Christian Contradictions and The World Revolution by Andre Kehoe

CHRISTIAN CONTRADICTIONS
AND
THE WORLD REVOLUTION
Letters To My Son
André Kehoe
First published in Ireland 1991 by
Glendale Publishing Ltd.
© 1991 André Kehoe
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Kehoe, André
Christian contradictions and the world revolution
1.
Christianity related to Science and Politics
I.
Title
ISBN 0—907606—87—3
ISBN 0—907606—88—1 pbk
Origination by Wendy A. Commins, The Curragh, Co. Kildare
Printed in Ireland by Colour Books Ltd., Dublin
Any background information on this book, or it's dissemination, which readers might require may be
obtained from: jandbneary@iol.ie
2
PREFACE
What's gone wrong with our world? Wars, threats of war and catastrophe; wellbeing, wealth and prosperity;
forty thousand children dying every day from want in the midst of world abundance; rising unemployement
where there is so much to be done; military expenditures in the West alone of a million dollars a minute while
governments are unable to implement essential education and social reforms; the rich getting richer and the
poor, poorer; leading economists predicting the worst crash of all timeleading to the likelihood of what
Galbraith has referred to as 'total economic disaster'; the family disintegrating and divorce rampant; drink, drugs
and suicide on the increase; pollution threatening our health, the rape of the earth threatening its resources, the
spreading contagion of violence threatening life everywhere...
Here, André Kehoe, now living in France, someone from the inside, speaking from the experience of over
twenty years as a principal administrator with the OECD in Paris, the FAO in Rome, the United Nations
Development Programme in Africa and working on consultant missions elsewhere with UNESCO and the
World Bank, diagnoses the problems in depth and indicates what the ordinary man and woman can do, right
now, to rectify the rapidly deteriorating situation before it turns to tragic drama for our children. For there is a
contrasting scenario to the disastrous one adopted by the Western Establishment, to provide the rising
generation with the greatest opportunity mankind has ever known for exciting activity and an exciting future.
As in the case of a doctor faced with a desperately diseased condition, however, the cure cannot be undertaken
without detailed examination and diagnosis of the disease, the process to which the author here invites the
reader in a radical and well-documented study combining personal experience with extensive research and
scholarship. It is a book or perhaps more accurately a bombshell that is certain to stir intense controversy in
political, business, religious and intelligentsia circles around the world and possibly trigger a – hopefully,
peaceful – world revolution. It is also required reading for those between eighteen and thirty who are mystified
by the modern world and where is headed.
"A formidable and visionary work which I hope... is widely read." Tony Benn, MP.
3
CONTENTS
1
- INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................6
2
- THE GATHERING STORM ......................................................................................................... 11
3
- RELIGION AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM............................................................................ 38
4
- THE LUST FOR POWER ............................................................................................................. 51
5
- ESCALATING THE ARMS RACE............................................................................................... 65
6
- THE TIMEBOMB ABUILDING................................................................................................... 98
7
- A CASE STUDY......................................................................................................................... 117
8
- PSYCHIC AND RELATED SOURCES OF VIOLENCE ............................................................ 144
9
- THE ORIGINAL REVOLUTION................................................................................................ 155
10
- WHAT WENT WRONG? ........................................................................................................... 174
11
- A VOICE CRYING IN THE WILDERNESS............................................................................... 180
12
- THEOCRACY AND TYRANNY................................................................................................ 186
13
- TOWARDS THE TURN OF THE TIDE...................................................................................... 191
REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................................ 204
4
Note
To avoid tiresome repetition of ‘he/she’, ‘her/him’, etc., the formerly general practice has
been adopted of using ‘he’, ‘his’, ‘him’ to signify the human person irrespective of
gender.
5
1 -
INTRODUCTION
La Cerisaie-sur-Eure
France
15 November
My dear Ciarán,
Since your telegram announcing your safe arrival in the United States, the long delay before receiving any
further word caused your mother and me some disappointment. Not having a proper address, we were unable to
contact you. We now understand that you could not afford the cost of a telephone call and are pleased to hear
that you are beginning to earn some money giving French tuition.
We were relieved to have your long letter together with the programme of study and chapter outlines for your
political science doctoral dissertation, Christian Contradictions and the World Revolution. You are casting an
ambitious line but it is an appropriate extrapolation from your years of study in the Sorbonne. I hope I shall be
able to rise to your invitation ‘to provide a challenging letter’ on each chapter, and for my part I look forward to
your throwing down the gauntlet — with your admirable capacity for sustained argument — in stimulating
letters from your side. To cross swords with you now in writing will add a new dimension to former discussions
here at the fireside in La Cerisaie hallowed by the ghost of Malcolm Lowry.
Your mother will keep you posted on personal and family matters, leaving Paterfamilias free to concentrate on
your subject matter. I shall allow myself the liberty of meandering and raising live hares rather than flogging
dead horses, even if it means risking an occasional slip into the shaky-bog of error. In your own writing
remember that being occasionally inconsistent may be a mark of creative vitality (provided your examiners are
not too dumb to understand that). And no matter how much scholarship you invest in your synthesis, it cannot
be more than itself a provisional thesis subject to attack and the formulation of its antithesis and new synthesis.
This is the only way human thought can progress. But the more watertight you make your theory, the greater the
effort that will be required to produce a counter-theory and the better the latter can be.
I shall also bear in mind your request for reading references from my bookshelves.
Since your tutor has told you that arrangements can be made for publishing your work if it is good enough, you
have an added incentive, since writing is one of your ambitions. But bear in mind that although Omar’s words
do not primarily apply to writing they include that too:
The moving finger writes; and
having writ
Moves on: nor all thy Piety
nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel
half a line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out
a Word of it.
Be careful with words. Otherwise, they will do your thinking for you.
Waking people up is more important than giving them recipes. We must have men who can stand up, not automatons cut down, in Padraig Pearse’s words, to Procrustean measure, passive consumers subdued by The
System, reduced to football and the media, and cars for toys. These are the lambs that will be led to the
slaughter. So be provocative. A measure of creative chaos will be useful. Confuse the issues by scattering them
through the text, forcing the reader to knit the strands together, digest the material and form his own synthesis:
Use your French irony and satire.
Develop the Chestertonian art of paradox, which obliges the recipient to make an about-turn, retrace his steps
and try to find his way again. The West will either be animated by such persistent knocking as would waken
Duncan, like the Yeatsian ghost of Roger Casement that is still banging on the door, and be turned back from
the path of self-destruction which Soren Kirkegaard saw it embarked upon, or else it will be aroused, too late, by
the muffled thunder of approaching hoofbeats.
There are now signs that the staggering overt and covert power of the United States may be on the wane. Since,
however, you are studying in the United States and will be drawing heavily on that country in your work and
since the European Community seems to be going down the same road on which the US gave the leadership that
6
set the example to the world, our correspondence will perhaps concern that country more than others. But let me
say once and for all:
— that the United States has not been the sole source of badness in the world;
— that it was Europe (including Czarist Russia) that blazed the trail in imperialism and exploitation and
continues it today with renewed vigour;
— that a clear distinction must be made between the US (and Western) Establishment of high financiers,
big business and arms merchants, with their spokesmen in politics and the media, and the great
American people who are among the sufferers of The System (a matter we shall come back to under a
later chapter).
I should also add at this point that names from our particular time such as Reagan, Carter, Thatcher, Mitterand,
Kohl, Gonzalez, Bush, Kinnock and so on are merely symbolic. Change the names, the times and the countries
and the same criticisms of The System will remain applicable and this criticism must not exclude ourselves. In
these times hypocrisy is one of our predominant characteristics. We grumble and groan about the faults and
failings of others when we could do infinitely more for the reformation of society by examining our own
consciences and acting accordingly. We talk about the evils of unemployment at a time when sloppiness, sloth
and dissipation in futilities is writ large in our attitude to getting the most out of life instead of putting the most
into life. We take secret pleasure spreading the consoling idea that the socio-economic structures of the world
are too big to understand and too hot to handle. This salves our consciences, enables us to indulge the ancient
anthropological pleasure of blaming our woes on scapegoats without lifting a finger to tackle them, and go on
our hedonistic consumption spree with a light heart.
According to an old, self-evident axiom, everything of importance must start in one individual’s mind. And thus
one man can change the world because where there is one there can be two, where there are two, four, and so on
in an accelerating geometrical progression until the movement becomes a tide. If the ‘butterfly effect’ as defined
in the science of chaos can be so significant, how many thousand times more can be the outcome of concerted
action by a snowballing movement of people, beginning, like all organic construction, with a small nucleus and
developing in ever expanding concentric circles until it embraces humanity. But it must be based on reality and
accurate diagnosis of the malady if it is not to continue to be mere crisis management of chaotic and negative
impulses as described by Paul Petit who said that the social is not a source but the visible projection of the
secrets of conscience, the sum of personal defects, the spreading cancer of individual egoism. The president or
prime minister is no more guilty than I am and if he has more power for misguidance it is because we allow him
to exercise it by failing to make ourselves adequately aware of the root-causes of what is happening.
Extending this principle, we have to turn the spotlight not only on ourselves and our crimes of omission but also
more broadly on the reflection of ourselves in our society instead of what is at best futile and at worst warmongering, the practice of projecting criticism onto some Reaganite 'evil empire’ on the asinine basis that
criticism of the West plays into the hands of the East or of some other nefarious interest. Worse than that, there
is a tendency to descend to the level of those whom the Western Establishment considers to be their inferiors,
where we have had a secretary of state advocating organised terrorism by his government, an earlier
one talking in his ‘can do’ style of brashness of ‘taking out’ Quadafi the way they ‘took out’ Allende, and the
CIA publishing a handbook a few years ago to show terrorists how to terrorise in Nicaragua. If the West cannot
hold itself to higher moral standards than these, its claim to leadership and superiority is hollow pretence.
Not to question is not to think and not to think is to let one’s life slip away in a kind of living death, to which the
terrible sentence applies, ‘Let the dead bury their dead’. Nothing should be omitted from your criticism. The
scientific approach is to question everything (including science itself, its long-term objectives, its premises, its
methods and its findings). You have a duty to think unconventionally, which, by definition, is the only possible
way to think. If you do not strive to be of the argumentative elite you will be opting for membership of the new
intellectual lumpenproletariat who have abdicated responsibility and devoted themselves to rehashing safe and
received ideas, which enables The System to take them to its bosom and pay them handsomely. They thus
become criminal accomplices of the evils of society, incapable of analysing the human predicament.
As in the physical sciences, so in human affairs, nay, much more in human affairs, nothing is given once and for
all; everything must be questioned and held up to pitiless examination. When the early civilisations of
Messopotamia and Egypt had become congealed for some two thousand years of repetition and mere
technology, the Greek breakthrough was a breakaway, from accepted ways into critical, irreverent thinking and
the mental freedom to which it led. No Babylonian or Egyptian, even the most intelligent, ever dreamt of such a
quantum leap from received ideas. The clouds burst and the heavens opened. In a mere two centuries, by their
fearless questioning and challenging, the Greeks laid the foundations of biology, anatomy, history, political
science, philosophy and all subsequent open-ended enquiry. Nothing was sacred or safe from that questioning
spirit, which produced its first martyr in Socrates, accused of blaspheming and corrupting the youth of Athens. It
7
was a similar questioning spirit of criticism that launched the Italian Renaissance, as it was the spirit of criticism
that set Martin Luther on his way. Hegel, among others, has shown that ideas and criticism pursue their majestic
march in seeming isolation but have a powerful impact on the material world.
Though Karl Marx gave prominent place in his dialectical materialism to the social mechanism of conflict, his
own ideas produced a world upheaval in the socio-political field that has been snowballing for over a century.
Even a physical scientist of the calibre of Jacques Monod, Nobel Laureate in physiology, pointed out that while
the abstract world of ideas — what Teilhard called the noosphere — transcends the biosphere even more than
the latter transcends the inanimate, ideas conserve certain properties of living organisms. Like them they tend to
perpetuate and multiply their structures, to fuse into one another, recombine, segregate, evolve and participate in
the selection process. In addition, they have a powerful effect on communities which make them their driving
force. As for history, R G Collingwood pointed out that history proper is the history of thought. There are no
mere events in history. What counts particularly for the discovery of future trajectories is extrapolation of the
long distance curve, ignoring the short-term zig-zags. This indicates that the West is not necessarily destined to
prevail forever. It has dominated the world for five centuries. Civilisations like individuals are born, develop,
mature and die, or follow a four-stage cycle such as that described by P R Sarkar. Could the average age of a
civiuisation be five centuries, the duration of Greece, of Rome’s greatness, of the Dark Ages, of the Medieval
rebirth, of the modern age of the West?
There are now alarming similarities with the state of Rome before the collapse began. This, however, should not
encourage fatalism. On the contrary, it should stimulate critical thought and action to save the best from any
impending shipwreck. Bear in mind that in our own time the rise to power of Nazism and Fascism from 1918
onwards was partly due to the silence of the vast majority of Europe’s intellectuals. If the West is to be saved it
will not be by flattery but by standing firm, challenging and criticising. As Bill Moyers put it, you are in deep
trouble when, like President Reagan, ‘you decide not to examine your culture but to flatter it’. Archibald
MacLeish said there is an American cause which has been much wronged ‘and all the more dangerously because
its enemies are ourselves’. The theme of Allan Bloom’s book, The Closing of the American Mind, is pertinent.
The problem is not peculiar to America but the tragedy is that it applies to the country that has been leading the
world for half a century. As Professor David Glidden of the University of California pointed out in a comment
on this work, the difficulty is not in what we do not know but the falsehoods cluttering our minds, the half
truths, prejudices and illusions which must be purged from our over-laden brains before we can learn to think
clearly. This corresponds to the unanimous teaching of the greatest educators all the way back to Socrates.
Anthony Lewis said that in addition to the self-confident liberalism of Jefferson’s America, there was another
strain running through US history, a paranoia about those who are different, a morbid fear of opposing views,
which, I might add, could upset the sacrosanct consensus of the ruling Masonic Order and its obsession with the
ridiculous notion of boiling all down in the melting pot. In addition to this form of the closed mind, there is the
vast mass of those for whom culture is the cult of the ephemeral, who rely on the media to do their thinking for
them, an abdication of man’s most sacred and most distinctive duty. Hence, to borrow Sean O’Faolain’s words,
‘without outspoken, sometimes even violent protest, democracy stagnates.... The role of all protesters is not to
answer questions but to ask them, uncomfortably and persistently’. Anthony Burgess referred to ‘that fighting
element in the practice of literature without which books are a mere decor or confirmation of the beliefs and
prejudices of the ruling class’. That is it in a nutshell, even though your own work does not fall neatly into what
is generally understood by the word ‘literature’. But when you come to having a refurbished version of your
thesis published and can break free of the hidebound educational establishment, you will be in a position to
draw closer to literature, which should be the real cutting edge into the future if and when it frees itself from self
indulgence in escapist romanticism, writing for the market or flattering the Establishment. Then it can once
more carry the searing flame of Swiftian indignation.
Albert Camus stated that writers have an obligation to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves. And
Bernanos: ‘If you are too cowardly to look this world in the face and see it as it is, turn away your eyes and
stretch out your hands to its chains’. Raymond Jean, referring to the valuable demolition work by the late French
writer, J Sulivan, commented to the effect that thinking had to be subversive and refuse to accommodate itself to
the conventions and facilities which founded institutions, empires and the so-called ‘security’ of frightened
individuals. If it is true that all that is necessary for the victory of evil in the world is for good men to do nothing
it is equally true that the triumph of cant will be assured if the intellectuals indulge in escapism or allow
themselves to be bribed by position or prestige into becoming The System’s advocates. Plato himself declared
that a society which is not enlightened by intellectuals is condemned to be led by charlatans. And Chesterton, in
his book on Thomas Aquinas, said that Aquinas must always have been thinking combatively.
"This, in his case, certainly did not mean bitterly or spitefully or uncharitably; but it did mean combatively.... It
is generally the man who is not ready to argue who is ready to sneer. That is why, in recent literature, there has
been so little argument and so much sneering.... (Aquinas) was never an intellectual snob.... He had all the
unconscious contempt which the really intelligent have for the intelligentsia."
8
In the particular sphere of christianity, Hans Kung has said that it is the theologian’s solemn responsibility to
speak the truth irrespective of what ecclesiastical authorities he may hurt. The true fighter for truth must be
totally outside entrenched bias and be able to take opposite sides. Daniel Rops said, ‘Guelfe to the Gibelins and
Gibelin to the Guelfes’ is always the position of truly free spirits.
In such a controversial work as you have taken on you will find it difficult to escape the charge of generalising
from the particular but this is inevitable unless you were to write an enormous and enormously boring work
larded with cowardly hedging and cover-up. You must have the courage to make your statement without fear or
favour. There is also nowadays a rather common misconception about criticism and some people criticise others
for being judgemental when they are thus being judgemental themselves or as if we must carry tolerance to the
point of allowing the greatest horrors a free hand.
Criticism, however, must not be personal or impugn men’s motives. We do not have either the right or the data
to sit self-righteously in personal value judgement on anybody, to. cast doubt on their conscience or apportion
guilt. Even in an extreme case like, say, that of Adolf Hitler, we do not know to what extent he was personally
guilty and to what extent his evil enterprise may have been due to a psychosomatic accident at birth or shortly
after, to genetics, parents, upbringing, education, the diktat of Versailles or the nefarious influences inside
Germany that had prostrated his country. Even allowing for human liberty, we are not in a position to judge
where determinism ended and personal responsibility began. If we were fully sane we would find it easy to feel
immense sympathy for evil-doers like Hitler, caught in the labyrinthine coils of monstrosity. It has required all
the genius of Shakespeare, Racine, Corneille and the Greek dramatists to portray, without explaining, the
complexity of evil in the human psyche. Perhaps Freud’s greatest error was that instead of explaining it he
explained it away. A man cannot begin to unravel the sources of evil in himself, not to speak of doing it for
another. We are all Hitlers at heart who do not suffer from his circumstances and perhaps lack the courage of a
twice-decorated corporal of World War I. If humanity is to emerge from its greatest-ever crisis it has to divest
itself of the supreme evil of self-righteousness and discover its universal solidarity in evil. Admission of
personal guilt and refusal to sit in judgement on others is not only the sole path of ontological truth but also
constitutes the best starting point for both criticism and action. We do not have to hesitate in our criticism when
we are personally absolving those whom we attack and including ourselves in the guilt structure. Recognising
our own responsibility for the macabre state of the world is the best recipe for action to rectify it. So far, to
paraphrase Rousseau, we have been making such poor use of our liberty that we deserve to lose it.
Leading sociologists and psychologists advocate as an important action in creativity the personal decision to
revolt and to consider oneself alienated from the system within which one lives. It is not a coincidence that
many of the greatest scientists, thinkers and artists have been rebels, promoters of the creative challenge which
abhors the cold hand of The System operated by the Establishment with its sophisticated mask. A French
thinker, Alan Veronese, put it as follows: ‘Criticism is the first phase of creation; without critical distancing it is
not possible to modify reality’. In addition to the intellectuals properly so-called, scientists and artists (in the
broad sense) are also concerned. Both are now mostly following rather than leading, working particularly for the
market, for money or for glory rather than from inner necessity and that psychic energy and curiosity which
produced the Velasquezes and the Mendels, the Leonardos and the Einsteins, the Curies, the Pasteurs and the
Michael Angelos. Most have now been taken over by The System and approximately half of the world’s
scientists have prostituted themselves to the arms industry. Utilitarianism, pragmatism, materialism and
empiricism have largely replaced the anguished search for truth. Dominated by things rather than rising above
them they are leading the march into a way of life in which man himself becomes mechanised, a small cog in a
giant wheel, pacing the treadmill from which the only escape is into drink, drugs or suicide.
The late, lamented American writer, John Gardner, one of the lost needles in the mounting haystack that
suffocates us, who said that be witnessed writers, composers and painters knocking off their works at midnight
with their left hands and a bland smile, illustrates our predicament with the old Scandinavian legend in which
the good god Thor goes around middle earth year by year beating back the enemies of order, maintaining a
space of light and liberty where gods and freemen could dwell. Thor was getting old and tired and the jungle of
darkness was closing in. So the God of Wisdom went to the King of the Trolls and demanded to know of him
how order might prevail over chaos.
‘Give me your left eye’, said he, ‘and I will tell you.’
So Woden surrendered his left eye.
‘The Secret’, said the troll, ‘is that you must watch with both eyes.’
When art, intellect or science surrenders one of its eyes to The System it becomes redundant and the way is
cleared for the rough beast spoken of by Yeats in his oft-quoted poem written when the omnipotent West was
9
beginning to dance its way through the gay twenties. ‘The war to end all wars’ had been won and nobody but a
few spoil-sports like himself was thinking any dour thoughts about the far-away end of the century:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre will not 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.
...............................................
..... And somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again: but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
The second half of your thesis will involve, inter alia, an examination of those ‘twenty centuries of stony sleep’
which have led us to what may be our approaching nightmare.
10
2 -
THE GATHERING STORM
You are driving your scalpel already in the direction of the bone with your draft Chapter II, which I have been
scribbling on since I received it. One of the points that emerges from your analysis is the widening gap between
political promise and performance which we have allowed to develop. It is indeed clear that if the freedom,
justice and essentials of life, long sought by the oppressed and the deprived, could be provided by declaration,
the world would already have become a Garden of Eden. The Declaration of Philadelphia in 1776, proclaiming
the principles of independence, recognised the right of every people to insurrection in the pursuit of its ideal.
Seven years later, the French Constitution went so far as to designate insurrection not merely as a right but as
the most sacred of duties. In our own time, the nations of the earth, gathered in solemn assembly in New York
issued the Declaration on the Rights of Man in 1948 and another in 1959 on the rights of the child. A subsequent
declaration regarding the world’s starving children represented ‘a commitment at the highest level to build a
world that will guard the most precious resource of the human race. Another included a clause giving every
people the right to determine their political regime, to ensure their economic, social and cultural independence
and to protect the sovereign use of their natural resources and wealth. Not to be outdone, the European
governments produced their own declaration on human rights in 1950. The ‘First Development Decade’ in the
60s and then the Second in the 70s were triumphantly predicted to lead the Third World marching behind the
West’s banner into an era of abundance for everybody. The Green Revolution was proclaimed to be the Final
Solution to the problem of world hunger, which was about to be banished from the face of the earth and the man
who launched it duly received his Nobel Prize. Mr Louis Lundborg, President of the Bank of America, declared
in 1967 that profit constituted the motive force capable of solving the problem of hunger ‘as rapidly as possible’
(whatever that syntax may mean). Every year on the occasion of FAO’s birthday celebrations, the anniversary of
its founding, there used to be innumerable declarations by heads of government and other important dignitaries
deciding to solve the problem of Third World hunger. And every time there is a celebration of a previous
declaration, as in 1988 for the 40th anniversary of Human Rights, a new round of declarations is spawned from
the old. In 1974 there was the Declaration on the Establishment of a New World Economic Order, designed to
produce a more equitable system between the rich North and the exploited South. In the same year, the World
Food Conference was launched in Rome, where Dr Henry Kissinger, American secretary of state, made a new
declaration stating that
'today we must proclaim a bold objective — that within a decade no child will go to bed hungry, that no
family will fear for its next day’s bread, that no human being’s future and capacities will be stunted by
malnutrition'
The decade is long passed.
UN statistics show that over 700 million people go to bed hungry every night, that a much larger number fear
for their next day’s bread, that over a billion people have no roof over their heads worthy of the name, that more
than 20 million homeless children sleep in the streets of Latin America, that 2 billion people suffer from
malnutrition, and that 40,000 children die from this malnutrition and its attendant diseases every 24 hours, the
time it takes for Western governments alone to spend 1 ½ billion dollars (constant 1985 dollars) on arms and
armies.
Because Ethiopia was a so-called ‘Marxist’ country, the media concentrated heavily on the problem there and in
other ‘unfaithful’ countries to the detriment of the Third World as a whole. In merely one corner, the North East,
of capitalist Brazil, for example, ten million people have died of hunger in the past five years, and in those five
years in the Third World in general more people have died of hunger than in all the wars of the world during the
past 150 years. Some authorities forecast an accelerating death toll, leading perhaps to over a billion famine
victims by the end of the century, as distinct from the victims of the AIDS epidemic now also adding to the
hecatomb, encouraged by the inhuman living conditions in the shantytowns.
Professor René Dumont has been observing Third World economic development longer perhaps than any
man alive, for over half a century, and not from the comfortable offices of Western development agencies but
from first-hand studies in the remote wildernesses of Asia, Africa and Latin America. The Western media are
now preparing to shed floods of crocodile tears over the Third World tragedy, but Dumont, for a quarter of a
century in book after book, while the Western Establishment, Western experts and Western media were
11
determined to keep the brute facts of imperialist exploitation hidden from the public, has been warning of what
he has called (Pour I’Afrique, j’Accuse) ‘an unprecedented catastrophe’, adding that ‘our prosperity is built on
monstrous pyramids of children’s corpses’ which may well spell ‘the end of the reign of the whiteman.... The
results of his management are such a disaster that the time has come to withdraw from him the levers of power
which he has operated for destructive purposes’. In his preface to Plantu Pauvres Cheries, Claude Julien, editor
of Le Monde Diplomatzque, states:
The tragedy of the Third World, the brutal exploitation, the profits generated, the children starved, the
uprisings crushed in blood, the prosperity of a few built on the misery of a multitude — all this has to be
expressed in such astronomical figures that they lose their concrete signification.
Thus, to many living in abundance in the West, the famine victims are merely figures on paper. To a
businessman who takes the trouble to walk a few hundred yards from his Hilton or Intercontinental hotel in a
Third World city to the nearest shantytown and look on the face of a young mother holding her dying infant,
they will no longer be figures on paper unless all sensitivity has seeped out of him. Third World families are
more attached to children than those in the West and can spend a whole year’s income to mourn and bury a dead
child.
Partly due to a deliberate policy by the Western-controlled media to reduce news coverage about Third
World disaster caused by Western imperialism, a policy which largely emanates from the Establishment —
consider for example that in Britain the National Curriculum Council has recommended to the secretary of
education that geography lessons should teach pupils about places rather than themes such as Third World
problems — and partly due to the obsessive narcissism about internal Western politics and the struggle for
power among partisan politicians which fill these same media, there is a declining sense of outrage about what
is happening. People are also encouraged to feel that in a dangerous world and the capitalist rat race it is safer to
mind one’s own business, the business of getting on or of joining the yuppie set, and to keep one’s head down
about Western responsibility, with its connotations of pointing the finger at the multinationals which wield so
much power in our lives. Many people thus turn selfishly in on themselves, often with disastrous psychic
consequences.
World population projections for 2000 AD are 61/4 billion of which approximately 5 billion will be in the less
developed countries. Projections for 2025 AD are 81/2 billion for the world and 7 billion for the Third World.
Third World population will be particularly concentrated in the shantytowns of the megalopolitan centres.
Mexico City will have somewhere between 25 and 35 million, Sao Paulo around 25, Rio de Janeiro 20, Bombay
and Calcutta 17 — massive conglomerations metastasizing out of control, working up to about 4 billion urban
citizens projected for the Third World by AD 2015. None of these cities has the employment, the housing, the
sewerage, the energy resources, the water supplies, the medical services, the schools or the food to meet the
situation caused by the chaotic flight from the countryside (due to Western exploitation, as I shall presently
proceed to show). The rag pickers on the dumps compete with the swarming rats for anything useful. People
regularly eat excrement unawares and live in permanent affliction with tuberculosis, malaria, typhus, various
forms of schistosomiasis and other fatal diseases.
In some of these cities, the pumping out of large quantities of ground water for factories, housing and outside
supplies for the slums is already beginning to cause both urban and agricultural problems, including sometimes
a slow sinking of buildings. Irrigated farming is threatened by falling water tables, salinification and declining
aquifers when the supplies are from non-replenishable fossil water reserves. A scientific commission sponsored
by UNESCO a few years ago brought together a team of the world’s leading seismologists to examine the
increased risk of earthquake due to the construction of major dams and waterworks, especially when coupled
with heavy concentration of population and buildings in the vicinity. And yet, water is a primary problem: over
3 billion people do not have access to potable water. But the megalopolitan problem in the Third World is not
merely a material thing that is quantifiable. It also involves a deep redistribution of the political and socioeconomic cards. The vast shantytown is a place of cultural and racial confrontation, a boiling cauldron creating
new ways of thinking, a massive concentration of frustration surrounding well-stocked shops and rich
neighbourhoods. Sudden, forced exodus from the rural hinterland is a wound that does not easily heal in these
conditions. One or two examples picked at random from the innumerable will be sufficient to illustrate the
plight of the millions of the deprived in the
cities of the Third World.
12
To the east of Cairo, there is a very large cemetery known as the City of the Dead, but it is far from dead — tens
of thousands of people are living between and inside the tombs. One third of the people of Cairo live in homes
that are not connected to any sewage system and hundreds of thousands live on the city’s seven garbage dumps
where the filth, smoke and stench have to be experienced to be believed. 70 per cent of the residents of Calcutta
are estimated to live on $8 a month but even this is a statistical average which does not reveal the plight of the
poorest. City after city across the length and breadth of three continents reveals a parallel pattern of deprivation,
disease and death.
There is little possibility by the very nature of things that humanity will ever reach a condition of universal
liberty, equality and fraternity, but it will never abandon the struggle, and the opulence, hedonism and power of
the rich are a continuing source of instability and turbulence at every level down the pyramid. This is
ineradicably inscribed at the deepest psychological level of life in society, although it had to await the modern
school of social anthropology as expounded by authorities like René Girard to have it clearly diagnosed, an
important matter to which I shall return in another letter.
Against this background it is time to demolish the hackneyed Western rhetoric implied in the term ‘developed’
at a time when millions of people are developing backwards and cannot do otherwise. There is no way without
the exhaustion of the world’s resources and the destruction of the environment, by which the present 80—90 per
cent of the world’s population in the under-privileged category can reach the standard of living enjoyed by the
10—20 per cent of the world’s privileged people along the lines dictated by the West. This subject has been
dealt with extensively for a quarter of a century in many scholarly works, which have hitherto been either
ignored by the media or damned with faint praise, because the media, mouthpiece of The System and engine of
the consumer society, are in the business of creating myths. Driven by the sheer weight of the evidence, the
media in recent years have been belatedly and hesitantly climbing aboard the ecological bandwagon but they
still remain broadly committed to the myth of unlimited production, unlimited consumption and unlimited
expectations for everybody, irrespective of the fact that the planet’s resources are not unlimited and the
possibilities for environmental destruction are. The myths provide prosperity for the profiteering establishment
and for the media which The System finances. One little example of the monstrous pollution: the thousands of
drums of radio-active waste being dumped annually in our seas are producing lethal seepage which is destroying
the rich underwater plant life on which we depend for 90 per cent of our vital oxygen, not to speak of the
damage to our fish.
Gabriel Marc of the French Justice and Peace Commission has made an interesting calculation. Gross world
product, he points out, is approximately $15,000 billion, less than $3,000 per head per annum of the world
population, below $10 a day. If redistribution were to be operated downwards we would arrive at the absurd
position of levelling incomes by increasing assistance to the Third World by over 12,000 per cent, without
considering the poor and the unemployed in the West. If there was to be a levelling upwards, it would mean
multiplying the present gross world product seven times, another absurdity considering the consequent pollution
and exhaustion of resources spread over a long period to mankind’s ultimate horizon.
Gandhi put the matter succinctly: ‘The earth has enough for every man’s need but not for every man’s
greed’.
The word ‘development’ suggests a unique Western model for the world, to which the peoples of Asia, Africa
and Latin America are supposed to be in the process of acceding. Technically, the essentials could be provided,
such as food by genetic engineering in crop plants, assuming that phosphate and potash supplies hold out,
bearing in mind that consumption of fertilisers per head of the world’s population increased from 5kg in 1950 to
26kg in 1980, which, multiplied by the population expansion, gives a global increase of over a hundred million
tonnes in a mere 30 years. This development has also caused serious water pollution problems in many
countries. Beyond basic essentials, however, try applying our acquisitive objectives — ever more expensive
household furnishings, gadgets and comforts, escalating food and drink patterns, holidays, hotels, tourist resorts,
travel facilities, sports equipment and dress (in skiing, for example, Western Europe has a market of over 30
million adepts — 5.5 million in France alone), yachts, and cars perhaps equivalent to the 1.3 per head of the
population reached by Los Angeles, or 3 or 4 private planes per family as among the very wealthy in Latin
America — to a world population expected to eventually stabilise at approximately 10 ½ billion. ‘Ever climbing
up the climbing wave.’ Consider the resultant consumption of raw materials, the destruction of the forests, the
dense, factory-packed planet, the endless concrete and tarmacadam, the pollution of earth and atmosphere, the
ozone problem and the glass-house effect. As it is, some of the worst of our Western pollution cannot be
eliminated but only diverted elsewhere. Many polluting industries are being foisted on the Third World in a vain
attempt to escape their effects as if much of the pollution could not return to us in the atmosphere, in fish and
other products: we in the West are not living in another galaxy; we are all packed together on a very small
planet. In addition, dangerous waste products are being shipped to the Third World for dumping at derisory fees,
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and grain, meat and milk powder contaminated from radio-active leaks are also being exported, ostensibly to
save lives but in reality adding to the deaths.
A further example of Western depredation — sometimes encouraged by banks exchanging debt for forests —
is the destruction of the tropical rain forests, of vital ecological value, now being levelled at the rate of fifteen
million hectares per annum — it takes only 5 minutes for a power saw to bring down a 100-year-old giant —
turning vast areas into moonscapes, causing a fall in transpiration, atmospheric humidity and rainfall which is
disastrous for future agricultural production over vast areas and causes extreme swings of the water cycle, from
calamitous flooding to even more calamitous drought. In northern Nigeria, for example, annual rainfall has
fallen in 50 years from 600mm to 400mm, and staple food production is now collapsing. 40 per cent of Ethiopia
was under forest at the beginning of the century; the forest area is now down to 4 per cent and one of the results
is the unnatural and dramatic rise and fall in the level of the Nile and the consequent threat of massive famine
spreading to Egypt. Forest destruction is not basically due to high population ‘per Se’, as is often claimed by the
vested interests, but to the triple effect of the burning of forests by wealthy cattle ranchers particularly in Latin
America, forest industrial exploitation by the Western timber industry, and colonizing to deflect pressure for
even modest agrarian reform away from the vast latifundia which their excessively wealthy owners and big
business associates not only refuse to reduce but are forever extending. The vandalism includes the threatened
attack on one of nature’s glories, the soaring cathedral groves of Chile with their three-thousand-year-old alerce
cedars and their irreplaceable ecosystems.
