intervention of the Friars. The boy was then venerated as a local saint (but never canonized) after a miracle was claimed, and he was enshrined in the Cathedral until the Reformation. There is little evidence that the shrine was popular and some doubt that there was ever a proper cult of Hugh. The King was clearly the prime mover in the Blood Libel, aided and abetted by John of Lexington and probably also by the Papal Nuncio. He took the lead in choreographing the rapid events over several days in Lincoln, leading to the confession and condemnation of the Jews. He was the main financial beneficiary. The Papal Nuncio, Rostand Masson, was apparently present with the King throughout the events as part of his retinue. Seven days afterwards he declared Henry’s son, King of Sicily. Therefore it seems that the Jews of Lincoln were sacrificed for the King’s Sicilian business. The motives of the Bishop and the Cathedral cannot be accurately determined, though they played their role in supporting and not resisting the drama. Joe Hillaby asserts that John of Lexington’s actions were extraordinarily timely and fortuitous in assisting his brother the Bishop in his task to magnify the existing cult of Hugh of Avalon and the task of building the Angel Choir, as well as establishing the new cult of the ‘Little Hugh’.
The boy martyr was later celebrated in numerous ballads and songs as well as in Chaucer’s ‘Prioress’s Tale’ (Canterbury Tales). The gruesome lyrics of the ‘Ballad of Little Sir Hugh’ (but usually without mention of any explicit Jewish identity of the alleged perpetrators) are still performed today in folk music circles, frequently without any explanation or apology. As such, ‘Blood Libels’ became one of the most pernicious and enduring of all anti-Semitic fabrications, spreading through Europe and beyond, even up to the present day.
During the 1290s, soon after the general expulsion of the Jews from England by Edward I, the remains of Little Hugh were translated to a new shrine intruded into the South Choir Aisle Screen, but there is little evidence that the cult was ever a success. The architectural evidence (as interpreted by Stocker and Hillaby) suggests that Edward I had a significant role in its construction. Two out of four original coats of arms on the shrine were Edward’s, and we know that he made a gift to the shrine in 1299 / 1300. The style of the shrine seems to be modelled on the architectural tabernacles for the statues on the original 12 Queen Eleanor crosses, erected by Edward I on the path and resting places of his wife’s body, on its way to London from Lincoln, rather than upon usual sepulchral design. It seems entirely likely that the shrine was intended to be linked to the visceral tomb of Queen Eleanor, at the end of the same aisle in the Cathedral. Hillaby asserts that the shrine may have also been intended as a symbol and a piece of royal propaganda, to deflect hostility from Edward and his wife who trafficked in Jewish debts, and to build on the gratitude of the nation in his subsequent action as ‘defender’ of Christianity in expelling the Jews in 1290.
The original plinth and raised back panel of the shrine of the c. 1290s still survive. There are also two broken stumps of the former canopy at the back that made what would have been part of a panel at the side of a small side arch forming the upper structure of the shrine. There are still visible traces of rich green and blue pigment used to decorate parts of the shrine. At the end of the 19th century it was said that there were remnants of gilding as well.
The pierced base of the shrine has gone, along with its ornate canopy, with tall side pinnacles, niches, and the decorative finial with a niche illustrated in Dugdale’s drawing. These were all removed in the Civil War. It seems that there was also a figure of Little Hugh in the shrine. Overall the shrine was a tall monument, reaching at least up to the top of the choir wall, if not higher.
In 1736 the painted, freestone figure of a little boy, about 20 inches high, still existed and was recorded by an antiquarian, Smart Lethieullier. It was by tradition part of the original shrine. The figure was supposed to bear the marks of crucifixion. The head had by that time been broken off and it had been removed from the shrine and was in ‘a by-place just behind the High Altar, where we found it covered with dust and obscurity’.
In 1791, the tomb was opened, when the Cathedral paving was renewed. The remains of Little Hugh were found in a stone coffin just below the paving and seen for the first time since the Middle Ages. The boy was apparently four feet and two inches tall and was thought to have a rather long thin face. No doubt modern forensic work, if available, would have been able to say something about the circumstances of his death. The skeleton provided a refutation of one allegation, as his teeth had not been smashed, as alleged in the blood libel stories.
A careful examination of the surroundings of the shrine shows other significant features. The former upper superstructure of the shrine was skillfully and well integrated into the screen wall of the choir and looks as if it had been carefully planned and positioned so as to be a focus of the aisle in which it stands, even though it was not part of the original design. An impression is gained that the canopy may have been rested, afterwards, above, and onto, an existing tomb, which was itself much more crudely inserted into the Choir wall. It rested on and above the base and back of the tomb (the surviving elements) and was structurally separate, and not built in one piece, which is why the dismantling of the canopy at the Reformation did not destroy the tomb beneath.
The evidence suggests that an original tomb of Little Hugh was significantly embellished to become a major feature of the south side of the Cathedral and in its day represented not only the cult of Little Hugh, but garnered a royal meaning and patronage as well and was quite imposing in its improved state after 1290.
The Cathedral for many years placed a notice by the shrine of Little Hugh to explain its meaning, but it is easy for the casual visitor to completely miss the remains. The notice has its own history and has evolved over the years. Before 1959, a notice largely repeated the traditional libel. But in 1959, it was replaced by the then Dean, the Rev D.C. Dunlop, who was reported by the Daily Telegraph as saying that the Chapter did not wish, ‘to see things that are not true up on the walls of the Cathedral’ and that a new notice would correct the record. This new notice, cancelling the libel, remained in place for a good many years, but recently has been further revised and then improved again, most recently through a collaboration project between the Cathedral and the Jewish community.
Between July 2008 and September 2009, the notice was entirely re-written in an interfaith collaboration, by Professor Brian Winston (for the Lincoln Jewish Community), Carol Bennett (for the Cathedral) and Marcus Roberts (JTrails) as part of the Trails Jewish heritage project in Lincoln, working in the first instance with the Lincoln Jewish Community. The American academic Elisa van Court had criticised the wording of the existing signage in 1997 and again in a publication in 2006. The new plaque refers to ‘Little Hugh’ without referring to him as ‘Saint’ since he was never officially recognised as such by Rome. Calling him a ‘saint’ confers false credibility for the blood libel in Lincoln. The new signage also draws notice to the terrible consequences for the medieval Jewish community (the most notable omission in the original signage as high-lighted by van Court) and the contemporary relevance of the shrine. The new notice is the result of excellent interfaith relations between the communities and a desire to show the real significance of the Lincoln Blood Libel today.
Well we know where we’re going But we don’t know where we’ve been And we know what we’re knowing But we can’t say what we’ve seen And we’re not little children And we know what we want And the future is certain Give us time to work it out
The Talking Heads
To borrow from Boz, these were the worst of times, these were the strangest of times. So disillusioned were we with our politics and our politicians, so dispirited by the sad state of the plant, so fissured and fractured as a society, with our intractable culture wars, we retreated into own private Idahos, pulled up the drawbridge and settled in with our iPads and iPhones and our Foxtel with the vino collapso and watched all the fun of the fair.
The mellifluous but perennially entertaining Donald Trump had a bad year, and a resolute Theresa May likewise. Confounding critics, she endeavours to persevere as she steers her foundering shipm of State towards Brexit and China’s Uighur Muslims. Barbaric Da’ish had a bad year (which was rather a good thing) , as did the unfortunate Rohinga of Myanmar, and the long-suffering people of Gaza.. Resilient Bashar Assad had a good year, with a little help from his Russian, Iranian and Hezbollah friends, but the wars of the Ottoman succession grind on. Vladimir Putin and the fat conductor Kim Jong Un had an excellent year, courtesy of POTUS. Angela Merkel lost her sparkle but royal Markle sparkled, and the luminous Taylor Swift, all legs and lipstick, emerged from her apolitical closet to swing the vote against the Donald in the US midterms. Her trim gluteus maximus starredin a court case that typified a year that saw women stand up strongly against years of aberrant male behaviour.
The Australian parliament devolved into a circus of tantrums and turncoats as the Liberal and National coalition devoured its own in a year book-ended by smutty sexual scandals, whilst canny Labor kept its powder dry for what bodes to be an whopping electoral victory in 2019. We wished that our rulers and representatives would stop behaving like children and start running the country and governing it for all of us.and then the children walked out of school en mass and told us that when they grew up they’d do a better job. The circus clowns huffed and puffed and denigrated the young ones – which only served to embarrass them more for their paucity of vision and partisan division.
And so, to the year in review:
During what was to many observers a dispiriting year of division and destruction, In That Howling Infinite maintained its watch with an eclectic mix of commentary, commemoration, culture and comedy. It was a big year – some forty posts in all. So many indeed that decided to reposted my favourite top five – those that I most enjoyed writing – on In That Howling Infinite’s Facebook page. See these at the conclusion of this review.
In a December post, Free Speech, One Each, we expressed disappointment with the ignorance, naivety, and self-absorption of electorates, left and right: their lack of historical knowledge and of curiosity, an unhealthy and self-defeating habit of accepting facts, narratives and theories based upon their preconceptions and prejudices. Nowadays, it often seems as if the reasonable middle has been excised from political discourse, drained out by the shrill voices of the extremes with their identity politics, virtue signalling, and vested interests. Social media has exacerbated the situation as folk lock themselves into their own echo chambers, listening only to those with whom they agree, ignoring or even avoiding contrary opinions and perspectives. It is a self-defeating, delusional, zero-sum form of groupthink that erodes trust and goodwill and prevents the development of consensus and cooperation. Meanwhile, opportunistic politicians and commentators build their constituencies by appealing to the particularistic, even atavistic wants and fears of their followers. Too often this reduces things down to atavistic lowest common denominators. They literally seize the low moral ground. Peoples problems and fears are real enough, and do need to be solved or allayed, but too often they are gulled, manipulated and recruited by modern-day snake-oil salesmen and show-tent shysters.
It was with this in mind that we caste a weary and cynical eye over Australian politics and society, particularly the ongoing history and culture wars, beginning in January with the self-explanatory We’ve Got The Australia Day Blues , and continuing with Conservatism in Crisis, Milo Downunder, an alt-right love story, and the ongoing angst about the Ramsay Centre and its proposed university course on western civilization. Never in recent memory have so many words been printed about so little – at least not until the right’s last holy war. And so, there is The long, dark teatime of The Australian’s soul and its sequel The Oz’s lonely crusade. By year’s end, both sides appear to have run out of puff and the course will most likely end up in small regional campuses rather than the prestigious halls of Sydney and Melbourne.
Southern Discomfort.
The year’s leitmotif was the ongoing fiftieth anniversary of 1968, a tumultuous year for the world, and a formative one for myself personally. Stories of the events of that year are interspersed my own recollections – what I was doing at at the time, and what was going through my youthful head. In Encounters with Enoch, I revisit English politician Enoch Powell’s controversial ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. Then it’s Springtime in Parisas I recall les Évènements de Mai. And thence to Prague and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia with Tanks for the memory – how Brezhnev changed my life. Finally, there was the year in review with Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold – 1968 revisited.
2018 was also the centenary of the armistice that ended The Great War. November 1918 – the counterfeit peace discussed how for many countries and peoples in Europe and beyond, the conflict and the bloodshed continued. We also shared a poignant, fitting tribute by Gerry Condon to all the “doomed youth” of all wars withDulce et ducorem est – the death of war poet Wilfred Owen
There were other anniversaries. The Wild Wood and the Wide World revisited Kenneth Grahame’s riverbank pastorale The Wind in the Willows 110 years after it’s publication. Ghosts of the Gulag, which followed on from an earlier discussion of film The Death ofStalin released earlier in the year, looked at the contribution of Alexander Solzhenitsyn on the fiftieth anniversary of The Gulag Archipelago. The Russian theme continued with Whoar! And Peace – a light look at the BBC’s recent racey adaptation of Tolstoy’s celebrated house-brick.
As always, the politics and people of the Middle East feature prominently in In That Howling Infinite. January kicked off with Ahed Tamimi – A Family Affair, a discussion about the young Palestinian activist and the first family of the resistance. Out of season, we visited the birthplace of the Christ child with O Little Town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie and tell the story of a border town that has existed since the beginning of recorded history. We considered whether an Israeli-Palestinian confederation was possible, and republished Israel author David Grossman’s A Fortess But Not Yet a Home, and a review of author Amos Oz’ Dear Zealots – letters from a divided land. Sadly, Oz passed on 28th December, his death and that of the indomitable Uri Avnery (see last September’s Seeing through the eyes of “the other’) in August saw the passing of two of the most forthright intellectual proponents of the receding ‘two state solution’. We also reviewed the intimations, imperfections and implications of Donald Trump’s “ultimate deal”, an ostensible end to the intractable Arab-Israeli conflict but which is effectively Throwing Abbas under the bus. The wider Arab and Islamic world features in Islam’s house of many mansions, and, in the wake of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the Yemen war, we consider the possibility of Sanctioning Saudi -1973 revisited.
Our history posts were as eclectic as ever. We continued our series of Small Stories with a profile of The Monarch of the Sea, Prince Roy of Sealand, the smallest country in the world, and The Odyssey of Assid Corban from a tiny village in Lebanon to a wine dynasty in Auckland, New Zealand. A video of University College Dublin’s celebrated Choral Scholars inspired a look at an old Jacobite song Mo Ghile Mear, whilst the anniversary of the Irish rebellion of 1798 recalled another song and a host of personal memories: The Boys of Wexford – memory and memoir. We reviewed two historical novels. In Cuddling up to Caligula, we discovered a soft side to the controversial Roman Emperor; whilst melancholy Martin Sparrow’s Bluesshone fresh light on the travails of Australia’s early white settlers. And a review of Ulrich Raulff’s Farewell to the Horse, a history of man’s long relationship with our four-legged friend, galloped away from me as we sang the song of the horse with The Twilight of the Equine Gods – part history, part memoir, part prose-poem.
You were taken away at dawn. I followed you As one does when a corpse is being removed. Children were crying in the darkened house. A candle flared, illuminating the Mother of God… The cold of an icon was on your lips A death-cold sweat on your brow – I will never forget this; I will gather To wail with the wives of the murdered streltsy Inconsolably, beneath the Kremlin towers.
Anna Akhmatova, Moscow 1935
Russian author and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn‘s three volume The Gulag Archipelagowas completed fifty years ago. It was published five years later, with an English translation the following year. It covered life in the gulag, the Sovietforced labour campsystem, in a narrative constructed from a variety sources – reports, interviews, statements, diaries, legal documents – and Solzhenitsyn’s own experience as a zek, a gulag prisoner – famously if excruciatingly retold in his chilling, literally and figuratively, and yet brief, autobiographical OneDayInTheLifeofIvanDenisovich.
Following its publication in the west, the book circulated in underground samizdat publication in the Soviet Union until its appearance in the literary journal Novy Mir in 1989. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, The Gulag Archipelago has been officially published in Solzhenitsyn’s own country, and since 2009, it has been mandatory reading in Russian school curricula.
A 50th anniversary edition was released on November 1st, 2018 with a forward by Jordan Petersen, the Canadian psychologist, author, and poster-boy – a kind of thinking person’s Milo Yiannopoulos – for many on the conservative side of politics who rant and rave about the existential threat to western civilization and Judeo-Christan values posed by the triple headed Cerberus of political correctness, identity politics and value signaling that has ensorcelled the hearts and minds of the youthful, radical, emotional, university left and their mentors and their sinister svengalis in academe and media. There is almost a “Reds under the beds” paranoia at play here in which is that communism and all it’s works are a kind of secular succubus, and that impressionable youngsters and deluded oldsters must be exorcised of false and failed promises.