Part of the destruction of trees and vegetation is due, of course, to the desperation to which hungry people
have been driven by generations of Western colonization and despoliation, being forced to fall back for their
survival and that of their emaciated livestock on whatever meagre resources they can find, especially as they are
under constant threat from the owners of the ever-expanding latifundia. Certain well-placed Western agents
operating through the news agencies and the media have tried to spread the calumny, adding insult to injury, that
‘the natives’ are thus to blame for the destruction of the forests. But the cases are well documented (for example
by the French National Agricultural Research Institute and by the forest protection group, Robin des Bois) of
protective action by local inhabitants against depredation by the Western and Western-linked timber interests,
such as the people in Itar Pradesh tying themselves to trees to defend them and replanting to replace those felled,
whole tribes in Amazonia committing suicide because their forests were being levelled, others rearing predator
insects to control forest pests and managing their environment with great subtlety, the Penan of Borneo going to
jail for blocking forest roads against the bulldozers, etc. [The position of game destruction is somewhat different
— highly organised poaching, in league with an international network not unlike the drugs mafia, destroying
animals such as elephants for the ivory ornaments traded by the ivory barons of Hong Kong.]
In the great Amazon forest — one of the world’s major lungs which breathe out pure oxygen into our
atmosphere and breathe in and destroy the polluting carbon dioxide which our ravenous industries belch out
daily — landing strips enable planeloads of miners, developers and prospectors to arrive, bringing equipment,
supplies and even prostitutes, so that, as Don Luciano Mendez, President of Brazil’s Catholic Bishops’
Conference, said, the Indians have become riddled with tuberculosis, venereal disease and ‘a myriad of ailments
brought in by the miners’, with the result that, he says, ‘It is already too late to save the Indians, because the
programmed massacre of the Brazilian Indian cannot be stopped’. The Calha Norte Project began with the
destruction of the forest, the expulsion of health workers, missionaries and anthropologists who might inform
the world of what was happening, and the launching of a major programme of military occupation devised by
the National Security Council.
The Western-originated rape of the earth which we are now witnessing is, of course, related to big business,
high finance and the publicity and media industries promoting consumerism, possessiveness and greed for
constant replacement and renewal of material things with a view to ever-increasing hedonism and ‘keeping up
with the Joneses’. Before World War II there was at least a certain ethic among manufacturers who wanted to
make a product that would both last for a long period and not go out of fashion. Since Keynes, consumerism is
encouraged through fashion changes, gadgets and the built-in obsolescence described by Vance Packard. I
would advise you to read at least some of Packard’s disquieting analyses of our modern consumer society from
the following list: The Status Seekers, The Waste Makers, The Pyramid Climbers, The Naked Society, The
Hidden Persuaders and The People Shapers. The conmen behind the ad agencies are now involved in advanced
research on hidden persuasion to turn everybody, if possible, into Pavlovian-reflex automatons. The research
includes monitoring brain waves, wiring cinema seats with electronic devices to test reactions to cinema ads,
psychographic segmentation of the market, psycholinguistics and the semantic differential, subliminal
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stimulation (hidden messages in innocent’ music records and films) produced by machines with microprocessor
computer control, behaviour modification programmes, built-in sexual undertones, psycho-seduction of children
and other devious devices. Big Brother is no longer merely watching, he is feverishly manipulating.
Gigantesque quantities of money are thus used to convert luxuries to necessities in a never-ending spiral,
creating simultaneous hunger and satiety, accentuating covetousness and jealousy and the struggle to compete
with others in a remorseless rat race for everything from expensive fashions to the latest gadgets, developing the
dissatisfaction that stimulates escapism. This expands the market for pornography, spectator sports, drink and
other forms of evasion. It also encourages drug-use, prostitution and suicide and promotes crime by the havenots against the haves, as well as our increasingly gratuitous violence. This is a projection of Karl Marx’s
diagnosis of the alienation of man through his domination by the products of his own hands. Spokesmen for The
System bemoan the ravages of the drink problem while over $2 billion are spent annually in drink advertising by
this same system.
You will find all the statistics you need in the publications of the UN, UNESCO, FAO and ILO. There are
also a few good books dealing with Third World problems. I would particularly recommend: L’Arme
Alimentaire, by Sophie Bessis (La Decouverte); How The Other Half Dies — The Real Reasons for Third World
Hunger, by Susan George (Allanheld, Asmun and Co.); Merchants of Grain, by Dan Morgan (Viking Press);
Global Reach (on the power of the multinationals), by Richard Barnes and Ronald Muller (Simon and
Schuster); Negociants et Chargeurs, by Phillippe Chalmin (Economica), plus the works of René Dumont. There
are, no doubt, others in other languages and countries to which I do not now have access (a fact which will also
help to explain why in these letters I shall be concentrating particularly on a few typical countries which I
happen to know best but this does not mean that the others do not fit into the overall picture).
The socio-economic imbalance between the North and the South is still growing, notwithstanding the fact that
the North, with 15 per cent of world population, has some 80 per cent of production, 90 per cent of exports, 90
per cent of arms expenditure, 98 per cent of research investments, 85 per cent of the budget for education and
training, and 85 per cent of income. This 15 per cent consumes approximately seven-eighths of the world’s raw
materials, energy and basic commodities, and over half of it is drawn from the poor countries at prices which
turn the terms of trade heavily against those in greatest need. One American (or three Frenchmen) uses as much
energy as 60 Indians, 160 Tanzanians or 1,000 citizens of Rwanda. Since World War II consumption has been
increasing 2’2 times faster than world population growth. In SubSaharan Africa the average income per head
fell from $560 in 1980 to $450 in 1988, a period during which it increased in the industrial countries from
$11,000 to $13,000.
The widening income gap between rich and poor passes via all countries, which means that in any coming
showdown there are large numbers of the disgruntled in the West who could take an anti-West stand. According
to a study conducted by the American Federal Reserve Board, 2 per cent of US citizens hold 30 per cent of the
nation’s financial assets, 50 per cent of all private stocks and 71 per cent of all tax-free bonds. The American
dream has indeed come true —for a few. The value of the average citizen’s vote can be gauged from the data in
William Greider’s 800-page analysis, Secrets of the Temple — How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country (in
the interests of the high financiers). The richest 20 per cent of US citizens receive approximately 45 per cent of
all income, against under 5 per cent for the poorest 20 per cent. Between 1977 and 1988, the 10 per cent in the
lowest bracket experienced an average annual income decline from $3,763 to $3,286 (an income of $274 a
month), while during the same period the richest 5 per cent expanded their annual income from $94,476 to
$129,762, an increase of $35,286 per annum, so that merely the increase in the case of the richest was over ten
times greater than the total income of the poorest. It should also be remembered in relation to the poor people’s
hope of ever rising out of their poverty that education costs an average of $12,924 per annum in the private
system and $5,823 in the public, which effectively condemns most of the lower classes to remain forever the
lower classes. Furthermore, 37 million young Americans have no social security coverage. In the ‘war against
poverty’ proclaimed in Establishment rhetoric, poverty is winning the battle.
In Brazil, the richest 10 per cent of the population held 40 per cent of national wealth in 1950 and 47.7 per cent
by 1985, while the 40 per cent of the poorest saw their share further declining from its 10 per cent in 1960, and
so on all over the Western controlled world. Contrary to the optimistic theories of the right-wing regimes that
came to power in Great Britain and the United States at the turn of the decade, which were supposed to produce
a trickle down from the wealthy to the poor, the opposite is occurring inside the well-off countries, between the
rich North and poor South and within the Third World. The ‘paradise now’ mentality and the unbridled desire
for money and power are also leading to increasing corruption. There is a potential Rockefeller, Rothschild or
Getty hiding in all of us and acquisitiveness knows no bounds. Read, for example, Citizen Hughes by Michael
Drosnin, and see how one man can purchase and corrupt state governors and presidents, in the struggle for more
15
and more money and more and more power. The social stratification of society always existed everywhere but
we shall see later how a new and brutal element was introduced into it in 16th and 17th century England and
subsequently in Europe before being extended through colonization and socio-economic imperialism to the
world at large. At the end of the African colonial period the income gap between Black and White was, for
example, (1962) 1 to 27 in Kenya, 1 to 23 in Tanganyika, 1 to 17 in Uganda.
Too much tribute cannot be paid to the self-sacrificing doctors, nurses, teachers and missionaries of all kinds
who brought, and continue to bring, light and alleviation to the Dark Continent in the wake of the colonizers but
they often had to face severe obstruction from the latter, who went in to exploit and not to administer charity,
just as missionaries in Latin America face opposition today. There are thousands of unknown and unsung
Mother Teresas of all the Calcuttas of the world sacrificing themselves and working themselves to the bone in
the slums and shantytowns, gathering up the crumbs that fall off the West’s overladen table and distributing
them devotedly to save a few of the mounting toll of our victims. However, without wishing to detract from the
credit due to such Trojan workers, the question may be asked whether their goodwill may not be partly wasted
in charity that ought to be more directed into reform of the socioeconomic system that is the real cause of the
plight of the poor. Until this is rectified, the same cause will produce the same effects, and that in the
paternalistic dual sense of ‘ad vitam aeternam’. In 19th century Europe, when the working class was being
treated less humanely than donkeys in the mines and the factories, many people of good will argued that it was
merely a moral matter to be improved within the existing system, thereby pre-empting progress based on
fundamental change. This philosophy arises from a tendency to see something sacred in traditional patterns, to
confuse the natural law with establishment law and to fail to recognise certain socio-economic structures as
being in basic conflict with ethical values. The greatest social workers saw the need for radical change, like
Frederick Ozanam alleviating the condition of the poor while searching for a more lasting solution of the
problem.
There are also those who have made a caricature of Christianity. The role of the catholic hierarchy in Latin
America up to Vatican II, and beyond in some countries, notably Argentina, is well known and documented.
Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries and the first half of the 20th, Anglican theocracy institutionalised
church support for British imperialism in Africa and Asia, prompting Mahatma Gandhi to say that he admired
the Christ of the christians but not the christians themselves. Today, certain American Fundamentalist churches,
backed by great financial resources, insidiously continue to support American imperialism in the South, not to
mention the so-called Unification church founded by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon boosting repressive
regimes everywhere. All this however, cannot be said without simultaneously giving credit to the courageous
clergy trying to speak out in defence of the poor and the oppressed and being largely ignored by the media (with
their pages full of football, racing, tennis, fashion, cars and every conceivable kind of entertainment and chatter)
as if there was an organised conspiracy of silence. Worse than that, these clergy run the gauntlet of non-stop
intimidation and harassment, or assassination, the fate meted out to many, of whom bishop Oscar Romero is
merely one of the more famous. Another case in point (not much reported by the media in case the people of the
West might discover that a considerable proportion of Palestinians are christian), the Palestinian bishops. Bishop
(patriarch) Michael Sabbah of Jerusalem has said (La Croix-i ‘Evenement’, 19 February, 1988) that the
percentage of christians among the Palestinians was being forced down drastically through emigration caused by
Israeli military, political, psychological and socio-economic pressure. The same bishop’s words about
Palestinian ‘terrorism’ could apply to most of the ‘terrorism’ by the weak against the strong throughout the
world: it was not a desire to kill and destroy but a cry of despair. One must also not forget the great work being
done against heavy odds by church-sponsored organisations such as, here in France, the dedicated and dynamic
committee of the hierarchy, the CCFD (Comité Contra la Faim et Pour le Development) and by both protestant
and catholic groups elsewhere.
Regret has sometimes been expressed for white men losing ‘their’ lands and positions at the hands of newly
independent peoples, an argument which side-steps the question of the original expropriation, the spoliation
since then and the fact that at independence many of the colonialists, previously hired by the secret service
Freemasonry of their mother-countries, recruited some of the best elements from the new administrations with a
view to continuing the exploitation of minerals, forests, land, fisheries and climate at the expense of the mass of
the people. If, merely to indicate the general pattern, I pick one or two examples from the early days of Western
exploitation of the Third World which happen to be from the British Empire, this does not mean that the other
colonizers were better than the British. It is merely because, as you know, I have somewhat more experience of
the English-speaking world and because you are writing for English-speaking readers. For information on
today’s situation in the French Empire you could begin with René Dumont. Everybody knows of the cruelty of
the Dutch occupation in Indonesia, which lasted 350 years and left the Indonesian people in the most lamentable
state of subservience and deprivation. Then there are the former Belgian, German, Spanish and Portuguese
Empires. There have been others, such as the Turkish, but they did not retain their domination and exploitation
16
as thoroughly as the modern capitalist empires did. In this, the Anglo-American Empire proved the most
powerful.
When the corrupt Robert Clive (who later committed suicide when accused of his corruption) went into India in
1743, the country was scarcely behind England in prosperity and like England was beginning an important
industrial revolution. The ancient trade routes with Europe were functioning, textile production was flourishing
and a great variety of food production was feeding the people as effectively as in any country in Europe, where
there was then also frequent famine. Exploitation by the conquerors, based on the now well-oiled process of
enriching local Quislings, then proceeded to turn the mass of the people into a condition of slavery even worse
than the nascent capitalism was doing in England. The same process was followed as in Ireland a century
earlier: local initiative and industry were stifled and the best land expropriated. Indian textiles were replaced by
imports from Lancashire. Lord Cornwallis’s Permanent Settlement Act made estate size unlimited and cut down
native food production in favour of large plantations producing jute, indigo, tea, opium and other commodities
for export to swell the bank accounts of the owners in England. The new transport system, the railway, built by
slave labour, was oriented towards the ports, particularly Calcutta. Although Indian conditions are not quite
comparable with those in Africa, it might be added for purposes of relative illustration, in the absence of similar
figures for India, that in building the railway line from the Congo to the sea, so cruel were the working
conditions for the labour force, one slave labourer died for every railway sleeper laid.
Mahatma Gandhi, the pacifist who had no hatred in his blood for England, no evil bias, traced the story of
the conquest of his country (Vinoba, by Lanzo del Vasto, Denoel) thus as far back as 1915:
It began with the exhaustion of the land and the destruction of the village. The best arable land, that had been
used to produce the essentials of life by the Indian people, was converted to the production of wheat, cotton,
jute, sugar and other products for British industry. It became a regular bloodletting, a suction of the substance of
the nation outwards via the ports. In destroying the villages the invader destroyed the focal points of laborious
and peaceful community life. Cloth and clothes for the Indians began to be made in England with Indian fibres,
which thus made a trip half way round the world and back to enrich the English merchants and manufacturers.
Many millions became unemployed and impoverished and the strongest of them were subsequently conscripted
into England’s army and paid by taxes levied on other Indians to defend the Empire that
trampled upon India, against the Germans who might perhaps have freed India. A nation that had for centuries
been the light of Asia for its science, its mathematics, its self-discipline and its industrious people was reduced
to a country of impoverished slaves governed by laziness, fear and ignorance. ‘A century of servitude did that to
us’, cried Gandhi. They played Muslim against Hindu, the Nabab against the Nisan, Radja against Radja and
caste against caste. It was a conquest not by the English people but by a company of merchants who sold India
to the Crown. The English sold India to the English and the Indians paid the bill. With impeccable logic, India
paid the price of its own enslavement.
Even for a man of Gandhi’s calibre, it was too late in his time to turn the tide and rebuild India from the
ground upwards, from the solid foundation of the village, based on small farmers and traditional craftsmen. By
the time of independence India was already top heavy and its foundations undermined.
The British big business companies established to exploit the Third World included the Levant Company
(established in 1581), the East India Company (1599), the Hudson’s Bay Company (1670), the South Sea
Company (1713), the African Company (1553—1660), the British North Borneo Company (1881), the Royal
Niger Company (1886), the Imperial British East Africa Company (1888) and the British South Africa
Company (1889). The founder of the last-mentioned, Cecil Rhodes, was a rather typical example of the West’s
empire builders. He believed it possible to make a fortune and achieve power by what he cynically called
‘philanthropy plus five percent’. This triggered a rise to fame launched by gaining control of the diamond fields
of southern Africa, where he paid 5 million pounds sterling for the holding of a fellow Englishman. He was to
leave a will and a fortune to found a secret society ‘the true aim and object whereof shall be the extension of
British rule throughout the world’, even to the point of recovering the American colonies for the Empire. He
dubbed over-zealous missionaries as ‘negrophilists’ but was always as ready to quote the New Testament for his
purposes as Kruger was to quote the Old, a practice which helped to gain him missionary allies. He had
powerful men behind him, including Lord Rothschild and General Kitchener and his imperialism found favour
with Queen Victoria. His attitude to life can perhaps best be summed up in his own words: ‘I like the big and
simple —barbaric if you like’, and his policy, again in his own words, as ‘equal rights for every white man
south of the Zambesi’.
When Rhodes’ adventurers, sometimes glorified as ‘explorers’, drove north from South Africa, the invaders
found buildings of stone, today’s copper and gold mines already in operation and a flourishing agriculture. But
the British were superior in firearms, accentuated by the devastating machine-gun invented in London in 1883,
two years before the Berlin Conference carved up Africa between the Europeans. So the invaders captured the
most fertile crescent of the land, which they promptly named Rhodesia, and the capital, Salisbury, after the
17
British prime minister. For, part of the imperialist strategy in destroying native self-confidence, self-awareness
and initiative is either to replace local place names or to destroy the language and way of life which gave them
meaning. The process was very complete where the conquest was early and thorough, as in Ireland, where Dr
Douglas Hyde explained the depth of the Irish slave-mentality at the end of the 19th century, when little
children in the Gaelic-speaking West were being taught such verses as:
I thank the goodness and the grace
Which on my birth have smiled,
And made me in these Christian days
A happy English child.
Even today, after nearly three-quarters of a century of Irish ‘independence’, the tens of thousands of historic
places that would have given meaning to every village and hamlet, enriched the people’s lives and boosted their
self-confidence, have lost their significance for all but a few. Taghmon, Camolin, The Ballagh, Killisk,
Cahirciveen, Oulart and the rest of the pregnant place names that once spoke loudly to the people are now
nothing to the hurrying traveller but dots on a map and sounds signifying nothing, as indicated by John
Montague:
All around, shards of lost tradition,
The whole countryside a manuscript
We had lost the skill to read.
You might object that a multitude of languages would inhibit world communication. We shall be discussing this
perhaps at a deeper level in a later letter but for the present suffice it to say that the incentive value of nations
rising in the world with their own tongue would be an enrichment for all as people became conversant with
other languages, that coalescing of local to regional languages would have been the natural progression instead
of the sudden and brutal imposition of the imperialist tongues, and that restraint on imperialist dominion in this
field would even now be a good thing. As René Girard and other social anthropologists have shown, the
imperialist theory that elimination of differences would make for peace between peoples is a myth. Girard
argues the very opposite, that if and when everybody becomes alike and there are no differences to respect we
shall simultaneously have universal violence on a horrendous scale.
Taken in conjunction with the fact that in the case of imperialist dominion virtually all institutions,
architecture, food habits and ways of life are imposed from abroad rather than being rooted in native soil, the
end result is schizophrenic societies which spell trouble for the world. Notwithstanding the use of every
conceivable kind of torture and death, from the rack and the pitchcap to plain slaughter, the genocide attempted
in Ireland for several centuries failed, but the ethnocide largely succeeded. Make no mistake about it, Ciaran: the
rape-obsessed mentality does not halt its ambition with economic, political or military conquest, nor with the
possession of people’s bodies as slaves. Its ultimate objective is the rape of the soul that gives the body its
unique personality, its life and its hope. Fichte maintained that in such circumstances efficiency is impaired due
to the corruption of thinking, because clarity, confidence and coolness in reasoning, according to his argument,
are hindered in a language other than one’s ancient tongue.
This is one of those basic questions which invariably arouse a great deal of passionate prejudice, when what is
simply required is a little cold logic, of the kind projected, for example, by a leading Northern Ireland protestant,
Dr J Robb, who could hardly be accused of narrow-mindedness in such a matter. He had this to say on the
subject in a letter to the press of September 1988:
Language is precious and necessary if we are to preserve the diversity on which man’s social as well as
his biological and psychological survival is so dependent.... The potential of language and the associations
evoked by it provide us with a weapon with which to diminish the arrogance of those who seek to control us
through the imposition of ‘global’ language,
an attitude that has been well grasped by a considerable proportion of the Scots, the Welsh and many others
elsewhere. There is more in this than meets the eye. The Fascist mentality, now again at work in the world notwithstanding everything that has been said against Hitler, with its ever-more-subtle aim of reducing the
individual to a brainwashed, dependent cog in a giant machine, sees ‘global’ language, which cannot now be
18
other than English, as a powerful means of planetary mind manipulation in the hands of the half dozen press
lords and media barons who increasingly control the collection and flow of both information and entertainment.
No less a person than Samuel Johnson, speaking about the need to protect Gaelic in Scotland, said, ‘There is
no tracing the connection of ancient nations but by language; and therefore I am always sorry when any
language is lost, because languages are the pedigree of nations’. The best way to destroy a people and force
them to their knees is to destroy the pedigree that gave them their sense of identity. Culture has thus an effect on
economic growth. There are numerous examples of the effect of ancient culture and language on dynamism and
initiative. It is not surprising that, for example, the oppressive right-wing regime in Kenya, a satellite of the
Anglo-American empire, banned from his native land Ngugi Wa Thiong, Professor of Literature in Nairobi
University, eminent writer and author of Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature.
Cynics will point to the absence of integration between cultures and racial elements in various societies, a short
term, superficial view which ignores a host of socio-economic factors, traditional prejudices, class distinctions
and unequal opportunity, which distort the essence of the matter. But, with regard to the long-term unification of
the human family one is reminded of Teilhard de Chardin’a scientifically-based thesis that differentiation unifies
and unification differentiates. The father of the Common Market, now known as the EC, J Monnet, a down-toearth man with his feet on the ground and his head in economics, said before he died that if he had to begin all
over again to launch the European Community he would start with culture. In the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development, OECD, concerned solely with economic growth in the world’s richest,
capitalist countries, a staff bulletin prize essay on Japan (No. 118-20, 1989) said: ‘Who could argue that Japan’s
sense of cultural uniqueness and its people’s cohesion and determination hasn’t helped make the country what it
is today? Few deny culture’s role in economic development....’ On a purely humdrum, practical plane, imagine
arriving for your exotic holiday in the south of France or Spain, ‘to get away from it all’, and finding everybody
speaking English, eating ham and eggs and watching American television.
A leading thinker, writer and scholar in France, René Guenon, who has some thirty major works to his name,
has said that the invasion of the world by the West was
an invasion by materialism in all its forms, and it cannot be other than that; all the disguises, more or less
hypocritical, all the moralising pretexts, all the humanitarian declarations, all the cunning of a system of
propaganda which knows where necessary how to render itself insidious in order to better reach its objective,
cannot undo this truth, which can be denied only by those who are naive or those who have a vested interest
in this activity, which is satanic in the most rigorous sense of the word,
‘satanic’ meaning, he says, in the original Hebrew, that which turns things upside down, which attacks them
backwards, the spirit of negation which identifies itself with the downward pull of entropy, infernal in the
etymological sense. Guenon adds that when resistance to foreign invasion occurs in a Western country it is
labelled ‘patriotism’ and commands the greatest praise, but when it is in a Third World country it is called
‘fanaticism’ or xenophobia and merits the highest disdain.
Another renowned authority, who is attempting a breakthrough into new thinking, psychotherapist Scott
Peck, medical director of the New Milford Hospital Mental Health Clinic, who, day in, day out, is in constant
combat with the forces of evil similar to those described in an academic rather than clinical manner by René
Girard here in France, has attempted a definition of evil as that which opposes life, that which has to do with
mental and moral no less than physical killing, fostering dependency and exploiting power, discouraging
people’s capacity to think for themselves, diminishing their originality, liveliness and enthusiasm, robbing them
of their humanity — a ghastly cancer that gained access to a Creation which was originally an affirmative act of
life and love (The People of the Lie).
To return to the typical example of Rhodesia, the invaders prepared a system of laws by which 6,000 white men
became the legal proprietors of the best half of the arable land and several million Africans were confined to the
other half. The whites then established a monopoly on credit, research and advisory services so as to better
maintain the blacks in a position of inferiority from which, or so it was hoped, they would never be able to rise
and challenge white supremacy. The two economies were closely linked, the prosperity of the one depending on
the poverty of the other, a micro-scale example of what is now a macro North-South problem of planetary
proportions. By the time of Rhodesian independence, over 90 per cent of the country’s food was being produced
on white farms employing a quarter of a million blacks at an average wage of $30 a month, a considerable
proportion of them being employed not in production but waiting on the tables of their masters. A further
number had been exported as slaves. The West today no longer needs to import its slaves: it installs itself where
they are. An additional factor is that the colonizers, breaking certain age-old taboos, have also done irreparable
19
damage to the ecosystem, examples being the destruction of the forests, and the locust plague due to the
development of large estates and waterworks.
You and I saw a variation of the imperialist process in Kenya, where the colonizers chose the Kikuyus for
attention because they inhabited the best land: hence the source of today’s persistent tension between the
Kikuyus and the other tribes. This situation is replicated all over Africa to the benefit of the West’s arms
merchants who do all in their power to stimulate tension, aided and abetted by the artificial borders drawn
between states by the colonizers for their own purposes and without consulting the people. The enormous
private estates in Africa, as in Latin America, now the cause of so much socio-economic problems, are largely
the West’s creation. Imperialism battened on the exploitation of both the natural wealth and man to nourish its
appetite for power, money and conquest. The slave trade and the cruelty with which it trampled upon human
beings is symbolic. The precise figures will never be known with certainty but the most likely numbers are 10
killed for every 1 brought alive to America to replace the Indians who were being exterminated. In the 19th
century on the river Nile alone over 5 million died on the first leg of their infamous transportation to build the
New World, ‘land of the free’: the figure is recognised by leading historians. It was in the natural order of things
that the Irish anti-slavery worker, Roger Casement, had to be calomnied and killed, even if the immediate reason
was his other struggle — for Ireland. The slave trade finally ended less from moral outrage than from the fact
that the agricultural and industrial revolutions made slaves largely unnecessary. It is partly symbolic of the
planetary suicidal policy of the West that, as Professor J Weatherford has shown in Indian Givers — How the
Indians of the Americas Transformed the World, the loss of the Indian civilisation was also a loss to the world’s
economy, agricultural systems, ecology, medicine, navigation, political philosophy and even architecture and
urban planning. As in the case of most of the Third World peoples they were pointed to as useless, shiftless and
lazy after being rendered so by Western expropriation, exploitation and deprivation.
Colonialists and neo-colonialists have been following the basic pattern set in Puritan England earlier, when the
Homo economicus began his supremacy and, as was said by Thomas More at the time, ‘the livestock were
eating the men’ as the new rich who were to become England’s aristocracy laid out their estates in pastureland
instead of more vital tillage and thus helped to drive the small farmers out of the way into the urban slums
where they were to be exploited a second time during the industrial revolution by the descendants of the
landlords who had put them to flight. The land of the Third World has been laid out not in pastureland but in
large estates and plantations producing tropical products for the West while the small farmers have been forced
to flee into the shantytowns. One of the more modern instruments has been the Green Revolution using new
high-yielding varieties of grains valuable primarily to the rich who have the know-how, the land space, the
equipment for irrigation, the money to purchase the fertilizers, the pesticides and herbicides and the incentive of
high market returns. Partly through this revolution, food has lost its age-old primary function of feeding the
people, and is replaced by its investment and market value even if much of the food is destined for the storage
bins and the world market manipulators in Chicago and other major centres.
I propose to discuss specific aspects of the problem of Latin America in a later letter. Here I would merely
say that when one watches the American multinationals, following in the wake of 19th century British
exploitation, sucking the lifeblood of such a richly-endowed continent where the people want nothing so much
as to be allowed to feed themselves from their own soil; when we observe the connivance behind a façade of
ritual protests in defence of human rights by our European governments who are doing the same to Africa; when
we see corporations like United Brands (United Fruit or the Chiriqui Land Company) buying and selling politicians as freely as bananas; when we observe the degradation of the torture chambers, the activities of the secret
police, the right wing death squads and the cynicism (seen symbolized with macabre ‘humour’ on a wall in La
Paz
— ‘Combat poverty, kill a beggar’); when we recall the pre1983 Argentinian regime — certainly not gone from
the world forever — promoting the capture of little children like war booty from their assassinated parents and
their use as the personal slaves of their captors, sometimes for prostitution; when one remembers the long
duration of this night of agony for so many million people extending over a whole continent, one cannot but
become convinced that the sum of evil there represented takes on a more sombre glow than the Nazi camps.
And all because of what? Because of the cry of the poor to be allowed to live to produce food for their starving
children and have access to the most elementary medical attention to ease their suffering.
There are still some people who believe that even if the multinationals are exploiting the Third World and
draining it of its resources they are at least providing a livelihood for Third World workers. You and I have seen
what the livelihood is like, the little children destined to die before they are twenty from lung disease, crawling
like rats into the mines where the galleries are too small for a man; the degrading misery of workers; dwellings
20
which make one almost agree with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theory of the happy primitive in his jungle; the
slave labour in the plantations; the tears in the eyes of grown men unable to provide for their sick and dying
children from the misery wage they receive; the little girls of ten or twelve years prostituting themselves in the
bars and alleyways near the West’s luxury hotels to help their families. More than that, there is a widespread
slave trade in such youngsters, bought and sold for these activities. Hunger is a hard taskmaster. In March 1988,
the non-governmental Third World aid group, Freres des Hommes, published a detailed report on Manila which
showed that in that one city there are almost 20,000 (twenty thousand) children given to prostitution, some as
young as 8 or 9 years. One of these little girls told a surveyor that to go with a tourist or an American soldier
meant at least that she had a bed for the night, but some of these children do not even survive the night alive.
The West’s garrisons in Third World cities are not the pure defenders of freedom that the Establishment would
have us believe. Freedom is one and undivided; sullied in one aspect or spot it is sullied in all. You might be
tempted to think that these matters are unorganised accidents which bear no relationship to capitalist
undertakings. Let me disabuse you with this random example: a British package tour agency issued a brochure
in 1989 offering their customers full-blooded exploitation of these children in the Far East, ‘girly bars’ and sex
shows, ‘lewd invites five paces from your hotel’, the girls being described thus: ‘Technically-speaking they’re
whores: in truth they’re little girls showing you their knickers.’
In How the Other Half Dies, Susan George wonders, in relation to the whole Third World, why the media,
always in• search of sensation, have not campaigned more vigorously against Third World oppression and
hunger, the most sensational, most persistent, organised scourge the world has ever known. It must not have
occurred to her that the press lords and media barons are part of The System and the media are its mouthpiece.
There are also several right-wing institutions which make a practise of harassing liberal journalists. It does not
stop at harassment in Latin America where many hundreds of journalists have been murdered during the past 15
years. The assassins are almost never caught (which is an indication of who they are).
The continuing exploitation of the countries of the Third World since they achieved their ‘independence’ could
not have been ensured without the prior conquest and recruitment of the oligarchies established at independence.
Freemasonry and the West’s secret service representatives in the colonies were among the instruments used.
Even before independence many of the schools established by the colonial powers prepared the way among the
pupils from an early age. Mr Tony Benn, MP, former British cabinet minister, who renounced his aristocratic
titles for his principles, a man from the inner circle, who has been all his life in a privileged position to know,
has pointed out that decolonization merely marked a tactical withdrawal from political and military domination
sufficient to defuse violence or revolution and wait for a chance to reassert control another way. To help
maintain influence and respect, says Mr Benn, ‘we left them a parliament and a speaker complete with wig and
mace and invited them to tea at Buckingham Palace’. This is what René Dumont refers to as ‘purely nominal
independence’. In relation to the recruitment of the native oligarchies by the West since the postwar
independence movements, Susan George provides a detailed analysis of how the thousands of new recruits
brought annually to the US, and to a lesser extent to Europe, for training, were indoctrinated to become servants
of the West on their return to high posts in their native lands and, in particular, to facilitate the implantation of
Western big business interests and military bases as a ‘quid pro quo’ for the continuation of the aid destined
especially to support the elite in those countries and the exploitation of land, labour, mineral deposits and
fisheries.
In addition to the USAID programme, the Pentagon was then — in the 60s — bringing some 30,000 young
military and police officers to the US annually for training. Foundations such as the Rockefeller, Kellog and
Ford Foundations played a part in these activities. Susan George describes how ‘the Berkeley Boys’, trained by,
among others, the University of Berkeley, and sponsored by the Ford Foundation and the CIA, succeeded in
overthrowing an Indonesian government that was a threat to Western exploitation of the country. The overthrow
cost over $20 million per annum during the preparatory years and an estimated 1/2 to 1 million people
massacred in the final putsch in 1965. A Fascist tyrant, Suharto, was catapulted into the presidential palace to
organise a brutal dictatorship under the five principles, without batting an eyelid, of ‘belief in one God, social
justice, national unity, democracy and humanitarianism’. This is Newspeak in earnest. A number of gigantic
Western corporations then went to work to exploit oil, tin, nickel, copper, bauxite, tropical forests, rubber
plantations and fishing. And that is in a country where income per head is under $100 per annum, though here as
elsewhere income per head is a statistical myth obtained by dividing GNP by population irrespective of
distribution; the masses of the poor have no income. The agrarian reform that bad been launched by President
Soekarno was stopped and the way reopened for the agribusiness estates, sometimes managed by military
officers, using the crop varieties and cultural methods of the Green Revolution to enrich themselves after the
21
departure of the smallholders. One is reminded of the estates we knew in Kenya that were managed by President
Jomo Kenyatta’s lieutenants.
The problem of the Third World is not some unfortunate accident into which we have slipped against our will.
As far back as the 16th century, Sir Walter Raleigh had said that whoever controlled trade controlled the world’s
wealth and whoever controlled the wealth controlled the world. President Woodrow Wilson laid down the
principle that ‘a country is possessed and dominated by the capital invested in it’, which is now only a half truth
because capital is being massively drawn out of the Third World, particularly Latin America. In 1823 President
James Monroe declared Latin America the private hunting ground of the United States. In 1912, President
William H Taft was more specific (my translation from French copy): ‘The day is not far distant when three
Stars and Stripes will designate the extent of our territory, at three equidistant points — one at the North Pole,
one on the Panama Canal and the third at the South Pole.’
Naturally, Third World people are not without their share of responsibility. They have their tribal, racial and
religious prejudices like the rest of us, often more strongly ingrained. But where their socio-economic problems
can be shown to be due to inefficiency, local oppression or corruption, the West’s responsibility in this must be
examined. The West has been governing the planet for 500 years. It has trained and taken in tow the oligarchies
of the Third World. We cannot now hope to escape with impunity by pointing an accusing, self-righteous finger
at those we governed for so long and pretended to lead and educate. Present problems are the growth of
historical causes and cannot be analysed without examining the roots which produced them and will continue to
feed them if not eradicated. Specifically with regard to the charge of corruption, our Freemason society is more
efficient in hiding it, as shown by Stephen Knight in The Brotherhood, which describes, inter alia, Freemason
corruption in Britain from the top of the ladder downwards. Only the occasional crack in the façade enables us
to peep behind once in a while.