Petersen’s forward is actually a good read, if somewhat overblown, slanted, jumbled and repetitive, long on opinion and short on historical memory. For example, whilst Karl Marx, Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong, and also Cuba, Cambodia and Venezuela come in for a predictable and justified bollocking, there is no mention at all of their ideological opposites, the equally repugnant and brutal authoritarian regimes of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, and numerous right wing tyrants the world over – although admittedly, these in no way matched the rigour and discipline and the pervasive and pernicious social and psychological control of the ‘peoples’ republics’. Nor, apart from an acknowledgement that brutal excesses are common to all regimes, is there a balanced recognition that capitalism can be as corrupt and exploitative and as red in tooth and claw as communism.
I’ve republished an edited extract of the forward below as it is worth reminding readers of Solzhenitsyn’s significant contribution to our understanding of recent history and of the resilience of the human spirit and the courage of the flesh and blood “souls in torment” who run the gauntlet of man’s inhumanity to man and emerge at the far end bloodied but unbowed. But Bob Dylan said it better in his shimmering anthem Chimes of Freedom;
Tolling for the aching whose wounds cannot be nursed For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
I have included the online comments on Petersen’s piece as these encapsulate the good, the bad and the ugly of ostensibly informed opinion among the readership of Rupert Murdoch’s redoubtable and often cogent flagship, The Australian. Some display binary groupthink and an almost Pavlovian approbation replete with predictable, tired epithets about left-wingers and Labor/Labour politicians. Others are more nuanced and better informed. Most surprising and indeed disturbing is that few readers appear to know much about the subject matter – namely the history of the Soviet Union and of Solzhenitsyn’s journey, including the story of the Bolshevik revolution, of Lenin and Stalin, the purges of the ‘thirties and ‘forties, and the gulag itself – an institution that was actually initiated by the Czars. Few appear to have heard of let alone read any of Solzhenitsyn’s novels, nor indeed any of the many published accounts of the Stalin years. I would wager that this dearth of knowledge and perspective is a reflection of the weakening of historical memory among the wider populace as such momentous events and eras recede further and further into the past.
By strange symmetry, I have recently reread historian Robert Conquest’s tombstone of a book, The Great Terror, a relentless narrative of arrests, trials, fabricated confessions, hostage-taking, deportations, torture and executions as Stalin consolidated his rule, eliminated enemies real and imagined, and created his own model of a socialist state.
It commenced with the elimination of the Old Bolsheviks, his former comrades in arms, and then expanded to embrace all in the party and society at large who may or may not have shared his vision. Intellectuals, philosophers, writers, poets, musicians, priests, scientists, academics, teachers, civil servants, workers and peasants, and the Red Army’s Officer Corps – a contributing factor to the Soviet Union’s need to make a pact with Nazi Germany in 1939 and its disastrously slow response to Hitlers invasion in June 1941.
An estimated death toll is difficult to determine. In those dark days, people simply disappeared, and the NKVD covered its tracks well. The official number for the “Great Purge” of 1936 to 1938 stands at 1,548,366 detained persons, of whom 681,692 were shot – an average of 1,000 executions a day. Various historians claim that the real number of victims could be twice as much.
But the the arrests, executions, and deportations commenced as early as 1930 and continued right up until Stalin’s death in 1953. Conquest, in his The Great Terror: A Reassessment does the gloomy math: 1930-36, 7 million; 1937-1938, 3 million; 1039-53, 10 million. The number of deaths in the Soviet Union that were explicitly ordered by someone – in other words, the number of executions – is actually relatively low at around 1.5 million. The majority of the deaths were caused by neglect or repressive policies – for example, those who died in the Soviet gulags, those who died while being deported, and German civilians and Prisoners of War are believed to have perished while under Soviet guard.
The numbers who were transported, exiled, displaced, and scattered to concentration camps or far-eastern towns and villages were likewise incalculable. as the brother of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago comments in the final scenes of David Lean’s beautiful but flawed movie)
There is a myriad of books and films about these events. Wikipedia is as good a place as any to start. Robert Conquest’s is the most acclaimed – and rightly so. Then there is Arthur Koestler’s chilling novel, Darkness at Noon, published in 1940, which recounts the thoughts of an Old Bolshevik as he awaits death in the execution cells:
A shapeless figure bent over him, he smelt the fresh lrather of the revolver belt: but what insignia did the figure wear on the sleeves and shoulder-straps of its uniform – and in whose name did it raised the dark pistol barrel?
As for movies, there’s always David Lean’s DoctorZhivago, which realistically albeit melodramatically portrays the choices and compromises confronting ordinary, intellectual Russians in the years of revolution and civil war. But I would highly recommend the poignant but powerful Burnt by the Sun, a 1994 film by Russian director and screenwriter Nikita Mikhailkov and Azerbaijani screenwriter Rustam Ibragimbekov. The film depicts the story of a senior officer (played by Mikhalkov) and his family during the purge of the Red Army.
And there was the poet Anna Akhmatova, whose words open this piece, bearing sad witness to the imprisoned, the deported, the disappeared and the dead – including in their number, two husbands and her only son – memorializing the suffering of herself, her family and millions of her compatriots in her tortured testament, Requiem.
Russia’s Stations of the Cross did not cease with the end of the Terror. Three years latrer came Operation Barbarossa and the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the rapid blitzkreig that took the Wehrmacht to the gates of Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad, and the bloody clawback that brought the Red Army to Berlin and to take captive the peoples of Eastern Europe.
Over twenty five million Soviet citizens died during the Great Patriotic War, of which just under ten million were military. Most died as a direct result of the military conflict that ranged from the Baltic to the Caucasus. But miilions also perished at the hands of the NKVD and in the forced mass deportations of “suspect” peoples, including the Volga Germans and the Crimean Tartars.
At wars’ end, the Terror rolled on, albeit at a lower setting. Josef Stalin remained suspicious, vengeful and paranoid, and the purges continued right up until the moment he departed this mortal coil (as depicted in dubious slapstick in Armando Iannucci‘s recent TheDeath ofStalin).
Many, many Red Army soldiers who had been taken captive by the Nazis were arrested on their return from captivity. Many were shot for ‘desertion’, and thousands sent to the Gulags. Whether they had surrendered or had been subdued and taken captive, often as fast-moving battle fronts left them stranded, abandoned and entrapped behind enemy lines, they were deemed cowards, traitors and enemies of the Soviet Union and its people. They were moreover doubly damned. Whether from behind the wire of concentration camps or as slave labourers in German mines, fields and factories, they had witnessed, come into contact with, and had been contaminated by the world outside.
Which is where Solzhenitsyn came in.
But but first, English songwriter Al Stewart’s tribute to Solzhenitsyn and those like him who were ill-paid for their service and sacrifice.
I’m coming home, I’m coming home, now you can taste it in the wind, the war is over And I listen to the clicking of the train-wheels as we roll across the border And now they ask me of the time that I was caught behind their lines and taken prisoner “They only held me for a day, a lucky break, ” I say they turn and listen closer I’ll never know, I’ll never know why I was taken from the line and all the others To board a special train and journey deep into the heart of holy Russia And it’s cold and damp in the transit camp, and the air is still and sullen And the pale sun of October whispers the snow will soon be coming And I wonder when I’ll be home again and the morning answers “Never” And the evening sighs, and the steely Russian skies go on forever
The Gulag Archipelago confirmed the horrors of the Soviet Union
Jordan Petersen, The Australian 17th November 2018
First, you defend your homeland against the Nazis, serving as a twice-decorated soldier on the Eastern front in the criminally ill-prepared Soviet Red Army. Then you’re arrested, humiliated, stripped of your military rank, charged under the auspices of the all-purpose Article 58 with the dissemination of “anti-Soviet propaganda”, and dragged off to Moscow’s infamous Lubyanka prison. There, through the bars of your cell, you watch your beloved country celebrating its victory in the Great Patriotic War. Then you’re sentenced, in absentia, to eight years of hard labour (but you got away easy; it wasn’t so long afterwards that people in your position were awarded a “tenner” — and then a quarter of a century!). And fate isn’t finished with you yet — not by any means. You develop a deadly cancer in the camp, endure the exile imposed on you after your imprisonment ends, and pass very close to death.
Despite all this, you hold your head high. You refuse to turn against man or God, although you have every reason to do so. You write, instead, secretly, at night, documenting your terrible experiences. You craft a personal memoir — a single day in the labour camps — and, miracle of miracles! The clouds part! The sun shines through! Your book is published, and in your own country! It meets with unparalleled acclaim, nationally and internationally. But the sky darkens, once again, and the sun disappears. The repression returns. You become (once again) a “non-person”. The secret police — the dread KGB — seize the manuscript of your next book. It sees the light of day, nonetheless; but only in the West. There your reputation grows beyond the wildest of imaginings. The Nobel committee itself bestows upon you its highest literary honour.
The Soviet authorities, stripped of their camouflage, are enraged. They order the secret police to poison you. You pass (once again) near death. But you continue to write: driven, solitary, intolerably inspired. Your The Gulag Archipelago documents the absolute and utter corruption of the dogmas and doctrines of your state, your empire, your leaders — and yourself. And then: that is printed, too! Not in your own country but in the West — once again — from copies oh-so-dangerously hidden and smuggled across the borders. And your great book bursts with unparalleled and dreadful force into the still naive and unexpecting literary and intellectual world. You are expelled from the Soviet Union, stripped of your citizenship, forced to take residency in a society both strange to you and resistant, in its own way, to your prophetic words. But the power of your stories and the strength of your morals demolish any remaining claims to ethical and philosophical credibility still made by the defenders of the collectivist system that gave rise to all that you witnessed.
Years pass (but not so many, from the perspective of history). Then? Another miracle! The Soviet Union collapses! You return home. Your citizenship is restored. You write and speak in your reclaimed homeland until death claims you, in 2008. A year later The Gulag Archipelago is deemed mandatory reading by those responsible for establishing the national school curriculum of your home country. Your impossible victory is complete.
The three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago — one continuous, extended scream of outrage — are, paradoxically, brilliant, bitter, disbelieving and infused with awe: awe at the strength characterising the best among us, in the worst of all situations. In that monumental text, published in 1973, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn conducted “an experiment in literary investigation” — a hybrid of journalism, history and biography, unlike anything written before or since. In 1985 the author bestowed his approval upon Edward E. Ericson Jr’s single-volume abridgment — republished here on the 50th anniversary of the completion of the full three-volume edition and centenary of the author’s birth — and sold 30 million copies in 35 languages. Between the pages of Solzhenitsyn’s book — apart from the documentation of the horrors of the legions of the dead, counted and uncounted, and the masses whose lives were torn asunder — are the innumerable soul-chilling personal stories, carefully preserved, making the tragedy of mass betrayal, torture and death not the mere statistic Stalin so disdainfully described but individual, real and terrible.
It is a matter of pure historical fact that The Gulag Archipelago played a primary role in bringing the Soviet Empire to its knees. Although economically unsustainable, ruled in the most corrupt manner imaginable, and reliant on the slavery and enforced deceit of its citizens, the Soviet system managed to stumble forward through far too many decades before being cut to the quick. The courageous leaders of the labour unions in Poland, the great Pope John Paul II and the American president Ronald Reagan, with his blunt insistence that the West faced an evil empire, all played their role in its defeat and collapse. It was Solzhenitsyn, however, whose revelations made it positively shameful to defend not just the Soviet state but the very system of thought that made that state what it was. It was Solzhenitsyn who most crucially made the case that the terrible excesses of communism could not be conveniently blamed on the corruption of the Soviet leadership, the “cult of personality” surrounding Stalin or the failure to put the otherwise stellar and admirable utopian principles of Marxism into proper practice. It was Solzhenitsyn who demonstrated that the death of millions and the devastation of many more were, instead, a direct causal consequence of the philosophy (worse, perhaps: the theology) driving the communist system. The hypothetically egalitarian, universalist doctrines of Karl Marx contained hidden within them sufficient hatred, resentment, envy and denial of individual culpability and responsibility to produce nothing but poison and death when manifested in the world.
Solzhenitsyn, the day of his release in 1953 after 8 years in prison.
For Marx, man was a member of a class, an economic class, a group — that, and little more — and history nothing but the battleground of classes, of groups. His admirers regarded (continue to regard) Marx’s doctrine as one of compassion — moral by definition, virtuous by fiat: “consider the working classes, in all their oppression, and work forthrightly to free them”. But hate may well be a stronger and more compelling motivator than love. In consequence, it took no time, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, for solidarity with the common man and the apparently laudable demand for universal equality to manifest its unarticulated and ever-darkening shadow. First came the most brutal indictment of the “class enemy”. Then came the ever-expanding definition of that enemy, until every single person in the entirety of the state found him or herself at risk of encapsulation within that insatiable and devouring net. The verdict, delivered to those deemed at fault, by those who elevated themselves to the simultaneously held positions of judge, jury and executioner? The necessity to eradicate the victimisers, the oppressors, in toto, without any consideration whatsoever for reactionary niceties — such as individual innocence.
What can be concluded in the deepest, most permanent sense, from Solzhenitsyn’s anguished Gulag narrative? First, we learn what is indisputable — what we all should have learned by now (what we have nonetheless failed to learn): that the Left, like the Right, can go too far; that the Left has, in the past, gone much too far. Second, we learn what is far more subtle and difficult — how and why that going too far occurs. We learn, as Solzhenitsyn so profoundly insists, that the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And we learn as well that we all are, each of us, simultaneously oppressor and oppressed. Thus, we come to realise that the twin categories of “guilty oppressor” and “justice-seeking victim” can be made endlessly inclusive. This is not least because we all benefit unfairly (and are equally victimised) by our thrownness, our arbitrary placement in the flow of time. We all accrue undeserved and somewhat random privilege from the vagaries of our place of birth, our inequitably distributed talents, our ethnicity, race, culture and sex. We all belong to a group — some group — that has been elevated in comparative status, through no effort of our own. This is true in some manner, along some dimension of group category, for every solitary individual, except for the single most lowly of all. At some time and in some manner we all may in consequence be justly targeted as oppressors, and may all, equally, seek justice — or revenge — as victims. Even if the initiators of the revolution had, therefore, in their most pure moments, been driven by a holy desire to lift up the downtrodden, was it not guaranteed that they would be overtaken by those motivated primarily by envy, hate and the desire to destroy as the revolution progressed?
Thus the doctrine of group identity inevitably ends with everyone identified as a class enemy, an oppressor; with everyone uncleansibly contaminated by bourgeois privilege, unfairly enjoying the benefits bequeathed by the vagaries of history; with everyone prosecuted, without respite, for that corruption and injustice. “No mercy for the oppressor!” And no punishment too severe for the crime of exploitation! Expiation becomes impossible because there is no individual guilt, no individual responsibility, and therefore no manner in which the crime of arbitrary birth can be individually accounted for. And all the misery that can be generated as a consequence of such an accusation is the true reason for the accusation. When everyone is guilty, all that serves justice is the punishment of everyone; when the guilt extends to the existence of the world’s misery itself, only the fatal punishment will suffice.
It is much more preferable instead — and much more likely to preserve us all from metastasising hells — to state forthrightly: “I am indeed thrown arbitrarily into history. I therefore choose to voluntarily shoulder the responsibility of my advantages and the burden of my disadvantages — like every other individual. I am morally bound to pay for my advantages with my responsibility. I am morally bound to accept my disadvantages as the price I pay for being. I will therefore strive not to descend into bitterness and then seek vengeance because I have less to my credit and a greater burden to stumble forward with than others.”
Is this not a, or even the, essential point of difference between the West, for all its faults, and the brutal, terrible “egalitarian” systems generated by the pathological communist doctrine? The great and good framers of the American republic were, for example, anything but utopian. They took full stock and full measure of ineradicable human imperfection. They held modest goals, derived not least from the profoundly cautious common-law tradition of England. They endeavoured to establish a system the corrupt and ignorant fools we all are could not damage too fatally. That’s humility. That’s clear-headed knowledge of the limitations of human machination and good intention.
But the communists, the revolutionaries? They aimed, grandly and admirably, at least in theory, at a much more heavenly vision — and they began their pursuit with the hypothetically straightforward and oh-so-morally-justifiable enforcement of economic equality.
Wealth, however, was not so easily generated. The poor could not so simply become rich. But the riches of those who had anything more than the greatest pauper (no matter how pitiful that “more” was)? That could be “redistributed” — or, at least, destroyed. That’s equality, too. That’s sacrifice, in the name of heaven on earth. And redistribution was not enough — with all its theft, betrayal and death. Mere economic engineering was insufficient. What emerged as well was the overarching and truly totalitarian desire to remake man and woman, as such — the longing to restructure the human spirit in the very image of the communist preconceptions. Attributing to themselves this divine ability, this transcendent wisdom — and with unshakeable belief in the glowing but ever-receding future — the newly minted Soviets tortured, thieved, imprisoned, lied and betrayed, all the while masking their great evil with virtue. It was Solzhenitsyn and The Gulag Archipelago that tore off the mask, and exposed the feral cowardice, envy, deceit, resentment and hatred for the individual and for existence itself that pulsed beneath.
Others had made the attempt. Malcolm Muggeridge reported on the horrors of “dekulakization” — the forced collectivisation of the all-too-recently successful peasantry of the Ukraine and elsewhere that preceded the horrifying famines of the 1930s. In the same decade, and in the following years, George Orwell risked his ideological commitments and his reputation to tell us all what was truly occurring in the Soviet Union in the name of egalitarianism and brotherhood. But it was Solzhenitsyn who truly shamed the radical leftists, forcing them underground (where they have festered and plotted for the last 40 years, failing unforgivably to have learned what all reasonable people should have learned from the cataclysm of the 20th century and its egalitarian utopianism). And today, despite everything, and under their sway — almost three decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the apparent collapse of communism — we are doing everything we can to forget what Solzhenitsyn so clearly demonstrated, to our great and richly deserved peril. Why don’t all our children read The Gulag Archipelago in our high schools, as they now do in Russia? Why don’t our teachers feel compelled to read the book aloud? Did we not win the Cold War? Were the bodies not piled high enough? (How high, then, would be enough?)
Why, for example, is it still acceptable — and in polite company — to profess the philosophy of a communist or, if not that, to at least admire the work of Marx? Why is it still acceptable to regard the Marxist doctrine as essentially accurate in its diagnosis of the hypothetical evils of the free-market, democratic West; to still consider that doctrine “progressive” and fit for the compassionate and proper thinking person? Twenty-five million dead through internal repression in the Soviet Union (according to The Black Book of Communism). Sixty million dead in Mao’s China (and an all-too-likely return to autocratic oppression in that country in the near future). The horrors of Cambodia’s killing fields, with their two million corpses. The barely animate body politic of Cuba, where people struggle even now to feed themselves. Venezuela, where it has now been made illegal to attribute a child’s death in hospital to starvation. No political experiment has ever been tried so widely, with so many disparate people, in so many different countries (with such different histories) and failed so absolutely and so catastrophically. Is it mere ignorance (albeit of the most inexcusable kind) that allows today’s Marxists to flaunt their continued allegiance — to present it as compassion and care? Or is it, instead, envy of the successful, in near-infinite proportions? Or something akin to hatred for mankind itself? How much proof do we need? Why do we still avert our eyes from the truth?
Perhaps we simply lack sophistication. Perhaps we just can’t understand. Perhaps our tendency towards compassion is so powerfully necessary in the intimacy of our families and friendships that we cannot contemplate its limitations, its inability to scale and its propensity to mutate into hatred of the oppressor, rather than allegiance with the oppressed. Perhaps we cannot comprehend the limitations and dangers of the utopian vision given our definite need to contemplate and to strive for a better tomorrow. We certainly don’t seem to imagine, for example, that the hypothesis of some state of future perfection — for example, the truly egalitarian and permanent brotherhood of man — can be used to justify any and all sacrifices whatsoever (the pristine and heavenly end making all conceivable means not only acceptable but morally required). There is simply no price too great to pay in pursuit of the ultimate utopia. (This is particularly true if it is someone else who foots the bill.) And it is clearly the case that we require a future towards which to orient ourselves — to provide meaning in our life, psychologically speaking. It is for that reason we see the same need expressed collectively, on a much larger scale, in the Judeo-Christian vision of the Promised Land, and the kingdom of heaven on earth. And it is also clearly the case that sacrifice is necessary to bring that desired end state into being. That’s the discovery of the future itself: the necessity to forgo instantaneous gratification in the present, to delay, to bargain with fate so that the future can be better; twinned with the necessity to let go, to burn off, to separate wheat from chaff, and to sacrifice what is presently unworthy, so that tomorrow can be better than today. But limits need to be placed around who or what is deemed dispensable.
Here’s some thoughts — no, some facts. Every social system produces inequality, at present, and every social system has done so, since the beginning of time. The poor have been with us — and will be with us — always. Analysis of the content of individual Paleolithic gravesites provides evidence for the existence of substantive variance in the distribution of ability, privilege and wealth, even in our distant past. The more illustrious of our ancestors were buried with great possessions, hoards of precious metals, weaponry, jewellery and costuming. The majority, however, struggled through their lives and were buried with nothing. Inequality is the iron rule, even among animals, with their intense competition for quality living space and reproductive opportunity — even among plants, and cities — even among the stellar lights that dot the cosmos themselves, where a minority of privileged and oppressive heavenly bodies contain the mass of thousands, millions or even billions of average, dispossessed planets. In equality is the deepest of problems, built into the structure of reality itself, and will not be solved by the presumptuous, ideology-inspired retooling of the rare free, stable and productive democracies of the world. The only systems that have produced some modicum of wealth, along with the inevitable inequality and its attendant suffering, are those that evolved in the West, with their roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition; precisely those systems that emphasise above all the essential dignity, divinity and ultimate responsibility of the individual. In consequence, any attempt to attribute the existence of inequality to the functioning of the productive institutions we have managed to create and protect so recently in what is still accurately regarded as the free world will hurt those who are weakest and most vulnerable first. The radicals who conflate the activities of the West with the oppression of the downtrodden therefore do nothing to aid those whom they purport to prize and plenty to harm them. The claims they make to act under the inspiration of pure compassion must therefore come to be regarded with the deepest suspicion — not least by those who dare to make such claims themselves.
The dangers of the utopian vision have been laid bare, even if the reasons those dangers exist have not yet been fully and acceptably articulated. If there was any excuse to be a Marxist in 1917 (and both Dostoevsky and Nietzsche prophesied well before then that there would be hell to pay for that doctrine) there is absolutely and finally no excuse now. And we know that mostly because of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and The Gulag Archipelago. Thank heaven for that great author’s outrage, courage and unquenchable thirst for justice and truth. It was Solzhenitsyn who warned us that the catastrophes of the Soviet state were inextricably and causally linked to the deceitful blandishments of the Marxist utopian vision. It was Solzhenitsyn who carefully documented the price paid in suffering for the dreadful communist experiment and who distilled from that suffering the wisdom we must all heed so that such catastrophe does not visit us again. Perhaps we could take from his writing the humility that would allow us to understand that our mere good intentions are not sufficient to make us good men and women. Perhaps we could come to understand that such intentions are instead all too often the consequence of our unpardonable historical ignorance, our utter wilful blindness and our voracious hidden appetite for vengeance, terror and destruction. Perhaps we could come to remember and to learn from the intolerable trials endured by all those who passed through the fiery chambers of the Marxist collectivist ideology. Perhaps we could derive from that remembering and learning the wisdom necessary to take personal responsibility for the suffering and malevolence that still so terribly and unforgivably characterises the world. We have been provided with the means to transform ourselves in due humility by the literary and moral genius of this great Russian author. We should all pray most devoutly to whatever deity guides us implicitly or explicitly for the desire and the will to learn from what we have been offered. May God himself eternally fail to forgive us if in the painstakingly revealed aftermath of such bloodshed, torture and anguish we remain stiff-necked, incautious, and unchanged.
Jordan Peterson is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and author of the bestseller 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. This is an edited extract from the foreword to the new edition of The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, published by Vintage Classics.
As I have noted above,the online comments reflect on the range of opinions among the ostensibly informed opinion among the readership of The Australian. One entertaining characteristic is how often commenters lay into each other.
t’s much easier and more comforting to accept the narrative of the Left that you are oppressed, the victim of others. But I’m wondering where is this Oppression today in Australia? There are so so many helping hands out there for those who want to have a go. But then, to many, nothing beats being told you are oppressed and getting paid for it (Centrelink).
A powerful and thought-provoking read, this. I’ll be reading it over again and again to be sure I’ve got it right. If any man alive within the last hundred years deserves the title of ‘prophet’, it must be Solzhenitsyn and yet most ‘ordinary’ people have hardly heard of him let alone read his prophetic words.
This week the Greens have announced they want to jail anyone exporting coal (Currently or biggest export). Who else will be sent to the Greens gulag under the new left regime?
Word salad from a master of over oily pre-packaged 1000 Island dressing drenched word salads, Last week it was how Raskolnikov somehow proved the existence of objective morality or something like that. This time another false literary allusion to bolster the illusions of those right wingers who like to pretend they have read a book that doesn’t have pictures. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was very good, the rest was self serving attempts to get money from Yank publishers hoping to reinforce Yank prejudices during the Cold War.
The Canadian Peterson is part of the same racket.
Fantastic article by a man whose work should be studied and viewed in Unis worldwide. A totally brilliant mind whose moniker of Psychologist merely understates the depth and breadth of his anyalysis of humanity. Please keep his stuff coming in the MSM. The world really needs more like this.
One is so used to having a full page advertisement on the back page of the Weekend Australian Inquirer hardcopy, that it took me sometime to wake up that here was an article for the ages. It wasn’t until I retired to my bed that I was able to read it.
So much to think about and reflect on of our past for many of us.
What is so terrifying is that there is now a generation who do not know and understand.
Yet, this time next week, Victorians will have just gifted a further four year reign to the most Socialist Government this state has ever seen.
Marxism is essentially evil but democracy is not a Christian invention
The Greeks were the mothers of democracy but the Christians modernised it to what we have today.
It’s modern application certainly is. Bearing in mind there were well over a thousand years (two thousand, perhaps) between its origins in ancient Greece (but only for the elites) to its widespread adoption in what we now call the West, in what were all Christian nations at the time of its adoptions, it’s not drawing a long bow to describe democracy as a christian construct.
Wow excellent article and still today left winger activists are trying to stifle his voice and ban him from universities
Jesus spoke straightforwardly of the devil or Satan as a real spiritual personality, not a metaphor. And he knew and demonstrated practical authority over him.
Richard Wurmbrand makes a reasonable case that the envy and and desire to destroy that characterise communism historically already had a spiritual presence in Marx’s personal life following a souring of his early Christian faith.
A kindred visceral hatred, routinely transcending the rational, has manifested time and again in the world against Christians, Jews and Israel, through a variety of agencies. There’s no coincidence nor natural justice in the fact that Christians are statistically far and away the most persecuted group on earth (not least in communist China today).
Yet the same malice manifests less obviously in the neo-Marxism much closer to home. Activists are aggressively pushing an agenda to erode biblical morality, destroy Judaeo-Christian institutions and subvert godly authority structures and even the natural order, including the sexes and natural family. This is no less dangerous in the long run than the communism of Solzhenitsyn’s era.
While I agree with much that you have said, reality is Christian Institutions have been doing as much of those you accuse, to destroy the Judeao Christian place in the world through their own immoral behaviour and confusion about what they now stand for.
I see that Jesus/ Christianity would have been Marxist in ideology. However experiments in Marxism have failed usually ending up with totalitarian leadership living the high life while the peasants work their guts out. China is a little different in that they have a free market economy whilst pursuing socialism and totalitarianism. No one knows how it will end. The US with its plutocracy (not really democracy) pursuing a military state is hardly an ideal. We are mere corks bobbing on the ocean!
In the seventies Alexandre S was taught in Victorian schools as was Orwell. Suspicion lies on leftist leanings for their demise. Be sure they outnumber the democrates. You have to overcome that hurdle first. In other words Daniel Andrews has to go before you get any voice about recommending AS to be on the mainstream English curriculum which it was. Makes his meeting with the Chinese recently and keeping the supposed agreement secrete revealing about his leftist agenda. Daniel Andrews wouldn’t know about AS and less about George Orwell. Andrews is the biggest treat to our sovereignty and human rights than any leftist labour premier in recent history.
The elite who govern us now is an unhealhy blend of unions, public servants and big business. The next elite will be the same eccept worse.
Public servants are the most unionised of employees (I nearly said workers!), so no need to distinguish.
Great article JP. Best discussion for some time.
My thoughts: I have always seen Russia as a corrupt society run by an elite 1 to 2 million rich, with 150m poor. Given the hit Russia took defending against Nazi Germany I think it’s a bit simplistic to say Marxism failed, when given circumstances it never had a chance. Western Europe had the Marshall Plan to revive war torn economies, Russia didn’t. Regardless 60 years on, the Communist system, the leaders paranoia with the West, and the over expenditure on military does largely explain Russia’s ongoing underperformance. JP is right to call them out as a failure. Totalarian leadership doesn’t have a good record.
Right on, JP! In my experience, having had close association with members of the Labor Party in the early 70s, many immediately previously having graduated from university, and they having toasted “the revolution!” at joint dinners/lunches which appeared to be possible at that time, the prevailing thought was “why should we miss out?” I know from personal experience that there was not a scintilla of idealism present, and that they were craven opportunists (Labor lawyers, MPs, Ministers and union officials). They were the true entrepreneurs of our time, and have become rich beyond the most hopeful dreams of their conservative counterparts.
Also read “One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich”. A classic. And Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita”. Bravo Jordan Petterson, bravo.
And this is supposed to be original? Where’s this guy been. Robert Conquest laid it out in 1968 in The Great Terror. And Marx doesn’t have a lot to do with it. He was just a pretext for neo-Tsarist dictatorship, particularly under the Red Tsar Stalin. Stick to psychology,
Peterson has informed my secularly enforced ignorance of history, has framed for me the importance of understanding our cultural/political errors. Given your right to express complete knowledge on this topic, will you now meet your responsibility to individually do something about it. We wouldn’t be in this mess if you had in 1968.
There was nothing miraculous about the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was inevitable, at a predictable time It is a fundamental fact of human nature that first hand information takes precedence over second hand information. The hatred that drove government in the USSR depended on first hand memory of how bad things were before the revolution. Only that memory could suppress recognition of how bad things were after the revolution. Once the old guard faded from influence that veil would be lifted, and sanity would start to get a look in. And so it was lifted, Thirty years on, it’s a good time to be republishing The Gulag Archipelago.