Scoffing remarks have sometimes been heard about the dissolute living, corruption and incompetence of the
people of the Third World, as if it had not been largely the centuries of Western exploitation and oppression
which reduced them to their present state. There is also the inhumanity and cruelty of the Fascist dictators
tyrannising their peoples in Asia, Africa and Latin America but they are mostly in power with the connivance or
active support of the imperialist powers (which spawned their own anti-communists within the West in the nottoo-distant past, of whom the blue-eyed, white-skinned capitalist Adolf Hitler is the most illustrious example).
We also like to point the finger at Islamic fanaticism but have been paying inadequate attention to the
development over the years of the Fundamentalist fanaticism in South Africa, the United States and elsewhere,
partly responsible for stimulating an arms race that constitutes a form of organised world violence compared
with which the Muslim variety has so far been largely a derivative, defensive and makeshift reaction, but is now
likely to imitate Western establishment violence and become institutionalised, structured and disciplined. This is
the real lesson from such countries as Iran, Syria, Libya and Iraq. It is also part of our ‘idees recues’ that the
Arabs are inherently an inferior race, notwithstanding the great Arab civilisation and learning in the Middle
Ages.
There is the further problem of today’s brain drain from the Third World. Western agencies help to promote
the training of high-grade academic staff in the poor countries but very many of them are thus destined, through
their qualifications, contacts and the enticements offered, to spend their lives contributing to the development of
the West. United Nations statistics show that in the single year 1970 (the latest one for which I happen to have
the statistics at hand) university graduates who emigrated from the Third World to the United States represented
an aid figure of $3.6 billion from the poor countries to the world’s richest nation. In the same year, development
assistance from the US to the Third World was $3.05 billion. Since the war 30 per cent of newly qualified
doctors have been emigrating from India, where the poor are in desperate need of medical services. I have met
some dedicated professional men from Africa who would like to return home but the doors are often closed by
the white men who manipulate the levers of power in cooperation with their native collaborators, some of whom
are very wealthy.
They all have their Washington, London or Paris connection. Presidents, government ministers and higher civil
servants are well rewarded in the poor countries to act as local agents for the multinationals and encourage
policies favouring the latter and the large estates which form part of The System. By way of example, the
personal fortune of President Houphouet-Boigny of the Ivory Coast was estimated at the end of 1988 to be
approximately $5 billion, in a country with an impoverished people’.Amassing fortunes is aided and abetted
through the political links with ‘the mother country’ reimbursed in kind: the Fascist tyrant. Marcos of the
Philippines contributed $4 million to Mr Reagan’s election in 1980, $8 million in 19842. The multinationals and
other exploiters sometimes even complain about the facilities! A report on Nigeria, for example, says:
‘Obtaining clear title to land is notoriously complicated. Everybody in the village has to okay it.
22
One of the factors of exploitation is the manipulation of commodity and raw materials prices, which are
mostly decided in the major trading centres such as London, New York and Chicago. Combined with the high
costs of imports, this leaves the poor countries in a precarious position. The speculators in the trade centres,
such as the futures markets of Chicago, are all-powerful. With the aid of satellite photos and other sources of
information, with their television screens and their telephone linkages with London, New York and other
exchanges, the manipulators sitting in their trading room have more information about coffee in Brazil, copper
in Zambia or sisal in Tanzania than the local people involved in production. Satellites, operating for the Global
Telecommunications System, can now sound the situation over the whole earth twice every 24 hours. The
destruction of a crop by hail, rain or drought anywhere is known immediately in a centre like Chicago. The rush
to buy or sell futures follows, the speculators make a fortune and the poor countries pick up the bill.
Market domination by the multinationals facilitates control, speculation and manipulation. Approximately 70
per cent of the world trade in bananas is controlled by United Brands (formerly United Fruit), Standard Fruit Co.
and Del Monte Corporation. When five Central American producer countries tried to form a protective
grouping, the UPEB, in the 70s they were boycotted by the corporations and most of their bananas perished. The
hungry people in their countries naturally did not have the wherewithal to buy them. The multinationals are
supported quietly by the influence carefully wielded by Western governments in international negotiations
designed to maintain high world prices for products such as grains and manufactures which the West exports in
large quantities, and to keep prices low for the tropical products imported from the poor countries. The grains
pendulum has now swung, and climatic factors, reduced production and increased Third World consumption by
people deprived of their native food production capacities have caused a steep fall in stocks. Previously, official
quarters used to report the ‘humanitarian’ aspect of US wheat stocks, supposed to be maintained for
emergencies, when the primary purpose was to bolster the world market price, as I have heard frankly stated in
the closed international councils. Policy in relation to tropical products was the opposite, designed to maintain
deteriorating terms of trade for the Third World. This was not too harmful to the enormous West-controlled or
West-oriented latifundia integrated with the Western economic system and which could pass the pressure back
on their employees by further squeezing wages or increasing working hours. The worsened balance of payments
deficits for Third World governments rendered them more submissive and more dependent on Western
‘providence.
These are merely examples of a general, highly-organised strategy in which one of the factors has been food
aid.
A distinction must be made between emergency food from a variety of sources and ongoing, governmentsponsored aid. The former is unfortunately undergoing a transformation from the emergency category to the
ongoing category, due to the increasingly disastrous food production situation caused largely by long-standing
Western exploitation. Ongoing government sponsored food aid forms one part of Official Development
Assistance (ODA). The latter is used for a variety of overt and covert purposes, including payment for military
bases, balancing budgets, paying bonuses to ministers, military officers and higher civil servants among the
West’s puppets, and helping to finance publicity campaigns for Western food as a means towards market
penetration and expansion, as well as providing some genuine food aid to the hungry and development
assistance for projects. The OECD Development Assistance Committee, the rich men’s club of the wealthiest of
the 24 OECD countries — which, notwithstanding its name, has nothing to do with providing assistance, it is
merely a talking shop —holds ponderous annual meetings, presided over by the American Ambassador, which
produce the usual propaganda press releases and an abundance of platitudinous comment on ODA trends. The
multinationals are, of course, eager for Western governments (taxpayers) to raise the ODA: it helps to form a
smokescreen of concern for the poor, to maintain some life in the goose that lays the golden eggs and to provide
direct contracts for the grain, dried milk and other corporations which deal directly with deliveries of food aid,
and the manufacturers of inputs and equipment, which thus expand their markets.
Total bilateral ODA from all DAC countries combined increased from $14.59 billion in 1970 to $47.6 billion
in 1989, a year when the West received $178 billion in debt servicing in addition to the ongoing benefits of
terms of trade relationships, and the Third World continued to suffer the further loss of flight capital. During the
period from 1970 to 1989 non-concessional flows (bank loans, etc.) to Third World countries increased by
approximately fifteen thousand per cent. Though aid is small compared with the massive commercial lending,
the economic exploitation and the arms sales, it forms the thin end of the wedge for subsequent exploitation.
ODA has several clear functions. First of all, it helps the West in its global geo-political strategy, being given
particularly to countries which support Israel, and to those of key importance because of minerals, raw
materials, oil, geographical position or Western big business or farming interests. To prove this first point, all
you have to do is to examine the destination of ODA country by country over a number of years. The leading
beneficiaries of aid are Israel and Egypt (Egypt, for the present, being virtually an adjunct of Israel in the geo-
23
political strategy) together with Cyprus and Turkey (strategic NATO kingpins). Two-thirds of the total aid is
military or military-related (the so-called economic support funds’). Nearly 40 per cent goes to Israel and Egypt.
As we were able to learn first hand when we were living in Kenya, this country is another key recipient for ‘aid’
in the West’s geomilitary strategy and surveillance of the important area of the Indian Ocean. In return for
control of the port of Mombassa and the military airports at Nairobi, Nanuki and Wajir, the local politicians
receive handsome handbacks and the owners of brothels and casinos substantial benefits. The head of state,
associated with an Israeli-American billionaire, is one of the richest men in Africa, while his own people are
suffering from the most degrading misery in the shantytowns and protesting students are regularly clubbed,
arrested and tortured by the regime’s brutal police. This is the country that was held up as an example to the
Third World in January 1987 by the American secretary of state, Mr George Schultz, on an official visit heartily
applauded by the large population of ex-colonialists and neo-colonialists and naturally reported widely by the
West’s media.
With regard to the food aid component of ODA, this was specifically designed to condition Third World tastes
to Western products, supported by two back-up activities — the dumping of subsidised cereals in preparation
for market penetration and expansion and the replacement of traditional Third World food such as millet,
sorghum, sweet potatoes, beans, lentils and other leguminous foods (high in vital proteins), cashew nuts, various
species of Dioscorea (yams, etc.), which used to form the staple diets of the Third World, with large-scale
production estates and plantations producing either Western-style food crops such as wheat, with Western
technology, investment and equipment and often on land owned by Western corporations under cover of private
names or national companies, or tropical products important to the West’s industries, such as tobacco, tea,
coffee, rubber, jute, cacao, coconut, oil palm, coprah, groundnuts, cotton and sisal. Medical men say that
mothers fed during pregnancy on white bread rather than the traditional variety of legumes and other nutritious
foods and children similarly fed during their early life are condemned to produce a future generation of
submissive, apathetic people incapable of sustained attention, observation and learning. A study conducted on
30,000 children born in two hospitals in Recife in Brazil showed that while 6,000 born to the families of the rich
and the middle class in one hospital were perfectly normal, 24,000 born in the hospital for the poor declined in
size from year to year and are in the process of becoming pygmies.
The new colonial-type crops are encouraged through loans and grants, equipment, ‘agrarian reform’ in
reverse direction, research, fertilizers, and plant protection products of Western origin, so that big business
benefits at both the input and the output stage, and the ships which bring the inputs return with the harvested
products.
American Senator, subsequently presidential candidate, George McGovern, speaking in its early years in
support of PLO 480 and Food for Peace said:
Food for Peace has greatly contributed to our national interests in developing new opportunities for commercial markets. A substantial part of sales in national currencies has been used for publicity and promotion
of American farm products.... Thanks to Food for Peace we have introduced our commodities into countries
which will one day become our customers on a normal commercial basis.
Western publicity agencies are powerful instruments promoting the Western way of eating and drinking healthdamaging products to the detriment of traditional foods of higher nutritional value. Coca cola is replacing native
fruit and fruit juices. Beer is powerfully promoted even into remote villages. ‘A baby in every bottle’ used to be
used by one world-famous beer to show its potency. ‘For a lovely skin put your trust in ...‘ is one of the
innumerable ads which can be seen in places where the people do not have enough to eat. For further
information, you might read, for example, Alcohol Beverage: Dimensions of Corporate Power, by Frederic
Clairmonte and John Cavanagh, as well as Publicitë et Sociét~ by Bernard Cathelat, who says that it is the very
function of publicity to stimulate cultural chaos in order to introduce ‘miracle products’ from what many
‘natives’ are being led to believe is the omniscient West.
In 1984 President Ronald Reagan said that among the benefits of the Food for Peace Programme was ‘the
expansion of export markets for American farm products ... and the promotion of the foreign policy of the
United States.... Eight of our ten major agricultural markets are former recipients of the Food for Peace
programme’. Wheat bread is in the process of replacing the millet loaf and other native products everywhere in
the Third World. Even the catastrophe of famine serves Western interests, as evidenced, for example, by a
Dutch memorandum to the EC (Les aides alimentaires de Ia CEE et de la France, INRA, Paris, September
1977) —my translation: ‘By disintegrating the social fabric, catastrophes can constitute strategic opportunities
during which the necessities and the chances of success of aid increase, as the disorganisation opens the way, so
24
to speak, to restructuration.’ A CIA document4 declared that the food crisis could increase US power, and
another CIA report said that through the food weapon Washington could hold the necessitous masses of the
world at its mercy; Senator Hubert Humphrey had expressed similar sentiments as far back as 1957. During the
Indian famine of 1965—66 the US forced an agreement on the Indian government to keep silent about the war
in Vietnam in exchange for American grain. Professor B R Shenoy in PL 480 Aid and India’s Food Problem
(EastWest Press Ltd., New Delhi) has pointed out that US food aid reduced Indian production and stimulated a
price spiral that emptied the pockets of the poor and encouraged violent conflict.
Professor Wilfred Cantwell Smith in his book on Islam (Princeton University Press) was perhaps going deeper
than he intended when he said that ‘the opportunity of a Pakistan peasant to eat may depend on a decision made
in Washington’. The famine in Ethiopia offered an occasion to the West to denounce the evils of Marxism with
little or no reference to the fact that the so-called ‘Marxist’ regime did not create but inherited the problem from
the feudal regime of Western puppet Emperor Hailie Selassi. The problems were of such extreme complexity
that no government, of the right, the left, or the centre, could solve them in the short or medium term. Apart
from the guerilla war against the regime, paid for and armed by Western agencies and operated from Erythrea
and Tigre, the original socio-economic problems were largely created by Western and Israeli companies. The
case is analysed by Susan George, who describes how the richest river valleys were taken over by these
companies to the detriment of Ethiopian livestock and their owners who were forced to migrate to the poorest
land. In addition, the river Awash, used for livestock drinking, was polluted by the new industries producing
sugar for export and feeding the byproducts to cattle in enormous feedlots from which the beef was also
exported and the profits expatriated. The natives were left largely as spectators watching their own national
tragedy being organised by the multinationals as has been done all over the Third World. The hysterical Western
attacks on the Marxist regime in Ethiopia were not, naturally, replicated in relation to either Somalia or the
Sudan where a similar situation prevailed — famine and guerilla warfare — because these two countries then
had pro-Western regimes.
When the Sudan regime changed and took an anti-West stand, that country was also given the privilege of
having its famine widely publicised and the government accused of responsibility. The new Sudanese regime
also committed the unpardonable sin of siding with Iraq in the Gulf, as a result of which aid to the stricken
population was severely cut back and, for example, a ship carrying several thousand tons of food which
Khartoum said it had paid for was diverted to Djibouti. A research worker with Africa Watch, Alex de Waal,
author of a book on famine in the area, said that the Western attitude was, ‘We have these guys over a barrel and
let’s give them a whipping because of their behaviour towards Iraq’. Mr John Seaman, head of Save The
Children’s policy development unit, said the idea of turning back food from the country in the midst of massive
famine among innocents was scandalous.
Incidentally, Ethiopia is sometimes quoted by Western imperialist agents as a case where poverty was not
caused by imperialism, since a native flag always flew in Addis. Without going back as far as the Turkish,
Portuguese and other invasions which promoted fierce civil wars and devastation, in modern times the country
has been exploited by Western corporations based mainly in Egypt, Italy, France and Britain, the British having
controlled the entire Nile and the Ethiopians being pushed into the mountainous areas.
Returning to the question of food aid, this also contains an element of cynicism: the US Food for Peace
programme has included over a billion dollars worth of cigarettes and tobacco in the last 25 years, supported by
publicity campaigns of the type, ‘Come to Marlboro country’. In addition to Western expatriate technologists in
the Third World guiding research, training, extension and credit in the right direction to promote colonialist
production, price relationships and marketing facilities are used to the same end. Traditional native food
becomes the poor relation and the small farmers have to flee from the land, swelling the shantytowns where they
can be trained to consume Western products such as bread. Even in the famine-stricken Sahel, behind the
humanitarian rhetoric, the colonialist strategy prevails. A respectable expert group working within the OECD
secretariat in Paris, the Club du Sahel, admitted in a report on rain-fed crops in 1983 that the potential for such
crops (my translation from French copy) ‘is superior to present requirements and those foreseeable for several
decades ahead’ but they have not been exploited because West designed aid and agricultural policies ‘have, in
practice, given pre-eminence to export crops’ (such as groundnuts and cotton) and to large-scale dam
construction and irrigation projects requiring massive inputs of Western equipment and technology. ‘For every
tonne of irrigated grains produced’, says the report, ‘the Sahel receives from the international community
approximately sixty times more aid than it receives for each tonne of rain-fed grains produced’.
The construction of vast, Western style dams, instead of series of small ones which could have saved the land,
has resulted in the flooding and loss of many of the most productive river valleys. In Pour l’Afrique, j’Accuse,
René Dumont has pointed out that the cement merchants and the material and strategic interests of the moneylenders led them to oblige the local people to accept these dam-construction projects even though they were thus
compromising the future of these countries by systems which took no account of the subsequent agricultural
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development to which they might lead. To give one example of the usefulness of such dams: The Inga dam in
Zaire represents a third of the country’s national debt and operates at only 20 per cent of capacity. Such
Western-built dams, involving enormous funds, formed part of the Western-organised Green Revolution using
Western rather than native crop plants and requiring Western-style inputs of fertilizers and chemicals, and not
only swelled the Third World debt but also require continuing Western technology to function and result in
large part in the production of export crops which benefit a small proportion of the rich obligarchy while the
mass of the producers have to flee, sometimes being forced out at the point of the gun by native agents in the
pay of the foreign exploiter. One of the tricks in Kenya was to declare an estate a prisoners’ camp and give the
workers the Hobson’s choice of remaining to work as prisoners or leaving to starve as ‘freemen.
Allow me to give you just one more example to illustrate the value of food aid to the West: North Africa used to
be a traditional bastion of hard wheat production for the native diet of couscous. Western food aid promoted soft
wheat, flour and bread consumption, and Western-style production and seed oriented local cropping in the same
direction, so that North Africa, like most of the West’s empire, became largely a bread consumer and an
expanding market for Western wheat and flour according as home production was squeezed out in favour of
temporarily cheaper imports. I must confess that in more innocent days I was a party to this process for three
years in Algeria, helping to introduce the new varieties for the UNDP. In Tunisia where the campaign began
earlier than in Algeria, the area sown even to soft wheat declined from an annual average of 210,000 hectares in
1970—76, to an annual average of 90,000 hectares in 1977—82, after the second stage in the process had been
promoted through foreign aid and under advice from foreign technical cooperation experts in the ministries.
Funds which might have gone to improving productivity and returns on the farms were diverted to subsidies for
the urban populations, a strategy that had considerable political appeal for the West’s puppet, the Bourguiba
regime to which the threat was, naturally, from the new urban masses uprooted from their homes. The subsidies
had, of course, the further benefit of ftrnctioning in effect as incentives to Western wheat traders. Deterioration
in the terms of trade subsequently manipulated by the Western powers brought a reduction in necessary inputs
for agriculture and a decline in agricultural production — once more to the benefit of Western exporters.
Imports had to be paid for through an increase in foreign loans, in return for which the IMF and the World Bank
demanded the removal of customs duties on imports by 1991. All this, I might add, was accompanied by
triumphalist celebration in certain French media, delighted that a former colony was collapsing through ‘Arab
inefficiency’ (see, for example, the enclosed cutting from Le Figaro of Tuesday, 23 September, 1986).
Production on small, poor farms in the Third World is a very fragile thing and can easily disintegrate. The
effort to make ends meet between the price the poor consumer can pay and what it costs to modernise
production enough to have a surplus for the market, in countries that cannot afford the subsidies which we have
in the developed world, can collapse where food aid destroys both the production-price pattern and the
traditional food tastes. The result is that the small farmer goes out of operation, which further swells the throng
of the urban poor and expands the market for Western ‘aid’.
Two of the five world grain giants, Cargill and Continental, made roughly $1 billion each from the Food for
Peace programme in the first 10 years of its existence. Third World food imports increased at an annual average
rate of 7 per cent during the 70s, twice as fast as during the First Development Decade, and the Third World’s
food deficit doubled between 1975 and 1985. During the 40 years that the Third World has been under
discussion it has been made to appear with subtle pros and cons in the media that the problem is a kind of
intractable intruder, almost ‘an act of God’ which has resisted all diagnosis and treatment. The facts are
otherwise. The problem has remained because of the deliberate and largely concealed strategy to maintain the
Third World in a state of dependence so as to better exploit it. There is now a pretence at searching for new
ideas. There is also an insidious suggestion that it was not Western capitalist exploitation that reduced the Third
World to poverty but some genetic or racial inferiority among the ‘coloured peoples’, as if the world had never
known of the great Asian and Arab civilisations, the latter being Europe’s chief teacher in the Middle Ages.
As Raymond Crotty, a leading Irish economist, has pointed out, some Third World countries are successful
and promising, those few which have never been capitalist colonized. There are other differences besides. The
economic success of Taiwan is sometimes put forward as an example of what capitalism could ‘do for’ the
whole Third World, as if it had not already been ‘doing for’ the Third World for several centuries. But Taiwan is
not typical of the Third World. First of all, the Nationalist retreat from the mainland brought an enormous
concentration of the most educated and monied elite to a relatively small area; too few for a continent, they were
able to work wonders on the island. They were impelled by a new challenge in a new homeland, what was then
an island fortress threatened by the revolutionary masses back home, with the added incentive of all uprooted
refugees and the ‘hybrid vigour’ of being transplanted. Partly for these reasons, the competent new state
apparatus was able to play a strong role in the resurgence and keep control of the anti-communist development
programme from the US, whose appetite for expropriation and exploitation was also restrained by the fact that
Taiwan had little natural wealth to exploit. As in Japan, the wealth was the cohesion of a people driven by social
26
principles rooted in Asia and Confucianism, with a deep acquiescence in frugal living, a passion for work and a
strong respect for family and hierarchy from the top of the pyramid down to the underpaid labourers at the lower
end of the ladder. For, an important part of the commercially successful capitalism in these areas is the brutal
use of slave labour, including the bonded labour whereby a family is given a loan by his capitalist employer and
is thus held in bondage, usually for life and sometimes for generations.
Many people have been led to believe that prices in the capitalist world are determined by millions of people,
consumers and producers, in what is dubbed ‘the free play of the market’. The market is far from free.
Practically everything is manipulated by a minority. Some people allowed themselves to be convinced that the
price rises of the 70s were due to the Arab oil producers, without understanding the role of the Seven Sisters, the
major oil companies. Even a Western body like the OECD had to admit in the face of the facts that the increased
oil prices of the 70s contributed between only 1 and 2 per cent of the rise in the cost of living. Between 1970
and 1974, for every increase of 23 cents in the cost of the oil component in fertilizers the price of the latter was
raised from $3.79 to $9.15 by the very manufacturers who put it out that their price increases were due to the
increased cost of oil. It is one of the facts of contemporary economic history that the fertilizer industry registered
some of its biggest profits ever in the years following the 1973 oil crisis. Everybody tried to cash in on the
media hype and the consequent public hysteria over the Arabs and their oil. Soya prices for example, were
suddenly raised from $2 to $6 a bushel.
One of the several recognised causes of the collapse of the Roman Empire was the concentration of great
wealth in few hands. ‘The decline of the Imperial power’, said historian Hilaire Belloc, ‘was mainly due to this
extra-ordinary concentration of economic power in the hands of a few’. Everywhere, the ‘Rex’ had to reckon
with the strength of highly concentrated wealth. This problem, said Belloc, ‘should furnish us, if we were wise,
with an object lesson for our own politics today’. There are now less than 30 multinational conglomerates who
have the world by the throat, controlling the production and distribution of most essential raw materials and
basic commodities, manipulating the world’s money supply and prices, stimulating the consumer society to
expand the market and encourage acquisitiveness, and developing the conquest of the mind of man through the
press lords and media barons. Some of the manipulators use religion as a support for business.
Let me take just one example for consideration, that of the world’s supply of grain, and, by extension, of
poultry and eggs, pigmeat and much of the beef and milk.
Over 90 per cent of the world’s trade in grains is in the hands of five private conglomerates, completely family
owned: Cargill, Bunge and Born, Louis Dreyfus, Continental, and Andre. These five family companies operate
in the greatest secrecy behind a public relations façade and between them have hundreds of subsidiaries
functioning in practically every sector of the world economy, using a variety of different names. In Merchants of
Grain, Dan Morgan describes them from his extensive research, travels and interviews, succeeding a little in
lifting the veil of secrecy under which they work. One representative literally pushed him out of his Geneva
office, saying (quotations are my translations from French text): ‘Don’t think you’re going to dig up any
Watergate in the Swiss mountains’. The owner of Continental is reputed to prefer to lose $1 million than to see
his name in a newspaper. Like many of the arms manufacturers, they are not quoted on any stock exchange,
being family-owned giants, with enormous amounts of their own money. They are heavily involved in banking
as in other sectors. Cargill markets some 50 different products, is the world’s number one exporter of grains,
number one in egg production, the world’s second largest meat packer, the world’s third milling giant, the
largest trader in cotton, one of the first producers of agricultural seeds, livestock feed and fertilizers, and so on.
After Cargill, the rest is shared particularly between the other four and their associates operating under national
names in various countries and using national executives as their agents. Strict secrecy is their primary principle
here.
The ground for the grain giants had been prepared by the English Industrial Revolution that required a great
input of ‘biological fuel’ for the masses working in the mines and the factories, by the Repeal of the Corn Laws
and by the ploughing of the American prairies. Their second windfall came when they supplied both sets of
combatants in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. The two world wars then launched the speculators towards the
summit. In 1914—18 they received a great new boost with the supply of oats for the horses and wheat for the
men at a time when Europe’s manpower and horsepower were dying around Verdun, the Somme and the Marne
and were hardly in a position to produce much grain. Herbert Hoover was sending supplies officially to the
allies through the French ports and unofficially to the Germans through Antwerp. After his passage through the
presidency, Mr Hoover resumed his old post at the outbreak of World War II and was providing grain to all the
countries occupied by Germany until Mr Winston Churchill decreed a blockade. Between 1913 and 1921
exports of American wheat had doubled.
In the 20s the merchants were aided by the well-established American system in which interchangeable high
officials and secretaries (ministers) move back and forth between government and big business. The merchants
were also helped by Presidents Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, who opposed all state interventionism in the
27
sacrosanct affairs of big business. Coolidge is remembered by contemporary historians for his declaration:
‘There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime’. Harding was noted for
nepotism and Hoover was in many ways almost a carbon copy of President Reagan, adamantly against help for
the unemployed urban masses and believing deeply in the survival of the fittest. He was right. The fittest
survived, the less fit were buried across the fields of France and Germany from the Normandy beaches to the
Rhine and beyond and the five grain merchants grew bigger and better aided again by Herbert Hoover after
1945, when the US agricultural attaches around the world were mobilised to promote the American way of life,
or, rather, the American way of eating. Sandwiches and hamburgers, combining bread and largely grain-fed
meat, sold to the youth in the fast-food shops giving little employment, were the ideal in cost, composition and
novelty, especially when served in hot countries with chilled coca-cola, backed by glamorous advertising. The
USDA and the agricultural attaches organised the training of bakers, the provision of food in school canteens
and demonstrations in the newly-developing supermarkets. Selected bakers, millers, and dieticians in large
numbers were brought to the US for training.
Here are a few random examples of the results. In Japan, the ‘jyamba baga’ (Japanese for ~jumbo burger’)
bought in ‘Macudonarados’ (Mcdonald’s) became very fashionable. Iran was a country that had traditionally fed
itself on a rich variety of native vegetables, milk, poultry, goat and sheepmeat partly produced from native
barley. The grain giants, the USDA and the US agricultural attaché in Teheran, backed by the Food for Peace
programme, organised a newfood campaign which by the time of the fall of the Shah had destroyed the
country’s independence in the matter of food when what it needed was to strengthen it by improving native
production and providing employment in the process. American wheat mostly replaced native food, soy-beans
eliminated the feed barley and soya oil largely destroyed the home production of olive oil. Through the Food for
Peace programme, the USDA obtained the right of inspection of Iran’s agricultural policies and projects by
seven US experts appointed to full-time positions in the Iran Ministry of Agriculture. They were supported by a
large number of well-paid Iranian officials working for the CIA. Imports of American wheat rose in value from
$15 million in 1965 to $325 million in 1975. Ships were sometimes queueing for weeks in the Persian Gulf
waiting to discharge grain. And the agricultural attaché (quoted by Dan Morgan) declared: ‘The sooner John
Deere is installed in Iran, the better we will be able to control the agricultural projects he needs’. Susan George
quotes sources to show that in the area of Khuzistan alone 17,000 Iranian smallholders were expelled from their
lands to make way for the multinational agricultural corporations. A spokesman for one of these corporations is
quoted as saying (my translation from French text): ‘They (the government authorities) install irrigation on the
land before we come. We have nothing to do but exploit it. It is an extremely interesting arrangement’. Dan
Morgan points out that before an Argentinian head of state appoints his ministers he always takes advice from
the owner of Bunge and Born. It does not always stop at advice. The socioeconomic catastrophe that struck
Argentina after Carlos Menem was elected president in 1989 was at least partly due to the appointment to
important cabinet posts of two of the multinational representatives who proceeded to hand the economy over to
big business to liberalise international investment and to further open up the country to foreign exploitation.
What is the secret of success? A large part of it lies, of course, in the secrecy of Freemasonry. But the owner
of Andre confines himself to a technical answer to Dan Morgan:
‘The secret of success is to sell more cheaply than you buy and still make a profit’. Impossible? Yes, impossible
for the ordinary man or even a national company. But the ordinary rules do not apply to the big multinationals.
With dozens of subsidiaries under different names penetrating into every economic sector and virtually every
country, the giant can buy from and sell to itself across the frontiers, negotiate its way around national taxes,
invest offshore, play one product price against another, threaten to transfer its operations to a more hospitable
country, use its weight and international ramifications to impose differential influences on various markets, cash
in on fluctuating exchange rates and benefit by the enormous computerised data banks providing world
information of a monopoly kind which render the multinationals practically indispensable to government
advisers who do not have the means to mobilise such facilities. Cargill’s computer in Mineapolis, for example,
receives an average of 14,000 messages a day from the four corners of the earth. These messages concern hourto-hour prices on markets, commodity exchanges and futures, daily variations in exchange rates all over the
world, adjustments in customs rates, weather forecasts, trends in diseases and pests and many other matters.
The merchants’ power is such that they can negotiate secret agreements with governments by which they
sometimes pay as little as a 2 or 3 per cent tax on profits. Considering the competition between governments to
gain the manna of multinational implantation and the incentives offered, taxpayers are thus among the victims.
So are the unemployed, for, notwithstanding establishment propaganda that the multinationals relieve
unemployment, they are in effect only partly filling a gap which they created in the first place, the way they can
claim to be having success in controlling the pollution which they also create.
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Morgan gives examples of the exercise of power by these companies, e.g.: Following a problem of payment in
dollars, Continental diverted a large cargo of badly needed wheat away from Zaire and slowed down flour
production in its mills there. Flour and bread prices shot up and queues struggled for supplies. The government
was forced to surrender and to add the further bonus of giving Continental a national monopoly over the now
staple diet for Third World urban poor, bread and flour. The companies being private, family-owned giants, the
family head exercises absolute power. When, for example, the owner of Continental travels from his New York
house to his Paris apartment, his Swiss chalet or his ranch in Connecticut, he never relinquishes the reins and
only his opinion prevails. (Incidentally, the famous ‘Quaker oats’ is, in reality, Continental’s.) Each of the
family heads is keenly conscious of the importance of leaving an heir to continue the family dynasty.
I have never visited the Chicago Exchange but used to be on a jury for an international documentary film
festival in Berlin and once saw a film on the Exchange. The almost instant power it exerts around the world is
stunning, but it is nothing compared with the secret power of the multinationals, of which Chicago is a mere
reflection. It is said that some of the individuals involved in important negotiations almost reach orgasm on
clinching a major deal. As for the stock exchanges on which The System in general is built, aside from the
corruption and scandals which have come to light and which could be attributed to erring human nature to which
we are all heir — though greater temptation and power lead to greater corruption — the normal operation of
these places is hardly dignified, to put the matter mildly. As Peter Cunningham, who knew the financial temples
from the inside, said in The Bear’s Requiem, describing the sheer savagery in the inner precincts of the financial
world, these circles are the modern equivalent of the Roman Coloseum, with their feverish excitement,
aggression and ‘blood on the ground’ in the form of human failure, places resembling ‘an 18th century lunatic
asylum’, where a man can suddenly lose everything, gambling dens used by men accustomed to thick carpets
who recoil at the idea of the lower classes gambling a few bob in gaming machines.
Advantages to the West of ODA and food aid include the tying of aid to purchases in the donor countries, the
issue of tenders for development projects confined by contract to the donors, the obligation for receiving
countries to accord economic, commercial and military facilities to donors, the granting of a supervisory role to
the IMF, agent of Western capital, the commitment by receiving countries to develop costly infrastructures from
which the Western private sector subsequently benefits, and the profitable transport and sales by Western
corporations. In addition to the profiteering and exploitation, there are also the blunders. Thus the IMF experts
thought until quite recently that the debt-and-development problem of the Third World was a simple technical
matter to be corrected by financial and trade manipulation, forgetting the social and political implications which
in turn react with economic aspects. One of the means used in economic adjustment is the reduction of social
services, consumption, purchasing power and vital necessities such as education so as to orient a larger
proportion of national wealth towards immediate production, investment and exports to service debts. This can
force the middle classes to reduce or abandon savings, to sell part of their belongings or equipment, to take their
children out of school and put them to earning something or to go into debt to big businessmen or money
lenders, all of which has negative long-term effects.
Part of the problem of underdevelopment is diagnosed by certain Western experts in the exploding
population growth for which the Third World is accused. Those who blindly accept the media hype on this issue
seem unaware that African food production in absolute figures, i.e. irrespective of population and of production
per capita, has fallen by 20 per cent during the past 30 years and that production in the Third World in general
has been largely diverted from its primary role of feeding the people to the imposed role of producing export
crops to pay interest on the Western-triggered debts. With regard to the specific question of population
expansion, every demographer knows that the most effective way to lower birthrates is to raise standards of
living: for the poverty-stricken family in the Third World an extra child is marginally only another small mouth
to nourish with a pittance for 5 or 6 years, with the despairing hope that he or she might then become a helper, a
socioeconomic addition (an old Latin American proverb says:
‘Cada nino viene con un pan debajo del brazo’- every child arrives with a loaf of bread under its arm); mortality
rates being what they are, the parents fight back against biological and economic death by frequent births to
ensure the survival of the few; family and formal education also enter into the process, and a further factor is the
promiscuity in the overcrowded shantytown combined with the lack of a sublimatory outlet for sexual energy
among people who had been denied education, employment and self-fulfilment. It takes only a single generation
after the raising of living standards and child survival rates, the practice of greater social equality in distribution
and the creation of work opportunity, for parents to begin lowering birthrates. For generations the policies of the
West have worked to ensure the maintenance of poverty, ignorance and exploitation in the Third World. Who,
then is responsible for its high birthrate?
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One of the consequences of the population problem not often discussed is the sense of guilt inflicted on the
people of the Third World because the manner in which the West encouraged birth control programmes gives
the youth the impression that they are an unwanted commodity. Anyone who has lived close to them can testify
that this is one of the factors in the success of organisations such as the Muslim integrist movement which does
not treat them as rejects and parasites. Again, as in other important matters, the Western Establishment,
frightened of having embarrassing skeletons dug up from its cupboards, prefers to bury its head in the sand and
blame such developments on anything but the true causes. Notwithstanding Third World birthrates and the
collapse of the birthrate in Europe in the 20th century, the latter still leads the world by a very long stretch in
population density, with the sole exception of Bangladesh, Taiwan and Japan, the Netherlands leading the
European figure with over 350 inhabitants per square kilometre. The high European population density, let it be
said, was partly achieved through imperialist exploitation of Third World land, a fact that in the early part of the
century used to be summarised by certain economists with the comment: ‘Our cattle graze on the banks of the
Rio de la Plata’.
Western imperialism, involving centripetal capitalistic enterprise, the destruction of native initiative, the flight
of the small food producers to constitute the impoverished proletariat of the mushrooming shantytowns, the
systematic organisation of adverse terms of trade, the forced purchase of costly inputs for Western-oriented
production and the exploitation that results in enormous food imports have crushed the Third World under a
mountain of debt now approximately $1,300 billion. This is sometimes attenuated in the public mind by being
considered a mysterious new problem that might ‘go away’ as quickly as it came. In fact it is an old strategy: in
the early 60s objective critics were already decrying ‘the explosion of Third World debt’ when it was $6 billion.
Financial representatives inside and outside the media today succeed with subtle pros and cons in conveying the
impression that the Third World debt was freely contracted by sovereign governments (and insisting, Shylocklike, on their pound of flesh, the interest duly paid, even if it means killing the borrowing economy, and
notwithstanding the fact that in many cases the debt has been morally more than repaid through the
accumulated, usurious interest).
The facts are not quite so simple.
With the outbreak of still another Arab-Israeli war, oil prices increased from 1973 onwards through the 70s, and
Western banks received an enormous bonanza of petrodollars which they had difficulty in investing with the
usual profits in the Western economy because of the recession that had suddenly struck out of the clear blue sky
of nearly 30 years of explosive growth. It was proposed in 1974 that the lesser of two evils should be adopted,
give responsibility for recycling the petro-dollars to the IMF, agent of Western capitalism though it is, but a
body with some little measure of multinational control. The proposal was vetoed by the US. And so the banks
teamed up with their bedfellows in big business to launch Western goods, turn-key factories, and arms to put
down the guerilla wars, onto the Third World together with an abundance of money to pay for them at a rate of
interest beyond that which they had normally received from corporate investment. In addition, state-backed
borrowers were considered a better security risk than corporate borrowers. It was a matter of heads I win, tails
you lose. Now that the Third World debt gamble is in danger of not paying off as handsomely as planned, the
pressure is on and the poor countries are forced to expand the production of tropical products for the West
instead of the food they desperately need for themselves. Such usury would have been denounced throughout
the length and breadth of christendom in the Middle Ages as a crime crying to heaven for vengeance, assuming
that it could ever have been practised at the time, which was inconceivable. Unfortunately for the West, some of
the more remote small farmers forced out of their traditional forms of food production have recourse to the
production of crops for the remunerative Western drug trade. This aspect received publicity lately but as far
back as 1983 a US Senate Select Committee in Narcotics Abuse and Control visited Peru and Bolivia where 95
per cent of the world’s cocaine originates and found that most of the coca-growing campesinos had previously
been using their land for food crops.
In addition to what I have said about the more obvious quantifiable effects of permanent ODA and food aid
in the strategy of Western imperialism, food aid also helps to develop the long-term disaster of corruption, the
begging instinct and social paralysis. For, food production and use is much more than a matter of putting food in
people’s mouths. It is the priming of the pump in the whole psycho-socioeconomic process of human
development, enabling people to become rooted in their land and local community, develop family life and
skills and regional infrastructures while advancing to the next phase of expanding urbanisation, the development
30
of by-products, processing, light industry, heavy industry and exports of finished products. In rural China it
was possible to feel the sense of positive excitement after the successful launching of the native food production
campaign. Imperialism operates in the opposite way, stifling initiative, drawing off primary products and raw
materials for the benefit of the metropolitan country, and sending back food to the subdued people. It reverses
the natural current of provisions from country to town, distributing them via the ports and the cities, even to the
rural peoples starving on land that once produced their needs. Power, corruption and the rake-off is thus
concentrated in dangerous urban bands in league with the international networks.
All this is combined with the publicity campaigns organised by the multinationals. These campaigns have
broken down traditional tastes and patterns of living once based on nutritious local production. The corporations
are often more powerful, especially when working hand-in-hand with one another in non-competing business
through local agents and embassies, than the total national economy of the host country. Back home, these
giants, operating within the big business and arms production Freemasonry, constitute the powerful political
lobby sometimes referred to in the US as the Third House of Congress. Many multinational giants controlling
Third World mining, fishing and agricultural production and trade are mysteries and nobody knows their
turnover or the details of their operations under a great variety of names. Some conglomerates may have
turnovers running to hundreds of billions of dollars. Such figures compare, for example, with GNP (in 1985) of
$0.69 billion for the Central African Republic, $0.06 for Equatorial Guinea, $0.48 for Ethiopia, $0.23 for
Senegal, $0.12 for Burkina Faso, $0.14 for Niger, $0.2 for The Gambia, $0.15 for GuineaBissau, to take a few
examples from among the 50 poorest countries. Even a large country like Zaire, with immense natural wealth
controlled by foreign predators, has a GNP of only $5 billion. Profits repatriated by the multinationals are in
some cases up to 10 times higher than their investments in the exploited country.
Notwithstanding the advantages which the West believes it is enjoying through its exploitation of the Third
World, there is another dark side to the coin. First of all, the impoverishment of the enormous Third World
population is depriving the West of a long-term, more buoyant market than the short-term returns it obtains from
present exploitative practices. Secondly the massive arms sales used to put down the resultant guerilla warfare
among the deprived peoples is not only a further millstone around those countries~ necks but simultaneously
encourages the continuous expansion of Western military budgets. It is therefore not surprising that the leading
country of the West, the United States, is itself being burdened with debt. Combined private, corporate,
municipal, state and Federal debt amounted to some $8 trillion at the end of 1988, with Federal debt alone
standing at approximately $2 ½ trillion. The authors of this debt naturally dismiss it as harmless—see for
example The Wall Street Journal of 14 December, 1988 — no doubt because the profiteering political right, the
high financiers and the arms manufacturers are fearful of either a rise in taxation or a fall in arms production.
More objective commentators, however, are alarmed. Robert D Hormats in The International Challenge,
Foreign Policy No. 71, 1988 argues that the next generation would inherit a defective education system, roads
and bridges in a state of decay and a sinister urban environment. Paul Copperman, an educational expert quoted
by the National Education Commission, stated that for the first time in the history of the Unites States, the next
generation’s knowledge would be inferior to the present’s.
National debts mean that Western banks and their rich customers hold billions of guaranteed treasury notes
earning high interest ultimately paid for by the less rich. Debt and the socio-economic decline, coupled with
growing military ambition, are bad auguries for the world at large. Politicians in trouble at home may be
tempted to restore their popularity by launching an adventure abroad, as the British prime minister did on
sending a great armada sailing half way round the world to attack the little Falklands (Malvinas). It is one of the
lessons of history that economic depression tends to result in recourse to the rule of the survival of ‘the fittest’.
During the boom years of the 50s and 60s there was some little effort towards a spark of wisdom by the rich visà-vis the poor. This sentiment is now in decline. Apart from the danger of foreign adventure to detract attention
from a deteriorating economy, to mobilise public opinion behind the Establishment and to gain the bonus of
belt-tightening among the people, there is also the possibility of a financial crash. This would not make the
hungry and oppressed people any more hungry or oppressed but neither would it reduce the mounting toll of
famine victims in the Third World. Marx saw capitalism’s crisis foreshadowed by debt burdens, bankruptcies
and mounting unemployment.
Matters are worsened for the poor countries by the voting power in the international financial institutions.
Membership in the IMF and the World Bank has increased beyond the figures I have to hand but the weighting
remains essentially the same. For the period covered by my figures, of 123 member countries in the
International Monetary Fund, the 23 richest held 66 per cent of the voting power; of 128 members in the World
Bank, 22 countries had 66.2 per cent; and of 116 in the International Development Association, 21 held 65.1 per
cent. Financial power can thus be directed to aid pet projects belonging to the multinationals, to bolster the
West’s puppet regimes or to asphyxiate those which step out of line, as in the case of Allende’s Chile, from
31
which all financial help was cut off in 1973 and restored in unprecedented quantity after the United States
organised Allende’s downfall. Shortly before the upheaval that turned East Pakistan into Bangladesh, I
participated in a World Bank mission to West Pakistan and subsequently submitted a report in Washington
proposing the establishment in West Pakistan, through a World Bank loan, of a modern agricultural research and
training centre to provide induction and inservice training for agricultural extension staffs, together with a
countrywide network of farmer training and demonstration centres. I am not arguing whether my proposals were
good, bad or indifferent: that is hardly for me to judge.
The point of telling this little anecdote is merely to say that when the Bank’s official proposals emerged at a
Bank meeting in Washington, the project I had submitted had been transferred lock, stock and barrel without
changing a comma all the way across the Indian continent to East Pakistan where conditions are radically
different and where I would never have made such proposals. But why the transfer? The only explanation I
could get was that the project was large, impressive and original (though I could not see anything very original
in it) and might help a little to bead off the revolutionary situation then threatening in East Pakistan. A more
plausible explanation might be that the project was dangerous in being designed to trigger a long-term increase
in native food production and native-based skills on the fertile plains of West Pakistan, through native research
and research-based training. A good way to kill the project would be to transfer it at least on paper to the rice
paddies and swamps of East Pakistan where it could not possibly succeed. I had a somewhat similar experience
on a Bank mission to Morocco where political considerations also had to take precedence over technical ones.
The answer to my protests was that I was never again invited to participate in a World Bank mission. ~I am sure
the loss of my modest person to the Bank was of even less consequence to it than its loss was to me.)
There is a certain blind logic in the fact that the West, based on the Anglo-American-EC-NATO alliance, has
escalated the neo-liberal spree in favour of big business, high finance and the arms manufacturers, which goes
parallel with the desire to cut back support for multilateral action. I shall discuss the case of UNESCO in
another letter and for the present merely mention that governments and politicians are under strong pressure
from big business to reduce what little genuine pro-Third World action is conducted by the international
development banks when it carries the risk of increasing competition for Western products from the exports
which the Third World desperately needs to sell in order to meet its debt-servicing commitments. As I write,
there is a bill before the US congress which, if it passes will oblige the United States to vote against any
international loan for modernising copper production in poor countries like Peru, the Philippines, Zaire and
Zambia, where copper is a vital national product because this would sharpen competition for US copper on the
world market. Once more, this is not to point a selfrighteous finger at the US: all of us in the West as well as the
wealthier class in the Third World are accessories in the act, if only through our silence, our hedonism and our
fear. A step in the direction of reform would be for us to admit the fact instead of pursuing our selfrighteous
hypocrisy. Then we could all see together what could be done, beginning with a reduction in the scandal of the
million-dollar-a-minute arms industry and use of tbe savings for life instead of death.
It was part of the genius of President Reagan, ‘the great communicator’, to be able to convince the people that
white was black, and black, white. Thus, most were convinced that they had one of the greatest free-traders ever
in the White House. In point of fact, the Reagan administration was selectively protectionist, demanding free
trade for grains, beef, poultry and other products in which the US is competitive and resisting certain other
imports. In 1987, 24 per cent of American imports were subject to a broad range of restrictions against 12 per
cent when Mr Reagan began his term of office in 1980 (see Data in Business Week, 6 February, 1989). Under
the Reagan administration the rate of expansion of world trade slowed to one-half of what it was in the 70s and
one-quarter of what it was in the 60s. There is, of course, facility of entry for Third World products essential for
the West, which it cannot produce itself in sufficient quantity, as for example certain products required by the
arms manufacturers such as chromium, nickel, molybdenum, magnesium, manganese and tungsten. In these
cases the military machine would be paralysed without Third World supplies. The extremely rich Third World,
where the inhabitants are impoverished by Western exploitation, produces often at throwaway prices — in
addition to the tropical farm and forestry products already mentioned —almost the whole of the world’s
manganese and antimony, most of the cobalt, chromium, tin and bauxite, and, for our luxury jewellery industry,
over 70 per cent of our precious diamonds.
In addition to the Food for Peace programme which, as indicated above, is used everywhere, as has been
frankly admitted in some official reports, to further US investment strategy, in 1985 the US introduced a further
bilateral programme for Africa known as the Economic Policy Initiative (meaning ‘economic policy reform’)
for countries which further open up their national economies to international capitalist enterprise (in which,
naturally, who the winner will be is a foregone conclusion). Such activities are naturally supported by the
Establishment media in tendentious reviews of the world economy. Let me give just one example, that of the
(London) Economist of 23—29 September, 1989, which, of course, pulled out the old chestnut of what it gaily
32
referred to as ‘the Four Dragons’, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea, as typical examples for the
Third World. It is hardly necessary to insult your intelligence by discussing the Hong Kong and Singapore
enclaves as typical of the Third World. I have mentioned Taiwan already and South Korea belongs in a similar
category, where slave labour and bonded labour are among the instruments used to propel the economy into the
world rat race largely for the benefit of the local plutocracy and the multinational banks (liberally promoted in
the supplement with expensive full page advertisements bringing The Economist a huge windfall for which a
piece of tendentious writing is a small price to pay).
The US administration, supported in all but an occasional face-saving tactic by the other Western powers, also
casts negative votes on proposals that might displace private capital: in the first 4 years of the 80s, 50 proposed
loans were thus opposed at the World Bank and the smaller multilateral agencies. Conversely, loans for
repressive right-wing regimes meet approval. Thus, notwithstanding the state of siege in General Pinochet’s
Chile and what Western observers euphemistically qualified as a ‘deterioration’ of human rights conditions,
there was no Western opposition to loans by the Inter-American Development Bank for building roads which
are necessary for the transport of products by multinationals to the ports (and which, experience shows, can also
be useful in emergencies for the rapid deployment of troops). Up to 1986 a large part of the aid to Africa was
granted to the white regime in South Africa and to Zaire for the extraction and transport (road and rail
construction) of uranium and other raw materials of strategic importance to the West.
The French Centre for External Trade, in a report on the introduction of soya to Brazil, shows that in the 70s
the World Bank paid half the cost to Brazil for the building of roads from the plantations and from Cargill’s
soya plants to the ports. But in March 1985, the US secretary of state intervened with the Inter-American
Development Bank to block a vote on a $38 million loan that was supported by all 25 Latin American members
of the Bank, to aid small and medium sized farms to produce basic food needs for the poor in a small country
with a government elected in free elections observed by an international commission, namely, Nicaragua. That
country was also granted a verdict in its favour, in relation to the US Contra war, by the 15-man panel of
distinguished judges in the prestigious International Court of Justice in The Hague, a verdict that the United
States unilaterally refused to accept, thus rejecting the rule of law which the West proudly proclaims whenever
it suits. The media quickly dampened down news on this flagrant flaunting of the law by ‘the world’s law
keeper’ and the people soon forgot about the issue as the headlines were switched to less embarrassing matters.
This is a continuation of five centuries of might being right constantly followed in the West behind a
hypocritical façade.
Third World development has to be postponed to protect creditworthiness and maintain the debt servicing which
results in a large outflow from the poor countries to the rich. In addition, the US budget deficit and high interest
rates have been draining flight capital from the plutocratic minorities in the Third World for investment in the
West. Since the beginning of 1989, the Western trio of high finance, big business and arms production has
grown alarmed, following upheavals in Venezuela and elsewhere, that they could be facing either collapse or
explosion and may not be able to extract their last pound of flesh from the shipwreck. Even the managing
director of such a conservative Western organ as the IMF, Mr Michel Camdessus, said in an interview with
Time magazine (31 July, 1989) that ‘the debt time bomb would one day or another blow up’. Hence, proposals
have been following one another as to how to defuse the explosive situation. One of these has been the Brady
Plan, called after President Bush’s treasury secretary, in reference to which Mr Bush declared on 27 September,
1989: ‘We encourage these steps, not as self-sacrifice, but self-interest. True success not only will help the
debtor nations, but it will also strengthen the banks by putting their own portfolios on a sounder basis’. The
question arises at this stage, however, as to whether it is not too late to regain the confidence of the peoples of
the Third World, who are no longer seeking cosmetic arrangements whereby the West might be able to continue
exploiting their minerals, their land and their climate: to the popular leaders nothing less than a change of heart
would suffice, a change of heart that puts people first, ends exploitation and restores the ownership of the Third
World to the people of the Third World.
Whatever emerges in the way of brinkmanship relief, forced on the Western powers by the accumulating
dangers, it can only be hoped that it may be a little more realistic than the Baker Plan proposed by the US
secretary of state when he was secretary of the treasury, the same Mr Baker who personally owned ‘millions in
bank stock while serving as secretary of the treasury, where his actions on Latin debt had powerful
consequences for his bank’ (New York Times, 2 March, 1989). The true value of Mr Baker’s offer of $9.7 billion
new credits for 15 Latin American debtors may be gauged when it is remembered that the sum was less than a
quarter of the annual interest required of them. There is also the disturbing fact that taxpayers, through their
contributions to governments, to the IMF and the World Bank, may be in the process of being softened up to
bail out big banks troubled over their loans.
33
The announcement in July 1989 of a reduction in Mexico’s debt could be helpful if followed through with
the rest of the Third World, but even that would have little or no effect on the socio-economic, political and
military exploitation, which constitute the real bloodletting from which the poor countries are suffering. In
addition, the banks could recoup written-off debt over time by the simple process of arranging an increase of
interest rates in co-operation with the Federal Reserve, the IMF, the World Bank and the Western governments.
The former treasurer of the World Bank, Mr E Rotberg, told a meeting of the Bank Administration Institute in
Washington that banks should stop operating on the assumption that the principal can ever be paid. This means
that interest payments would go on forever. Debt servicing amounts to over $170 billion per annum. After
deducting new credits, the net outflow constitutes, even to the US Council on Foreign Relations, ‘a massive
perverse redistribution of income’ from the poor to the rich. New loans to service the old add further to the longterm problem. In addition, the repatriation of profits by the multinationals plus flight capital raise the annual
outflow to approximately $300 billion, profits to Western corporations being normally very high from Third
World operations through the use of slave labour, tax arrangements, manipulation of export-import prices and
other devices already mentioned. Furthermore, there has been a serious decline in Third World goods export
prices, which produced a fall in annual receipts between 1981 and 1985 from $104 billion to $87 billion (data
from UNCTAD), so that debt servicing amounted to 132 per cent of raw materials and commodity exports in
1985, the 32 per cent being made up of manufactures, service returns and, of course, new debts. The lending
banks themselves make some 60 per cent of their profits from abroad, particularly the Third World.
We are constantly being reminded by the profiteering Establishment that we are living in a democratic system
where the people are in charge. When and where were the people consulted over the monstrous exploitation of
the poor? And when and where did the people ask to be consulted? That is the great question.
According to the Stockholm-based International Institute of Peace Research, some $300 billion of the Third
World debt has been spent to date for arms purchases, and the amount is increasing. The IMF, which puts itself
forward as watchdog over economic orthodoxy and Third World government spendiiig, makes an exception in
the case of government spending on arms and turns a blind eye. The link between high finance, big business and
the arms manufacturers is not as tenuous as we are sometimes led to think. In addition to indirect government
action in promoting arms sales to the poor countries, western governments also play a direct role. It was one of
Mrs Thatcher’s proud boasts that part of her ‘batting for Britain’ programme was her success in raising the
country to second place in the arms sales league. Cabinet leaks by disappointed ministers and secretarial
attendants sometimes provide the public with a peep behind the closed doors. As reported by the London
Observer, when Mr George Younger, Britain’s defence secretary, referring to Britain’s biggest-ever sale of
Tornado Bombers, said at a Cabinet Defence Committee Meeting in 1989, ‘You know, Prime Minister, the
planes we sold to Saudi Arabia ...‘ he was interrupted by Mrs Thatcher who said, reportedly without a trace of a
smile, ‘The planes I sold to Saudi Arabia, George’.
An overseas aid minister, Mr Timothy Raison, after he was sacked wrote a remarkable open letter to his
successor in which he said that the aid budget was seen ‘as simply a big pot to be used for buying businesses or
impressing foreign rulers’. News erupted in May 1989 that a £1,000 million arms sale of September 1988 bad
been forced on Malaysia not only by making an aid package conditional on the arms deal but also by large-scale
corruption involving the payment of vast sums of money to Malaysian Prime Minister Mahatir Mohammad’s
pOlitical party UMNO and to agents and ruling families.
[See also, Arms Transfer to the Third World, by Michael Bazoska and Thomas Olson, research workers in the
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute5.] Even this is not the end of the story. In addition to importing
arms, the impoverished Third World is being forced into the production of arms for exchange currency to pay
for its arms imports. India is a case in point, now headed towards becoming one of the world’s super arms
producers with factories being set up by the arms multinationals 6•
The IMF no more than the World Bank and the other multilateral agencies is not some ‘deus ex machina’ to
be used as a scapegoat as they sometimes are. They are creations of the Western powers and act at its dictates.
Their policies are essentially the same as those of the governments and their financial and business lobbies.
Thus, with regard to the promotion of liberal economics, restrictive social policies and budgetary restraint, the
EC and the European governments, like the other Western powers, follow the same policy as their multinational
organs and, like them, are ‘liberal-minded’ with regard to Third World arms purchases. The impoverished
countries of Subsaharan Africa, for example, linked to the EC and the European countries through the Lome
Convention and bilateral treaties, have been spending an average of $1 ½ billion per annum on arms purchases
since 1975 without the EC Commission or a European government lifting an eyebrow. Neither do they seem
34
concerned when, as reported by UNICEF in its 1989 report on the situation of children in the world, the 40
poorest countries have had to reduce their educational expenditures by 25 per cent per child on average. While
we are speaking of Europe and the Lome Convention, it should be added that the 70 of the world’s poorest
countries linked to Europe transferred $147 billion to the West through adverse terms of trade between 1980 and
1987.
In addition to the arms purchases, another large part of the loans has been devoted to the building of turn-key
factories by Western concerns, which means that such loans largely end up in the bank accounts of Western big
business while the poor countries are left with the bill. Some such industries, as, for example in Brazilian and
Egyptian arms production and a variety of other forms of modern industrialisation, are of particular benefit to a
rich coterie in countries where the people are starving. Many factories chosen under advice from World Bank
and expatriate experts, built by Western agencies and paid for by the borrowing country are white elephants
which are now rusted hulks lying idle, having profited nobody but the Western suppliers, one of the moneymaking techniques used by the multinationals being to sell production licences involving products or technology
about to become outmoded.
One of the arguments sometimes heard in agribusiness circles to encourage the sale of machinery, equipment
and chemicals is that enormous estates using modern methods produce more, more efficiently. A great many
cases have been examined in the literature to show that this argument does not resist analysis. There is space to
mention merely one by way of example: In Columbia the 65 per cent of the arable land belonging to the richest
3.5 per cent of the landowners gives only one-fourteenth of the return per hectare of that of the small farms. In
addition, since most of the production from these large Third World estates is for export to pay for imports and
interest on the foreign debt, the hungry peoples of those countries are left as idle observers of the endless trail of
trucks and ships carrying away the product of the land which they desperately need to grow their own food and
start priming the native socio-economic mechanism to enable them to rise off their knees.
Peruvian production of anchovy could provide enough vital protein for all the peoples of Latin America but
it is exported to North America and the West as feed for livestock including our millions of cats and dogs.
The introduction of soya to Brazil for export made not only the staple food crop, beans, but also maize for
local livestock, scarce and dear and the price of meat, milk and eggs skyrocketed. The fact is that the Third
World, with its immense natural wealth, has been put in pawn to the West, and put in pawn forever, barring a
violent revolutionary upheaval and repudiation of a debt which has been already far more than paid back if you
add up the interest payments, the terms of trade and exchange, the incentives for Western implantation and the
expatriation of profits (without even going back to the original expropriation and exploitation).
The extension of modern latifundia farming throughout the Third World is a windfall for agribusiness but a
disaster for the peoples of the poor countries. Not least of the disasters is the developing soil erosion,
reminiscent of the famous ‘dust bowl’ in the United States, due to the exploitation of the land to the hilt without
concern for long-term fertility. The owners are often absentee landlords living in far-away cities, with no roots
in the land they possess nor among the labourers they exploit. In some areas enormous estates either used for
ranching or lying fallow also constitute a standing reminder to the hungry that land is not scarce. As the peasants
in Peru and elsewhere are driven home from town to the hills in rickety cattle lorries, they have hours to
contemplate the endless, empty tracts of rich land lying unused.
As in farming, so in industry. The ILO has shown, for example, that the production of modern synthetic
sandals in West Africa employed 40 workers where once there were 5,000 (including those for tanning and
preparation of materials). The synthetic material comes from big business where the leather used to come from
the small farmers. Again, according to the ILO, weaving in the Philippines’ with modern machinery benefitting
the plutocracy required 18 times more capital investment per yard of cloth and employed only one-quarter the
number of workers compared with the traditional techniques that share out the benefits. And the capital saved by
using the former methods would permit the creation of 100,000 new jobs, again distributing the benefits locally
rather than concentrating them in the hands of international businessmen and financiers. This situation has been
summarised by René Dumont in the phrase: ‘So much productive work available and so many without work’.
As I shall show later, I am not one of those who deplore ‘unemployment’ as the tragedy of our times —the
tragedy is not in the ‘unemployment’ as such but in the fact that the Powers That Govern us have no vision for
the productive, creative and exciting activity we could have for the unemployed. But more of that anon.
‘Unemployment’, in the accepted sense is, however, one thing in the West but premature unemployment in the
impoverished Third World is another.
When Africa was able to feed itself – admittedly with a much smaller population, but that does not deprive the
argument of its validity, for native development could have been promoted progressively on existing
35
foundations — it did so not on wheat and other imported products, but on sorghum, yams, cassava, plantainbananas, fish and a score of nutritious herbs and fruits. The West brought an upheaval, forcing a disastrous
change of tastes and production patterns tailored to the needs of Western industry and Western agribusiness. As
Mr Edem Kodjo, former secretary general of the OAU put it: ‘We produce what we do not eat and eat what we
do not produce’. In the Sahel, the switch to cash crops such as cotton helped to institutionalise famine, the desert
moved relentlessly southwards, the hungry flocked to the urban centres and food aid made beggars of a people
who were once stubborn and resistant. The last-mentioned factor is the gravest of all — the destruction of native
genius and self-confidence, the reduction of several billion Third World people to mental slavery, prevented
from entertaining any hope, in a world of fatalism governed by the white man. This is symbolically reflected in
the glossy ‘native’ magazines and airline journals distributed to air passengers by ‘native’ airlines, advertising
every luxury Western product from expensive Western cigars and tobaccos to French perfumes, 12-year-old
Scotch whiskies, men’s deodorants and — tragic irony — costly delicatessen foods, all available in the
supermarket department stores of Third World capitals; available, that is, for the expatriate residents and their
local counterparts.
This outcome of the social Darwinism engineered by the West since its inauguration in Post-Reformation
England, as we shall see, is justified by the profiteering Establishment with the hypocritical argument that it
encourages initiative in the struggle for survival. Everybody knows that misguided charity can promote idleness,
but, particularly since Lord Keynes, and encouraged by the danger of a Marxist backlash, the Western
Establishment has led the way with ‘charitable’ handouts, which include ODA to the Third World. As for the
argument that free-for-all socio-economic liberalism encourages initiative, this might apply if everybody in the
rat-race began from the scratch line with equal handicaps. But mental, moral, psychological and physical
poverty are now endemic among the masses from one generation to another and even the genetically-gifted
child is born with a millstone round his neck. Professor Howard Robboy of the Department of Sociology in
Trenton State College, in a letter to the press of 4 February 1987 said that there is a strong relationship between
a person’s position in the class structure and even his mental health. People born into oppressive surroundings
have little hope of ever rising out of them, especially, it should be added, when the Masonic dice are loaded
against their eventual advancement beyond a certain point, where the implied motto is, ‘Thus far shalt thou go
and no further’ unless you are prepared to sell your soul to the secret conspiracy.
Behind the façade of ‘democracy’ (which you will be examining in your Chapter IV) The System is not only
built primarily to benefit the Establishment in its essence but it is also basically flawed from an economic point
of view, as described, for example, by Ted Trainer in Developed to Death (Merlin Press, London, 1989).
Trainer shows that capitalist imperialism, operating according to disastrous market forces, cannot but help
the rich to get richer and leave the poor behind in the rat race. Not only does it exploit Third World land, labour,
forests, mines and fisheries for the primary benefit of the richer sections of society, but it also develops
industries designed by itself for itself which are mostly unsuited to the Third World. It confuses people
promotion with capitalist development and GNP expansion with growth in human welfare. The flawed principle
that ‘what is good for General Motors is good for America’ is now applied generally. Capital formation and
investment are wrongly considered to be the ‘open sesame’ to success. The sacrosanct idea of trade expansion
benefits the rich and impoverishes the poor. The System operates according to the notion that bigger is better,
that small is not beautiful and that balance of trade is vital even when it is maintained through the export of
arms, luxury goods for the elite and ever more and bigger cars. The hackneyed jargon about comparative
advantage is also used to favour the rich, encouraging Third World countries to devote their resources not to the
welfare of their own poor but to production for export to pay for luxury imports.
As Trainer says,
'forces at work in our economy are rapidly driving us into one highly integrated global economy, in which
the fate of all regions, towns and households will depend upon what suits the few gigantic players at the
centre of the system. Even now the antics of financiers and transnational corporations in their boardrooms in
Tokyo or New York can determine whether you can afford a home or whether the factory in your town
closes down.'
The conventional development model forcibly requires repression to maintain itself and as Chomsky, quoted by
Trainer, put it (Turning The Tide, Pluto Press, London, 1986):
'the tinier and weaker the country, the less endowed it is with resources, the more dangerous it is. If even a
marginal and impoverished country can begin to utilize its own limited human and material resources and
36
can undertake programs of development geared to the needs of the domestic population, then others may ask,
why not us?'
It is also easier for the small, poor country to be economically isolated or militarily crushed.
There are men of good will working in non-governmental, humanitarian organisations and elsewhere, who
are struggling on bravely with the effort to create a world where justice at last, might reign. There are some such
people to be found even in the intergovernmental organisations which are very largely under the control of the
West and its satellites in the Third World oligarchies, with most middle and senior level staff being political
appointees nominated by member governments and occupying posts often reserved as a reward for national civil
servants. The dedicated few are fighting a losing battle against overwhelming odds.
Two world wars, the Great Depression and the efforts since 1945 to varnish the West’s world conquest as an
antiSoviet crusade have helped to hide the strategy developed since Monroe and perfected under Theodore
Roosevelt and the Progressives, who refined the concept of American power:
to be based not on the old idea of a formal colonial empire but on a more subtle and insidious plan for economic
dominion supported by discreet military power. Theodore Roosevelt summed up the programme in his famous
phrase, ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick’, the big stick being the power of American arms, even before there
was a Soviet scapegoat to excuse it. Henceforth, all the way down to the disclosures concerning the activities of
the National Security Council under Vice-Admiral John M Poindexter and Colonel Oliver North, military power
would be an instrument of diplomacy, both combined in support of economic conquest. Mr Reagan was merely
continuing a long-established programme when, on becoming President, he proclaimed his determination ‘to
project American power around the world’.
French academician J Guitton has said that when the history of this 20th century comes to be written, with its
monstrous wars and its escalating violence and exploitation, one of the things that will be noted is our
unconsciousness of the immensity of the tragedy. At a time when such a large part of humanity is condemned to
live in the midst of hunger, disease and squalor and the threat of pollution and destruction hangs over the human
race, it is strange, says Guitton, that we are so anxious to increase consumption, comfort and luxury living, that
our television shows so much fun and feasting and that everything seems designed to turn our eyes away from
reality as the 20th century expires ingloriously.
History never repeats itself in the details but there are continuous similarities in the broad sweeps and principles.
The rape of the earth we are now witnessing is not different in essence from the razzia of the barbarians who at
the fall of the Roman Empire applied a strict moral code in their own society but believed that once they crossed
the Rhine or the Danube everything was permissible: plunder, rape and the use of whatever they could find,
however they could find it, by killing, destruction or expropriation. Professor Wilfred Cantwell Smith in the
work referred to above has said: ‘It is quite possible, and to outsiders obvious, that North America, despite its
technological prowess, material affluence, and tolerably adequate political structure, may lead itself and the
world to inconceivable disaster because of intellectual shallowness, moral obtuseness, or an inadequate vitality
of its ideals’. To complete the picture we should now add to his ‘North America’, the EC and the entire West.
For it would be unfair to give any impression, which I fear I may be unintentionally creating here, that the US is
alone the Big Bad Wolf. The whole Western Establishment has become increasingly similar. On this side of the
Atlantic, one of the independent intellectuals still speaking out, Michel Henry, in his latest book, La Barbarie,
denounces the destruction of everything that is most human by our modern barbarism, the daily plunder of the
earth, and the enslavement of science and technology to the military and industrial machine which sweeps
everything in its path in co-operation with high finance, declaring itself the promoter of ‘progress’ and
proliferating as a pestilence in an autonomous and unlimited ‘fuite en avant’ without hope or vision. Michel
Henry’s thesis is much more than a cry of alarm and horror; it is a cold, rational analysis.
In his preface to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, C A Robinson described Rome as a remarkable thing which
piled success upon success and then having conquered the world ‘enmeshed itself and civilisation in
catastrophe’. Is history here about to repeat itself?
Before examining that question further, we must now go back to the origin of this thing that may be plunging
the world into its greatest-ever crisis.
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3 -
RELIGION AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM
I am glad you finally obtained your tutor’s agreement for the inclusion of a chapter examining the origins of the
phenomenon whose world-wide manifestations you have been considering in the previous chapter, the
phenomenon which Oxford historian Hilaire Belloc — no wild revolutionary or ‘lefty’ but a distinguished
academic, writer and christian —referred to as ‘the vile cancer of capitalism’, with its exploited poor, one of the
greatest inventions ever for the minority of people born with the necessary privileges of family, health,
upbringing, nutrition, physical and mental energy, contact and luck. In our present era of the mass mind
manipulated by the ephemeral media, historical analysis is essential to dispel the thickening smoke-screen.
Keeping skeletons hidden in cupboards is an unhealthy business. They must be ruthlessly flushed out. Fearless
burrowing into origins is necessary to tear out problems by the roots instead of having them smothered over
with rhetoric which leads to festering in the body politic. The process rather frightens the Establishment, which
would prefer people to believe it has reigned since time immemorial over the ignorant masses by some sort of
divine right granted to good breeding and thus help to perpetuate its dominance into the future. The man of
inherited property, position and wealth, in the words of James Connolly, ‘dreads nothing so much as an
impartial and rigid inquiry into the validity of his title deeds’.
Instead, however, of your title, ‘The Origin of Modern Capitalism’, you might wish to adopt ‘Religion and the
Rise of Capitalism’ (John Murray, Publisher) the name of the classic work on the subject by R H Tawney, who
was professor of economic history in the University of London, a renowned authority and honorary doctor of
several leading universities in Britain and the United States.