The “evil empire” and its underpinning Marxist ideology, would not have gained traction without the wide spread acceptance of Darwin’s (atheistic) Evolution Theory. Without God their is no moral authority or compass; life really is all about the “survival of the fittest”. Stalin embraced communism after he read Darwin book on Evolution. He even went so far as to try to create “Ape Warriors” to populate his depleted army. Moreover “racism” is intrinsically linked to evolution theory. The historical and scientific evidence is overwhelming that God created this earth and mankind, but the lefty intelligentsia have turned their backs on truth to promote their own dark & dangerous agenda. Its ugly manifestation has been Marxism. (b47)
Communists are merely a political gang of very well organised criminals who want to kill the rich so that they can replace them.
Essential reading for all. And a clear reason why we need to abolish both the Labor and Greens Party’s.
Brilliant if not a long read, well worth it mind you. How do you dare abbreviate the piece to a comment, to my simple mind it is do not ignore the past, do not forget, do not think there is a magic solution. The extremists left and right have left a trail. Neither is correct, but we must be able to discuss the issues that matter without being branded.
Orwell and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn should be mandatory reading in every High School and in every Arts course. I read Animal Farm at school, then 1984 after graduating and finally The Gulag. Unfortunately I didn’t read the latter two until after twice voting for EG Whitlam and his ALP disaster team. But never again. If you don’t like Peterson’s introduction to TGA then read those 3 books. Read then before voting for BS and his bs.
I see the ‘usual suspects’ are absent from this discussion.
Who?
No. All the moderator’s favourites appear to be here, as usual. Ray.
What astonishing writing by Jordan Peterson. Astonishing because nothing like it has graced the pages of newspapers in my memory. He puts truth to the reasons why the Soviet’s mass murdered millions upon millions of Russians during its 74 year rule. As he says, it had nothing to do with egalitarianism and everything to do with pure hatred for fellow human beings. Stalin’s deliberate starvation of Ukrainians in 1930’s because he did not like them is a hard fact for committed socialists to compute. Such people have debated me on this topic in these Comments columns in the past accusing me of fabricating a story. Jordan Peterson has I hope begun a long overdue conversation into the real history of Soviet rule as written by a man who experienced the worst of it. Luckily for the West, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn escaped death more than once to write The Gulag Archipelago and many other books after that. My thanks to Jordan Peterson for unmasking and highlighting the truth of the Communist rule of the USSR 1917-1991.
Socialism – yet shorten and his receycled gillard government still believe this is the height of wisdom
It should be a compulsary in school history curriculum of what happened to millions who suffered and died in pursuit of communistic utopia.
I’m a teacher in public schools and I hand a copy of that book (the cut down version) to any thoughtful but naive student who seriously considers Communism to be a legitimate political system.
The author talks about the Stalinist period in USSR but fails to compare it to the historical periods both before and after it (e.g., the Hrushev ‘ottepel’ period, etc.). He also talks about a few examples of bad things happening in a few other countries. He then uses this selective evidence to come to his conclusions. He mentions, briefly, that extremes on either right or left are bad, but that is the only mention of any alternative views or any facts that do not accord with his opinion. After mentioning that both left and right extremes are bad, he still illogically concludes that left-wing views are bad based on what he is saying (but not the right-wing views). Furthermore, he somehow extrapolates what was happening during the Stalinist period and in a few other countries during certain historical periods into claims that the left-wing views are bad in general even if they are not extreme. The author ignored what was happening in right-wing Spain during the same period (where people were killed rather than sent to hard labour camps). The author also ignored examples of other right-wing states similar to Spain in the 20th century in South America, Asia, and other parts of the world. I understand the article can at the most support that certain manifestation of ideological extremes, either on the right or left are bad but clearly that is not what the author is trying to convey. The author is biased in a sense that he provides examples of bad governments in certain left-wing communist/socialist states in particular historical periods (ignoring other periods of these states and other communist/socialist countries) but does not provide examples of bad governments of extreme right-wing capitalist states in corresponding or other historical periods of the 20th century. This comment is not meant to support left or right, communism, socialism or capitalism. However, if the author meant to support capitalism he could have done a better job.
The author wrote the forward to The Gulag Archipelago, not an analysis of comparative political systems. One of his central points is that there is no excuse for continuing to believe and teach that Marxism is a legitimate and desirable system of social organisation. It has been, is and always will be a miserable, murderous failure. The books of Solzhenitsyn and the background to those books, along with works on democratic theory and practice, must, in future, be foundational texts in every Australian high school.
You are obviously confused and need to read more carefully. “A few examples of bad things happening….”? Do you not understand the momentous nature of those few ‘bad things’, the horrific death toll, the economic devastation, the extermination of intellectual capacity, the depravity of the slaughter? Sorry, anyone who claims that the socialist record can be discounted as ‘a few bad things’ is grossly ignorant or just an apologist!
The Marxist/communist doctrine begins with the rejection of the God of the Bible & His authority over us. Then it proceeds to put the State in the place of God. It uses the theory of evolution as its excuse for the rejection of God. The results of this Marxist belief are seen in the working out of this belief in Russia & all other communist countries. The Marxist philosophy put into practice actually proved the truth of the Bible where God reveals that every person has a depraved, sinful nature & is under the just condemnation of a Righteous & Holy God. the Lord Jesus came into this world & died in the place of sinful men & women so that they could be forgiven & cleansed from their guilt & condemnation & so receive eternal life. That in turn leads to a Christian living according to the precepts laid out in the Bible. Our way of life in the Western World & the freedoms, the system of law & order are based on that Judeo/Christian foundation. Those who follow Marxist/Communist doctrine destroy that Christian foundation & the end result is seen in the terrible consequences that took place in Communist Russia, China etc. One can only hope that Australians see this before it is too late & latter day Marxists (as seen in the Labor party & Greens etc) destroy what we have here.
Marxist indoctrination and oppression has succeeded in nations which are not Christian, China being the most obvious example. The theological and philosophical underpinnings of the society are forcefully removed by Marxism and replaced by it. People don’t throw away their religion to embrace Marxism! As for evolutionary theory, this is not an essential part of Marxism and many Christians and adherents of other faiths accept its validity without abandoning their religion.
I happen to agree with the content of what you say, but you shoot yourself in the foot with your stilted and pompous ‘elevated’ language. It makes your comment read as being all about yourself, rather than anything you might be trying to express.
God’s got nothing to do with it. Fairy tales.
How wonderful it would be if we had academics/professors with the wisdom of Professsor Peterson resident in our universities instead of the virtue signalling do gooders we seem to have in some universities in this country.
You make an error here, Bruce. The word should have been “all” universities here. Given time, our universities will destroy everything that Australia stands for and, sadly, most people don’t even realise it’s happening. Evil by stealth is the worst kind of evil.
As George Orwell said “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”
This should be mandatory reading for all voting citizens. Wonderfully articulated.
You can’t even get them to read ‘1984’ or ‘Animal Farm’
But long winded!
I read those books in 1973 and it opened my eyes to the evil of Communism. Jordan is the new Alexsandr in shining the light back on Totalitarian terror.
This was a good article from Peterson due to the content but he’s not a very good writer for this format. Peterson favours a “tossed salad” of words. He is verbose, well meaning but not a clear thinker, writer or talker (three kinds of clarity that go together).
Peterson’s ideas tumble. He is not able to make them coherent, to give them shape and purpose. His heart is in the right place but his expression lets him down.
Ok, so show us how it’s done. I find his clarity appealing but am ready to be awestruck by yours.
If only we can secede to the Taxpayers Republic of Australia and let the Progressive Republic of Australia have its own future! I am even happy to let the PRA have first pick of the best 3 States of their own choosing. The only condition of living in the TRA is that you pay more tax than you get from the Government or if you don’t then you forego your vote, and the only rule for leaving to the PRA is that once gone you may never come back. The PRA people can create their Utopia in whatever image they fit! Imagine how awesome life would be for you to let go of your hate and negativity in being freed from the burden of us oppressive and uncaring conservatives??! Surely it would be absolute heaven for you?? I wonder what people would choose? Ultimately it wouldn’t matter though – I guarantee that we would have war inside 20 years as the embittered and envy-ridden swill of the PRA seek to batter down the gates and overrun the TRA to escape the barren and destitute world that they will create for themselves and need to get their hands on other people’s money yet again. Where are you out there you compassionate and perfect Progressives who want to take me up on my ridiculously generous offer?? You can even have Queensland or wherever else you want as first pick??! Please I am begging you to come forward – no price is too big to be rid of you so that once gone we can concentrate on real nation building for the good of all once again….but I am sure that it will be sadly the case that pigs might fly first. ;-(
A free one way ticket to Venezuela would sufice:
For me, First Circle was better. Solzhenitsyn did indeed issue the warning. All of the frenetic “socialism must be tried again” fan club should read it before they condemn their own societies to such outrages against humanity. Wrong Mr Peterson the Left constantly reminds us that Russia, Venezuela, Cuba etc got socialism wrong, but they’ll get it right this time. Now for the facts. If you think socialism is the answer to your problem, you’ve never lived under socialism to know better. Equality of poorness, corruption when you’ve run out of other people’s money, war crimes. No innovation, no choices, basically one state produced brand of chocolate, oil, clothing etc. West Germany produced the BMW, East Germany just forget that lemon write-off. I’m in a rare position to witness this from an Aussie perspective, having grown up in Sydney’s inner west and then moving to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia for 3 years with my father, the differences could not have been so stark. I opened my wallet with candy money to buy some, but such a display of wealth was considered offensive. You had to look equally poor. Landline phones mostly non-existent, roads unsealed. Corruption paying off police and bribing teachers at schools for favours was rife. Bread rations for students, we had to pick it up from the UN several km’s away from school. Then modern day Croatia was born. The transition to capitalism gave them sealed roads, women discovered gossiping when landline phones first came. Mercs and BMWs started replacing those flimsy Yugo state produced socialist lemon cars. Now back in Sydney’s inner west, what do they want? Posters are rife with “kill capitalism”, “Turn Left”, socialist conferences etc. The “progressive” Left here obviously have never lived under socialism, and clearly they know no better.
A typically erudite rebuttal from a socialist. An individual so limited in thinking, he is incapable of comprehending he has conclusively proved his own cretiny.
It seems when people have freedom of speech, so many of them just want to ignore the lessons of history (or simply don’t read history) and dream of yet another socialist utopia. And whinge! How they like to whinge.
Solzhenitsyn’s work (which deserves more respect) is treated by Professor Peterson as a convenient peg on which to hang another of his long-winded, rambling statements about Jordan Peterson saving the world.
Did you bother actually reading the entire article?
Have you read the book Tom ?
This was written as a forward to the book. Do you not understand the context?
The rambling is the “edited extract”?
Despite a globalist agenda to segregate & secularise humanity into groups for identity processing, there is a profound thankfulness that we not only have Peterson as a instrument of forewarning the mass indoctrination techniques of past political regimes, but a national masthead that vigilantly advocates our right to individualism and freedom of speech, even whilst postmodern tendrils of the communist seed continue to attempt to strangle our western democratic way of life.
He’s totally opposite to identity politics but that’s cool.
Communism might be possible with lots and lots of God’s grace, an abundance of it to make it work. Unfortunately those who impose communism are atheists.
A one legged man could convert to Christianity, tomorrow. He’d still have to hop to the church on Sunday, same as he hopped to the pub, yesterday.
You need to ask Nick Vujicic, who was born with no arms or legs, whether having Christ in his life makes a difference.
Thank you. An academic who can communicate with reason. An educator that inspires us to think for ourselves not just about ourselves.
Of our elaborate plans, the end Of everything that stands, the end No safety or surprise, the end
Jim Morrison
For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son. John 3:16
The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918 saw an end to four years of carnage on the western front and the end of of the First World War. The armies were demobbed and men went home to lives that were changed utterly: British and French, Austrian and German, Belgian and Italian, Serbs and Bulgarians, Turks and Arabs, and also, soldiers from across the ocean – Americans and Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders, South Africans and Indians. Friends and foes.
The victors retired to a restless peace, but the vanquished, Germany, Austria, and Hungary, descended into revolution and civil war for a time as gangs of former soldiers fought on the left and the right. In eastern Europe, the crumbling of empires, the Russian revolution, civil war and the struggle to establish the borders of newly established states meant that armed violence continued, leaving deep scars and bitterness that many ways set the stage for the autocracies of the 1930s and further bloodshed.
The Polish-Soviet war lasted until 1921. The Russian Civil War, ending in 1923, raged across most of today’s Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and the Baltic region. British, Australian, American and French soldiers were dispatched to Murmansk and Archangel to fight the Red Army; Poles fought Ukrainians and Lithuanians, and defeated the Soviets at the gates of Warsaw; pogroms were perpetrated against Jews just as they had been for years, decades, centuries prior, accelerating , with subsequent consequence, Aliyah to Palestine.
The Greek-Turkish war of 1919-1922, which saw the Greeks, with British and French support, endeavouring to seize Constantinople, led to terrible massacres, and a forced exchange of populations that uprooted one and a half million Greeks and Turks from towns and villages they had occupied for a millennium. Armies marched back and forth across the Great European Plain, bringing devastation and starvation and destroying millions of lives. Central Asia, the lands now covered by the once Soviet ‘’stans likewise became battlegrounds for Reds, Whites and local warlords.
And in ‘John Bull’s Other Island’, as expat GBS Shaw called it, a “terrible beauty was born” – WB Yeats’ exquisite words – the doomed intifada that was the rebellion of Easter 1916, launched, opportunistically yet quixotically whilst English eyes were elsewhere, led exponentially into open rebellion, a qualified victory, and a civil war and partition that rested, roused and then resurrected in Derry in 1968 and decades termed somewhat innocuously ‘The Troubles’.
For some, there was light at the end of the terrible territorial tunnel. Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Finns, Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians, achieved statehood, or the restoration of nationhood, as did, fleetingly, Ukrainians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis. Poland reappeared on the map after over a century of having been carved up by empires. Hungarians lost two-thirds of their territory and more than half of their population. “Little” Serbia, which had ignited the Balkan powder keg in 1914, with Gavril Princip’s famous shot that ricocheted through complacent, twitchy and mightily armed Europe, was united with its Slav but religiously fractured Balkan neighbours in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia – and we now know how well that worked out.
Beyond Europe too, a bitter ‘Peace’ sowed dragon’s teeth. Last year, we commemorated the centenaries of the infamous Sykes Picot Agreement, the first draft of a colonial dispensation that established borders that remained unchallenged until Da’ish assaulted the status quo in 2014, and the Balfour Declaration, which set in train the rise and rise of the state of Israel and the long descent of Palestinian hopes for a land of their own. Ironically, the most militant Zionist pioneers and later, soldiers, terrorists and statesmen, emigrated from Poland and the Tsarist empire. These many legacies resonate today.
The end of WW1 saw the destruction of the Ottoman Empire and left Britain in control of Palestine and Mesopotamia. The peace conferences that followed led to the creation of modern Turkey, and, though for decades under French and British colonial rule, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Jordan. The Kurds turned up at the conference table but were denied a seat and thereafter, a state.