In his examination of the growth of modern capitalism, Professor Tawney includes a discussion of the
Roman catholic church’s traditional attitude to capitalism. Between the pre- and the post-Reformation position I
think I can adhere to a fairly objective view since, as you know, I am neither a protestant nor a catholic and
consider even the words themselves to be tribalistic, sectarian and reeking with undercurrents of pernicious
partiality, sometimes smoothed over with fine phrases. We must all know by now that none of us has a
monopoly of error. In later letters I shall have much to say against the pretensions of the Roman catholic church;
here I shall merely follow Professor Tawney’s authoritative work.
Nobody would want to pretend that either the preReformation church or the post-Reformation churches were
organisations of disembodied angels. They were men of flesh and blood like us all. In the Roman catholic
church, particularly from the 14th century onwards, the personal lives of many popes and ecclesiastics were
poles apart from their own teaching. Many were money-loving, power-hungry and corrupt. Cardinal Wolsey, for
example, used his great secular and ecclesiastical power to amass enormous wealth (and to produce at least one
illegitimate child into the bargain). In Wolsey’s favour it must be said that his downfall was largely due not to
any matter of morality but to the nobles’ hatred of the rise to power of a lowborn man of the people, a mere son
of a butcher. But the great men, the servants of the poor and the men of principle far outnumbered the weak. Of
such were ecclesiastics of the stamp of St Thomas More, or Sir Thomas More, if you prefer, a man who, in the
words of the noncatholic Robert Bolt, whose play about him produced the Best Film of its year, could not be
accused of any incapacity for life, who indeed seized life with both hands and nevertheless found something in
himself without which life would be valueless. When commanded to retreat from that he went to the scaffold,
dying as he had lived, a ‘supple, humorous, unassuming and sophisticated person ... who could no more be
budged than a cliff’.
As Tawney says, church teaching stood out as a beacon of social justice even in the midst of its breach. The
times were never wanting in Savonarolas and St Bernards denouncing churchmen who fell short of the ideal,
long before Martin Luther issued his supreme challenge. Church doctrine, based on the idea that the earth
belonged to God, traced back to such men as:
St Clement, the first Roman pontiff — ‘The use of all things that are found in this world ought to be common
to all men. Only the most manifest iniquity makes one say to the other, “This belongs to me, that to you”,
hence the origin of contention among men’;
St Ambrose — ‘Nature furnishes its wealth to all men in common. God beneficently has created all things
that their enjoyment be common to all living beings, and that the earth become the common possession of all.
It is nature itself that has given birth to the right of the community whilst it is only unjust usurpation that has
created the right of private property’;
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St Gregory the Great — ‘The earth of which they are born is common to all, and therefore the fruit that the
earth brings forth belongs without distinction to all.’
I have quoted these from the writings of James Connolly, the first christian communist martyr, denounced by
church and state as a terrorist in 1916.
Even Engels (in his Anti-Duhring), Jewish atheist though he was, emphasized the parallel between the proposed
communism and the way of life of the early christians. The church had kept a tight rein on every excessive
manifestation of capitalism for 15 centuries, emphasizing the inalienable right of an occupier not to be evicted
by a proprietor, discouraging the ancient practice of despoilment, making even an informal occupation
agreement or ‘pacta nuda’ fully binding, and rigorously forbidding the charging of interest on loans. The
‘pactum subjectionis’ made the monarch’s power relative and could justify regicide in case of excess (to be
compared with Hobbes’ preaching the supreme and absolute power of the sovereign at the time of Cromwell).
An essential part of church activity was the provision of services for the poor. Monastic compounds had an
‘inflrmitorium’ open to the public, a pharmacy and frequently a garden of medicinal plants. The alms house was
a further part of the monastic establishment. Karl Marx praised the old monastic communities as places where
there was virtually no such thing as private property and where working monks, lay brothers, tenants and
labourers formed a community, in Marx’s words, ‘carrying on their work with the means of production in
common, in which the labour-power of all the different individuals is consciously applied as the combined
labour-power of the community’.
Tawney points out that the institution of property, the transactions of the market place, the whole fabric of
society and the whole range of its activities stood by no absolute title but had to justify themselves at the bar of
religion and that ‘Christianity has no more deadly foe than the “appetitus divitiarum inflnitus”, the unbridled
indulgence of the acquisitive appetite’. Contrarywise, the doctrine that penetrated Christianity via Puritan
England is symbolised in the delightful heading on one of Tawney’s chapters from an old Tyndale translation of
the bible: ‘And the Lorde was with Joseph, and he was a luckie felowe’.
The critical transition period from the old church dispensation to the new doctrine took place in England in the
two centuries following the Reformation. ‘In the triple reconstruction, political, ecclesiastical, and economic,
through which England passed between the Armada and the Revolution, every ingredient in the cauldron
worked a subtle change in every other’, until, step by step, the English scene was so transformed that by the
early 19th century a British statesman was able to declare: ‘Things have come to a pretty pass if religion is
going to interfere with private life’. This separation, this new form of the ancient Manicheism persistently
condemned for a thousand years, had its roots in Luther’s disastrous doctrine of the two kingdoms that he
devised from Christ’s words, ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are
God’s’, which in reality according to the whole spirit of the Gospel mean that one must never render to the
world of money and power and corruption, the cult due to God alone. Luther handed power to the Prince and
Hobbes spelled it out in the gory detail that has inspired all dictators ever since and is perhaps not far removed
from the hidden hopes implied in the pomp and power of our ‘democratic’ prime ministers and executive
presidents. Christ stood that world on its head. Situating Caesar in the context of tax gathering, in effect
reducing the Deity of the world, the Supreme Pontiff, to the role of a mere tax collector, the lowest of
professions, He desacralises all power, pomp and money. By reaching up to dethrone the highest, He
simultaneously dethrones all petty imitations. Similarly, by reaching down to lift the lowliest, He exhalts the
power that came ‘to serve and not to be served’. He invented democracy. But He did not invent the ersatz
variety imposed on the people by the modern Establishment. And, ‘the poor you have always with you’ remains
a standing challenge and a call to action, not the trivialisation of poverty and the mockery of the poor that
certain well-heeled commentators would like to make it.
But, says Tawney, the (Lutheran) ‘treaty of partition has lapsed and the boundaries are once more in motion.
The age of which Froude, no romantic admirer of ecclesiastical pretentions, could write ... that the spokesmen of
religion “leave the present world to men of business and the devil”, shows some signs of drawing to a close ...
and “an attempt is being made to restate the practical implications of the social ethics of the Christian faith”, for
“issues which were thought to have been buried by the discretion of centuries have shown in our own day that
they were not dead, but sleeping”.’
Does this indicate a partial, though hesitant, return to preLutheran thought, to the time when ‘not only political
but social theory is saturated with doctrines drawn from the sphere of ethics and religion, and economic
phenomena are expressed in terms of personal conduct, as naturally and inevitably as the 19th century expressed
them in terms of mechanism?’ The turning point away from 1500 years of teaching was the 16th and 17th
centuries, when the ‘theory of a hierarchy of values, embracing all human interests and activities in a system of
which the apex is religion, is replaced by the conception of separate and parallel compartments’; ‘... the distance
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traversed in the two centuries between 1500 and 1700 is ... immense’. Previously ‘the typical popular teaching is
that of ... manuals such as “Dives et Pauper”; the typical appeal in different cases of conscience is to the Bible,
the Fathers, the canon law and its interpreters; the typical controversy is carried on in terms of morality and
religion as regularly and inevitably as two centuries later it is conducted in terms of economic expediency.... The
age of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell has nothing to learn from the 20th century as to the niceties of
political intrigue or commercial sharp practice’.
Among certain pre-Reformation churchmen, ‘a cynical unscrupulousness in high places is not incompatible
with a general belief in the validity of moral standards which are contradicted by it’, for, after all, because
doctrine and conduct diverge, it does not follow that to examine the former is to hunt abstractions. That men
should have thought as they did is sometimes as significant as that they should have acted as they did.
After the Reformation, many English churchmen continued to claim a hearing on questions of social policy.
But, ‘by the middle of the 17th century all that is altered’. After the Civil War, ‘the attempt to maintain the
theory that there was a Christian standard of economic conduct was impossible’ ... and ‘... the appeal to religion
is often a decorous drapery for a triumphant materialism.... Between the idea that a man must not take advantage
of his neighbour’s necessity, and the doctrine that “man’s self-love is God’s providence”; between the attitude
which appeals to a religious standard to repress economic appetites, and that which regards expediency as the
final criterion — there is a chasm which no theory of the permanence and ubiquity of economic interests can
bridge ...‘ and ‘... to watch how ecclesiastical authority strives to maintain its hold upon the spheres it had
claimed and finally abdicates them — to do this is ... to stand at the sources of rivulets which are now a flood’.
Tawney makes a comparison between Luther’s simplistic doctrine of the two Kingdoms and the four main
attitudes which the Middle Ages adopted toward the world of social institutions and economic relations:
practicing ascetic aloofness from them; taking them for granted as matters of indifference; promoting agitation
for reform; or accepting, criticising and amending them as the material of the Kingdom of God. The note of
evangelical poverty preached by St Francis ‘was the note of the majority of movements for reform’.
Indifferentism was the essence of Wyclif, who was a kind of premonition of the Reformation. But ‘the
distinctive feature of medieval thought is that contrasts which later were to be presented as irreconcilable
antitheses appear in it as differences within a larger unity’. The analogy by which society was described,
‘invoked in every economic crisis to rebuke extortion and dissension with a high doctrine of social solidarity’,
and ‘not finally discarded till the rise of a theoretical individualism in England in the 17th century’ was that of
the human body. ‘Kindly man’s hand helps his head, and his eye helps his foot, and his foot his body’. The class
privilege, class oppression, exploitation and serfdom that were part of that era’s phase of socio-economic
evolution were all incorporated into a functional organism in which each knew his place. ‘Peasants must not
encroach on those above them. Lords must not despoil peasants.’
The life ‘of mere money-making was recalcitrant, and hence, indeed, the stigma attached to it.... If the
medieval moralist was often too naive in expecting sound practice as the result of lofty principles alone, he was
at least free from that not unfashionable form of credulity which expects it from their absence or from their
opposite.... There was little room ... for the doctrine which silences scruples and closes all accounts with the
final plea of economic expediency’. And when medieval ecclesiastics in high place violated their own
principles, this was not passed over. ‘From the middle of the 13th century a continuous wail arises against the
iniquity of the Church’, and ‘the abuses which were a trickle in the 13th century were a torrent in the 15th’. But
so grew the denouncements, from the St Bernard’s, the St Brigid’s of Sweden, the St Catherines of Sienna and
the Savonarolas:
‘Oh vanity of vanities, yet no more vain than insane. The Church is resplendent in her walls, beggarly in her
poor.’
But, says Tawney, ‘the denunciation of vices implies that they are recognised as vicious; to ignore their
condemnation is not less one-sided than to conceal their existence; and, when the halo has vanished from
practice, it remains to ask what principles men valued and what standards they errected’. ‘At every turn ... there
are limits, restrictions, warnings against allowing economic interests to interfere with serious affairs.... Avarice
is a deadly sin. Trade is legitimate: the different resources of different countries show that it was intended by
Providence. But it is dangerous business. A man must be sure that he carries it on for the public benefit, and that
the profits which he takes are no more than the wages of his labour.’ Private property ‘is to be tolerated as a
concession to human frailty, not applauded as desirable in itself; the ideal — if only man’s nature could rise to it
— is communism’. ‘The estate must be in the largest possible number of hands. It must provide for the support
of the poor. Its use must as far as practicable be common.... The suspicion of economic motives had been one of
the earliest elements in the social teaching of the Church, and was to survive till Calvinism endowed the life of
economic enterprise with a new sanctification.’
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Prior to Calvin, the scholastics were preaching a labour theory of value which Karl Marx would have been
happy with. Theological opinion was unanimous in condemning payment of interest merely for the act of
lending, as contrary to Scripture, contrary to Aristotle, and contrary to nature, for it is to live without labour, it is
to sell time which belongs to God. And if popes, ecclesiastics and kings did not conform to the doctrine it was
because the argument against usury operated in ‘a quite different order of economic activities from that
represented by loans from great banking-houses to the merchants and potentates who were their clients. Its
object was simple and direct — to prevent the well-to-do money-lender from exploiting the necessities of the
peasant or the craftsman’. However, even when those in high places made a mockery of the doctrine, the
doctrine still remained, slow, static and conservative, but protective.
This very roughly, is a sketchy outline of the broad canvass on which Tawney proceeds to paint in the details of
the upheaval brought by three key men, among a host of lesser figures: Martin Luther, Henry VIII and John
Calvin. We shall have to return to them again in a theological context. For the present let us merely follow
Professor Tawney’s economic trail.
A turning point for Luther came with the peasant’s rebellion in 1525. Having previously preached and
pamphleteered against the high and mighty, says Tawney, he now turned his savage tongue against the rebels:
‘Who so can strive, smite, strangle, or stab, secretly or publicly ... such wonderful times are these that a prince
can better merit Heaven with bloodshed than another with prayer’. The occasion ‘helped to stamp on Lutherism
an almost servile reliance on the secular authorities’. Deprived of the support of the pope, Luther turned to the
princes. And all over Northern Europe, wherever the Reformation held sway, the Prince became the power. The
protestant Karl Barth, whom most protestants would probably consider to be the 20th century’s greatest
theologian, referred to the catastrophe of Luther’s legacy ‘with respect to the relation of law and Gospel, of
temporal and spiritual power, by which its natural paganism has not been so much limited and restrained as it
has been ideologically transfigured, affirmed and strengthened’.
‘Luther’s utterances on social morality’ says Tawney, ‘are the occasional explosions of a capricious volcano,
with only a rare flash of light amid the torrent of smoke and flame, and it is idle to scan them for a coherent and
consistent doctrine. Compared with the lucid and subtle rationalism of a thinker like St Antonio, his sermons
and pamphlets on social questions make an impression of naivete, as of an impetuous but ill-informed genius,
dispensing with the cumbrous embarrassments of law and logic, to evolve a system of social ethics from the
inspired heat of his own unsophisticated consciousness. It was partly that they were “pieces de circonstance”,
thrown off in a storm of revolution, partly that it was precisely the refinements of law and logic which Luther
detested. Confronted with the complexities of foreign trade and financial organisation, or with the subtleties of
economic analysis, he is like a savage introduced to a dynamo or a steam-engine. He is too frightened and angry
even to feel curiosity. Attempts to explain the mechanism merely enrage him.... His attitude to the conquest of
society by the merchant and financier is the same as his attitude towards the commercialisation of religion by
the new Babylon in Rome.’
Convinced ‘that serfdom was the necessary foundation of society, his alarm at the attempt to abolish it was
intensified by a political theory which exalted the absolutism of secular authorities, and a religious doctrine
which drew a sharp antithesis between the external order and the life of the spirit.... He preaches a selfless
charity, but he recoils with horror from every institution by which an attempt had been made to give it a
concrete expression’.
After denouncing Teilhard’s ‘A Dieu par la terre’ four centuries in advance, Luther declared that God speaks
to the soul ‘solus cum solo’, as a voice in the heart and the heart alone. ‘Thus, the bridges between the worlds of
spirit and of senses are broken and the soul is isolated from the society of men that it may enter into communion
with its Maker. The grace that is freely bestowed upon it may overflow in its social relations, but those relations
can supply no particle of spiritual nourishment’. The difference between Luther’s doctrine of the funnel through
which God’s love alone flows down to the passive believer and out to other men through charitable action, and
the persistent catholic doctrine right down to Teilhard that a growing love for men and the labour of love in the
Lord’s vineyard promote the love of God, is the difference between night and day. This was one of the
keystones of the Reformation. ‘Since salvation is bestowed by the operation of grace in the heart, and by that
alone, the whole fabric of organised religion ... drops away, as the blasphemous trivialities of a religion of
works. Secular interests ceased to possess, even remotely, a religious significance’. It was the inner life alone
‘which could partake of sanctification. The world was divided into good and evil, light and darkness, spirit and
matter. The division between them was absolute; no human effort could span the chasm’. Manicheism raising its
ugly bead in new form.
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Then Professor Tawney asks the question: ‘To wave aside the world of institutions and law as alien to that of
the spirit
— is not this to abandon, instead of facing, the task of making Christian morality prevail?’ Is it not useless for
the Cburch to prohibit extortion unless it is prepared to undertake the intellectual labour of defining the
transactions to which the prohibition applied? Luther ‘denounced covetousness in general terms, with a
surprising exuberance of invective. But, confronted with a request for advice on the specific question whether
the authorities of Danzig shall put down usury, he retreats into the clouds. “The preacher shall preach only the
Gospel rule, and leave it to each man to follow his own conscience. Let him who can receive it, receive it; he
cannot be compelled thereto further than the Gospel leads willing hearts whom the spirit of God urges
forward.”’
The prophet of Wittenberg thus made the great breach and through it poured a host of princes of whom the
most redoubtable of all was Henry VIII.
Henry had the stamp of a man who will let nothing stand in his way. And neither did he. The British Empire
and the Anglican Church had their foundation stone. Known for his monstrous egoism and wild temper and with
a great penchant for chopping off men’s (and women’s) heads, he turned one by one upon his wives, his most
brilliant ministers and the leading humanists of the day. When, in Belloc’s words, his passions ‘of pride, of lust,
of jealousy, of doting, of avarice, or of facile power were aroused’, he was ‘incapable of negotiation and still
more incapable of foresight’ and he ‘blundered into disaster’. He had no overseas colonies and was determined
to begin the process of conquest and mercantilism by subduing Ireland, where his predecessors had been
nibbling without real success. Henry’s decision was destined to lock England and Ireland in mortal combat,
nearly 500 years of blood and tears, the final issue of which is not yet decided. For the purpose of conquering
Ireland and for other purposes, including the building of a fleet, the king needed money. And all around him lay
the great monastic estates built from many centuries of patient application of the monastic rule, ‘Laborare est
orare’. Henry originally had no theological quarrel with the catholic church, and as every schoolboy knows had
been granted the title Defender of the Faith by the pope for his book denouncing Luther. But his lust for power
and possession and his growing appetite for the blood of his wives, his ministers and anyone who stood in his
way became compounded with his hunger for money.
And so, as the appetite grew by what it fed on, he expropriated and scattered the monks, butchering many,
took over their monasteries and threw their lands on the market. If one had to isolate any particular event in the
complex rise of modern capitalism, its counterpart, Marxism, and the escalating wars it has of necessity
produced, this, together with the blessing Calvin gave to money and worldly success, was it. In that 16th century
a strong popular resistance to the Reformation, as Belloc pointed out, nearly defeated a small wealthy class
which used the excitement of a minority and the upheaval in Germany to obtain material benefits for
themselves. A violent persecution directed by the wealthy against the English populace just happened to
succeed. ‘In little more than a hundred years the newly enriched had won the battle.’ The wealthy took
advantage of the Germanic revolt against order, ‘for it is always to the advantage of the wealthy to deny general
conceptions of right and wrong, to question a popular philosophy.... It is always in the nature of great wealth to
be insanely tempted ... to push on to more and more domination over the bodies of men
— and it can do so best by attacking fixed social restraints.’ The landed squires and the merchants, ‘powerfully
supported by the Jewish financial communities in the principal towns, felt that — with the Reformation — their
opportunity had come.’7
At this point, and in view of the fact that we are dealing with what was essentially a socio-economic
convulsion rather than any theological challenge, let me leave the 16th century for a while in order to briefly
consider certain economic aspects of the Middle Ages which led up to it; other aspects of the medieval period
will be arising under one of your later chapters.
The 16th century land-grabbers did not obtain mere tracts of undeveloped countryside awaiting the magic touch
of some ‘protestant ethic’ to make them bloom. They were highly-developed going concerns, with high class
farm buildings, livestock and systems of husbandry. Though the great progress made after the end of the Viking,
Anglo-Saxon and other invasions of the Dark Ages had come to a halt in the l4th-l5th century recession due to
bad weather, the Black Death and the militarisation following the English invasion of France, the Black Death
having wiped out half the population of Europe, the Hundred Years’ War having devastated France and a
serious downturn in weather conditions having further reduced crop yields, the monastic estates and their work
ethic had more competence than most to weather the storm and the upturn had begun well before the
Reformation.
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Hardly had the Roman Empire collapsed when Benedict had sowed the first seeds of the resurgence at Monte
Casino. Here and elsewhere, a rigid application of his rule ‘Laborare est orare’ for over four centuries in the
hidden fastnesses of the tottering edifice produced a first harvest at Cluny, whence the product was scattered all
over Europe by a host of dynamic leaders of the stamp of Gregory VII or Bernard of Clairvaux. They took up
the cudgels against the inertia, the vested interests, the defensive conservatism and the blurred vision that had
become a habit of mind during the dark, dangerous days of the European winter. They set all Europe on the
march. It was spring-time again, a time for action. It was also a time for precision: thinking, the forerunner of
everything else, was clarified, law codified and words wedded to facts. From this first renaissance, the material
recovery followed as logically as summer follows spring.
The monks had been first into the breach, clearing the scrub, laying out the farms and launching a vast range of
experimental work facilitated by their incessant travel and their use of a common Latin language, and in touch
with the science of the Arabs through Palestine, Sicily and Spain. In the five centuries from 900 to 1400, crop
yields were increased by several hundred per cent, and the subsistence agrarian economy of the Dark Ages had
been transformed into a dynamic society developing industry, trade and cultural life. A revolution was brought
about in the sources of power, first by the invention of the horseshoe and the horse collar and then by harnessing
water and wind power. As early as 1086, the Doomesday book produced by the Normans recorded already
5,624 mills in England. River power and wind power were not confined to grinding grain; they were also used
in connection with iron working, tanning and leather making, the shrinking and felting of woollen fabrics,
sawing timber, crushing oil seeds, manufacturing paper and other things, in monastic communities that were
hives of industry, where the working day was strictly divided into periods for manual work, study and prayer, a
way of life that charged the mental and physical batteries, combined day-today efficiency with the long-term
vision and provided a transcendent reason for dedication to the task. Of course there were avaricious abbots and
bishops, some living as a kind of absentee landlord, but they were the exceptions rather than the rule and did not
detract from the overall industry and productivity produced by the great mass of monks.
There was mostly a symbiotic relationship between the monastic communities, the trades guilds and the
aristocracy, which contributed to the common endeavour. Among other things, civil and mechanical engineering
were brought to a high degree of sophistication and the construction of increasingly elaborate gearing trains was
expanding everywhere. New technology had brought a vast improvement in industrial and agricultural
productivity, which, in turn, produced a vigorous expansion of rope making, barrel and basket making and other
arts and crafts. Advanced techniques were developed for the mining of coal, used, inter alia, for the manufacture
of soap. As for architecture, the vast carpet of Gothic churches spread all over Europe speaks for itself and
shows the bold revolutionary concepts that were realised in that dynamic period. Lock gates were developed in
the 12th century as were mechanical clocks with an ingenious spring system. There were 40,000 recorded
editions of books in Europe by 1500, a bare half century after Gutenberg.
All this was reflected in that intellectual curiosity which had led to the foundation of the universities by the
church. The church, notwithstanding the doctrinal errors that had begun to infiltrate as far back as the 2nd
century, at least cannot be faulted for the energy with which it led the reconstruction, as it had preserved the
infrastructures of civilisation during the centuries of barbarity. The monks not only led the way in clearing the
land, laying out the estates and developing food production, but they also organised the care of the sick as well
as the massive effort in education particularly favouring the poor and working upwards through its schools and
research establishments to the universities which it established throughout Europe. The Latern Council of 1179
made it a strict obligation to have a school attached to every church. Almost any child who had the intelligence
and the ambition could climb to university level.
Even if you take up the argument at what was probably the nadir of the medieval church, the case of the
Inquisition, originally set up to save Spain from a Moorish comeback and to combat alchemy, sorcery,
witchcraft and satanic practices as well as apostacy and heresy, abuses certainly set in particularly in the late
period of scholastic decadence, when the condemnation of Galileo marked one of the most shameful episodes. If
there were such miscarriages ofjustice there were also monstrous criminals, such as Gilles de Raiz, from whom
society had to be protected, and — it should be added — the fact that a man like de Raiz was a Marshall of
France and a wealthy feudal lord did not protect him from the full rigours of the law. Notwithstanding the
precarious balance in which civilisation then hung and the need for stern counteracting measures at a time when
the challenge was powerful, the Inquisition was not the bloodthirsty institution that has been deliberately
depicted. Even if it had been it would not weaken the argument because in the form in which it is wildly
attacked it was introduced after the great period we are speaking about, when modern decadence was beginning
to penetrate the body politic. Ancient Roman law came back in force from the 13th century onwards and, among
other things, torture began to be allowed by the church which had previously opposed it vigorously. But
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arithmetical precision designed to mislead the innocent-minded has gone as far as ascribing to the Spanish
Inquisition alone 31,912 people burned alive, 17,659 burned in effigy and 294,451 tortured.
The facts have been researched by such authorities as the German Ernst Schafer, the Frenchman Gerard Dufour
and the Danish Gustav Henningsen, a good protestant who spent many years burrowing in the archives
researching the original records. These men discovered that the figures poured out by generations of historians
were the product of a delirious imagination. That imagination belonged to a Spaniard called Llorente, a
collaborator with Joseph Bonaparte, who hated his native country, fled to France and concocted the figures to
discredit Spain. He subsequently admitted that his data were mere assumptions but this has been conveniently
ignored by those historians whose pet prejudices are always threatened by facts. Henningsen arrives at a figure
of three to four annual executions arising from perfectly regular trials. The fact that the executions were by
burning was, unfortunately, part of those rougher times, more ‘civilised’ than Roman crucifixion, less so than
the later beheading by axe or more modern refinements such as hanging, gassing and electrocution. In this
connection, perhaps it may be of interest to note that as I write, after a couple of centuries of ‘Modern
Enlightenment’, nearly two thousand condemned people are awaiting execution on death row in the United
States, that many are unable to find lawyers to deal with their appeals, that ‘indigent inmates may soon be sent
to their death without the chance of fully litigating constitutional claims’8 and that in July, 1989 the Supreme
Court ruled that crimes by children and the mentally-handicapped may be punishable by death —inconceivable
under Inquisition Law. The three to four annual executions of the Inquisition hardly add up to a holocaust in the
context of those times, when men of the stamp of Cromwell were to lay whole towns to waste for the glory of
God without giving their victims the chance of a trial.
Part of the indoctrination about the Middle Ages was that everything began with the Renaissance, a theory
that does not correspond with the facts. Among other experts of the period, the great authority Jacob Burckhardt
even apologised for using the term Renaissance which sounded ‘as if during the Middle Ages all cultural life
had been sleeping as though dead’. Incidentally, it is worth adding here that one of the factors that Burckhardt
gave as being responsible for the new awakening in Italy was the multitude of independent states free of the cold
hand of centralising monarchs and bureaucracies that have been the curse of Europe ever since. (Basques,
Corsicans, Occitanians, Alsatians, Bretons, Welsh, Scots, etc. take note.)
Even in ordinary everyday living, the working man in the Middle Ages was a member of an extended family
and of a neighbourhood and a community that supported him. He belonged to a union — then called a guild —
where his place was established and his wage assured. He knew his station in life and could hope for modest
progress but no more, in a society that valued stability. Those tempted to frown on it might remind themselves
that in 19th century Britain villagers used to sing religiously, ‘God bless the squire and his relations, and keep us
all in our proper stations’. Nobody could now want to return to the Middle Ages, but it was a step along
humanity’s road and had compensations that we have lost.
Work contracts were governed by strict church laws which respected human dignity, the physically-weaker
capacity of women and the protection of children. The administration of justice was free of charge for the poor,
who were provided with defence lawyers gratis. If you consider the subjugated state of women between the 16th
and the 19th century, reduced almost to the condition of slaves in the middle and lower classes and playthings in
the upper, and compare it with the power and position of medieval women, you may receive a surprise,
considering the ideas with which we have been indoctrinated. As Regine Pernoud has shown in La femme au
temps des cathedrales, medicine was among the disciplines commonly exercised by women in France, women
were frequently in charge of large monasteries of both sexes, girls were major at 12 years of age — two years
before boys
— and married women could retain their maiden name (until a 17th century law obliged them to adopt that of
their husbands). They were involved in the administration of properties, in the trades, in business and
commerce, in literature and the arts, politics and education. And if certain universities turned somewhat antifeminist in the 13th century it was partly due to the study of Aristotle, who with all the ancient Greeks
considered women inferior beings, partly to the progression of old Roman law and partly to some exaggerated
pretentions on the part of women themselves, as later satirised in Les Femmes Sauantes by Moliere, who
himself had been brought into the theatre by a young woman producer, Madeleine Bej art, head of an already
famous troupe of actors at 25 years of age.
After the Reformation women were among the weaker members of society who were trampled upon. There
were no more convents for their education and the enobling image of the Virgin Mary was rejected as popish.
They became the daughters of Eve who dragged men into sin. If Freud had been less obscurantist about
medieval enlightenment, be might have been less hard on women and not considered them anatomically,
physiologically and psychologically such inferior creatures as they had indeed been obliged to become by the
time Freud was observing them. In other ways too the baby was thrown out with the bathwater. The cult of the
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saints was rightly rejected but with it their dedicated example, with the result that a new coarseness and selfishness entered society. If you study their real lives rather than the imaginary distortions you will discover what
sturdy men and women of flesh and blood they were, their beneficial influence on kings and ecclesiastics, on
letters and the arts and on the rude tempers of worldly men in every sphere. If the world today had even one
head of state or politician of the standard of St Louis, King of France, or St Thomas Becket of Canterbury, exchancellor of the realm, we would have at least one voice crying in favour of sanity. We who are terrified of the
very idea of sanctity or sainthood could benefit from reading the old pagans such as Plato, Aristotle and Cicero
on the necessity for heroic sanctity in the body politic.
In another of her classic works on the Middle Ages, Lumiere du Moyen Age, Regine Pernoud describes the
intimate social mixing of the classes during the centuries which people have been taught to believe were
governed by a distant political hierarchy with an absolute monarch at the top who lived in luxury and wealth at
the expense of his subjects. ‘Historians’, without conducting original research, projected 17th century
experience back to the period they wished to decry, making it a caricature. Ancient Rome and Greece were
indeed oppressive except to the governing elite, as was the period from the 16th to the 19th centuries, but not the
four centuries from the 10th to the 13th. These four centuries saw the population of Europe doubled and were
the most fertile in every sense that the world had known since the rise of classical Greece. The equality of man
and woman was a fundamental principle which did not exist in antiquity. Property rights were no longer
absolute as they were again to become in the 16th century; property had, above all, a social function.
The Arabs made a major contribution to medieval science and the christian influence further enriched it. The
archives contain an extraordinary range of treatises on medicine, mathematics, geography, physics, chemistry,
astronomy, architecture, geometry and other subjects. Albert the Great conducted experiments that led to Edison
eight centuries later. Arnaud de Villeneuve, a professor in Montpelier, discovered sulphuric, hydrochloric and
nitric acid. Raimond Lulle initiated research leading to organic chemistry and the function of mineral salts in
living organisms. The first qualified doctor in England, Thomas Linacre, later to become founder of the Royal
College of Physicians, travelled to study medicine in Padua, Italy, where he obtained his MD degree in 1496.
Many of the scientists of the 20th century who are discovering the unity of matter do not perhaps realise that it
was taken for granted in the Middle Ages. A term of disdain would have it that the people lived on herbs and
roots, when, in fact, these words referred in the case of the former to cabbages, spinach, salads, leeks, and
everything grown overground, and the latter to carrots, radishes, turnips and other vegetables which developed
underground. In the southern half of the Continent, wine was consumed by everybody down to the lowliest.
Most inland farms cultivated fish in ponds in addition to the sea fish available in coastal areas.
The European Middle Ages civilisation was the first and last in the world to achieve sustained, revolutionary
development in every domain without foreign conquest, exploitation and slavery, which were the foundation of
all previous and subsequent empires. Medieval Europe alone in history lifted itself up by its own bootstraps.
Thousands of factories on river and stream transformed water energy through an ingenious variety of
engineering techniques into many types of vertical and horizontal power. The earliest recorded power-driven
iron works, mentioned in a manuscript dated 1197 AD, was at the Cistercian Monastery in Soroe in Sweden9.
Power-operated paper making was introctuced at Fabiano in Italy in 1276. A paper factory still working on the
River Dore near Ambert in the Puy-de-Dome, France, was founded in 1326. It was estimated that a machine for
the fulling of cloth using water power replaced 40 men tramping it with their feet. In the middle of the 13th
century, Abbot John spent £100 repairing the mills and other machinery on the rivers of the monastic lands
belonging to St Alban’s, north of London, and in order to pay the costs he obliged the inhabitants to have their
wheat ground and their cloth fulled by the monastery instead of doing the work at home by manual labour. One
of the results was the first popular rebellion against technological progress led by Wat Tyler in 1381. Cement
had not yet been invented but this did not prevent the construction of dams using refined techniques of
combining earth, timber and stones. Some of these dams were enormous: one on the Garonne near Toulouse
was angled across the river and measured 400 metres, with a flow of 9,000 m3 when the river was in flood and
half that in the dry season. R J Forbes in A History of Technology (1956) describes the power hammers used in
metallurgy in the Middle Ages, some weighting 300kg, striking from 60 to 120 beats per minute. Bellows and
blowing engines operated by water power permitted the raising of the temperatures in blast furnaces to as high
as 1200 oC.
Thanks to research conducted in France, we know that the horses of the Middle Ages could pull loads twelve
times those allowed by Roman law because of the horse collar developed as early as 800 AD and the invention
of the modern nailed horse shoe in the 11th century. A further factor in the agricultural revolution of the Middle
Ages was the invention of the modern coulter, sock and mouldboard plough.
Development was largely ended by the English invasion of France by Edward III in 1337, the Hundred Years’
War that ensued, the financial difficulties which the war caused to both sides and the Black Death which
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destroyed whole villages and towns and struck terror into the hearts of the people who, henceforth, in despair,
turned to superstitious practices and pagan forms of religion as escapism from the horrors of life. The Great
Schism and the warfare between the Italian city states set a pattern of despotism and government by spies and
assassins that penetrated through the papal states to the Vatican. The papacy declined to an all-time low with the
Renaissance popes, lovers of beauty, luxury, wine and women as well as intrigue and the clash of arms. And yet,
the central core of that medieval civilisation, France, remained economically, technologically and culturally the
world’s leading power, notwithstanding the decline from Louis XIV to Louis XVI, until the Revolution which
brought everything crashing down (including the education, due to the killing, expulsion or dispersion of the
clergy who operated the schools) and enabled England to profit from the wreckage by exploiting French
industrial and agricultural inventions while France was forced to turn in on itself in a surge of protectionism that
was to last until the Second Empire and in many respects until the middle of the 20th century.