The war changed more than maps, frontiers and regimes. The needs of modern warfare brought women into the workforce, galvanizing the movements that won them the vote in many democracies. The pace of technological change already underway in industrialized countries was quickened by the demands of war, and advances in land transportation and aviation continued exponentially, as did the development of weaponry, together with the insatiable demand for fossil fuels. Economic privation precipitated the first successful Communist revolution and many failed ones, whilst the peace, resentments, reparations, and recession prompted many to turn to far-right authoritarians in Italy and then Germany. The mass movements of populations helped spread the deadliest epidemic the world has ever known: the 1918 influenza virus or Spanish Flu, which quietly killed possibly up to a hundred million souls – more than both world wars combined.
In the last decades of the Twentieth Century, historians would observe with the benefit of hindsight how the Second World War rose ineluctably from the ashes of the first, just as the division of Europe and the Soviet enslavement (and I say this as a lifelong leftist) of those Eastern European countries that emerged after 1918 led to the Europe of today, and as the peoples of the Middle East reaped the whirlwinds of both conflagrations. Many look back on the tumultuous decades that followed the Great War, and sensing signals and signposts in contemporary temporal tea leaves, advise is to be afraid, be very afraid.
We like to identify patterns in history that help us understand and explain our contemporary world. But we should exercise caution. To continue the hindsight riff, remember that things we see in the rear view mirror appear closer than they really are. The world is very much different today, as is our knowledge, our perception, our hopes and fears, and so also, our prognostications and expectations. If we can do it all over again, we’ll do it differently, and much more dangerously and destructively. Having learned so much, we have, one fears, understood so little.
As we remember that moment in Western Europe and the Levant when the guns at last fell silent, let us contemplate melancholy mathematics of the human toll poignantly described by American economist and academic Patrick Chovanec in a fine article in the New York Review of Books, which I have reproduced below:
“In the Great War itself, over sixteen million people died, including almost seven million civilians. The US got off relatively lightly, with 117,465 people killed, just 0.13 percent of its population. In Serbia, somewhere between 17 and 28 percent of the country’s population was killed. But even numbers like these leave little concrete impression on our minds … people would (tell) me about a grandfather or great-uncle who fought and died in the war, and is forever twenty-four-years old in some field in France, or Turkey, or Italy, or at sea. For most people, that absence is what defined the war: someone left and never came home. The world that they shaped, by their presence and their absence, is the one that we live in, whether we realize it or not. And we, like them, can only grope our way forward, day by day, into an unknown future”.
Gavrilo Princip arrested after his assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, Sarajevo, June 28, 1914
Four years ago, I went to war. Like many of the people whose stories I followed in my daily “live-tweets” on World War I, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. What began as an impulsive decision to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of Austrian Archduke Ferdinand’s death at the hands of a Serbian assassin, in June 1914, snowballed into a blood-soaked odyssey that took me—figuratively and literally—from the rolling hills of northern France, to the desert wastes of Arabia, to the rocky crags of the Italian Alps, to the steel turret of a rebel cruiser moored within range of the czar’s Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia. And like the men and women who actually lived through it, now that the Great War is ending I find myself asking what, if anything, I’ve learned from it all.
In the American mind, World War I typically occupies an unimpressive place as a kind of shambolic preamble to the great good-versus-evil crusade of World War II, a pointless slugfest in muddy trenches for no worthy purpose, and no worthwhile result. Its catchphrases—“The War to End All Wars,” “Make the World Safe for Democracy”—evoke a wry and knowing chuckle. As if. But the war I encountered, as it unfolded day by day, was far more relevant, passionate, and unpredictable.
Posting daily newspaper clippings and photographs, found mainly in books and online archives, I began to see the Great War as a kind of portal between an older, more distant world—of kings with handlebar mustaches, splendid uniforms, and cavalry charges—and the one that we know: of planes and tanks, mass political movements, and camouflage. It snuffed out ancient monarchies in czarist Russia, Habsburg Austria, and Ottoman Turkey, and gave birth to a host of new nations—Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Armenia, Azerbaijan—that, in their struggles to survive and carve out an identity, continue to shape our world today. The British declared their intent to create a national homeland in Palestine for the Jews.
Daily Mirror/Mirrorpix via Getty Images
Russian infantry marching to battle, Poland, August 1914
The needs of the war brought women into the workforce, and helped win them the right to vote. The huge privations it inflicted triggered the world’s first (successful) Communist revolution, and the frustrations it unleashed prompted many, afterward, to turn to far-right authoritarians in Italy and then Germany. And finally—though many have forgotten it—the comings and goings of people caused by the war helped spread the deadliest epidemic the world has ever known: the 1918 influenza virus, which quietly killed an estimated 50–100 million human beings in their homes and in hospitals, more than both world wars combined.
I also encountered a cast of characters more varied and amazing than I thought possible. Rasputin, the dissolute Russian mystic who warned Czar Nicholas that going to war would destroy his dynasty, and was murdered in part because he was (falsely) suspected as a German agent. The Austrian Emperor Karl, who inherited a war he didn’t want, and tried fruitlessly to make peace. T.E. Lawrence, a scholarly young intelligence officer whose affinity for the Arabs helped turn them to the Allied cause, and shaped the modern Middle East. Mata Hari, a Dutch-born exotic dancer who played double-agent, seducing high-ranking Allied and German officers for valuable information, until she was caught and shot by the French as a spy.
Some of the names are familiar, and offer hints of future greatness—or infamy. A young anti-war journalist named Benito Mussolini, sensing the way the wind blows, changes his tune and aggressively advocates for Italy to enter the war, before signing up himself. A young Charles De Gaulle is wounded at Verdun and taken prisoner for the rest of the conflict. A relatively young Winston Churchillplans the disastrous Gallipoli Campaign and pays his penance by serving in the trenches, before making a political comeback. A young Harry S. Truman serves as an artillery officer on the Western Front, alongside (and outranked by) a young George C. Marshall (his future Army Chief of Staff and Secretary of State) and Douglas MacArthur (his future general in the Pacific and Korea). A young George S. Patton develops a fascination with tanks. A young Walt Disney doodles cartoons on the side of the ambulances he drives, in the same unit as a young Ray Kroc (the founder of McDonald’s). Another young ambulance driver, Ernest Hemingway, finds inspiration on the Italian Front for his novel A Farewell to Arms. A young Hermann Göring (later head of the Luftwaffe) becomes a dashing flying ace, while a young Erwin Rommel wins renown fighting at Verdun and in the Alps. Meanwhile, an odd young German corporal, who volunteered in the very first days of the war, is blinded by poison gas in its final days, and wakes up in hospital to the bitter news that Germany has lost. His name is Adolf Hitler.
General Photographic Agency/Getty Images
French troops under shellfire during the Battle of Verdun, 1916
The dramatic panoply of people, places, and events, however, only occasionally rises to the fore. For the most part, the war is a steady stream of ordinary people doing ordinary things: washing their clothes, attending a concert, tallying supplies, fixing a car. History books give us a distorted sense of time, because they fast forward to major events. A day may take a chapter, a month may be passed over in a sentence. In fact, there were periods where nothing much happened—plans were being made, troops trained, supplies positioned—and when you live-tweet, you experience that waiting. Sometimes, it led to intriguing surprises, like photographs of dragon dances performed by some of the 140,000 Chinese laborers brought over to France to lend muscle to the Allied war effort. Mostly, it was a matter of endurance. Each winter, the fighting came to almost a complete stop as each country hunkered down and hoped its food would last. The “turnip winter” of 1916–1917, when the potato crop failed, nearly broke Germany; the increasingly desperate craving for “bread and peace” did break Russia the following year.
The future president Herbert Hoover made his reputation by coordinating food relief shipments to German-occupied Belgium, and later as the US “food czar” ensuring Allied armies and populations were fed. The vast mobilization was effective: by 1918, the Allies were able to relax their food rationing, while Germany and its confederates, strangled by an Allied naval blockade, were on the verge of starvation. America’s war effort was accompanied by a vast expansion in the federal government’s power and reach. It nationalized (temporarily) the railroads and the telephone lines. It set prices for everything from sugar to shoes, and told motorists when they could drive, workers when they could strike, and restaurants what they could put on their menus. It seized half a billion dollars of enemy-owned property, including the brand rights to Bayer aspirin, and sold them at auction. The US government also passed espionage and sedition laws that made it illegal to criticize the war effort or the president. Some people were sent to prison for doing so, including the Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs, who ran for president for a fifth and final time from a cell.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
A woman munitions worker operating a machine in an armaments factory, Britain, circa 1915
Winning the war, however, was far from a sure thing. For three years, the Allies threw themselves against an evenly-matched enemy on the Western Front, without making any breakthroughs, while the Eastern Front gradually crumbled. An early Allied foray to take out Turkey, at Gallipoli in 1915, ended in bloody disappointment. Inducing Italy to enter the war on the Allies’ side, that same year, was supposed to swing the entire conflict in their favor; instead, the catastrophic Italian rout atCaporetto, in the autumn of 1917, put the Allied effort in greater jeopardy. When Lenin seized power in Russia, at the end of 1917, he took it immediately out of the war and ceded immense land and resources to German control. True, the US had by then entered the war, in response to Germany’s submarine campaign against merchant ships and its clumsy diplomatic scheming in Mexico. But with the war in the East essentially won, the Germans saw a window in which they could shift all of their armies to the West and crush the exhausted British and French before enough American troops could arrive to make a difference. Their spring offensive, or “Kaiser’s Battle,” in early 1918 drove deep into Allied lines, prompting the French government to evacuate Paris.
The Germans’ big roll of the dice failed. The Allies held, and the US mobilized much faster than anyone expected. By the summer of 1918, a perceptible change had taken place. Hundreds of thousands of American troops were arriving every month at French ports, and their first units were taking part in battles, piecemeal at first, to push the Germans back. Even in September, however, nearly everyone expected the war to continue into 1919. That was when a huge US army of 3 million men would be ready to take part in a big Allied offensive that would drive all the way to Berlin. It never happened. That fall, the German army—and those of Turkey, Austria, and Bulgaria—first buckled, then collapsed like a rotten log. By November 11, the war was over.
The fact that nobody saw the end coming, the way it did, highlights the value of going back, a hundred years later, and reliving events day by day, as they took place. What may seem obvious now was anything but so then, and we do the people who lived through it, and our understanding of them, a real disservice when we assume that it was. “Life can only be understood backwards,” the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard observed, “but it must be lived forwards.” The British historian C.V. Wedgewood elaborated on the same idea: “History is lived forwards but is written in retrospect. We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was like to know the beginning only.” We can’t entirely forget that we know what happened next, but when we at least try to identify with people who did not know, we shed new light on them, and on what did happen.
Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images
Leon Trotsky with the Soviet delegation to negotiate a peace treaty with Germany, Brest-Litovsk, 1918
Take the Russian Revolution. We see it as the birth of a Communist superpower, and struggle to make sense of the seemingly half-baked, half-hearted effort by the Allies to intervene by sending troops, including Americans, to Russia’s ports in the far north and far east. People at the time, however, saw it almost entirely through the prism of the Great War. At first, the Allies welcomed the overthrow of the czar, and believed it would rejuvenate the failing Russian war effort. By replacing an infamous autocrat on the Allied roster with a fledgling democracy, it made “making the world safe for democracy” a more credible call to arms, and helped pave the way for the US to enter the war. When Lenin took over and made a ruinous peace with the Central Powers, he was seen as simply a German puppet. And when Bolshevik forces, augmented with released German and Austrian prisoners of war, attacked a unit of Czech soldiers crossing Siberia to rejoin the Allies on the Western Front, those suspicions blossomed into fear of a full-fledged German takeover of Russia. The Allies sent troops to key Russian ports to secure the war supplies stockpiled there and provide an exit route for the loyal Czechs. They considered trying to “reopen” the Eastern Front, but realized it would take far too many men. They assumed that when Germany was defeated, their proxy Lenin would eventually fall, and when the war ended, they naturally lost interest. It all makes sense, but only if you see through the eyes that people saw through at the time.
Did it really matter who won the war? In its aftermath, the Great War came to be seen as a colossal waste, a testament to the vanity of nations, of pompous older men sending foolish younger men into the meat-grinder for no good reason. War poems like “Dulce et decorum est” and novels like All Quiet on the Western Front have crystalized this impression. But this was not how people felt at the time. German atrocities in Belgium and on the high seas—some exaggerated, but others quite real—convinced many people that civilization, as they knew it, really was at stake. I was consistently and often surprisingly struck by the sincerity of support, not just on the home front, but among soldiers who had seen the worst of combat, for pursuing the war unto victory. The tone matures, but remains vibrant: these were, for the most part, people who believed in what they were fighting for. At what point the bitter cynicism set in, after the war ended, I cannot say. But at some point, that enthusiasm, and even the memory of it, became buried with the dead.
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Boys wearing bags of camphor around their necks to ward off influenza, 1917
Though, in fact, in many places the war did not actually end. An armistice was declared on the Western Front, and the armies there were disbanded and sent home. But Germany, Austria, and Hungary all descended into revolution and civil war for a time, with gangs of demobilized soldiers fighting on all sides. In Russia, the Soviet regime and its multiple enemies would battle for several years, while trying to reconquer territory surrendered when it quit the war against Germany. The Greeks tried to reclaim Constantinople from the Turks, and would be massacred when the Turks succeeded in reconsolidating their country. The Poles fought wars with the Ukrainians and the Soviets to define the boundaries of their newly independent country. Jews and Arabs continue to fight over the new lands liberated from the Ottoman Empire to this day.
In the Great War itself, over 16 million people died, including almost 7 million civilians. The US got off relatively lightly, with 117,465 people killed, just 0.13 percent of its population. In Serbia, somewhere between 17 percent and 28 percent of the country’s population was killed. But even numbers like these leave little concrete impression on our minds. Some of the most touching parts of my experience live-tweeting were the times when people would tweet back to me about a grandfather or great-uncle who fought and died in the war, and is forever twenty-four-years old in some field in France, or Turkey, or Italy, or at sea. For most people, that absence is what defined the war: someone left and never came home. The world that they shaped, by their presence and their absence, is the one that we live in, whether we realize it or not. And we, like them, can only grope our way forward, day by day, into an unknown future.
Historica Graphica Collection/Heritage Images/Getty Images
Poet Wilfred Owen died on 4 November 1918 – seven days before the guns fell silent. The centenary of his death was marked in the village where he died bya ceremony in which the Last Post was playedon a bugle Owen took from a German soldier killed during the battle to cross the nearby Sambre-Oise.
A poignant, fitting tribute by Gerry Condon of Liverpool to all the “doomed youth” of all wars. Lest we forget …
Here are random thoughts on the latest television dramatization of War and Peacewhich showed on free-to-air here in Australia in September 2017 and has been repeated many times since.
In the early ‘seventies, I went through a ‘Russian’ phase, wading patiently and pensively through the greatest literary hits of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Solzhenitsyn. They seemed to suit my temperament during the cold, damp winter months as I journeyed back and forth on the London Undergound to mundane and monotonous temp jobs. I recall watching all seven hours of Sergei Bondarchuk’s epic‘sixties adaptation in one overnight sitting at at an art house cinema in Bloomsbury Square in 1973. But I fell asleep during the thunderous battle of Borodino. The BBC crammed its 1972 adaptation of War and Peace into fifteen hours over twenty episodes– the film that shot Anthony Hopkins and Robert Powell to stardom.
How on earth do you compress some 1,500 close-typed pages into just six one-hour episodes, as the Beeb’s latest period piece does?
A lot, obviously, has to go.
So, out go all the long expositions and naval-gazing ruminations. There no need to ponder much on the inner manifestations of the ‘Russian soul’, whatever that might be. The philosophizing that was retained felt lightweight and incongruous against the splendour of the social scene, the rural vista, the battlefields, and great historical events. Hence Andre’s deep-and-meaningfull thoughts on glory, and latterly, on bucolic visions, seemed a tad intrusive. Pierre’s thoughts on freedom. freemasonry and, latterly, after his near-death experiences, on brotherly love and the simple life, appear lightweight and cloying.
And to suit our twenty-first century tastes, in comes some glamorous naughtiness – a surfeit of sexy vignettess which old Leo Tolstoy would probably have loved but would never have committed to print, and some poetic license (or licentiousness), bare thighs and cleavage so that we well and truly got the message. It was, nonetheless a “polite society” sans filth, blood, and profanity.
What Tolstoy left to surmise and imagination, this down-sized saga leaves no sheet unturned. Helene and Anatole Kuragin really do appear to have had it off together, and she does indeed bonk Nikolai’s mates Dolokhov and Drubetskoy, and sundry others – she was quite clearly the Petrograd bike. And, of course, she comes to a bad, hallucinogenic, and sanguinary end.
The families are well drawn, and quite humorously depicted. The scheming, naughty Kuragins; the affectionate and lighthearted Rostovs, headed up by their bumbling, adoring and ultimately impecunious papa – well played by comedian Adrian Edmondson. The uptight, and undemonstrative Bolkonskys, with Jim Broadbent giving a masterclass in fine acting – “best in show” indeed. We get a fair if Kubrikesqe ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ picture of Pierre Bezukhov’s wicked, dissolute lifestyle, and his faltering, stumbling road to redemption.
So, does this truncation of the big book work? I would say yes. The story flowed, the various story-lines held together, and it was relatively easy to keep track of the characters by their appearance if not by their long names. The best way to judge a serialization is by the question: do you finish an episode looking forward to the next? And the answer is yes.
As for the cast, it appears like anyone who was anybody in British television drama or comedy, looked good in historical costume and was not in Game of Thrones, got a gig and a chance to do Napoleonic dress-ups – with the exception perhaps of Colin Firth, Aiden Turner, John Simm, Matt Smith, Jenna Coleman, Olivia Colman and Claire Foy.
Lily James is gorgeous in an elfin, ingenue way. Although her Natasha Rostova looks and behaves like an eighteen year old throughout, and not the thirteen years old who ages in years and wisdom as portrayed by Tolstoy. She sang beautifully, and she sure can dance. The famous Natasha’s Dance scene was nicely done if too brief. It was over too quickly and failed to show how important this particular scene was to Tolstoy ; in the book, the Rostovs retire to a wooden hut at the end of a day’s hunting, where folk songs are played to the balalaika. Natasha dances to a song, but it is not a waltz or polka she is doing – instinctively, she dances like a peasant girl. The Russian soil is in her blue blood. Nevertheless, I do like Lily James. And so, it seems do the powers that be: she’s doing quite alright these days with lead roles in Darkest Hour, Mama Mia! Here we go again (singing and dancing again), and Yesterday, again singing and dancing – the lass cant keep still.
Paul Dano, the slim, young, scheming, preacher of There Will Be Blood, as Pierre Bezukov? Still slim and young looking, though “kinda funny looking” as they say in Fargo-speak. But portraying the tall, fat, shortsighted, dissolute and bumbling Pierre? Amazingly, it seems to have worked. His is a credible performance, although his “niceness” to the Rostovs and Bolkonskys, and his transformation to all-round good guy could be quite irritating. Inept, opinionated, inadequate, and out of his depth both romantically and socially. My favourite Pierre moment in the book is when he resolves to liberate or lighten the burden on his serfs – a subject close to Tolstoy’s heart – and how his steward circumvents his wishes. This was not even touched on in the film.
Jim Broadbent as the crusty, cranky old curmudgeon Bolkonsky Senior was a tour de force. He stole every scene he was in, and although he was not like I imagined from the book – less ascetic, more rough-edged – he was the best character in the film.
Adrian Edmondson, comedienne Jennifer Saunders’s other half, and bad boy of The Young Ones and Bottom, was an unexpected delight as the genial but incompetent Rostov patriarch. He played it for laughs, and his decline under financial pressures and family tragedy was nicely handled.
James Norton’s wannabe martial hero Andrei Bolkonsky was a stitched up, uptight, frustrating, and irritating jerk. You wanted to give him a good shake. And that’s just how Tolstoy would have liked it. He looked good, especially in uniform, and carried himself just as a stitched up, uptight jerk would. I guess that makes his apotheosis and death all the more interesting. So nice that everyone got to say their goodbyes. The Gladiatoresqe ‘out of body’, vanishing into into the Russian sunset sequence as he passed on was a bit too much, but.
Jessie Buckley as his sister Princess Marya was excellent. Whilst she was in no way as plain and unprepossessing as Tolstoy painted her, her “ugly duckling” transformation was lovely to behold. I actually felt happy that she finally found happiness. She had to lose her father and brother to find herself, and also, find Nikolai, the naive and gallant hussar. Irish Jessie has been making quite a name for herself of late as a country and western singer, and in major roles in the dubious Taboo and chilling Chernobyl.
Jack Lowden’s Nikolai, Natasha’s air-headed, profligate brother, was very well cast. A selfish prick who takes his folks for granted (and bankrupts them for bad measure), and treats pretty, poor, patient, pauper Sonya terribly, he has awful taste in friends (except for loyal Denisov) and plays a terrible game of cards,. But he sings beautifully (his duet with Natasha is a delight), and looks great in uniform.
Tuppence Middleton played Helene Kuragin as the soap-opera bad girl. She looked good, took her clothes off, wore see-through fashions, and camped it up (would Tolstoy have let her out like that, I wonder? He would doubtless of appreciated her “indoors,). And you couldn’t wait for Pierre to kick her out.
Helene and Anatole Kuragin
Minor characters were presented – with the exception of Matthieu Kannovitz’s Napoleon – a very poor caricature. I liked Brian Cox’s Kutuzov, but for me, he will always be Dalgeish of Deadwood. And Aneurin Barnard was excellent as the opportunistic Boris Drubetskoy. His meeting with Napoleon was a hoot. He is a great actor, having portrayed Cilla Black’s Bobby in Cilla, David Bailey in We’ll Take Manhattan. Rebecca Front was very good as his scheming, impecunious and irritating Mama – well remembered from the comedies The Thick of Itand Nighty Night, and still, to a degree, playing it for laughs – even when securing Pierre’s inheritance by wrestling a soon-to-be disappearing will from the hands of his avaricious relatives.
Stephen Rea played Prince Vassily Kuragin with a supercilious lugubriousness, whilst Callum Turner portrays his son Anatole as a card-board cut-out rake. Gillian Anderson, looked resplendent as society hostess Anna Pavlovna Scherer, did not have very much to do except play, well, a society hostess. And lastly, there was Tom Burke’s over-the-top bad-boy Fedor Dolokhov. As Tolstoy himself put it: “There are three things I love to do!’ he roared. ‘Fight, drink, and I can’t remember the other one … “ And: “I think you’re an absolute ruffian,’ Helene tutted, branding him ‘disgusting.’
One judges the success of a visual dramatization by how well renders the original’s iconic scenes and set-pieces. Here then is a brief critique.
The famous, plot-setting grand ball was nicely done – the set, the clothes, and the dancing, building up well to Nat and Andy’s meeting and floor show. Natasha’s Dance at the Rostov dacha, so iconic and important to Tolstoy’s narodnik sympathies, was, however, disappointingly undercooked. Bezukhov and Dolakhov’s duel in the snow , was deftly done, demonstrating what a foolish, deadly practice this was. Pierre’s Freemason initiation was risably pythonesqe – all signs and handshakes and overdone dramatics. Why bother?
The French Invasion of 1812, heralded Halley’s Comet, as a vast army crossing the Neimen, Boney’s fateful Rubicon, is melodramatically underwhelming but perhaps, to be otherwise would have required a very big budget. and yet, the battle of Borodino – I was awake for this one – was probably the best screen portrayal of this bloodbath that I have seen. The French occupation of Moscow was cliched and cursory, whilst the burning of the city, always difficult portray in film, came across as cut-price CGI. The disastrous French retreat from Moscow, prisoners in tow, was likewise difficult to portray, but somehow, by thinking small and focusing on the micro-dramas of the debacle, and with some cold-weather channeling of David Lean’s Dr Zhivago, it actually worked.
And finally, when the tumult and the shouting ended, the captains and the kings departed, and the characters have met their various ends or apotheoses, what of that bucolic happy families ending?
As Tolstoy himself was to say, in the opening lines of another weighty tome, all happy families are alike. The rural family barbecue was a derivative denouement. The surviving members of the three families, now three generations, gather together after all their trials and tribulations in an idyllic rustic lifestyle bought and paid for with Bezukhov and Bolkonsky money. It is reminiscent of the final scene in Cold Mountain, Shenandoah, How the West was Won, The Sound of Music, and many others in which ‘Good’ eventually triumphs over despair, deprivation and disaster – you know how it goes: “We’re so glad all the bad stuff is over and done – may our lives now be pleasant and delightful”. Or as Tiny Tim (of Dickens’ fame, not Tulips) declaimed, “God bless us all!”
But, Tolstoy’s drawn-out, ponderous and indeed, anticlimactic and awful “getting of wisdom” finale would not have worked on screen. “Thankfully!” many would declare. And anyhow, isn’t this how the classic hero’s quest is meant to end: with revelation redemption, reunion, and a kind of contentment. The old Count, in his mystical, mythic way, wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.
And after six hours of pretty good entertainment, who am I to blow against the wind?
We’re going to speak Frussian, join the army, fall in love, fall out of love, get very cold, and then die
John Crace, Mon 11 Jan 2016
Illustration: Matt Blease
It was July 1805, and all St Petersburg was concerned about the advance of Bonaparte. Though not so much as to cancel a soiree at which Pierre, a bastard by birth but not by nature, was to be introduced to Russian society.
“Pierre is not one of nous,” several guests observed. “Not only does he forget choses but he doesn’t speak Frussian. Et he drinks even plus que nous.”
Prince Andrew, a bastard by nature but not by birth, cleared his throat delicately. “As a member of the officer class, I have decided to join the army,” he declared.
“I shall join the hussars,” Nicholas declared, while his sister Natasha eyed up potential husbands. They might become rather scarce.
Pierre checked his fob watch. The pages were turning faster than he expected and his father had now died. “I seem to find myself the richest man in Russia.”
War proved more terrible than either Andrew or Nicholas has expected. Dreams as well as men got killed. “How I embrace death,” Andrew murmured as the battle of Austerlitz raged. “Pas so vite,” said Napoleon. “Permettez-moi de vous donner une main. Now I must wash my chubby little body.”
“I’m home,” said Andrew as his wife died in childbirth.
Pierre felt the burden of expectation and married Helene but, helas, she had a bit on the cote. The anguish was intolerable, but Pierre felt obliged not to kill his love rival in a duel and left St Petersburg for many years to ruminate on Freemasonry before deciding a knotted handkerchief was not for him. Instead, he chose to improve the lot of his serfs, who had up till now remained entirely invisible. “Harrumph,” he concluded at last. “I cannot improve their lot because they have never had it so good.” Tolstoy nodded approvingly, lifting his eyes momentarily from the handsome handmaiden beneath him.
“So, 500 roubles on the peace lasting,” said Nicholas, as Napoleon and the Tsar embraced in friendship, thereby losing the remains of the Rostov fortune.
“I am distraught,” Andrew declared as Natasha fell dangerously ill.
It was now 1812 and Pierre was beside himself as the French approached Moscow. “‘I am deranged with symbolism and Helene has left me even though I left her first. I vow to kill Napoleon,” he said.
“Je ne peux pas believe que je have just perdu the battle of Borodino,” Napoleon squeaked, his shoe-lifts giving him gip. “The French had by lointhe best army.”
“But Russia had nature and spirituality on its side,” said Tolstoy while a chorus of Volga boatmen sang patriotic songs.
“Can you not faire quelque chose about the fumee in Moscow?” asked Napoleon. “Et quand will I receive the surrender?”
“Jamais,” Mother Russia replied. First scorched earth, then General Winter. War is hell.
Pierre hovered between madness and death as the French performed atrocities during their withdrawal from the icy embrace of Mother Russia.
“There is a nobility in being broke,” said Nicholas’s aunt. “So I am going to give you some more money.” “Oh, thank you,” Nicholas replied. “Now I can marry Mary. And maybe you and Andrew can make up now, Natasha?”
“I forgive you, Natasha,” said Andrew, before dropping dead.
“That’s handy,” said Pierre, appearing out of nowhere. “Maybe I can marry you instead.”
“Yes please,” Natasha whimpered. “I can give up my singing, we can have four children and I can become a right old drudge, because Leo thinks that submission is a woman’s natural state.”
Tolstoy bowed his head. He was tired. The novel was a difficult thing. Not that his book was a novel, of course. Though people would be bound to call it that. Fools all of them. We can only know we know nothing.
The horse has been man’s most important companion – forget cats and dogs – and the most durable of historical alliances – against which every other covenant has been fragile and ephemeral – not even our relationship with our gods has shown a comparable degree of stability. Our story resonates with an equine leitmotif – in our dreams, our fantasies, our histories, our literature, and our movies; in our aesthetics and our notions of speed, strength, power, courage, fortitude, loyalty and beauty.
Hey and away we go Through the grass, across the snow, Big brown beastie, big brown face, I’d rather be with you than flying through space.
Mike Oldfield, On Horseback
Pastorale
Oh the world is sweet The world is wide And she’s there where The light and the darkness divide And the steam’s coming off her She’s huge and she’s shy And she steps on the moon When she paws at the sky
Leonard Cohen, The Ballad of the Absent Mare
What is there not to love about a horse?
Its big, brown, doe eyes; its earthy, sweaty aroma from a land somewhere between babies and barnyards; the warmth of its neck on your palm; the rough feel of its mane in your fingers; the smell and the squeak of saddle leather; the jingle-bells of the bridle. The strength you sense through your thighs; an exhilaration that is close to fear as you kick his flanks into a trot, a canter, a gallop, and whoa! and you’re never one hundred percent sure she will obey you. And then, when it’s over, the radiated heat, the damp hide, the glow of sweat, almost a mist of equine energy as you dismount after the ride. You feel wired, alive, and at one with the horse, with the land, with nature.
I first rode a horse in the late seventies, on my first visit to Australia with my first wife. Her old man was a doctor on locum in Coolah, ‘beyond of the Black Stump’, which is to say, the back of beyond (and there really WAS a black stump on the outskirts of town, for the infrequent tourist to be photographed by in pre-selfie days). A local farmer had invited us out to ride his large property, and so we rode, in the heat haze of high summer, through wide, dry, open, paddocks, mobs of roos scattering as we approached, flocks of cockatoos roosting riotously in the branches of dead trees, and flies. Yes, I learned about the “Aussie salute” that summer. I fell in love with the Australian bush then and there, the “wide brown land” of Dorothea Mackelllar’s “sunburnt country“. A few years later, as a newly arrived immigrant, I would go riding again, this time with country friends in the Dungog cattle country north of Sydney.
I was not a good rider, but I loved the craic. Not a natural like Adèle. When we first met, she kept four horses and looked after a whole riding school of them, bringing them in bareback riding, stock-whip cracking, a proper jillaroo. ‘Western pleasure’, it was called. No jackets and jodhpurs – it was cowboy hats, boots and blue jeans – before helmets and Occupational Health and Safety. I rode her gorgeous chestnut quarter horse called Twopence, and she, a handsome palomino named Trigger (of course). A riding accident put me in hospital – and I never rode a horse again.