To return to our main theme, Professor Tawney describes the mania of land speculation in England after the
suppression of the monasteries. ‘Middlemen, who bought scattered parcels of land, held them for the rise, and
disposed of them piecemeal when they got their offer.... Rack-renting, evictions, and the conversion of arable to
pasture were the natural result, for surveyors wrote up values at each transfer, and, unless the last purchaser
squeezed his tenants, the transaction would not pay’.
‘Why, after all, should a landlord be more squeamish than the Crown? “Do ye not know”, said the grantee of
one of tbe Sussex manors of the monastery of Sion, in answer to some peasants who protested at the seizure of
their commons, “that the King’s Grace hath put down all the houses of monks, friars and nuns? Therefore now
is the time come that we gentlemen will pull down the houses of such poor knaves as ye be”’ Some churchmen,
while declaring, ‘with all the remorseless precision of a disciple of Calvin’, that wilful idlers were to be
excommunicated by the Church and punished by the State, continued to uphold certain aspects of the old
morality, but ‘the upstart aristocracy of the future had their teeth in the carcass, and, having tasted blood, they
were not to be whipped off by a sermon’. For ten years, there was ‘a sinister hum, as of the floating of an
immense land syndicate, with favourable terms for all sufficiently rich, or influential, or mean, to get in on the
ground floor’.
In addition to taking land, livestock and farm buildings, chalices, tabernacles and anything containing gold were
smelted to swell the flow of money.
As for the schools, they were ‘swept away wholesale in order to distribute their endowments among
courtiers. There were probably more schools in proportion to the population at the end of the 15th century than
there were in the middle of the 19th’. Tawney says, quoting A F Leach, that ‘these endownments were
confiscated by the State and many still line the pockets of the descendants of the statesmen of the day.... King
Edward VI’s Grammar Schools are the schools which King Edward did not destroy’. Rich men similarly seized
hospital endownments, with the result, as Crowley declared, that the sick had to beg in the streets.
‘The men who had invested in the Reformation when it was still a gambling stock naturally nursed the
security, and denounced the revolting peasants as communists (even then), with the mystical reverence for the
rights of property which is characteristic in all ages of the “nouveaux riches”.’ Becon, in the Jewel of Joy in
1553, attacked the vices of the abbey-lubbers: ‘They abhor the names of the Monkes, Friers, Chanons, Nonnes,
etc., but their goodes they gredely gripe. And yet where the cloysters kept hospitality, let out their fermes at a
reasonable price, norished scholes, brought up youth in good letters, they do none of all these thynges.’
To people nurtured on the old religious order, ‘the new agrarian regime, with its sacrifice of the village — a
fellowship of mutual aid, a partnership of services and protection, “a little commonwealth” — to the pecuniary
interests of a great proprietor who made a desert where men had worked and prayed, seemed a defiance, not
only of man, but of God’. Robert Crowley declared that it was the work of ‘men that live as though there were
no God at all, men that would have all in their own hands, men that would leave nothyng for others, men that
would be alone on the earth, men that would bee never satisfied’.
‘The opinion of the practical man on questions of economic conduct was in the 16th century in a condition of
even more than its customary confusion. A century before, he had practised extortion and been told that it was
wrong; for it was contrary to the law of God. A century later, he was to practise it and be told that it was right;
for it was in accordance with the law of nature. In this matter, as in others of even greater moment, the two
generations which followed the Reformation were unblessed by these ample certitudes. They walked in an
obscurity where the glittering armour of theologians “... made a little glooming light, most like a shade” ‘.
‘Theologians agreed that I should love my neighbour as myself but “Who precisely is my neighbour? and
how exactly am I to make my love for him effective in practice.” ‘ To such questions the new religious teaching
supplied no answer. ‘It had insisted that all men were brethren. But it did not occur to it to point out that, as a
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result of the new economic imperialism that was beginning to develop in the 17th century, the brethren of the
English merchant were the Africans whom he kidnapped for slavery in America, or the American Indians whom
he stripped of their lands, or the Indian craftsmen from whom he bought muslins and silks at starvation prices.’
The (London) Guardian newspaper of 6 July, 1989 quotes a hymn composed by a slave ship owner in the
18th century which was sung by the crew and their families on shore before the ship set sail for the Caribbean to
take on its cargo of human misery bound in chains in the hold, and, according to The Guardian, this hymn ‘is
still available in Methodist churches’:
How sweet the name of Jesus sounds
In a believer’s ear.
It soothes his sorrows, heals his wounds
And drives away his fear.
Jesus, my shepherd, brother, friend,
My prophet, priest and King:
My Lord, my life, my way, my end,
Accept the praise I bring. Amen.
The social teaching of the church, says Tawney, had ceased to count, because the Church itself — the new
Anglican Church — ‘had ceased to think’. The ‘social theory of the Church of England turned its face from the
practical world, to pore over doctrines which, had their original authors been as impervious to realities as their
later exponents, would never have been formulated’. By the 18th century, the very conception of the Church of
England as an independent moral authority had been abandoned. ‘An institution which possesses no philosophy
of its own inevitably accepts that which happens to be fashionable.’ And the new social ethic was that not of the
Mystical Body, ‘not a community of classes with varying functions, united to each other by mutual obligations
arising from their relation to a common end. It is a joint-stock company rather than an organism. The concept of
purpose is replaced by that of mechanism. The most important rights are property rights and property rights
attach mainly ‘to the higher orders of men, who hold the tangible, material “stock” of society. Those who do not
subscribe to the company have no legal claim to a share in the profits, though they have a moral claim on the
charity of their superiors. Hence the curious phraseology which treats almost all below the nobility, gentry, and
freeholders as “the poor” — and the poor, it is well known, are of two kinds, “the industrious poor”, who work
for their betters, and “the idle poor”, who work for themselves ~‘ As Spencer was to put it later, it was not
merely that the fittest would survive but that only the fittest should survive, though the elementary question
seems not to have been put: “Who is the fittest? Those with the brute force to have more or those with the
intelligence to be more?’
‘The spiritual blindness which made possible the general acquiescence in the horrors of tbe early factory
system was not a novelty but the habit of a century....’ The Church had reproduced the temper of an aristocratic
society, as it reproduced its class organisation and economic inequalities, and ‘was disposed too often to idealise
as a virtue that habit of mean subservience to wealth and social position which’, says Tawney,’ ... is still the
characteristic and odious vice of Englishmen.’ But the wealth, of course, was not to be equally distributed
because the doctrine generally accepted as self-evident was that ‘everyone but an idiot knows that the lower
classes must be kept poor or they will never be industrious’ and the higher the wages of the poor the more they
spend it upon drink; ‘that high prices, therefore, are not a misfortune, but a blessing, since they compel the
wage-earner to be more industrious.... All were agreed that, on moral no less than on economic grounds, it was
vital that wages should be reduced’. Subsequently the very notion of democracy, which entered the modern
vocabulary during the 18th century, came to be considered a threat to the social order, and even 19th century
liberals believed the criminal and the worker to be synonymous. Few tricks of the unsophisticated intellect, says
Tawney, are more curious than the naive psychology of the business man who ascribes his achievements to his
own unaided efforts, in blind unconsciousness of a social order without whose continuous support and vigilant
protection he would be as a lamb bleating in the desert. That individualist complex owes part of its selfassurance to the suggestion of Puritan moralists that practical success is at once the sign and the reward of
ethical superiority. ‘No question’, argued a Puritan pamphleteer, ‘but it (wealth) should be the portion rather of
the godly than of the wicked ...; for godliness hath the promises of this life as well as of the life to come'.
Puritanism was partly a throwback to the Old Testament, with its Pharisees ‘lovers of money’ and its Sadducees
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who believed in divine recompense here below and the idea that the interest of society coincided with their own.
The ‘poor’ of the Old Testament was almost synonymous with ‘sinner’, and heavenly chastisement was
considered to fall on the Israelites largely because of the lower classes, a kind of untouchables, though they were
the classes from which Christ recruited the founders of christianity. The Jewish-Calvinist love of money was
also partly inspired by the Book of Job, but René Girard, as we may have an opportunity to discuss in later
correspondence, has shown that this is an obscene interpretation of Job.
The notion, says Tawney, ‘that distress is a proof of demerit, though a singular commentary on the lives of
Christian saints and sages, has always been popular with the prosperous’. It is also a consolation for a society to
regard the poor as damned in the next world, ‘if only to justify itself for making their life a hell in this’. The
wealthy had it both ways, in this life and in the life to come. And so what bad been ‘familiar, and human, and
loveable — what was Christian in Christianity, had largely disappeared’. What remained was private rights,
private interests and private salvation (reserved mainly for the well-to-do) — ‘the materials of a society rather
than a society itself. The seeds were thus sown for that ‘them and us’ alienation that was one of the remote
causes of what would erupt as Marxism in the 19th century. Alienation did not begin with the rise of modern
capitalism but through it received a powerful impetus, and all the greatest exponents of it are post-capitalist,
culminating in Marx himself. It would be useful for you to study the depths of horror to which the people were
dragged in Marx’s 19th century Britain. Let me give you just one little example: In the mines, women (and
children) were stripped to their waist and made to crawl on their hands and knees to haul the pit harrows with
chains that passed between their legs, mutilating them appallingly in their private parts. The Karl Karx who
spoke up for them is the same Karl Marx who is still denounced by the politico-religious Establishment in the
same way that another friend of the poor, James Connolly, was denounced as a terrorist, the difference being
that Connolly was executed.
Towards the end of the 17th century the Freemason Order was being founded, and in 1694, the year King
William of Orange became head of the London lodge, modern banking replaced the mild Italian variety when
William Patterson and a group of the new rich lent him, as a kind of initiation symbol, a large quantity of gold in
return for a charter to enable them to issue substitute notes exchangeable for the king’s gold which they would
lend to the public at 8 per cent. With this legal tender, without the backing of goods exchanged, money passed
from the power that had traditionally controlled it into private bands. And the loan to the king at interest was the
beginning of the world’s snowballing debts and banking institutions which later prompted Jefferson to write to
John Adams that the banking establishments were more dangerous than standing armies.
A more altruistic form of banking had been instituted in Italy two centuries earlier when the Franciscan friars
organised interest-free loans to rescue the poor from the clutches of the usurers, as Shakespeare was to illustrate
in The Merchant of Venice.
It is hardly any surprise that Karl Marx, reading of the rise of modern capitalism in the library of the British
Museum, came to regard it as evil and its supporting religion as the opium of the people. The new morality was
based on a new, ‘divinely ordered’ creed that selfishness is good for society, ‘that the individual is absolute
master of his own, and, within the limits set by positive law, may exploit it with a single eye to his pecuniary
advantage, unrestrained by any obligation to postpone his own profit to the well-being of his neighbours, or to
give account of his actions to a higher authority’. Alexander Pope summarized it:
Thus God and Nature formed the general frame And bade self-love and social be the same.
The seeds of this selfishness, euphemistically baptised ‘individualism’ had been already sown by William of
Ockham and his anarchic nominalism. All was for ‘the best in the best possible of worlds’. As the English
Establishment began to take shape in the form of what was to become the triple alliance of Government, Church
and City, its members might well declare with the Duke of Cambridge that ‘any change in any direction for
whatever purpose is strongly to be deprecated’.
The flight of the peasantry from the land to the cities that was launched in the 16th and 17th centuries formed
the proletariat of the 19th, whose sweat was needed to build the new Industrial Revolution, to the benefit of the
landowners’ descendants, who followed the peasants to exploit their sons in the cities as the fathers had the
fathers in the countryside. The new mass society of shallow, transitory relationships —the formless mob, if you
like — was about to develop. The stage was being set for the secular Messiah and his manipulation of irrational,
emotional power. Morals were to become tangential rather than organic. The search for status and image was
launched. Some of the fruits ripening today are the spreading self-centred atomisation of existence, the mass-
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produced detritus of an imposed culture polluting the sources of an authentic culture of the people, confounding
individualism and personalism, the individual and the personal. The former is given sops to keep it submissive
and integrate it as a cog in the wheel of the City. The latter, isolated and naked, is handed over, gagged and
bound, to the devouring jaws of conflicting appetites and interests. And hovering over all is the anonymous
power of Money and the Media.
The human person replaced by the individual has become an interchangeable, disposable part of the whole,
annexed by the City and mobilised for production, consumption or war. Marx was a good student and on the
foundation stone of his Hegelian and anti-Hegelian ideas erected the immense construction of his philosophy
nourished by the several dozen British authorities whom he digested. He raised a 19th century hope for a class
that had lost it in the slums of Manchester and every other industrial city.
All hesitations and reservations had been thrown to the winds, and the individual was raised to the summit,
his private property made supreme and might became right. Hobbes not only invented the modern consumer
society when he declared, for the first time since the dawn of christianity, that happiness did not depend on the
inner quality of the human person as had previously been taught but was a continuous progression from one
physical appetite (‘cupiditas’) to another, but he also prepared the way for the ruthlessness of modern war,
declaring armed conflict the inevitable means of deciding the strongest in a jungle where by nature’s law every
man had a right to everything. Conquest received its benediction. Men, said Hobbes, are basically selfish and
more or less of equal strength. The natural condition of the human kind is ‘a war of every man against every
man ... with continual fear and danger of violent death’. The life of man ‘is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and
short’. The Henry VIIIs, the Elizabeths and the Cromwells obtained a seal of approval and unrestrained liberty
which an Alexander Borgia, a Julius II or a Cardinal Richelieu never did. Henceforth the sluicegates were open
and the lesson has reverberated down to our own time, to the Hitlers, the Stalins and the tyrants of Latin
America and elsewhere.
Summing up the post-Reformation rise of modern capitalism under the term ‘The Launching Pad’, in her book
Progress For A Small Planet (Earthscan Publications, London), Barbara Ward, a world authority and again no
‘Lefty’ but a middle-of-the-road christian, pointed out that the whole of society tilted towards the power of the
land and its profits invested for the benefit of a minority in new machines, first for the agricultural revolution
and then for the industrial.
‘Against these forces, the third and indispensable factor of production, labor, had little chance. Cottagers driven
off the land by enclosures, the urban poor, hand workers disfranchised by the new machines — where could
their countervailing bargaining power be found? They had none. By competing with one another for the new
jobs, they drove wages down to the smallest sum required to keep a worker in existence. Under this “iron law of
wages”, a Lancashire laborer had an expectation of life of seventeen years, women worked underground on all
fours in coal mines, pauper children went manacled to the mills. One can gauge the scale of their drudgery by
one of the first pieces of corrective factory legislation passed in Britain in the early nineteenth century. It limited
children of twelve years and under to an eighty-four-hour week. As William Cobbet bitterly remarked of the
new working classes, no medieval serf had to labour “in a heat of eighty four degrees (Farenheit) and be liable
to punishment for looking out at a window....”’
‘Within a market so biased by power at the top and abject defencelessness at the bottom, the “bargain” gave
the entire surplus gained by the productiveness of the new machines to land and capital and thus produced an
unexpected instability in the whole system.... Workers lost — at a cost we still pay for — the variety, gaiety, and
relative autonomy of earlier traditional societies.... Few breaks in human experience have been as great as the
industrial revolution’s introduction of total work. We are still trying to recover from its merciless effects of
human stultification.’ It was a neurosis rooted in Calvin’s doctrine of predestination and his disciples’ terrified
search in the Old Testament for some sign that they were among the chosen few. They found it in the belief that
worldly success was a sign of salvation. It was the birth of the thing that led to workaholism, the tyranny of the
goodies over the baddies, the power syndrome, imperialism, the arms race, the rape of the earth and today’s
impasse and pollution. It was a dramatic turning of the screw to produce the modern civilisation which no less
an authority than René Girard describes as a tomb under which Christ and his message lie buried.
The System has so far held firm. When Marxism threatened to overturn it and put the masses in power, the
Labour movement, triggered into being largely by the controlling Masonic Order, barred the route. After the
defeat of the British general strike in 1926, the disgruntled miners were forced back down into the pits and large
numbers joined the Communist Party, which doubled its membership in a few months. The Establishment
feared a development similar to that in Russia, and Edward, Prince of Wales, stimulated Freemasonry to draw
labour into the middle ground10. The people were eventually bought off with social security, football and the
media and finally pinned down by hire-purchase and house mortgages. Any social mobility allowed to penetrate
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through into the higher echelons of the Masonic Establishment would be just enough to save face and maintain a
façade of ‘democracy’. But the vast bulk of the masses would know their place and the theocratic regime would
penetrate into the parishes to weigh in the balance. The bourgeoisie would hold the middle ground and the
Establishment would move in the more rarefied atmosphere of the Eton-Oxbridge-Exclusive Club circuit. In the
1960’s a Labour government under Harold Wilson proclaimed the death of the Club System and the coming of
the classless society, with the results we all know (incidentally including the promotion of Wilson himself and
other socialists such as the SDLP catholic from Northern Ireland, Gerry Fitt, and many more into the Club
circuit as an aristocracy sitting among the privileged in the House of Lords).
The mystery of post-Reformation capitalism in England does not lie in its individualism and drive for
success and wealth; if the world is based on the survival of the fittest, perhaps it was a struggle for legitimate
objectives. In terms of social Darwinism these men hungry for power and property perhaps represented the
fittest. The mystery lies elsewhere, in the fact that the people who constituted the bulk of the movement read the
bible religiously, considered strict sabbath observance a central part of their lives and constantly sang psalms
and hymns in honour of a pennyless, homeless knockabout from Galilee who lived among the poor and the
outcast, was not very particular about sabbath observance, constantly broke the Law of God as laid down by its
bible-toting defenders, kept doubtful company, cast frequent aspersions on any preoccupation with material
wealth, preached the famous Sermon on the Mount, said quite plainly that salvation would be attributed to the
poor and those who helped them, and took to himself the words of the prophet:
I hate and hold in horror your feasts and take no pleasure in your solemnities. Deliver me from your noisy
hymns and the sound of your harps. But let right flow like a stream and justice as an unending river.
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4 -
THE LUST FOR POWER
‘For approximately three-quarters of the 16th and 17th centuries’, says Tawney, ‘Europe tore itself to pieces. In
the course of the conflict the spiritual fires of Renaissance and Reformation alike were trampled out beneath the
feet of bravos as malicious and mischievous as the vain, bloody-minded, and futile generals who strut and
posture, to the hateful laughter of Thersites, in the most despairing of Shakespeare’s tragedies....
‘... It is possible that the bankruptcies of Governments have, on the whole, done less harm to mankind than their
ability to raise loans, and the mobilisation of economic power on a scale unknown before armed the fierce
nationalism of the age with a weapon more deadly than gunpowder and cannon ... and the new technique of war,
involving the use of masses of professional infantry and artillery ... was making it ... a highly capitalised
industry ...‘, with the eventual outcome which we have seen in our own times: three empires, the French, the
Russian and the Anglo-American, mobilised twice in the 20th century against a fourth, for death and destruction
on a previously unimagined scale — all adding up to four centuries of murder and mayhem between the
Western powers before we had the new scapegoat of Ronald Reagan’s ‘evil empire’ to excuse our
warmongering, four centuries of state-sponsored aggression which, every time it is reactivated, always arouses
the same delirium among the citizenry, driven by the power Establishment to a mind for slaughter with an
eagerness they would never display in peaceful pursuits. ‘Get the Gerries.’ ‘Kill an Argie before breakfast.’ ‘Kill
‘em, kill ‘em all, and let God sort ‘em out’, with T-shirts screaming, ‘Eat lead you lousy red’. The two last
mentioned examples are from a mass rally held in Las Vegas in September 1986 (described by the Sunday
Times of 21 September) at which, for a mere $15, ‘you could be photographed clutching an enormous machine
gun with one hand’ and in the other ‘a disrobed blonde’ whom you had just saved from the Nicaraguan forest.
The Rambo doctrine in action.
In such matters, the public, the politicians and the media are operating in a vicious circle where it is difficult
to know whether the hen or the egg came first. The masses like their sensationalism because they have been fed
with it for so long that they need their daily dose, the media thrive on it and the warlords and politicians profit
by it and thus have favourable ground whenever they wish to see peaceful citizens, normal neighbours,
hardworking men, fathers of families, converted almost overnight into angry monsters for the myth of the tribal
Nation-State. When Mrs Thatcher sent her armada to attack the Falklands, one commentator said that ‘after the
boredom of the environment we had the excitement of a real crisis’. If we are to be faithful to the past four
centuries and continue the escalation, the victims of our next war will be numbered not in tens but in hundreds
of millions. This mounting state-sponsored violence goes hand-in-hand with increasing ‘democracy’. Medieval
war was merely a series of skirmishes waged by a nobility who were recruited for a particular campaign by a
duke or a king and who were impatient to return home to their estates where life was lived, unlike our modern
soldiery who make their home at the military bases, living a life apart from the country they are supposed to be
serving.
The medieval monarch was subservient not only to God but also to customary law, a sacred thing compared
with the laws which modern democracies make, break and remake with impunity. The Divine Will represented
the goodness which the king was expected to follow, even if he did not always measure up to the standards
proclaimed. He was being constantly reminded that any power he had was vicarious. The archbishop who
crowned the King of France warned him that through the crown ‘you become a participant in our ministry and
as we are the pastors of souls in the spiritual domain you must be the servant of God in the temporal’. Yves of
Chartres wrote to Henry I of England after he mounted the throne: ‘Prince, do not forget that you are the servant
of the servants of God and not their master; you are the protector and not the proprietor of your people’.
In post-Reformation times the prince began to consider himself commissioned to attack people in the name
of a God of law and order. Luther had given them their cue in 1525, calling on them to earn heaven by the
amount of blood they spilled, and Hobbes later constructed a philosophy encouraging the monarch in the use of
the sword at home and abroad. The world belonged to the strongest. Might was right. Instead of deploring the
unfortunate accident of occasional war, denouncing the horror of war and proclaiming the immorality of war,
the Establishment, who no longer, as before, had to lead from the front lines, began to create an attitude which
led to the glorification of war and the erection of monuments in honour of those who were best at killing. The
ground had previously been prepared with the collapse of the great Medieval civilisation, which began in the
14th century, and which, like the fall of Rome, has important lessons for our own time. Then as now, insecurity
and confusion of values began to take hold of society. Then as now the bourgeois businessmen were concerned
with price fluctuation, inflation, devaluation and competition. Then as now they became obsessed with law and
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order and the need for strong centralised government to support them. Then as now the rich bourgeoisie poured
money into the political coffers to influence policy. Then as now the political power began to take centre stage.
Then as now state taxes became heavy with a corresponding search to evade them. Then as now a spirit of revolt
stirred the air. Then as now prostitution, sodomy and dissolute living were becoming widespread. Then as now
there were voices crying in the wilderness against the spreading disintegration. There was much talk of morals
at a time of moral confusion and new forms of popular religion.
Paradoxically there was also as now considerable development of positivist science: the bishop of Lisieux,
Nicolas Oresme, introduced analytical geometry; Nicolas de Cuse and Georges Peurback established the
foundations of modern mathematics and astronomy; the theory of gravity was developed; Albert of Saxony and
Marsilus d’Inghem defined the principles of physics and mechanics; Jean de Linieres calculated the incline of
the earth; Thierry de Frieburg explained the rainbow; Pierre d’Ailly described the spherical nature of the earth;
Francois de Mayronis developed the science of economics; etc. But art, as now, showed an excess of research,
gratuitousness and lack of firmness and direction11’12 And for those who relish their melodrama, the collapse of
the Medieval civilisation was accompanied by the plague, which terrified the people much as the AIDS scourge
does today.
Medieval society had been a thing of relative balance. In the public domain there had been a healthy triangular
affair between church, prince and people, and the balance was always swinging. A striking feature of the times
was the small size, the small finances, the scattered nature and amateurish methods of the ‘armies’, the brevity
of the campaigns and the extreme politeness and absence of hate which accompanied them. “Messieurs les
Anglais tirent les premiers” was perhaps more significant than some cynics have tried to make it. The King had
some contingents provided occasionally by his vassals for short periods, usually limited to 40 days, and he often
had to go literally begging among his subjects for money and support because he had no tax-levying parliament,
civil service, extensive legal powers or police force such as a modern state possesses to dominate its citizens in
what is called democracy, where the ‘demos’ has the privilege of paying and is persuaded that it is also ruling.
The King had on occasion some local help from militiamen where a battle was fought but they were of very
poor military quality. In the 13th century, the first great Capetian King of medieval France, Philip Augustus, had
no army but a few household guards who dined at his table, no civil service but some clerics and no treasury but
the income from his own ancestral estate. Even against the onrush of the Turkish hordes later, the Emperor, with
the support of pope, princes and kings, was never able to assemble more than a mediocre defence force. The
most shameful of the military adventures, the Crusades, which had previously come closest to mobilising
Europe, were mere ragtag affairs.
The Hundred Years’ War, the shipwreck of the medieval civilisation and the Reformation changed all that.
Hobbes added his powerful ingredient at a time when socio-economic, political and military developments
combined to create a new aggressive potential. Individualism penetrated every realm of life. The disintegration
of Europe was reflected in the clear separation of the classes and the disintegration of the individual.
Schizophrenia reached into the mind, which was separated into will, understanding and memory, and was itself,
as the thinking mechanism, separated from the body. Man was truly divided against himself.
The door was thus opened for the entry of the tyrant who had not been seen since the days of paganism. The
schizophrenic individual became cold and inhibited, stereotyped, lacking spontaneity, but interiorly conserving
and hiding his anger, ready to explode in impulsive discharges of violence or war if his subjective will was too
long constrained by objective reality. The new philosophers, from William of Ockham onwards, told him that
truth was whatever the individual decided it was. The Dutch philosopher Spinoza declared that whoever held
power ‘has the sovereign right to command anything he wishes ... and the subject is held to absolute obedience’.
It was a far cry from St Augustine, who had said: ‘... Since we believe in God and are called to His Kingdom,
we cannot be subjected to any man who would attempt to destroy the gift of God of eternal life’.
The Krupp dynasty, forerunner of our modern arms Moloch was founded at a time when increasing military
power was to feed and be fed by the arms industry, both buttressed by the expanding power of the state. Prussia
introduced military service in 1733. Militarisation had further advanced greatly by 1813 when 450,000 men
were engaged in the decisive battle of Leipzig. We became more efficient still as democracy advanced into the
20th century. From 1914 to 1918, some 9 million men of the various armies were killed and 6 million wounded
in the ‘war to end all wars’, when the imperialist powers, in a typical outburst of hypocrisy, called up half the
peoples of the world ‘to fight for the freedom of small nations’. The Irish leaders alone took them literally at
their word and decided to fight for the freedom of their own small nation. Whether by design or accident, the
war came to the rescue of capitalism, threatened as it was by the international revolution of the working classes.
The war whipped up nationalistic antagonisms, the Second International organised no mass opposition and the
trains converged on the war zone carrying the working class of Europe to massive mutual slaughter.
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When the next war came round we were able to achieve an annual average of the previous war’s total deaths
and the slaughter amounted to nearly 50 million military and civilian dead between 1939 and 1945. Our modern,
‘enlightened’ civilisation committed more economic vandalism, destruction and murder in five years than the
barbarians did in five centuries. Time and time again I have visited some of the places where the slaughter of the
two world wars took place. It is a shattering experience: picturesque old villages containing irreplaceable works
of Gothic architecture, where men had lived and laboured for a thousand years, erased from the map without
leaving a trace; acres and acres of cemeteries; young Germans, French, English, Indians, Arabs, Africans ...
sleeping their last long sleep side by side after killing one another, young boys who had no enmity for one
another, driven by the arms manufacturers, the warlords and the politicians into this senseless slaughter.
Of course these young men have their anonymous memorials and what the leaders back home call ‘glory’.
Tremendous comfort going over the top at zero hour with bayonet lunging. Tremendous comfort as you lay
dying in the mud with the rats crawling over you. Tremendous comfort for your beloved ones at home, sisters,
mothers, childhood friends. Once, in World War I the men were courtmartialled by their christian commanders
for having fraternised with the enemy to sing carols on Christmas Day. In the Chemin des Dames, a short drive
from where I am writing these words, half a million horses were massed for the assault on Von Bulow’s 2nd
army. Most of these horses were slaughtered with their men, leaving a scene of desolation that can be viewed in
3-dimensional photographs at the Carrefour de 1’Armistice near Compiegne. The warlords like to talk of the
glory. The intimate records are different: dying men murmuring, ‘My wife and children, I’ll never see them
again’; clutching the hand of a comrade, ‘For pity’s sake, don’t leave me’. Every attack or counterattack was
announced as the signal for final victory. Between mid-April and mid-May 1917, nearly half a million men from
the German and allied sides were wiped out on a stretch of 12 miles. While the warlords were manipulating
abstractions, the men were dying as individuals. Mutiny was denounced as Marxist-inspired, but here is how
René Coutois describes it in his Le Chemin des Dames: ‘Men ... were sick of the butchery, of the attacks
improvised without preparation, which served to mask the lack of any serious strategy. Their revolt was the cry
of human beings pushed to the brink, unscrupulously sacrificed like livestock.’
One of them, Jacques Meyer, has left vivid descriptions13. Bourgeois optimism, pushing the men from safe
quarters behind the lines, decreed that ‘the war to end all wars’ would be a short one. Marshall Joffre, offered
helmets for his men in 1914, replied that they would not have time to wear them:
‘I’ll cut the German pigs to pieces in two months’. As the two months dragged on into winter, corporals and
men in the trenches found it a matter of life or death to protect themselves against the cold and rain with every
conceivable kind of rag, bag and cloth they could lay hands on to tie around their ears and feet. When they soon
became covered with mud, the men were converted to ‘uniform masses, losing the very appearance of human
beings, bearded, long-haired, covered with filth and lice, harassed silhouettes, like hooded ghosts, crawling to
the firing lines’ from which many would never return. Added to the drenching from the rain, there was the
interior moisture from sweat produced by the combination of struggle and fright. To their drenched clothing,
growing heavier with mud at every move, was added the weight of their gear and rations, utensils, guns,
grenades, bread, sugar, tins of the poorest-quality food, shovels, picks ... weighing twenty kilos or more, carried
through the narrow trenches, catching upon every jutting obstruction. And all the while they had to be ready to
grasp the trigger at the first alert, assuming that the trigger was not also jammed with mud and refusing to
respond to numbed fingers. During movements by night there was the added torture of sleep, ‘the head rolling
from side to side the breathing short, the heart beating fast, buzzing in the ears, suffering oozing out of the body
... will we ever stop?’ To young boys frightened of poison gas, the toughs answered, ‘Don’t worry, you won’t
need gas, you’ll die anyway’. Those who survived the gas had to drag their asthmatic bodies for the rest of their
lives unless they died young from tuberculosis. Such are some of the glories of war which the politicians, the
warlords and the arms manufacturers have never known. The famous Irishwoman, Maud Gonne MacBride, then
working as a Red Cross nurse with the French, wrote to Yeats in Ireland that she was nursing the wounded from
six in the morning until eight at night, ‘trying in material work to drown the sorrow of it all — and in my heart
is growing a wild hatred of the war machine’. She was ‘patching up poor, mangled, wounded creatures in order
that they may be sent back again to the slaughter’. ‘Nothing is left standing’, she said, ‘but the insolence of
ammunition manufacturers.'
The medieval king not only had no standing army but was served by no parliament with extensive legislative or
tax-gathering power. When this was instituted a vast change came over the body politic. Henceforth money
would be available to pay a professional soldiery and the race to expand armies and armaments was on. Since
Parliament was increasingly supposed to represent the popular will the people could not but become supporters
of its decisions. Where previously the Mystical Body of the faithful was a tangible reality, the people now
became an abstract notion at the beck of the state. Hobbes’ Leviathan has no life of his own and no will but that
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of a monarch or parliament deciding in his place. No longer would the state have to go abegging for permission
and resources to wage war; it passed laws that gave it both. Warmongering became a government sponsored
industry, increasing simultaneously with the extension of state power. But the citizens are involved in the
slaughter as they are involved in the decisions to go to war. Violence has been made popular. As Karl Marx
pointed out, the parties which, one after another, struggle for power, ‘see the conquest of this enormous edifice
of the state the prey offered to the victor’. The medieval king had no civil servants; the modern government on
taking power auto-matically takes over a great army of them housed in an imposing array of buildings.
Incidentally, the beneficiaries of the vast corpus of law and the state’s interference in the daily lives of its
citizens include those involved in the enormous litigation industry, the lawyers. In the US for example, the
number of lawyers, already very high at 260,000 in 1960, had grown to three quarters of a million by 1989. The
power of the state and its legislative capacity is also indicated by the activity of another category of
beneficiaries, the wealthy pressure groups and their lobbyists: the US now has 337 resident lobbyists for every
one of its senators! It is not possible for a people’s elected representatives to do their duty to the people while
these powerful pressure groups are breathing down their necks, entertaining them in the best restaurants and
bribing them through huge contributions to their re-election funds and to sometimes less worthy endeavours.
Lenin’s thinking was an alteration of Marx in believing that a post-revolutionary period of state power and
dictatorship was necessary until the bourgois revenge-seekers were educated to fit in with the spontaneous will
of the masses. We in the West do not need any such Leninist consolation; we have gone a step further to
democratic acquiescence. What began in Puritan England as the revolt of the individual against the species has
led to the opposite extreme of the anonymous mass imposing its will on the individual. Once we hand over
power to those who are theoretically supposed to represent us in parliament we abdicate and observe
parliamentary proceedings as we might observe a football match. All the parties are playing the same game. But
there is this difference, that whereas the football is of no ultimate concern to the spectators, the parliamentary
struggle for power takes place at our expense. Naturally we obtain benefits. But at what a price. And benefits
which we could organise more cheaply on a voluntary basis. Parliamentarians also grant themselves certain
privileges which they deny to the people whom they pretend are their masters, as for example when they grant
themselves reductions in the taxation they impose on their electors, when they render themselves immune to the
law, when they provide funds for the political parties to increase their indoctrination of the people, when they
give themselves handsome pensions for life after a few years service and when on retirement or electoral defeat
they use their position to garner directors’ fees in various corporations. It is not surprising that they go to such
lengths for election: in the US for example each senator paid an average of $4 million to get elected in 1988
(IHT, 20 March, 1990, from The New York Times).
In the Middle Ages, the most modest extension of state power evoked an immediate reaction. Its anonymous
nature today and the myth that it is of the people enable it to pass insidiously into every aspect of our lives with
hardly a murmur on our part. On the contrary, we look to the state to solve our problems and allow it to lead us
into war almost without protest. President Reagan came to the presidency promising to reduce the power of the
state and ended by increasing it, partly for the production of arms, which caused a large budget deficit that had
to be met not only by reduced social expenditure but also by increasing state income. The number of US
government employees increased from 4,966,000 in fiscal 1981 to 5,210,000 in fiscal 1986. And so the same
process is repeated — increasing state power, increasing militarisation and increasing taxes leading to further
state power, and the unending cycle continues.
When ‘democracy’ theoretically opens the door to power to all its citizens it ensures the permanence of state
power. Bureaucratic socialism offers an example of the manner in which the people become their own slaves,
eager to applaud even reactionary government provided it is elected by themselves. Socialist France since 1981
is a case in point. Never were French election promises so betrayed, never did unemployment mount so high
notwithstanding the collapse in the birthrate, never was French arms production pursued with such vigour and
still ‘the masses who are asses’ (H L Mencken) continued to support a government which betrayed its promises.