Twopence & Trigger
That was a decades ago, but living in the bush, I still feel pleasure when I see horses in their paddocks. The sight, sound, and smell strike a melodious, atavistic chord that many would recognize as distinctively Australian. How many Aussies of a certain age would not thrill at the Banjo’s ballad of the bushman that is almost our national poem:
He hails from Snowy River, up by Kosciusko’s side, Where the hills are twice as steep and twice as rough, Where a horse’s hoofs strike firelight from the flint stones every stride, The man that holds his own is good enough’.
In this centennial year of the Palestine Campaign of WWI and the gallop of the Australian Light Horse towards the strategic Beersheba wells – praised, inaccurately, as history’s last great cavalry charge, the Light Horseman and his hardy “Waler” (from New South Wales) have achieved iconic status in a media supercharged on “Anzackery”. Calmer voices have argued that on the scale of the carnage on the western front, where Diggers died in their thousands, and indeed the Gaza battle itself, where the Anzacs were a very small part of a very large army, it was really no big thing, But never let the facts get between a politician and a photo-opportunity. During the closing scenes of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the journalist says: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”.
And it was always thus. As German academic and cultural scientist Ulrich Raulff’s tells us in his captivating “micro-history” Farewell to the Horse: The Final Century of Our Relationship:
“Like love and the stock exchange, our historical memory is a motherland of wishful thinking, sacrificed to our faith and blind to known facts…This is why historical myths are so tenacious. It’s as though the truth even when it’s there for everyone to see, is powerless – it can’t lay a finger on the all powerful myth”.
Farewell to the horse
It is an easy segue from my Australian pastorale to Raulff’s illuminating canter through the story of the “Centaurian Pact” between humans and horses. it is at once a ride, a revelation, and a reminiscence of my short-lived ‘cowboy’ days.
“The horse” Raulff begins, “has been man’s most important companion – forget cats and dogs – and the most durable of historical alliances – against which every other covenant into which we have entered has been fragile and ephemeral – not even our relationship with our gods has shown a comparable degree of stability”.
He then recounts how over the span of a few decades, a relationship that endured for six millennia went “to the dogs” – excuse my awful pet-food pun. And it happened almost unremarked, unnoticed, and unsung. “For a century, the oat-powered engine was the universal and irreplaceable power unit of the forced mechanization of the world”. And then it was gone, replaced by the internal combustion engine. And yet, the term “horsepower” is to this day a measure of the performance of vehicle engines (although now mostly replaced by kilowatts) – a horse was the equivalent of seven men.
“The twilight of the equine gods”, as Raulff describes it, was a long goodbye indeed, and in the realm of myth, memory and metaphor, horses are with us still; or as he so lyrically expresses it: “ghosts of modernity” (echoes of Dylan, in my mind, at least) that “haunt the minds of a humanity that has turned away from them”.
Like its subject, Farewell to the Horse is a handsome, wide-ranging, beast. More elegy than epitaph, eclectic and imaginative in scope, viewing the horse as muse, as mount, and as metaphor, Raulff sings the song of the horse – and if ever there was a ‘horse opera’, this is it.
Eloquently and at times poetically translated, and generously illustrated with pictures from galleries, libraries, and photo archives, Raulff takes the reader through the many worlds of the relationship. On his academic home-turf of sociology and psychology, his references are primarily German, but straying from his academic stable, he ambles into a lush and diverse pastureland of history and mythology, politics and philosophy. economics and geography, industry and commerce, physics and biology, science and medicine, sport and recreation. And art and literature: how artists and writers brought their perspectives, personas and passions onto canvas, Kodak and the printed page. In many ways, its infinite variety reminded me of English historian Simon Schama’s fascinating Landscape and Memory.
Raulff has divided his book into four broad thematic sections, each with an evocative title – The Centauran Pact, A Phantom in the Library. The Living Metaphor, and The Forgotten Player – each exploring a particular aspect of the horse’s story. But he allows himself much extempore stream of consciousness as he periodically wanders off-script with childhood reminiscences and collected anecdotes, and dips into favourite paintings, books and films. And time-travels through six thousand years, and traverses the globe too in his long ride – from the Steppes of Eurasia to the Great Plains of America, from the cities of MittelEuropa to those of the Midwest, with side trips to the Middle East and Andalusia.
It was contagious. I too got to thinking beyond the page, recalling and contemplating a miscellany of ideas and images that came to mind whilst reading, and indeed, whilst writing this review, wandering down forgotten bridle-ways (literally, a horse riding path, or trail originally created for use by horses, but often now serving a range of travelers). And is this not what a good book should do?
The Song of the Horse
The horse, the intelligent mammal, the great vegetarian, a prey animal whose strength is in flight, who has no desire or need for confrontation or quarrel. It’s speed, its main asset, enabling it to flee its predators, is also what attracted it to the attention of man, with whom it entered into a long-lived, unequal devil’s bargain. “They were able to turn the inconspicuous potential energy of tough prairie grasses, inedible to almost all other animals into the spectacular energy of a fast endurance runner. Thanks to its natural properties as a converter of energy, the horse could bear kings, Knights, female lovers and rural doctors, draw carriages and cannons, transport hordes of workers and employees, and mobilize entire nations”. And indeed, Raulff takes us on a jaunt through these tableaux.
He quotes historian Ann Hyland: “it was a small step, albeit a brave one, for man to mount a horse”, and writes: “The comparison with the moon landing is certainly not exaggerated. The moment when man began, by domestication and breeding, to connect his fate to the horse – not with a nutritional intention, but with a vectorial aim – may have been, before the invention of writing, the narrow gate through which man entered the realm of history”.
And lo, our story resonates with an equine leitmotif.
The horse is in our dreams and our fantasies, in our literature, and our movies, in our aesthetics, and our notions of speed, strength, power, courage, fortitude, loyalty and beauty. From the diverse mounts that conveyed Chaucer’s pilgrims to Canterbury to that paragon of American folk culture, the cowboy. From the rambunctious centaurs of Disney’s’ Beethoven Fantasia to the gaunt quartet bearing the seer of Patmos’ horsemen of the Apocalypse. From the teenage innocence of National Velvet and Black Beauty to Thomas Hardy and Carey Mulligan’s sensual and photogenic jaunt in the recent remake of Far From the Madding Crowd. From the patriotic jingoism of Alfred J Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade and Rudyard Kipling’s East is East and West is West to Banjo Patterson’s blokey bush ballad The Man From Snowy River, which I have quoted above (and will reprise below). The horse has even entered into the invented worlds of science fiction, with Joss Whedon’s rollicking space-pirate adventure, Firefly, and more recently, Westworldwith its Wild West theme park populated by lifelike android cowboys and Indians on their robot horses.
Westworld
[If I have one small quibble about Farewell to the Horse, it is in its Eurocentricity. The Land Down Under doesn’t rate a mention even though the horse has played an important role in the evolution of Australia’s perceived national identity – “perceived” because here too, we are captive to that “powerful myth” that Raulff believes subverts fact]. We see horses every time we leave our rural property. They are an intrinsic part of our country life, and many of our friends are riders. Here are a couple of pictures of our good friend Chris riding the National Trail through Guy Fawkes National Park:
Whilst drawing cleverly on the arts – and the book is well-furnished with illustrations that are well spoken to in the text – Raulff does not venture into poetry, where there are to be found many wonderful images. Take but a few examples drawn from just one poem, and marvel at the metaphors in Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Boys Own’ tale of a young British officer tracking down a daring Pathan bandit:
The Colonel’s son has taken horse, and a raw rough dun was he, With the mouth of a bell and the heart of Hell and the head of a gallows-tree”.
“It’s up and over the Tongue of Jagai, as blown dust-devils go, The dun he fled like a stag of ten, but the mare like a barren doe. The dun he leaned against the bit and slugged his head above, But the red mare played with the snaffle-bars, as a maiden plays with a glove”.
“They have ridden the low moon out of the sky, their hoofs drum up the dawn, The dun he went like a wounded bull, but the mare like a new-roused fawn”.
And, of course, there are the songs. There’s the doomed Texan troubadour Townes van Zandt’s enigmatic anti-hero:
Pancho was a bandit, boys His horse was fast as polished steel, Wore his gun outside his pants For all the honest world to feel
Pancho and Lefty
And whilst Raulff includes a poignant picture of a lone, pedestrian cowboy carrying his saddle through the scrub like a mariner lost on the land, he doesn’t mention Leonard Cohen’s bereft and distraught cowpoke :
Say a prayer for the cowboy His mare’s run away And he’ll walk til he finds her His darling, his stray
The Ballad of the Absent Mare
But more from St. Leonard of Montreal later…
Frederic Remington’s Bronco
A Phantom Limb
The horse’s glory days may be over, but the echoes of a long and fruitful relationship linger in our lines and in our language – in our idioms and our figures of speech: like, “getting back in the saddle”, “pulling the reins” and “taking the reins”, “champing at the bit”, “gaining the whip hand”, and the timeless put-down, “get off your high horse!” Phrases such as these are used everyday by people who have never been physically close to a horse let alone ridden one, and whose visual encounters are limited to country outings, circuses, televised equestrian events and westerns (in Australia, as in the US, we can still enjoy country fairs and carnivals that feature rodeos and endurance rides).
And note that these usages are somehow connected to power, control, and aggression – and often, casual, almost matter-of-fact violence (the idea of being “horse-whipped”) – violence inflicted not only on humans but on the animals too.
Raulff asks: Why is it that the most powerful visual images of horses are in their warrior role? Does it not say more about ourselves than what was genetically a passive, docile, tame-able (we call it “breaking”) grazer?
Equestrian Statues
Salah ud Din al Ayubi, Damascus
The horse has a complex and varied curriculum vitae. For six millennia, it has been our dependable beast of burden, the bearer of people, packages and progress, shrinking distance and opening up new lands. But it has also been the agent of power, politics and pogroms. A bearer of great ideas, and also of great tyrants.
The horse has long been a living metaphor of power – the absolute political metaphor, indeed.
“The combination of horse and rider is a powerful symbol of domination, and one of the oldest in the book”. The caudillo, the martial “man on horseback” so beloved of painters and sculptors – and of putative dictators (although Stalin and Hitler, Raulff reminds us, despised horses). There’s Alexander the Great on Bucephalus, defeating Darius; David’s conquering Napoleon crossing the Alps; bodacious Boudicca reining in her chariot steeds on The Embankment. To be physically and violently unhorsed is to be taken down literally and figuratively. Hence Richard III’s anguished “my kingdom for a horse”, and George Armstrong Custer and the men of the Seventh Cavalry demountd and doomed on Last Stand Hill.
The rise of the horse changes the position of the people and along with it, their view of the world around them – what Raulff calls the ‘cavalier perspective’. It is rooted in an age-old fantasy of the fusion of man and beast, from centaur to chevalier. The unfortunate Aztecs believed the mounted conquistadors to be half man half beast. That dismissive rebuke “get off your high horse” echoes a primal fear of the mounted marauder, be he the Scythian archer, the Mongol warrior, the rogue knight or the Red Indian (“savage” he was called back in the day) of the Great Plains. Recall the Cossacks lining up on the snow-covered square, about to charge the defenseless marchers in David Lean’s Dr Zhivago. Recall the Dothraki, screaming their war cries, thundering down on the doomed Lannister infantry. “We still see traces of horses’ archaic role as inspirers of terror when required to intimidate picketing workers or to drive rallies of protesters out of shopping precincts”.
Something wicked this way comes – Clive Owen’s Slav King Arthur
During his travels, Raulff visited Israel, where he chanced to observe ultra-orthodox Jews protesting against their youth being conscripted into the Israeli Defense Force. Jerusalem authorities mobilized mounted police officers against the recalcitrant religious. He indulges in pogrom projection, imagining the Haredim being intimated by a Cossack Shtetl flashback. Fanciful, perhaps, but as a young man during the Vietnam demonstrations in London’s Grosvenor Square, I learned that there’s no greater killer of revolutionary passion than the sight of than a wall of fat horse’s arses backing towards you with those nervous hooves a’twitching.
And yet, the use of the horse in this manner forces it to go against its nature, trained to stand its ground in dangerous circumstances when all its instincts are to flee danger. Ostensible police brutality in Grosvenor Square was juxtaposed by the reality that police horses were stabbed by banners and tripped and stoned with glass marbles. Several were so injured that they had to be euthanized.
Horse meets Haredim in Jerusalem
…and meanwhile, in the other side of town
The Wide Open Spaces
The power bestowed upon men by horses is much more than such authoritarian, martial muscle. The horse enabled landsmen to conquer what Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey called “the tyranny of distance”. For Rudyard Kipling’s “fluttered folk and wild”, it ushered in a tyranny of a malevolent kind.
The horse-led conquests of European and Asian empires during the second millennium BCE by the chariots and later, cavalry of the horse-people disgorging from the steppes like some equestrian blitzkrieg, transformed world history. They brought their political structures, their warfare, their masculine, spiritual character – their “asabiyyeh” or, literally “muscle” as famed Arab historian Ibn Khaldun put it. The Eurasian nomadic warrior, “that ‘natural born’ combatant, who, as tough and austere as his resilient horse, emerged as the terror of the sedentary populations of Europe and the orient”. The same could be said of the warriors of Islam as they erupted out of their Arabian heartland and reached the walls of Constantinople and the frontiers of the Franks.
One powerful factor in these invasions was the horsemen’s speed. “In every contemporary account of the Mongols, great stress is laid on their speed: suddenly they were there, only to vanish and appear somewhere else even more suddenly”. The alliance between man, horse, and the arrow was likewise significant, providing the ability to kill from a distance, whilst moving, on horseback.
“Thanks to the horse, distant territories could be conquered and vast dominions could be established. The horse and its rider made the land they traversed tangible, recognizable, and able to be taken”. The horse became indispensable in terms of control of the land, subduing its inhabitants, and enabling Its exploration. In America, it brought the conquistadors, and in time, ensured that The West was won with catastrophic consequences for the native Americans with the loss their land and hunting grounds.
War Horse
Since it’s domestication, we humans have never resiled from putting our beloved horses in harms way. As an inspirer of terror and as a battering ram of blood and bone, mounted cavalry have been used on battlefields against soldiers and in streets and villages against civilians. Horses and mules have long provided most of the muscle used to move men and machines – the true “horsepower” of any war effort – serving in a wide variety of roles, including being ridden, as draft animals pulling vehicles and heavy weapons, and as pack animals. They, like their human comrades have perished in uncounted numbers by shot and shell, by accident and cruelty, disease and starvation, and during World War I, by poison gas. Sending animals to war seems, today, somehow even more awful than sending people to war, but in the past, there was little room for that sentiment. Animals were absolutely essential to any war effort, and they had to be sent – during WWI, millions of them, Most were horses and mules, but dogs, pigeons, camels, and even water buffalo and elephants were also found in some theatres of the war.
Celebrated English composer Sir Edward Elgar wrote in August 1914: “Concerning the war I say nothing … the only thing that wrings my heart and soul is the thought of the horses … oh! my beloved animals … the men … and armies can go to hell but my horses: I walk round and round this room cursing God for allowing dumb brutes to be tortured … let him kill his human beings but … how can he? Oh my horses.”
Farewell Old Friend by Fortunio Matana
A Day at the Races
Our pact with the horse was much more up more than the power and the glory, the conquest and the trail-blazing. Horses’ fleetness, stamina and beauty satisfied other, more hedonistic yearnings, and today, their days on the field of battle long over, they serve to give us pleasure – and profit.
And they have always done thus – particularly in the antecedents and descendants of the Ancient Greek hippodrome (named thus for horses and the racing thereof). In the downtime between warring and raiding, hunting and horse and chariot racing attracted many a warrior’s energy and enthusiasm, and provided less martial spectators with, vicarious thrills. We have been racing horses for as long as they have been our companions, and wagering on their speed and stamina. This passion fostered complementary endeavours in breeding, training, thieving, and gambling.
The racing carnival still exerts an atavistic, ofttimes addictive spell over riders, owners and punters alike. “The spectacle of race day echoes times and indeed conflicts past, the jockeys’ bright colours, representing a return of heraldry, a way of distinguishing otherwise indiscernible participants”.
It’s there you’ll see the jockeys and they’re mounted out so stately, The pink, the blue, the orange and green, the emblem of our nation, When the bell was rung for starting, all the horses seemed impatient, I thought they never stood on ground their speed was so amazing
Galway Races (Ireland, traditional)
In horse racing, nothing and no one is hunted, only the shadows of time”, Raulff notes prosaicly.
American author EC Morgan is similarly lyrical: “Time is a horse you never have to whip”,
In That Howling Infinite recently published a review of Morgan’s masterwork The Sport of Kings, a long and deep story about an old Kentucky horse-breeding family. She displays an unerring instinct for metaphor and music. A horse’s neck shudders under its rider’s hands “like a dreaming dog”. Of the racehorses, she writes: “they exploded out of the gate like doves from a cote”; and, “now the school of horses swung round the turn as if caught in a sweep net”.
Raulff explains why horse racing was indeed ‘the sport of kings: Britain emerged as the world power of thoroughbred racing under the racIng-mad Stuart Kings who transformed the sleepy village of Newmarket into the Mecca of the turf, supplanting hunting with punting as the favourite pastime of the idle rich and the indolent upper classes. When Scots King James wasn’t corralling and coaxing the best minds in the land into producing his beautiful Bible, he was both patron and participant with a keen eye for quality horse-flesh.
Teenage Daydream
Did I mention that horses can be dangerous? They are large, high, broad, heavy, and for all their tameness in the hands of a seasoned rider, they can also be excitable, unpredictable, and wild. When you take up the reins, you literally put your life in your hands. In My Early Life , his biography of his cavalry days, Winston Churchill wrote: “No hour of life is lost that is spent in the saddle. Young men have often been ruined by owning horses, or through backing horses, but never through riding them, unless, of course, they break their necks, which, taken at a gallop, is a very good way to die”.
But danger can come in other guises.
There was probably no way a cultural scientist trained in sociology and psychology could or would avoid how in its variegated pedigree, the horse has also figured as a sexual metaphor, conjuring up thoughts erotic with images of fair maids carried away by amorous riders. Raulff’s copious images include those famous abduction scenes beloved of renaissance painters, but there are many encounters in literature, art, cinema and song that are much less violent. It is as if the rider’s skill with his mount presages his prowess in the sack. There is titillation, there is temptation, and perhaps, surrender. Picture Ross Poldark cantering broodily across the Cornish clifftop, and lifting his Demelza up onto Seamus’ back (that is indeed his name).
True you ride the finest horse I’ve ever seen, Standing sixteen one or two with eyes wild and green, And you ride the horse so well, hands light to the touch. I could never go with you no matter how I wanted to.
Jimmy McCarthy, Ride On (listen to the song at the end end of this post)
Ross Poldark and Seamus
Ulrich gets into his stride, so to speak, when he commits to print his daydreams of the object of many a teenage baby boomers’ longing, the androgynous, pony-tailed cow-girl. He ponders also the puzzle of pubescent girls and horses – that tom-boy world, temporary “islands in the flowing river of time”: “Somewhere between a doll and a real-life partner, the horse is the ultimate sex toy. It’s the largest, most beautiful and final plaything before the transition from home and family to a new relationship with a sexual partner”.
Arwen Evenstar
Having raised the subject of women on horseback, there no ignoring the Amazons. Legend says that they were adept horse-women. As are the heroines of the literary canon who express their subversive sexuality in equestrian interludes – Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, and Thomas Hardy’s Bathsheba Everdene. Each are subjected to the author’s affectionate attention. When JRR Tolkien wanted to present a strong and wilful heroine in his ostensibly homoerotic epic, he placed Éowyn on a horse, albeit incognito. But she was the exception to JRR’s macho rule. He would never have sent elf princess Arwen Evenstar out like that. But director Peter Jackson, sensing how well it would translate to film, substituted the luminous Liv Tyler for elf lord Glorfindel to confound the Nazgul riders at the ford of Bruinen. Here is a Carey Mulligan in glamorous array as Bathsheba:
The horse, the healer
So what is this spell that horses weave? We’ve talked about power. We’ve talked about prowess. We’ve talked about passion. Raulff doesn’t venture into the imaginative, the mystical, the magical, and, going further, ameliorative power of horses – that inexplicable feeling you sense when you’re in close proximity to a horse. presence, an aura of sentient calmness. Let’s go back to our opening paragraph.
“What is there not to love about a horse? Its big, brown, doe eyes; its earthy, sweaty aroma from a land somewhere between babies and barnyards; the warmth of its neck on your palm; the rough feel of its mane in your fingers; the smell and the squeak of saddle leather; the jingle-bells of the bridle. The strength you sense through your thighs; an exhilaration that is close to fear as you kick his flanks into a trot, a canter, a gallop, and whoa! and you’re never one hundred percent sure she will obey you. And then, when it’s over, the radiated heat, the damp hide, the glow of sweat, almost a mist of equine energy as you dismount after the ride. You feel wired, alive, and at one with the horse, with the land, with nature”.
It is said that there there is much more to a horse than its rider and that undeniably physical allure – that if you put your hands on or even near a horse’s body and close your eyes, you can feel a golden thread of energy travelling from your hands to its body, and from that body to your hands. There is a quiet strength to a horse that communicates a state of calm, relation, and peace. and a Therapists who work with grief and trauma are discovering that an emotional connection can exist between a horse and a human, that being in nature, in the presence of horses, seems to help children, teenagers and adults expand their emotional awareness and enhance their mental health, beginning the work of reconnecting them to the self, and to their environment, and even healing something inside that has been broken, often for years.
Poets might describe it as an opening up the heart. Therapists call it limbic resonance, the capacity for sharing deep emotional states arising from the limbic system of the brain, which can include heightened feelings of empathic harmony. Horses, they believe, are highly sensitive creatures and possess an uncanny ability to read and mirror us because it is a skill that keeps them alive. They are instinctively prey animals, and in order to survive, they had to become excellent interpreters of energy, emotion and intention. Their sensitivity has been bred into their DNA for millions of years. But It is still all about the heart and the emotional states of calm and even joy when we feel positive emotions.
As a coda to this brief commentary on the horse as healer, a friend of mine passed away recently in Bellingen Hospital. The hospice ward is an impressive place in terms of its staff and the care they give a horse came to his bedside and lay its head on his chest – a small horse, but a horse nonetheless. I have learned since that this pony is a regular visitor to hospices and aged care homes in the area. Bellingen hospital also allows cats and dogs to visit their owners.
For further reading on the horse as therapist, read this piece on horse heart math and an article by Candida Baker, an equine facilitated learning practitioner who helps people suffering from trauma in the Sydney Morning Herald.
The Unequal Bargain
There are wealth of emotions associated with horses, such as pride and admiration, a desire for power, fear and joy, compassion, and companionship, and a lust for freedom. The pony is the cowboys’ closest pal. Western star and crooner Roy Rogers described it best:
Who carries your burden, who carries your load On tumbleweed land or a long dusty road Who asks you no questions, who tells you no lies That four legged friend with the two honest eyes A four legged friend, a four legged friend He’ll never let you down He’s honest and faithful right up to the end That wonderful four legged friend
Roy Rogers, A Four Legged Friend (listen to the song at the end end of this post)
Over two millennia we have lavished depthless emotion, boundless affection and unlimited treasure upon horses. But we have also been capable of great cruelty both casual and calculated, – from willful neglect and senseless whipping to silent sacrifice as expendable extras on battlefields and motion picture sets. Raulff documents in prose and picture the violence inflicted upon our “four legged friend”, and also how pathos and sympathy for the horses’ plight evolved into a worldwide movement for the prevention of cruelty to all creatures great and small.
That very same Banjo Paterson who gave us the Snowy Mountain man’s famous ride also glorifying the race track – and yet the annual Melbourne Cup, Australia’s ‘race that stops a nation’, sees horses killed every year. we as a nation continue to praise and perpetuate what many see as animal cruelty. In Paterson’s day, horses were valuable and relied upon for transport and pleasure – theft was common – yet they were treated appallingly. Read The Man From Snowy Riverand reflect on the agony the hero inflicts upon his mount, which could barely move by the end of the ride and ‘was blood from hip to shoulder from the spur’. Yet Banjo, like apologists for the deaths on the track today – suggests that the horse was reveling in the chase.
But horses’ iconic place in our hearts and souls are sealed by their status as mobile metaphors of speed, of grace, of the wind in one’s hair, of wild, exhilarating, uninhibited freedom: “Run wild, run free”, like the troubled teen and the wild blue-eyed white colt in the 1969 British film of that name.
As Victorian bush poet James Cayce write in his poem A Magnificent Contradiction, a reminder of a debt that cannot be repaid:
The swirl of your mane alive in the wind, the glow on your flanks in the sun The spirit of freedom you stir in my soul, the rhythm and grace when you run. A whirlwind of power to wield or withhold; each movement made with conviction, A titan at work, a child at play; a magnificent contradiction
And it is with this in mind that Raulff concludes his epic ride, for it is one of the most poignant paradoxes that the idea of freedom and movement associated with horses and being on horseback, the image of the wild mustangs in The Misfits and Banjo Paterson’s Colt from Old Regret, is juxtaposed with the reality that this “creature of the wind”, as the Arabs described him, has surrendered her freedom and free will in the service of man.
Quoting the poet Albrecht Schaefer, Raulff tells of how “the horse knows that it would like to be free … but the burden is never ending, and it is rarely allowed to run and has to stand there even when it is frightened and when it is seized by the urge to return to its nature, to flee … It is trapped in eternal captivity, always overshadowed by an inescapable will to which it resigns itself without ever realizing”.
This magnificent animal, Raulff writes, “held in perpetual captivity, is seen by us as the epitome of all in nature that embodies nobility and magnanimity, stature, pride, and courage”.
Now the clasp of this union Who fastens it tight? Who snaps it asunder The very next night Some say the rider Some say the mare Or that love’s like the smoke Beyond all repair
Leonard Cohen, The Ballad of the Absent Mare
When the white man came into the new world, he brought his horses. He conquered the land and broke it – its ecology, its pre-Colombian history, and its people.
In the early years, the horses of the conquistadors humbled and harried the Native Americans. In time, many horses scattered and ran wild, and on the open prairie grasslands, they prospered and multiplied. The free people of the plains captured and tamed those feral mustangs, and so mounted, were better able to travel over great distances to fresh pastures and to the wide grazing grounds of the vast herds of buffalo, a rich source of food and fashion.
The horse gave the Native Americans mobility and speed, and an economic asset of value. They began trading horses with their neighbours, and also horse stealing, whilst their mounts gave them the edge in their territorial vendettas with neighbouring tribes. They bought steel axes and knives From the white traders who ventured into their lands from the east, and also, firearms which augmented their already effective mounted archery. This gave them a tactical edge when they first came up against the mounted soldiers of the US Army.
They were a formidable foe, their speed and maneuverability and their skill with bow and rifle, were more than a match for the clumsy, old-school heavy cavalry, and these, indeed, were compelled to adjust their own style and tactics to match their guerrilla adversaries, taking up light weapons – carbines and revolvers – and fighting on foot as circumstances dictated.
An irony of the Battle of Little Big Horn 8in 1876 is that George Armstrong Custer and his men rode on to a battlefield in which they were out-horsed, outgunned, and outmaneuvered by their numerically stronger foe. Another irony is that the only US Army survivors of that famous battle were the cavalry horses. As a contemporary witness of the aftermath wrote:
“As the men looked up and searched the broken terrain with weary, tearful eyes, down by the river a horse was struggling to get to its feet. Several of the men recognized the horse because of its peculiar buckskin-like colour. It was Comanche, the favourite mount of Capt. Myles Keogh, who had valiantly rallied the men of “I” Company right up to the end… He had apparently sustained at least seven wounds, and his coat was matted with dried blood and soil.” Comanche’s wounds were serious, but he recovered and spent his days as a celebrity, taking part in ceremonies and parades as a symbol of Custer’s memory. After his dearth, he was stuffed and placed on display at the University of Kansas Museum of Natural History. https://www.globetrotting.com.au/comanche-the-horse-that-survived-custers-last-stand/
The US Army exacted a terrible revenge for Little Big Horn. The days of the Plains Indian were numbered as the army and the hunters destroyed the buffalo herds that fed and clothed the tribes, and killed their horses, ending forever their wandering ways. As Neil Young was later to sing in Pocahontas:
They killed us in our tepee And they cut our women down They might have left some babies Cryin’ on the ground But the firesticks and the wagons come And the night falls on the setting sun
Say a prayer for the cowboy
His mare’s run away
And he’ll walk til he finds her
His darling, his stray
But the river’s in flood
And the roads are awash
And the bridges break up
In the panic of loss.
And there’s nothing to follow
There’s nowhere to go
She’s gone like the summer
Gone like the snow
And the crickets are breaking
His heart with their song
As the day caves in
And the night is all wrong
Did he dream, was it she
Who went galloping past
And bent down the fern
Broke open the grass
And printed the mud with
The iron and the gold
That he nailed to her feet
When he was the lord
And although she goes grazing
A minute away
He tracks her all night
He tracks her all day
Oh blind to her presence
Except to compare
His injury here
With her punishment there
Then at home on a branch
In the highest tree
A songbird sings out
So suddenly
Ah the sun is warm
And the soft winds ride
On the willow trees
By the river side
Oh the world is sweet
The world is wide
And she’s there where
The light and the darkness divide
And the steam’s coming off her
She’s huge and she’s shy
And she steps on the moon
When she paws at the sky
And she comes to his hand
But she’s not really tame
She longs to be lost
He longs for the same
And she’ll bolt and she’ll plunge
Through the first open pass
To roll and to feed
In the sweet mountain grass
Or she’ll make a break
For the high plateau
Where there’s nothing above
And there’s nothing below
And it’s time for the burden
It’s time for the whip
Will she walk through the flame
Can he shoot from the hip
So he binds himself
To the galloping mare
And she binds herself
To the rider there
And there is no space
But there’s left and right
And there is no time
But there’s day and night
And he leans on her neck
And he whispers low
“Whither thou goest
I will go”
And they turn as one
And they head for the plain
No need for the whip
Ah, no need for the rein
Now the clasp of this union
Who fastens it tight?
Who snaps it asunder
The very next night
Some say the rider
Some say the mare
Or that love’s like the smoke
Beyond all repair
But my darling says
“Leonard, just let it go by
That old silhouette
On the great western sky”
So I pick out a tune
And they move right along
And they’re gone like the smoke
And they’re gone like this song
In That Howling Infinite 