After all, it was ‘the people’s government’. Ma part de Verité by Francois Mitterand, candidate for the
presidency, said: ‘Two mortal dangers weigh upon humanity:
the spread of atomic weapons and the poverty of the Third World. I cannot tear myself free of this obsession....
Security, based on the principle “to everyone his atom bomb” makes war and universal death a certainty, the
victor being the one who dies a quarter of an hour after the other’.
It was the same Mr Mitterand who as president became one of Europe’s strongest supporters of AngloAmerican militarism, who made a special trip to Bonn to plead for the installation of new American missiles in
Germany, who raised French arms exports to the Third World to undreamt-of levels — doubled between 1983
and 1984 — who kept the war fires burning in the Middle East by supporting the Israeli policy of encouraging
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the Arab powers to fight one another with French weapons among others, who supported the Anglo-American
attack on the Falklands — Malvinas, who did all in his power to undo what he saw as the damage done to
NATO by de Gaulle’s withdrawing France from NATO’s military command and the expansion of the French
nuclear force which he had been denouncing for 15 years prior to becoming president, before climbing — once
more —on the bandwagon by applauding the Russian peace offensive of 1987—1989 almost as if he had been
its instigator. Rarely have words spoken so much more loudly than actions. This is the same Mr Mitterand who
used to say during election campaigns that he had a fierce personal disdain for money, a cheap insult — coming
from a man who has so much money after a lifetime of taxfree ministerial salaries and pensions and
innumerable perks — launched in the face of the poor who have no disdain at all for money because they do not
know how they are going to pay the bills at the end of the month. Perhaps Mr Mitterand’s greatest gift to the
Masonic Establishment, however, was the brilliant subtlety by which he allied himself with the communist party
in order to destroy it. A great hiatus suddenly developed between socialist propaganda for a quarter of a century
out of power and socialist action once the conquest of power was achieved.
In Britain, those who now believe — after 10 years to enable the people to forget — that the Labour Party could
alter the course of British history after Thatcherism would do well to examine the 1979 press archives and
discover that a Labour government had brought Britain to what was described at the time as national chaos
bordering on anarchy. Mrs Thatcher then swept to power on a tide of popular enthusiasm akin to hysteria
outside 10 Downing Street on 4 May, 1979. The country now seems to be building up to the typical
‘democratic’ situation of the old failures becoming the new saviours, notwithstanding the bankruptcy of Mr
Kinnock’s Labour with regard to constructive solutions. Mrs Thatcher’s own record was summarised by the
Daily Mirror of 10 April,1989. To open her reign her scriptwriter had burrowed back to the 13th century for the
words of St Francis of Assisi:
Where there is discord, may we bring harmony.
Where there is error, may we bring truth.
Where there is doubt, may we bring faith.
Where there is despair, may we bring hope.
The Daily Mirror pursues the subject with quotations from Mrs Thatcher coupled with the facts.
‘We Conservatives hate unemployment. We hate the idea of men and women not being able to use their
abilities.’ [Mrs Thatcher, Conservative conference, October 10, 1975.]
When she became Prime Minister there were 1,303,400 unemployed. By July, 1986, the figure had
reached 3,639,900.
‘Mortgage rates have risen steeply because of the
Government’s financial mismanagement.’ [Conservative
manifesto, 1979.]
The mortgage rate now stands at 13.5 per cent. When Mrs Thatcher became Prime Minister it was 11.75
per cent.
‘A Conservative government will spend more on fighting crime even while we economise elsewhere. Surer
detection means surer deterrence.’ [Conservative manifesto, 1979.]
Crimes of violence soared by 45 per cent between 1979 and 1987 and a further 13 per cent last year.
Sexual crimes rose by 10 per cent last year to 26,800. Nine out of ten women are now afraid to go out alone
at night, according to a recent survey.
‘The Britain I want is a land which cares for the weak, the old and the sick.’ [Mrs Thatcher, The Sun, May
1979.]
Child benefit (£7.25 a week) has been frozen for two years. More than 330,000 poor pupils lost free school
meals with the changes in social security entitlements. In 1980, the Tories cut Labour’s link between pensions
and earnings. But for that change, a single pensioner would now be £9 a week better off and a married couple
£14.
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‘Our party is the party of equality and opportunity.’ [Mrs Thatcher, Conservative Conference, Blackpool,
October 10, 1975.]
The real income of the top 10 per cent of households went up by a third under Thatcher. The real income
of the bottom 10 per cent fell by almost a tenth.
A typical hiatus between promise and performance also occurred in Spain where the anti-NATO socialist
candidate for power, Felipe Gonzalez, was converted to the pro-NATO prime minister as soon as power was
attained, though he subsequently had to back-pedal somewhat under popular pressure. Even the so-called radical
left in a small country such as Ireland, the Workers’ Party, was led by its leader in the spring of 1989 to join the
mainstream political movement in the capitalist EC which the party had been denouncing since its foundation.
Socialism, he said, would have to borrow the efficiencies of capitalism, a first small step, perhaps, towards
borrowing the efficiencies of arms production as a major support for capitalism. Similarly, the Israeli Labour
party puts itself forward as a defender of justice, morality, peace and all the virtues, but when it has participated
in government it has been as ruthless as the others in attacking defenceless Palestinian men, women and children
in the Israeli-held occupied territories.
As I write this letter French socialist President Mitterand is in his second 7 year term. Nothing has changed notwithstanding his quarter century of campaigning and promising the paradise he was preparing for France. Like
the other politicians of our time, he pays a great deal of lipservice to the popular causes but, like the others, has
no real design to change society in any meaningful way. What he has, again like the others, is a flair for tactical
manoeuvring in the corridors of power combined with the rhetoric that pours out incessantly on the air waves
from his party as from his opponents. The end point is that in the words of Alfred de Vigny, ‘Government is the
active symbol of outmoded thinking’. The electorate’s choice is between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, which
leaves the secret power to operate with impunity in the wings. Socialism is largely a lightening conductor to
deflect proletariat passion away from the citadel of power by conveying the illusion to the people, via the party
machinery, that they have a voice in high places.
Professor Bertrand de Juvenel, one of the West’s most respected political scientists of the post-war years,
who held lectureships in several leading universities, including Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, Berkeley and, of
course his alma mater, Paris, and who was the author of more than three dozen major works on political science,
economics, warfare, history and cognate subjects, in his Du Pouvoir (Hachette) makes an exhaustive analysis of
the passage during the past four centuries from the limited power and limited warfare of medieval kings and
nobles via the absolute power and expansionist aggression of the post-Reformation monarchs to the total power
and total warfare of 20th century democracy. He points out that royal power even in its days of absolutism wore
a human face and could be attacked and overturned. Today’s state-power is a faceless, all-pervasive Thing, the
Whole which is stronger than the sum of its parts and which can dominate the fragile individual in every act of
life, which levies its taxes with a sharp hand, raises its police and military to mystic status and throws itself
against all manifestations of the independent will with a vigour that the medieval king could never have
contemplated, and who had no professional police and military to do it even if he had been tempted.
Today there are some 25 million ‘peace-time’ soldiers under arms in the world, of whom approximately 7
million are in NATO and 5 million in the Warsaw Pact. When one remembers that these forces are backed by a
devastating range of the most powerful and sophisticated equipment, compared with the meagre hand weapons
of medieval times, that military costs in the West alone amount to over $1 million a minute (in constant 1985
dollars), that approximately 60 million civilians are engaged in economic activity related to military purposes
and that almost half of the world’s scientists (UNESCO data) are working on military research, it
is clear that a voracious parasite has been introduced into the ‘democratic’ body politic, that
warmongering has become our major industry and that we are heading in the direction of
converting the world into an armed camp that could erupt at any time into uncontrollable
violence, if not apocalyptic destruction should the nuclear Sword of Damocles held over our
heads be allowed to fall by one of the few men who hold it.
Our ‘democracy’ is centred around an all-powerful parliament, which, in the case of the
mother of parliaments in England is also, under the titular head of the monarch, the
controlling organ of a theocratic regime that considers itself, like the several hundred other
churches, to be the descendant of the simple fraternity founded by Christ, with the added
anachronistic anomaly of bishops of the persecuted Galilean sitting as Lords in the upper
house of a political parliament (akin to the bishops of Rome sitting on ‘St Peter’s throne’)
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without even the non-conformists of Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland being any longer
shocked.
Parliaments have three extraordinary powers which medieval kings never dreamed of: the
power to enact an ever-expanding body of law, whereas medieval law was a sacred thing that
could only be touched with extreme care; the power which the politicians and civil servants
give themselves to impose an increasing burden of taxation on the people VAT, customs
levies, excise, death duties, property taxes, income tax, and fees and licences for various
things; and the power to ensure that their decisions are executed by an enormous body of civil
servants and police, the size and authority of which would have made the medieval monarch
think he had arrived in Alice’s Wonderland. In the US, 18.2 per cent of the labour force is in
the civil service; the proportion in France is 24.7 per cent and in other European countries the
figure is probably somewhere between these two. Furthermore, tax gathering falls heaviest on
the middle classes; the very rich have methods of tax evasion not given to ordinary mortals.
Supporting and nourishing what Juvenel and other authorities describe as ‘totalitarian
democracy’ is the keystone of the whole system: the political party structures extending their
—
tentacles into every fissure and crack of every village and hamlet under the control of the parliamentarians who
are themselves under the control of the secret powers operating from the wings, aided and abetted by the media.
It should also be remembered that the political parties, not the people, hold the power of nominating candidates
for election. Those with most money or influence and with the greatest lust for power are chosen. They are thus
given access to the corridors of power, to insider knowledge and to those involved in the wheeling and dealing
and the first beneficiaries are family, relatives and friends who helped to get them elected, rather than the most
needy, the most reticent and the most deserving.
Far from being ‘government of the people, by the people and for the people’, ‘democracy’ is the
Establishment’s greatest friend, the strong right arm of The System, the guarantor of its permanence.
Dictatorships are fragile, a standing challenge for the overthrow of The System; so-called ‘democracy’ is The
System, which is why the word is constantly on the lips of those who profit from The System. Even the bestintentioned individuals in a hurry to grasp power or wealth or both become bogged down in crisis management
and do not have either the time or the inclination for the long-term altruistic vision, and fall to paying mere lipservice to it. They could be reiterating one of the modern deities, Lord Keynes, who said, ‘In the long term we
are all dead’. As Adam Michnik, editor of the Polish Solidarnosc daily, Gazeta Wyborcza, said, it is necessary
for the power of a political party to be able to name and attack an adversary. In the old days of romantic
nationalism, the marchers galvanised the people by pointing to the threat from the frontier, the way the marchers
in Paris at the time of the Revolution were shouting about the threat from Austria at a time when Austria was no
threat at all. Similarly, in its struggle for power, the political party must point to its opposite number as its
enemy and the enemy of the public. This is its ladder to power and the basis of totalitarian ‘democracy’.
The most power-hungry men rise to the top, the struggle to destroy their competitors corrupts them and the
adrenalin generated can drive them to further excess on gaining power. When thwarted they appeal to the
gallery and mobilise their supporters, sometimes almost to the point of frenzy, and this gives them an added
psychic impulse that can lead them over the precipice. In his diagnosis of narcissistic pathology, explaining the
conflict between narcissism on the one hand and, on the other, reason, altruism and the values which make a
man human, Eric Fromm says that the narcissistic person is alone and frightened at heart and his self-inflation is
an attempt at self-protection. Fromm continues: ‘The narcissism of the leader who is convinced of his greatness,
and who has no doubts, is precisely what attracts the narcissism of those who submit to him.’ The most neurotic
leader is often the most successful, until ‘his rage reactions in consequence of any set-back, his need to keep up
the image of omnipotence may provoke him to make mistakes which lead to his destruction’.
A valuable contribution to the study of modern Western ‘democracy’ has been made by Desmond Fennell
(Beyond Nationalism — The Struggle against Provinciality in the Modern World, Ward River Press, 1985),
writing not from academic theory but from his years of personal experience in trying to organise self-governing
local communities as part of a federal whole, to be thwarted and finally defeated by the politicians and media
men. In the course of his work and travels he was also able to draw upon the experience of others in different
countries working with the same aim, including the renowned Professor Northcote Parkinson. The objective was
‘a new kind of world liberation movement in which each frustrated community, freeing itself from selfobsession, would work for a world of realised communities in place of the massified world of empires — not by
the forcible “masculine” method of engineering it into being but by the seductive “feminine” method of
representing it, as reality and latent possibility, to a humanity which desired it in its heart of hearts’ (cf.
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Teilhard’s reference to future Man being made of a Body of bodies, a Brain of brains and a Heart of hearts) ‘as
it desired its own being. For humanity desires itself (an accurate reflection from fundamental psychology).
Fennell demonstrates, as Marx did before him, the destructive imperialism of the Establishment class. This is
natural in a ‘masculine’ world of social Darwinism in which the most power-hungry men and women reach the
top. Again like Marx, Fennell shows the relationship between the imperialist mind operating on the domestic
front and abroad and its action in producing provinciality and the slave mind among its own people as among
those it dominates elsewhere. On the domestic front it is partly effected through the power and the glamour
emanating from the capital city, and even ‘a movement of national liberation has often developed into the
imperialism of a national metropolis over its own nation’.
With regard to the religious component of this imperialism, he quotes Paul Goodman, a dissenting Jew:
‘With the increasing powerlessness of people in centralised social organisations and the ordering of their
behaviour by systems of technology, the religious problem is no longer how souls are to be saved, but how to
have human beings at all’. Fennell pushes the religious aspect an important degree further, away from Luther’s
concept of the lonely soul communing with its creator, ‘solus cum solo’. ‘God and Christ’, says Fennell, ‘live
and work on earth through man functioning according to human norms. Since we are not realised as a people or
social body in the normal human ways, the people of God and the body of Christ lack the ordinary human
prerequisites for their incarnation in us’. Instead of a humanly living body, our social malformation makes us
corpse-like. ‘The strain of remaining attached to an institutional Church which is alien to life, and which
alienates us as persons, is at last proving too much for many lively young people’. Fennell is here calling for
restoration of the vital social element which early Christianity enjoyed in the original Ekklesia, the assembly of
the people, and of the principle that the social is required for the presence of Christ.
It is not surprising that part of the attitude of ecclesiastics, as Fennell indicates, is not so much ‘to make secular
life perceptibly valuable and meaningful again by revealing its intrinsic sacredness’, but to make the church
appear meaningful to a world which the clerics and their lay colleagues believed to be meaningful already. The
leading ecclesiastics and intellectual churchgoers are at one ‘with all those technocrats, academics, bureaucrats,
financiers and politicians who had buttressed themselves with power and a fabricated “meaningfulness” against
the hungry emptiness of their hearts, the shadows in the back of their minds, and that desolate sense of absurdity
which was the core experience of the age, the theme of its greatest artists, and the oppression weighing heavily
on its well-fed masses.... Not for them to imagine for one moment that they were possessors of a revelation
which the age had not got and stood direly in need of. It was not their belief that the fact of Jesus Christ,
revealed in all its consequences for, and applications to, the realm of the everyday, would bring this world and
all its rulers tumbling down, make its wisdom appear absurd, and found a new world. The present world was not
absurd in their eyes. On the contrary they approached it with a credulous admiration ... in the wishful belief
that its science and knowledge, and its great accumulation of administrative, political and
physical machinery, had given life a new, previously unheard-of meaning’. What they sought
for their church, and by implication for Christ, ‘was a recognised niche in this machinery:
they wanted a place for their theology among the accepted “isms” of the times.’
Returning to the general aspects, Fennell points out that imperialism ‘is not something
which exists in finished form, but a process which is always proceeding in this age... a
gathering and piling up of power in a centre, and in the hands of a ruling class in that centre’.
Referring to the beginning of Rome’s decline and the British and other empires, he says that
‘imperialism always comes at the end of a great culture when the inherent power of the
culture and of the peoples who took part in it is exhausted. The EEC is an imperialist
process.’
Sometimes, especially under socialist governments, state power pre-empts any effort by local
communities to take themselves in hand. This has happened here in France since the arrival
of the socialists in power in 1981. In 1982 a vast corpus of legislation was introduced
concerning, as the preamble to the relevant Act says, ‘the rights and liberties of the
communes, the departments (= counties) and the regions’. We now have 22 regions, 100
departments and 36,527 communes with state guaranteed rights, duties and subsidies and
managed by over half a million councillors. The result is that every power-hungry individual got in on the act,
competition for subsidies in return for votes became intense, the multinationals were brought in to operate at
strategic centres, the villages are dying, the arts and crafts with high employment content are disappearing, the
ordinary people are looking on as spectators and Paris has become the glamorous hub of the power wheel a
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thousand times more than it was in the days when the Sun King reigned from his Temple of Apollo in
Versailles.
Totalitarian ‘democracy’ is naturally supported by the media, which not only receive their profits from The
System and act as its mouthpiece but also obtain their daily sustenance through the ephemeral socio-political
rhetoric feeding the press and the voracious appetite of planetary television, by which we now have virtually a
non stop world election campaign and get as interested in the internal policies of far-away democracies as if
they could make any difference to us, when the real power is hidden. After President Carter’s election, one of
his staff, P H Caddell, stated in a confidential report of 10 December, 1976, that it was not possible to govern
the people without continuous manipulation of public opinion and the maintenance of a permanent political
campaign. Media coverage deals more with the clash of personalities than with any real clash of policies.
I shall make no apology if in these letters I should quote Mr Tony Benn MP again and again, because he is
the only politician I know of who is doing any thinking, which is why the Establishment class are furious with
him and itching to silence him, since thinking is the most dangerous thing on earth, the thing that undermined all
the thrones of history, the thing the media would stop us from doing so that we all became mere receptors of
received ideas. He is a man driven by a passion for justice and truth, two things which could transform the world
if ever they were allowed to gain sway. Here is what Mr Benn, who is in a unique position to know, says about
the political system:
“We have parliamentary arguments and media coverage that are often superficial and shallow and confined
to personalities who exchange abuse, armed primarily with slogans drawn from the think tanks of the
advertising agencies. Indeed, as the situation gets worse, there are clear signs that the governing classes in all
parties are huddling together nervously, united by a denunciation of all those who question the central tenets
of the establishment — identifying them as extremists, loonies, revolutionaries, wreckers or mindless
militants who can be lumped together as ‘the enemy within’, and are best dealt with by the security services
or by the disciplinary machinery of the Labour Party.
And if the dissent expresses itself in demonstrations then the riot police are called in and the ultimate
weapon is a shoot-to-kill policy authorised by Crown prerogatives and upheld by the courts as necessary in
the interest of national security.
But it would be wrong to place the responsibility for all that has happened on the people at the top. For we
are all accessories by our acceptance of this system, expressed through the ballot box in elections which
make those who vote for the status quo, expressed in any political party, guilty of collusion with what is
being done.
If all or most of these charges against the present British political set-up can be sustained — as I believe they
can — it must be obvious that any serious attempt to improve our society will call for a strategy of reform
that goes far beyond anything that has been discussed, agreed or attempted by any major political party in
Britain.
Policies may change with differing circumstances and, unless we have a clear idea of the criteria which
should guide policy, we can sink into a swamp of pragmatism or ad hockery where everything that has to be
done is looked at in isolation, without any regard to what came before or what will follow or to parallel
issues that bear upon the decisions that need to be made.
The time has come when we should all be asking who has the power, how did they get it, in whose interests
do they use it, to whom are they accountable and how can they be removed (Tawney Memorial Lecture,
London, 19 March, 1988).”
Since we shall be dealing specifically with this fundamental question under your last chapter, let us now
continue with the effort towards a diagnosis of our difficulties.
The indoctrination of the people with the lie that they are ruling, compared with the secret vigilance under
dictatorship, compounded with the political demagogy transmitted through ‘charismatic’ personalities via the
media, has a soporofic effect. As James Reston pointed out regarding President Reagan’s popularity, ‘The
people like him because they are like him: hopeful, amiable and more interested in personality than in facts’. It
is commonly thought that the two-or-three-party regime provides for healthy conflict and debate, but the conflict
is confined to noisy argument about details and non-essentials which often amounts to mere exchange of insults
of a personal nature but never challenges the essence of The System because those in opposition are awaiting
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the day when they can assume the mantle of power that The System offers. Day after day in our newspapers,
night after night on our television screens, we hear party hacks and party leaders, unable or unwilling to produce
anything of substance as a realistic alternative to The System, lowering themselves, their parties and the general
tone of society to the level of the gutter with remarks directed to the gallery for cheap applause and cheap votes,
of the type used, say, by Mr Neil Kinnock, leader of the British Labour party, when (9 April, 1989) he called
Mrs Thatcher ‘the immaculate misconception’, to thunderous applause from his supporters, and referred to the
Tory party as being made up of ‘spivs and Philistines’, remarks which express nothing so much as the
bankruptcy of their author’s thinking.
Brooks Adams in the US put the question of our ‘democracies’ succinctly with his comment that the sole
problem of our ruling class was whether to coerce or to bribe the powerless majority. In practice there is a
shrewd mixture of the two. When the affairs of the nation go wrong, performance fails to live up to promise and
the election comes round, those in power naturally fight to hold on, but it is often a sham fight and when they
are defeated they are half glad, knowing that a period in opposition is the best cure for declining popularity. One
of Hitler’s principles was that the people’s memory is short. A few years is enough to reestablish the failures as
the new saviours, aided and abetted by their favourite media. To watch the tribalistic antics of supporters
celebrating an election win by their heroes, who are about to fleece them once more, is a pathetic spectacle of
‘democracy’ in action, a result of decades of media indoctrination following previous decades of mass
‘education’ designed to produce the non-thinking, mass man.
The joke that used to be made about the British Conservative party could be almost equally well applied to
all parties in all countries: getting votes from the poor and party funds from the rich by promising to protect
each from the other. The facilitating context is the incapacity of the infantile mentality to stand on its own feet
instead of clinging to a political father figure. The press lords and media barons, operating from within the same
governing Freemasonry that instituted the education system, are determined that the system from which they
profit will not be changed and that all radical analysis of essentials is replaced by a smokescreen of animated
discussion of secondary matters, which, naturally, includes bickering between politicians and media men in the
game of points scoring on matters of no moment.
The media organise public opinion polls which pose carefully chosen questions, obtain answers limited to
the stated questions and then call the politician and say, ‘Here are the matters that interest the public’ and thus
obtain his confirmation. The vicious circle is thereby continuously impelled like a merry-go-round. The
politician is glad to play the game because, apart from his belonging to the same Masonry or group of its fellowtravellers intent on not changing The System, the game gives him safe personal prestige without raising
awkward questions. A minor variation on this strategy is the manner in which interviewers of political
personages on newscasts pose pointed lead questions, deliberately phrased as critical, to give the interviewee an
opportunity to provide the right answer for the public.
Elections are increasingly played out less to sanction or oppose a programme than to decide personal popularity
and the ability to flatter. President Reagan, re-elected for a second disastrous debt-building term by a landslide
victory in 1984, was at once the most incompetent, the most popular and the most showbiz president the United
States has had to date. And it is more than symbolic that for the best part of a week the quadrennial Party
Convention showbiz in both parties is organised by media men, the media monopolise the show and the whole
nation goes berserk at the very moment when what should be required is a period of peace, quiet reflection and
calm presentation of the real issues.
Rousseau was no doubt wrong in seeing society suppressing liberty, by definition. This was a mere
philosophical concept which has little scientific basis in fact. But Rousseau was not so foolish as to think that a
return to primitivism was possible and, accepting society as a fact of life, he saw the necessity for free
assemblies of the people and the danger in the delegation of power. His views of parliamentary democracy may
be said to be summarised in the following comment on the English ‘democratic’ regime: ‘The English people
believe themselves to be free: they are fooling themselves. They are free only during the election of the
members of parliament. As soon as they are elected, they (the people) are slaves, they are nothing. In the brief
interlude of their freedom they put it to such poor use that they deserve to lose it.’ Today we should add that
with our massive media and party pressure the people are not even free at election time.
It will be said that the West has made enormous progress in science, well-being, health and life expectancy.
But to claim this as due to our present system is a typical ‘non-sequitur’. Progress has been a developing fact of
life for over a million years, ever since the human species emerged from the animal kingdom. It was greatly
contributed to by the Asiatic and Arab societies before its acceleration in medieval and modern times and it will
no doubt continue if and when the West sinks. In Christian times it could have been accomplished and indeed
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was in the Middle Ages before the collapse of health and life expectancy from the 14th to the 19th century
(beginning with the plague that came from the Orient), without the hecatomb with which democracy now
accompanies it.
Long-term science and the human welfare which ought to be its only ‘raison d’etre’ is not helped but hindered
by our mountainous waste of resources, the rape of the earth, the struggle for power, the vulgarity of the wealthy
and the escalating violence due partly to the acquisitiveness promoted by the gargantuan publicity and media
industry designed not for human welfare but to enrich the rich. Furthermore, we are not getting our health on the
cheap. For example, to purchase health annual French spending rose from 8 per cent of the family budget in
1963 to 16 per cent in 1988 and to 20 per cent projected for the century’s end. If we did not have the waste of
the million-dollar-a-minute military industry and had less pollution in our food and water, less medicines to buy
to support the pharmaceutical companies and less stress from our modern patterns of living, we could have more
preventive medicine, better and cheaper health, hospitals and mental homes less full and more psychosomatic
well-being.
The Middle Ages had the ‘advantage of the disadvantage’ that power was relatively fixed in a particular
class, which meant that those who had no expectation of acceding to it were in a position to be often extremely
radical in their criticism. Today when we are all potentially involved we are more hesitant. When politics
becomes a constant media spectacle and the state has so much power of taxation and legislation and such a body
of civil servants and police to enforce it, it is natural, as Juvenel put it, that life goes where life is and that the
vitality of a nation tends to be drawn towards the centre and everybody becomes eager for a share, through
himself, in a relative or a friend.
Barbara Ward pointed out14 that the medieval papacy, for all its faults, represented laws, interests and ideals
beyond the reach of state government. Thomas More went to the scaffold rather than recognise Henry VIII as
supreme head of the church of England because he foresaw the growth of tyranny with the gathering of civil and
religious power in one hand. Luther’s taking the side of the princes against the people and declaring that the
former should wield a sword that ‘must be red and bloody’ was a factor in creating later Prussian militarism
culminating in the rise of Adolf Hitler. Catholic countries also became despotic, but, as J N Figgis said in his
Studies of Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius, without Luther there would have been no Louis XIV. And
no Richelieu. This may be true, but it is also true that without the corruption of the Roman catholic church in the
14th and 15th centuries there would, no doubt, have been no Luther or Calvin and therefore no Henry VIII or
Oliver Cromwell. And without the error that had previously been creeping into the church for over a thousand
years, there would perhaps have been no Renaissance popes. But these are matters for the second half of your
dissertation. Suffice it here to say, in the words of Barbara Ward, that state absolutism became ‘the universal
rule in the Western world since the disappearance of our society’s first weak and embryonic experiment in
international order, the medieval church’.
What in the Middle Ages was only one of the three ‘etats’ operating in a precarious, tripartite balance of
power, the monarch, the church and the people, has been reduced to a single Imperium, the power of ‘the
sovereign people’. But it is purely theoretical power, restricted to an abstraction with its own connivance,
flattered at election time, manipulated for the rest of the time, allowed the privilege of a seat in the gallery via
the media which, in turn, are controlled by a few. The subtlety of our Western totalitarian democracy lies in our
belief that we are ruling while the real power is secret and unidentifiable. George Urban, a strong anticommunist, in conversation with the late Luigi Barzini in Encounter (May 1978) said that
in Britain and the US, editorial opinion of the kind that matters, for example on Soviet affairs, is decided by
half-a-dozen leader writers; by making three telephone calls in the middle of the afternoon, one can obtain a
fairly precise picture of what ‘British opinion’ is going to be the following morning.... Where in all this does
the little man come in? It is perhaps as well that he does not realise ... to what extent his personal fortunes,
indeed his survival, are subject to decisions made by a few men in his name but without him.... I am a little
disturbed to see, in America for example, the same men wearing so many different hats: one day as scholars,
the next as ambassadors, then again as senators, members of some Presidential task force, leader-writers,
strategic analysts, television interviewers, consultants to politically-loaded foundations — the list is almost
endless.
But even this is only the penultimate part of Establishment power. The real power is hiding in the wings.
In seeking to capture power, the ‘credible’ parties must move towards the ideological centre where they can
hope to catch the important election-winning marginal votes to their left or their right. This means that
‘electorable’ parties differ more in personalities, methodology and tactics than in their basic philosophies and
61
there is constant osmosis and contagion between their policies. By way of example, in the mid-1980’s we saw
the strivings of the American Democratic party to climb on the bandwagon of the militarism which it had seen
as having been greatly responsible for the victories of the hawkish American right in 1980 and 1984. Mr Robert
S Strauss, who was then Democratic Party national chairman, said about this: ‘We have a softness image that
has hurt us in contemporary times’. Mr Stuart Eizenstat, former adviser to President Carter, deplored the
‘perception that Democrats are unwilling to project our nation’s military power’. In 1986, Representative Les
Aspin, Wisconsin Democrat and chairman at the time of the House Armed Services Committee was, according
to Representative L Au Coin, Democrat of Oregon, ‘leading a mad scramble to find some (new, military)
weapon the party can throw its arms around’, and was in favour of more funding for the Pentagon’15. Mr Aspin
was a dove and turned hawk either to row with the tide or because he was being manipulated by the occult
power in the background. We have observed the same hawkishness developing in left-liberal parties in Europe.
Juvenel, like Hilaire Belloc, Daniel Rops and other historians, has shown how Rome’s decline set in when some
individuals began to amass large fortunes, enrich themselves from the exploitation of the conquered countries
and buy out smaller producers. At one end of the social scale an insolent plutocracy rose to the top and at the
other end the masses of the dispossessed peasantry became impoverished and ready to listen to the latest
demagogue preparing to trample on their liberty even as they propelled him into power. There is nothing new
under the sun. As the rich grain merchants and the Western industries using Third World land to feed their
factories have destroyed the capacity of Third World farmers to produce their own food and thus driven them
into the shantytowns where a policy of low grain prices becomes a new lifebelt, so Caius Gracchus, by lowering
wheat prices and distributing rations to every citizen, brought an influx of ex-smallholders into Rome, and
instead of a vigorous, independent citizenry, created a lumpenproletariat avid for ‘panem et circenses’. Instead
of the former system whereby any citizen could be temporarily called to participate in administering the affairs
of what was a true republic, the state began to form its own permanent civil service. Instead of a defence force
formed of yeomen farmers, the standing army was established and it soon became an aggressive imperialistic
force. The modern state was born. It was born from the inequality between the rich who were dictating their
policy and the poor who required protection. They found it in the state and liberty disappeared in the process.
Bertrand de Juvenel makes a singular comparison between the two Gracchi — the one who wanted to restore
equality and the one who instituted the modern state on the backs of the deprived — and the two Roosevelts.
The first Roosevelt attempted to develop equality against plutocracy and failed against the same egoism of the
powerful that caused the downfall of Tiberius. The second accepted the ‘fait accompli’ and built the modern
American state on the lines of the early Roman Empire with the support of the unemployed and the weak.
Individual liberty bowed out and social law took its place. Unfortunately, social law has its limits, and
notwithstanding the glorification of our theoretically egalitarian justice in practice there is one law for the rich
and another for the poor, a matter which has been expounded in relation to the Western world by such legal
authorities as J P Jean and F Guichard16.
Those who campaign for greater justice are sometimes calumniated, as when Mr Edward Meese, President
Reagan’s last minister for justice, declared that the American Civil Liberties Union was merely a lobby for
criminals. And yet, a study in Georgia on two thousand cases of homicide showed that the murder of a white
person was four times more likely to be punished by the death penalty than the murder of a black person. Such
defects of the ‘democratic’ system are not, however, the end of the story. The American R M Restak says17 that
there is ‘always the danger that more authoritarian, more rigid and repressive influences will be freely selected’.
This would be facilitated through indoctrination because the Western Establishment now holds in its hands
massive means of subtle mind manipulation through state-controlled education, school texts and the new
plutocratic oligarchy of a handful of press lords and media barons helping to prepare the way for possible
‘democratic’ enslavement. Adolf Hitler did not storm any barricades in 1933: he was chosen Chancellor of
Germany by a democratically elected parliament in a law-abiding manner after his party obtained over
17,000,000 votes and 288 seats in the elections of 5 March, to the applause of Great Britain at this choice of a
stalwart anti-communist. A few months later, as if to prove his democratic principles, Hitler organised a
referendum and received 40,500,000 votes to take Germany out of the League of Nations, against only
2,100,000 voting against him, a massive show of popular support and democracy in action.
Our own chickens might yet come home to roost. The people have been so indoctrinated with anti-Marxism
in its corrupt variant of Leninist-Stalinism that if a new Fascist ‘saviour’ were to arise they might be persuaded
to follow him into an apocalyptic world adventure that could signal the end of Western civilisation as Hitler’s
spelled the destruction of historic Germany. The whirlwind election cavalcade of a modern presidential
candidate in America resembles nothing so much as Hitler’s Mercedes sweep across Germany. Soviet Russia
had nothing comparable, though it will now, no doubt, with the arrival of capitalism, produce its own variant of
the process.
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Vance Packard in The Hidden Persuaders quotes a research engineer, Curtiss R Schafer of the Norden-Ketay
Corporation, as follows: ‘The ultimate achievement of biocontrol may be the control of man himself.... The
controlled subjects would never be permitted to think as individuals. A few months after birth, a surgeon would
equip each child with a socket mounted under the scalp and electrodes reaching selected areas of brain tissue....
The child’s sensory perceptions and muscular activity could be either modified or completely controlled by
bioelectric signals radiating from state-controlled transmitters’. This, of course, is merely a Fascist-minded piece
of technocratic dreaming, but such claims considered in the context that almost 50 per cent of the world’s
scientists are working for the military arm and taken in conjunction with a multitude of everyday practices
described by Packard, show that Big Brother’s ambition knows no bounds and that ‘eternal vigilance is the price
of liberty’. A few well documented books — as, for example, The Rise of the Computer State, The Threat to our
Freedoms, our Ethics and our Democratic Process, by David Burham (New York) — have been written on the
dangers of the massive increase in the use of computerised information by security agencies, police informers,
tax gatherers, insurance companies and private corporations.
These powerful organisations are now being put in a position, partly through the tax burden levied on the
citizen, to pry into the life of this same tax-paying citizen to a frightening extent and at the mere press of a
button to have an instant report on his telephone calls, his financial transactions, his way of life, his expenditures
and amusements, his travels and so on. Former French Minister of the Interior, Charles Pasqua, illustrated the
philosophy behind this by saying out loud what many politicians and higher civil servants think to themselves:
‘Democracy ends where the interest of the state begins’. This was the philosophy of Adolf Hitler. And in
Britain, Lord Denning, the highest legal authority in the land, said in march 1988 that it was more important to
uphold public confidence in The System than let innocent people free who had been jailed in error by The
System. From democratic Denmark it is reported that every citizen is now numbered with a figure which he uses
in every activity from the registration of his residence to the opening of a bank account, payment of taxes, the
registration of his official doctor, the receipt of social security payments and pensions, paying electricity bills,
dealing with police and so on. One almost begins to wonder when will some officious administrator think of
having everybody indellibly marked with his number, tagged like livestock. The fragile flower of liberty
depends on the proportion of people in a given society who prefer to be its watchdogs than to participate in the
power that destroys it. The decadent society is the one where the desire for wealth and power is most
widespread and the people are willing to sacrifice their liberty for the most illusory participation in power. The
vigorous society is, on the contrary, the one which has the greatest repugnance for power, either in its exercise
or in its submission to it; this is the society of freemen. There are nations where the passion for power so
exceeds the love of personal freedom that men will sacrifice the substance of liberty for the shadow of
dominance, destroying the former by the exercise of the latter. The West has a unity of political, cultural and
economic command in the hands of Masonry’s Thirty Third Degree which is worse than that which used to be
exercised by the Kremlin because it convinces the masses that democracy has given them control. There are
some signs of a possible dawn breaking over the horizon as people begin to lose confidence in a political regime
that allows ‘opposing’ parties to waltz in and out of power without changing anything of the fundamental causes
of our disarray. They are partners in the waltz for which the occult powers play the tune and the people look on
as spectators.
After an election it is said in the terms of the tired old slogan that ‘the people have decided’, when in fact the
people have decided nothing at all. ‘The people’ is an abstraction beloved of the politicians. What happens at an
election is that the people are presented with two or three teams of demagogues supported by massive publicity
which can be indulged in only by the dominant parties, financed largely, even here in socialist France, by men
of wealth. The majority of die-hard party faithful then cast their tribal votes as they have always done, a large
slice — 50 per cent in US presidentials, some 65 per cent in congressionals — wisely boycott the masquerade,
and a small minority of floating votes in the middle give one side a victory out of all proportion to the size of
this floating vote, which is not even independent in that it can only choose between Tweedledum and
Tweedledee. ‘Plus ca change, plus c’est pareil.’ There are also the anomalies of the system. Example: in the
parliamentary elections of 11 June, 1987, the British opposition obtained 17.7 million votes while Mrs
Thatcher’s party triumphed with 13.7 million (out of a total registered electorate of 43 million) and in the 1989
British elections for the European Parliament, the Greens won no seat although they obtained 14 per cent of the
votes. Another example: in the French elections of March 1986, 35 of the 37 socialist ministers of a government
‘rejected by the people’ retained their lucrative parliamentary seats to wait until another swing of the floating
vote returned them once more to ministerial or equivalent power.
An example of the ineffectiveness of government was provided by France in the 1950’s when The System
sailed on gallantly for some 10 years until May 1958, even launching achievements such as the Green Pool, the
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Coal and Steel Community and the EC virtually without a government because governments were falling every
few months. Later a powerful statesman of the stature of General de Gaulle confided to one of his ministers,
Alain Peyrefitte, (reported in Peyrefitte’s Le Mal Francais), that ‘Le pouvoir c’est l’impuissance’, which might
be freely translated, ‘Political power is powerless’.
In a society of freemen risk would be a personal charge, for, in the words of Juvenel, ‘the plenitude of liberty
implies the plenitude of risk’. Juvenel describes our present Western regime, as ‘the most despotic the West has
ever known, whatever the colours in which it drapes itself’. Like all despotic regimes, he says, it is unstable and
spreads servility and disorder. Its every effort to impose order must necessarily result in greater disorder, for, as
the anthropologist René Girard has pointed out, when the socio-cultural fabric begins to disintegrate as it is
doing today ‘any attempt to reconstitute it artificially can only lead to the bloodiest abomination’. Part of the
disorder lies in the spreading cancer of the arms industry, an expression of the lust for power. That is the
question you are taking up in your next chapter.
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5 -
ESCALATING THE ARMS RACE
And I know even more, even more
I can tell:
Once, by his violent hand, a dragon fell.
He bathed in blood, grew hard, and cannot
be slain.
And many have seen this, again,
and again, and again.
The Nibelungenlied
A new era was opened in warfare in October 1941 when the British Government decided to include direct
attacks on civilian centres in its bombing programme. Previously, in our times, civilian casualties were an
indirect result of attacks on military and industrial targets or of misdirection and error, at least in Europe; in
colonial warfare, imperialist air forces had bombed civilians in the 20s and 30s, but those people were ‘only
Blacks’.
A portent of how British thinking was moving had already appeared in 1940: though Hitler had given express
orders not to bomb London but concentrate on military targets, Churchill ordered the bombing of Berlin in an
effort to inveigle Hitler and Goering into bombing London with a view to gaining American sympathy and
military hardware. When the Germans did finally retaliate on London and other cities, as pointed out by David
Irving18 ‘unlike ... the big city populations, Churchill was nearly always forewarned by British Intelligence of
coming Nazi air raids, and fled from the capital, to return and show the familiar bulldog expression in the
devastated streets next day’; Irving documents this fact. A book by one of Britain’s most authoritative surviving
intelligence officers was banned by the British government in March 1989 ‘in the interest of national security’, a
new sacred cow being used as a cover-up for various kinds of questionable activities. This book, written by the
man who had broken the Japanese secret intelligence code, apparently shows that Churchill knew in advance of
the Japanese attack on the American fleet in Pearl Harbour and chose not to inform the US so as to bring that
country into the war.
Four months after the October 1941 decision, the Government added a further escalation when, in February
1942, they decided to make the killing of civilians the RAF’s first priority. Carpet bombing was henceforth
implacably expanded on both sides, accompanied by a mounting toll of the lives of innocent women and
children, until, as the war was drawing to a close, it culminated with a last great fling, a kind of triumphalist
victory celebration, on Ash Wednesday 1945, when Dresden, the pearl of Central Europe, the modern Athens,
was engulfed in devastating destruction, together with some 150,000 of its citizens, without military rhyme or
reason (like the monastery of Monte Casino and other priceless treasures) by three waves of, respectively, 245,
529, and 450 Lancaster bombers of the Royal Air Force. Sir Arthur Harris, chief organiser for Dresden-style
targets, was stopped one day by a policeman for reckless driving and told that he might kill someone. ‘So
what?’ he replied, ‘I kill thousands of people every night.’ Later, in the Nuremberg trials, the victorious Allies,
knowing that they could have been put in the dock by a neutral people’s tribunal for crimes against humanity in
Germany, Hiroshima and Nagasaki and for a massive breach of the established rules of war, unilaterally decided
not to consider the planned massacre of civilians by aerial bombardment as against the rules — an example, in
the military field, of how our ‘democratic’ governments and parliaments can make black, white, simply by
changing the law.
It has been stated by Liddel Hart, historian of both the first and the second World War, by Professor B V A
Rolling, one of the panel of the Far East military tribunal judging war crimes and by other authorities, that after
the collapse of Germany, Japan saw the end in sight and sent out feelers for peace, knowing that there was no
hope of victory against the armadas of the world now massing against her, the Anglo-American, French and
Russian empires plus the human tidal wave of China. A demonstration of the American A-bomb elsewhere than
on two cities, with large populations of innocent men, women and children, would, it was said, have been more
than enough to obtain a Japanese surrender. And if in the context of a combined Western and allied Russian war
against Japan, the hand of recognition and fairplay had then been held out to Russia, which had had its country
torn asunder, its economy ruined and nearly 25 million of its people killed (by comparison with 7 million
German dead and very small American casualties) the world could perhaps have begun to initiate a counterescalation towards a growing peace process between war-time allies.
American diplomacy knew better than to think that the sanguinary tyrant, Joseph Stalin, who, like the worst of
the old Czars, had held Russia in his vice-like grip for a quarter of a century, was immortal. But all question of
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distinguishing between the Soviet dictator, the Soviet regime and the Russian people was carefully excluded.
The American military-industrial complex saw the danger to its power, position and wealth of peace looming
ahead. And so the ally of yesterday would become the enemy of tomorrow and the last act in the old war would
be the first in the new. It was necessary to ‘up the ante’ not only to crush Japan but to terrorise Russia into either
an entirely new type of arms race or submission on capitalist terms, as had already been fixed by the West as a
goal in 1918, which turned sour in 1933 with the rise of the new-style capitalist Adolf Hitler.
G F Kennan, a hawkish anti-communist, author of the anti-Russian Policy of Containment, which he first
published under the pseudonym ‘X’ in the Foreign Affairs magazine of July 1949 when he was charge d’affaires
for ambassador Averell Harriman in Moscow, wrote a new book in his later years, The Nuclear Delusion
(Pantheon, 1982). In this he has had the honesty to draw attention to his country’s ignorance of Russian affairs
at the time of the Revolution, the Russian question having been largely limited before 1914 to the treatment of
the Jews and utterly deformed afterwards by what Kennan calls grotesque distortion by military propaganda and
hysteria which went so far as to paint the Bolsheviks as German agents. Several American battalions under
British command were sent to Russia before being withdrawn in 1919. Kennan compares the outbursts of antired hysteria at the end of World War I to those which plagued America in the 50’s with the McCarthy fanatic.
(There is evidence, by the way, that McCarthy was not acting on his own initiative but was a puppet set up and
manipulated by the occult power in the wings.) In retaliation Russia threatened to provoke subversion in
Western countries with a view to the destruction of the capitalist system and refused to assume responsibility for
foreign debts contracted by the Czarist regime, especially as the Czar had large financial holdings in Western
banks. At the same time Russia was prepared to cooperate with the West, being in desperate need of trade,
recognition and loans (when the new regime even borrowed money collected by de Valera in America for the
Irish War of Independence at a time when the new Ireland and the new Russia were very friendly before Ireland
was brought firmly back into the Western camp in 1922 after the execution of all the most revolutionary leaders
and the installation of a puppet government).
I must digress here to comment on the refusal by your educational authorities to allow an analysis of Marxism in
your thesis. The official reason that the subject is too vast may perhaps be genuine, though it is difficult to rid
oneself of the suspicion that such an analysis might show true Marxism in a better light than The System wishes
it to be seen in. The people I meet who are most outspoken against Marx and Engels have mostly never read
either of them, an example in our so-called age of enlightenment of the closed mind that allows others to do the
thinking. Marxism is generally denigrated in relation to the Soviet Union and a few impoverished colonies of
Western capitalism which were forced to experiment with it prematurely, though if they had received the
support from outside which right-wing regimes obtain, instead of the economic blockades and the Westernprovoked ‘Contra’ terrorism, we might have seen interesting new results.
Due to three quarters of a century of media propaganda, anti-Marxism has entered our social subconscious and
you will have to bear with me if I am thus forced into a somewhat tedious analysis, as I must also do in relation
to the arms race in order to deal factually, point by point, with the propaganda to which we have been so
subjected for so long that few people are now able to think for themselves on the issues. Nothing less than a
clear factual expose will be necessary to dispel the gathering smokescreen.
Russia has been singled out by the capitalist Establishment and media as an example of Marxist failure without
any in-depth examination. I do not hold any brief for either the USSR or the Leninist-Stalinist dictatorship that
mounted the throne of Czarist tyranny, but we have suffered from so much anti-Russian propaganda that I have
no intention of weighing on the side of the balance that has been grossly overweighed by the Establishment and
its spokesmen in the media, or, in the words of the liberation theologian Leonardo Boff of Brazil, attacking
Marxism to ‘reinforce those who persecute, torture and kill in the name of antiMarxism’. As long as we have a
mass of putrefying skeletons in our own cupboards we should not be wasting time and energy in the primitive
hunt for a scapegoat and half-baked searching for the mote in our neighbours’ eyes, when we would be better
occupied with the sound injunction, which we know since René Girard to be of primordial anthropological
importance, to first remove the beam from our own eye so that we can then see better to remove the mote from
our neighbour’s.
Our governing Establishment and its mouthpiece the media prefer to resort to crisis management, lurching from
one drama to another, often of their own creation, sweeping the real problems under the carpet, than to analyse
root causes and explore the origin of the seeds that are even now germinating in the compost of neglected
questions. Is it not indicative that not a single one of even our most intellectual and supposedly objective
newspapers has ever, as far as I can discover, made a serious serialised analysis of the most revolutionary
thinking offered to mankind in 2,000 years? We cannot deal with Marxism through the Establishment method of
turning our backs and hoping it will go away when we are not looking.
This is not to say that the 19th century Marxism of Karl Marx could now be accepted and applied in its totality.
Some of it is outmoded and some of it is difficult to agree with, but it is an unrivalled opus of socio-economic
thought which remains a standing challenge for updating to the modern world and incorporating into new socioeconomic systems. Its emphasis is on man and his need to create himself in useful activity, an aspect of Marx’s
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thought that is an apt comment on the modern capitalist crime of unemployment following the earlier crime in
the West and the ongoing crime in the Third World of crushing man under the jackboot of economic necessity.
The atheist in Marx saw man’s self-creation as evidence of the non-need to postulate the existence of God, but
why cannot the christian in modern Marxism see this self-creation of man as a divine gesture raising man to new
dignity by associating him in the creative act at its most vital apex as part of the process of creative evolution?
‘It is not the consciousness of men which determines their existence; it is on the contrary their social existence
which determines their consciousness’ was Marx’s view and hardly anybody could now disagree with that. And
why cannot Marx’s idea of the fulness of human liberty being at its best without what his 19th-century Prussia
saw as an authoritarian domineering God now be transposed to something which the true God of Rahnerian
liberty could applaud the way a parent applauds a child learning to walk by itself?
This emphasis on the dignity of man explains Marx’s horror of man’s alienation at the hands of capitalism, his
transformation from his true dignity to a tool producing the goods which escape from his hands in an impersonal
production mechanism owned by an anonymous system which increases value added through the marketing
process that further alienates the worker. The relationships of men with one another are also distorted.
Furthermore, Marx saw the state as the instrument by which the bourgeoisie dominated other classes. Under
capitalism, political and legal relations between men are dependent on material production, reducing the social
to the economic.
Thus, to Marx, ‘the bourgeoisie produces its own grave-diggers’ when man becomes aware of his alienation by
The System. Because his physical and moral energy were declining towards the end of his life, however, Marx
did not fully reconcile his views of a final revolution and a necessary ongoing revolution.
Some critics have said that Marx was talking theory. This is a ludicrous charge. First of all, all economists and
all the armies of civil servants who govern our system are talking theory. Secondly, Marx had the ongoing casestudy of Engels’ Manchester factory, Engels’ practical contribution to his thinking and other sources. Engels
added a further dimension, which will be useful under your last chapter, regarding further industry being
decentralised in the countryside and the dichotomy between town and country disappearing, to the benefit of
both agriculture and industry. Lastly, a matter which you will also be discussing in the last chapter, in the view
of Marx and Engels the bloated centralised state bureaucracy was destined to disappear.
Leninist-Stalinism was a distorted version of Marxism with which the breakaway Bolsheviks replaced
traditional tyranny in Russia. What the ordinary public now know of Marxism is largely confined to a few overworked catch phrases such as ‘Religion is the opium of the people’, a statement which, as we shall have an
opportunity of seeing under one of your later chapters, would have been applauded by Christ. There is little
excuse for our ignorance, because Marx was not some shady Freemason manipulating society from the shadow
of the Lodge under the protection of a diabolical Masonic oath, but an open and unvarnished defender of the
poor, whose works, including his masterpiece, Das Kapital, are available for anyone to read. His thinking will
not disappear by being ignored, for it is rooted in deep soil going all the way back to Heracleitus of Ephesus in
the 6th century BC, who emphasised the underlying connection between opposites in the act of cosmic creation,
without which there would be no tendency of opposites to unite. This is one of the basic pillars of Marxism,
which in its dialectical materialism aspect may be sketchily summarised as follows: As all science accepts,
matter exists in movement; this movement cannot but produce a perpetual state of evolution; knowledge must
take account of this evolution and be based on the interaction between man and the rest of matter and this
interaction itself forms part of evolution; thought is thus part and parcel of the process, and operates in
dialectical manner; evolution is an ascending process and man is its highest expression.
It is useful to single out this aspect of Marx from his massive writings on the relationship between capital, the
worker and production, because part of the Western antipathy to Marx comes from the powerful religious
faction, the Fundamentalists, who maintain the obscurantist notion of creationism against evolution, a notion
shared by the Roman church until demolished by the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin, who showed that even the
interiority or part of man known popularly as the ‘soul’ also shares in evolution, from the incipient ‘soul’ in
primitive matter to the advanced ‘soul’ in the creative genius and tomorrow’s quantum leap to the 'soul’ of
planetary mankind. This is not to say that science is not now increasingly questioning Darwin’s view of
evolution but, whether its form is Darwinian or otherwise, some form of evolution is an inescapable fact.
Wherever religion denies this evolution it may be considered the opium of the people but, as we shall see, it is
also an opium in more Christ-like senses, including — but again not confined to that — its suggestion that the
poor will be rewarded in heaven for their acceptance of their fate here below, an obscene interpretation of ‘the
poor you shall always have with you’. As mentioned already, the executed James Connolly, denounced by the
Establishment and by all the churches as a terrorist in 1916, was the first christian communist martyr to have
shown these aspects in his writings, his life and his death.
Marx did not suffer martyrdom but if the violence element were removed he was in many ways a Christ-like
figure, which is not too surprising since he was a christian of Jewish origin whose earliest writings exhibit deep
christian devotion, though he rightly turned against Prussian theocracy, and ultimately against the role of the
churches in general, ending as an atheist who never lost faith in man. Like large numbers of people today, he
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also made a distinction between the churches and the man-Christ for whom he maintained a great admiration,
being driven all his life with a Christ-like desire to sacrifice himself for the welfare of mankind. He was to know
poverty as a pauper among paupers, criticising the same politico-religious Establishment that drove Christ to his
death and attacking that dictatorship of money which led Eric Fromm, one of the 20th century’s most powerful
thinkers and a non-Marxist, to exclaim:
‘It requires all the enthusiasm of a Remi, a Maitre Eckhart, a Shakespeare or a Schweitzer to demonstrate the
poverty of imagination of people whose class sees in investments and profits the very significance of life’.
With regard to the Soviet Union, a proper comparative analysis would call for a large monograph developed
around several major axes.
First of all it should be related to the total world context and the explosive situation with which we are now
faced after the centuries of capitalism’s exploitation of the Third World following its exploitation of the poor of
Europe until the Marxist backlash produced an alleviation. During the early period of the rise of Europe’s
proletariat, every demand was met by the scarecrow cry of ‘Communism’, the way every effort of the Third
World poor to lift their heads was attacked (for three quarters of a century) as Russian interference: the ultimate
in imperialist cynicism, the wolf shouting ‘Wolf'. This goes hand-in-hand with what Professor Tawney called
the scurrilous charge, levelled by capitalism against any popular control of the system, that it would endanger
liberty. ‘The suggestion’, says Tawney, ‘that capitalism ... is the guardian of any liberties but its own is an
implausible affectation ... it would more properly be described as the parent of a new Feudalism’, a pertinent
remark at a time when a small number of multinationals, high financiers and media bosses have the world at
their mercy.
The West judges almost everything in economic terms as if there was not also a cultural dimension to man,
which has been more significant in the Soviet Union than in the West. Karl Marx described the primitive as the
man who had to spend most of his time in the struggle for material welfare, philistinism and self-indulgence,
leaving little time for thought, community and the arts. The capitalist mentality has now also infected Russia.
Previously, the ordinary Russian workingman appreciated such things as great ballet and great music, and
Russians who visited the United States used to suffer a culture shock on discovering people wasting precious
time watching soap operas and other infantile material when they could be enriching their minds with great
literature. In the USA and increasingly in Europe and elsewhere, many lonely people, emotionally
impoverished, diminished in purpose and self-fulfilment, sit in front of their television sets phoning in orders for
the products appearing on the screen, trying to fill their empty lives with goods which increase their hungersatiety syndrome in a culture that persuades us, in Nuala O’Faolain’s words, that shopping is a vital, meaningful
act bringing joy and happiness. Consumerism, the ad industry and the media are a bid for the soul and our
mammoth shopping centres are temples of our new religion but it is a religion from which the poor are
excluded, and the psychological crises during our christmas spending sprees, celebrating their polar opposite,
have the effect for many people of producing repetitive trauma which can be disastrously cumulative.
The vested interests promoting this consumerism are the same which decry Marx as ‘the materialist Messiah’.
To these capitalists literature and the arts are merely icing on their economic cake whereas to Marx and Engels
they were part and parcel of the very substance of life and life was the yarn from which they were spun. The
Stalinist tyranny in Russia used literature and the arts as one of its evil instruments in the indoctrination and
subjection of the people, but to Engels and Marx all the great art and literature of Europe right back to the
Greeks were liberating because they were a search for the truth that would set people free. Their interest in the
arts was non-exclusive and included even right-wing aristocrats such as Balzac. To both of these founders of
Marxism, the search for truth, as expressed in the work of the giant figures of literary history, was a vital
constituent in the transformation of society because if the people were not to be deflected by specious arguments
they must be able to answer their critics and if they were to be imbued with the necessary commitment and
enthusiasm they must themselves be versed in the eternal truths of struggling man as dealt with by the writers
who have stood the great test of time.
Marx would be adamantly against the capitalist, profit-making, ephemeral best-seller pitched at the gallery and
appealing for its popularity to the basest instincts, to science fiction or romantic escapism. To Marx, such
writing would be harnessed art, taking sides in favour of the capitalist ‘status quo’ and, as has been said, if a
writer — or anybody else — is not part of the solution he is part of the problem.
One of the fundamental differences between Lenin’s distortion and the master’s teaching was that the former
tried to impose socialism from above, so much a contradiction in terms that it is a direct imitation of right-wing
methodology, whereas true Marxism calls for socialism to be developed from below. To prepare the people for
this, popular education in literature and the arts are of basic importance and even Stalin was not able to avoid it
entirely, so that the Soviet people developed an acquaintance with them which the Western masses are mostly
denied.
At time of writing it is impossible to predict the outcome of the revolution sweeping Russia. What one can,
however, say with certainty is that the applause from the Western Establishment and its media, crowing from its
dungheap at this ‘demise of communism’, is premature. This Establishment and its media have so far managed
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to conceal from the public that while official Leninist Stalinist parties and other revisionists are frightened, true
Marxists everywhere are joyfully celebrating, perhaps with undue optimism, the downfall of a neo-Czarist
tyranny hypocritically called ‘Marxism’ by Lenin, Stalin and their power-hungry successors all over Eastern
Europe. I say ‘perhaps with undue optimism’ because for all anybody can know the pendulum could swing back
just as violently to a new form of the old capitalist dictatorship under which Russia suffered for centuries. The
West has so far also managed to ignore the fact that many real revolutionaries in Third World countries are
observing the events in Eastern Europe as a striking demonstration of the power of the people, knowing that it is
in People Power that the Third World is going to hold the upper hand over the West tomorrow.
Considering Russia on the basis of the West’s obsession with the lowest common denominator of economics,
Russia up to the arrival of Gorbachev had a debt which was relatively small compared with the more than $8
trillion of US private, corporate, state and federal debt, without counting US unfunded liabilities in social
security and government pensions. As The Washington Post put it on 2 March, 1989, ‘As long as foreigners
continue to send their pounds, guilders and yen in vast quantities, the fortunate United States can continue to
swan along in a haze of fake forecasts and evasive policy pronouncements’. The fact is that the US is living
largely on borrowed money — and borrowed time.
Another aspect of ‘the Russian question’ is the eternal Russia in the background, the thousand-year-old
theocracy of the Czars buttressed by the plutocracy which battened on the misery of the masses. Here it must be
added in the interest of historical accuracy that the last of the Czars, Nicholas II, was a kindly man of great
piety, devoted husband and father of an exemplary family, a Russian patriot who insisted on leaving the comfort
of his palace to command his troops at the front during World War I. But he was over-scrupulous, vacillating,
burdened with the terrible Czarist heritage he felt compelled to hand on, and trapped by the need to placate the
men of wealth who controlled the country with the aid of the secret police, the dreaded Okrana, in the case of
which the Leninist-Stalinist successors to the Czar, again as in so many other matters, did not innovate but
continued the old Russian tradition with the newly-baptised KGB of which the West has its own equivalents,
with the West’s added advantage that they have a vast supporting structure both in the Masonic conspiracy and
in the churches.
It must also be added in the interest of historical accuracy that the brutal version of the horrendous murder of the
Czar and his family as originally publicised by the Western Establishment (and accepted by the Bolsheviks to
show the attacking powers that now there could be no going back) has so entered our subconscious that it is
hardly overtaken by modern scholarship showing it to be highly unlikely to be an accurate version of what
happened at the Ipatiev house in Ekaterinbourg on the night of 16 July, 1918. If the facts were such as half a
century of propaganda would have it, it would certainly be one of the most odious crimes of history (though less
odious, carried out by a group of barbarians in the Urals, surrounded by the White Army and threatened by
plans from several countries and organisations to liberate the Czar and restore the monarchy, than, say —
without comparing it with the reign of terror of the pagan French Revolution but with the action of educated,
god-fearing christian leaders of the Establishment — the crimes of a Henry VIII or an Oliver Cromwell).
Revolutions are bloody affairs and the Russian was not the first or the bloodiest nor will it be the last to be
spawned by capitalism. However, the most disreputable aspect of the affair was the refusal of King George V
and the British government to grant political asylum to the king’s first cousin as insistently requested by
Kerensky, prime minister of the provisional government of Russia. This is an example of how the Western
Establishment can be hypocritically lavish with admonition, warning and reprisal in relation to every
interference with human rights, life and liberty as long as it happens in the anti-imperialist camp but can perform
a neat somersault aided by the silence of the media when its chickens come home to roost and the principles it
had used to make a great hue and cry about others are conveniently forgotten or tossed to the winds in the name
of real politik or other convenient label.
The official excuse for refusing asylum to the king’s cousin was that his wife, also a cousin, was German and
would be an embarrassment at a time of war with Germany. In fact the proposals from Moscow included refuge
for the Czarina and her daughters in Germany. Truth not being a particular mark of the Establishment, 71 years
after the Romanov affair, in April 1989, the British prime minister’s press secretary cited ‘the massacre of the
Czar and his family’ as one of the factors inhibiting the government from accepting President Gorbachev’s
invitation to the queen to visit Russia, a statement that was faithfully reported by the media and swallowed by a
gullible public. Any stick was good enough to beat the Soviets within the context of the necessary tension to
maintain the arms race. And the capitalism that has been itching for 70 years to get its hands on Russia behind a
façade of rhetoric about freedom and democracy is as interested in the heroic tragedy, worthy of Greek drama,
of the life and death of the Czar and his people as it is in the millions of those whom it has starved in the Third
World. The crocodile tears for the Czar and the Russian people are merely for public consumption. Though the
legality of owning slaves in Russia had been abolished about the same time as in the United States, the mass of
the people continued to live in the most degrading squalor up to 1917. This feudal system was not the society
for which Marx intended his communism — a post-capitalist evolution — no more than he would have intended
it for such Third World countries as tried it prematurely. Having subjugated the people for so many centuries,
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the system had left the Russians fit subjects for a continuation of the old Kremlin tradition in the new form
which Lenin and Stalin gave it, a far remove from true Marxism. It was only towards the end of his life that
Marx, pressed by some Russian disciples, had half-heartedly admitted the possibility that his proposals might
perhaps be able to do something to lift the oppressed people of Russia out of their misery.
The combination of external attack by imperialist forces combined with the capitalist counter-revolution from
within and the influence of the power-hungry Stalin even before Lenin became incapacitated in 1923, led to the
final destruction of the revolutionary hope, aided and abetted by the anti-Marx anarchist Bakunin, as was
acknowledged by Lenin himself in his writings. Bakunin was highly placed in the Freemason hierarchy and a
self-proclaimed satanist. In this connection it is worthy of recall that the Masonic summit or 33rd degree
practices devil worship and that Adolf Hitler, too, admitted to being deeply influenced by Masonic cult and
symbolism, ‘the dangerous element and the element I have taken over’19 Both Lenin and Hitler created
something new, which was no longer merely Marx’s political and socioeconomic programme in the former case
nor confined to anti-Marxist capitalist principles in the latter. They both created a new secular religion, heavily
dependent on the mystique of the cult leader and the rite and ritual that was seen at its best in the Nuremberg
night rallies. Hitler’s SS also relied heavily on masonic ritualistic insignia and initiation ceremonies. These
matters were ruled out as inappropriate at the Nuremberg trial, no doubt because of the Masonic membership of
the court. The essential religious lessons from Hitler as from Lenin were therefore lost to the post-war
generations. To the fanatical masses, both Lenin and Hitler were High Priests, depending on parades, music,
repetitive slogans, the play of light and spectacle, and highly-charged ceremonies that appealed to the heart
more than to the head that would be required to comprehend Marxist or anti-Marxist theory. It is perhaps not
without significance that Stalin had spent 5 years studying for the priesthood in the seminary of Tiflis.
For three quarters of a century the annual celebration of the revolution has been in October but the end of the
feudal autocracy did not occur in October 1917 but in February, overthrown by a populist liberalism. During
those eight months, when the fate of Marxism hung in the world balance, the Bolsheviks managed to engineer
the overthrow of the new semi-Marxist government and its replacement by a dictatorship. Lenin’s successors,
dictators all, from Stalin onwards, continued the process, continued to celebrate the Revolution in October and
continued the myth that they were following Marx, the myth that gave them a semblance of legitimacy in the
people’s eyes. At the same time Stalin pursued his strategy to stifle the master’s teaching and never relented
until he had eliminated the last of the Marxists, Leon Trotsky.
The Soviet system that finally evolved from the turbulence of revolution, the challenge of opponents and the
enmity of the West, was an amalgam of the old Fascist dictatorship, a new capitalism of the state and some
Marxist principles of social justice which meant, notwithstanding everything, that the oppressed proletariat were
provided with a free health service, decent housing, full employment at a fair wage and high-class free education
for all, a combined performance that placed the new Russia at a costly disadvantage in the rat race with the
West, particularly when, like Nicaragua, Angola, Zimbabwe and Vietnam on a much smaller scale, it had to
carry the immense burden of a protective arms race imposed by Western opposition.
Progress was achieved without any Marshall Plan aid such as that which lifted Western Europe out of the
doldrums between 1948 and 1955, without the West’s vast resources from its plunder of the Third World and
notwithstanding a war against Hitler’s panzers which left some 25 million of the Russian people dead and saw
their economy and their infrastructures torn to a shambles, a morass of desolation unparalleled in history. The
polar opposite of the USSR, the capitalist paradise, the United States, never experienced such devastation, such
destruction of its productive apparatus, such annihilation of its most energetic manpower, has never known what
it is to be attacked in its own homeland by an expansionist capitalist power.
When all is said and done about Russian strength and weakness in relation to the capitalist rat race and the
West’s obsession with Gross National Product, balance of payments, trade deficits, technological achievement,
monetary policy and the rest, perhaps the Spanish scholar and research scientist, Federico Mayer, director
general of UNESCO, looking towards the future at the beginning of 1989, made a fair enough summary when
he said: ‘After the French Revolution, that of liberty, and the Russian Revolution, that of equality, there remains
the third Revolution, that of fraternity’, which perhaps contains some measure of truth, though it should also be
remembered that the French Revolution suppressed the liberty previously granted to strike action and the
liberties it did bring were at the cost of 8 per cent of the population left dead, facts which help to cut the Russian
Revolution down to contextual size. Indeed, French historian René Sedillot has stated that, contrary to the
French Revolution which laid waste many of France’s most historic buildings and monuments, the Russian
‘carefully preserved the heritage of the Czars’. One last remark: It is perfectly natural that in all the Western
media hype about the counter-revolution in Russia, the fact has not been mentioned that it was a semi-Marxist
regime that has brought ‘a new democratic freedom’ almost inconceivable under Czarist capitalism.
A further problem remains to be examined in relation to the Soviet Union, the dissidence of the Jews. This did
not begin in 1917 but, together with the pogroms, was an old Russian tradition. It was, however, subsequently
exacerbated by two modern facts: the fact that the Jews were understandably eager to join relatives and co-
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religionists in Israel from 1948 onwards and the fact that they were not allowed to accumulate such wealth in
Russia as they would wish.
To avoid any possible misunderstanding, it must be said at this point, in fairness to the great spiritual heritage of
the Jews, who, like many Christians, have been misled by their leaders, that a clear distinction must be made
between the noble phenomenon of Judaism and the aggressive brutality of Zionism. The latter fits perfectly into
the exploitative capitalism of Christendom; the former belongs to the spirit of the prophets. It is perfectly natural
that the aggressive Western Establishment and its media have given little publicity to ultra-orthodox Jewish
movements which have been decrying Zionism down the years. One of them, Naturei Karta, through a
spokesman, Rabbi Moshe Hirsh, wrote to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on 22 August, 1989 asking for his
help to dismantle Israel, and thus, as he added in an interview, ‘re-establish the good neighbourly relations
between Jews and Arabs that existed in this land before the Zionist incursion’. Such Jewish organisations regard
the establishment of the Israeli state as sacrilegious.
Apart from Jews, most of the Russian dissidents I have met in Paris were still Marxist, deceived by the betrayal
of Marxism on the part of Lenin and his successors. In addition to the Jewish dissidents, there was and is the
perfectly natural Muslim dissidence stirred up by Islam with CIA support from bordering countries (which I
shall discuss in my next letter). Helped by the hysterical hype from the media, most people seized with
enthusiasm on Solzhenitzyn’s dissidence seemingly without having read him. Solzhenitzyn, however, was
equally trenchant in attacking Western decadence as he was in attacking Leninist-Stalinism, equally
denunciatory of our free-market capitalism as he was of Soviet state capitalism, equally critical of our multiparty
political system as he was of Russia’s single party system —what was required, he said, was a non-party system
(a vital matter which we shall be discussing under your last chapter).
Russia also had its quota, like every country, of malcontents, psychotics and mentally deranged people. But the
millions of children and grandchildren of those who had for hundreds of years been serfs and slaves living in
abject misery are not sorry that their world took a dramatic turn for the better with the Revolution and that they
obtained equal rights with everybody to decent housing, wages, free health services and high-class education.
Even Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan must be seen in the context of the geopolitical and military strategy
between the powers, against the background of the feudal obscurantism that previously held the Afghan people
in subjection and in the light of Great Britain’s attacks of the 19th century and its wars of aggression which
contributed to the impoverishment of Afghanistan and left whole towns and villages in ruins. Russia is not the
only big bad bear in that part of the world, which has been a centre of strategic struggle between the nations for
centuries, where the Western powers are firmly ensconced through Israel, Turkey and Pakistan, at least for the
present, that is to say barring any Islamic upheaval that could reshuffle the strategic cards.
In all this, the sole criterion must be the search for strict historical truth without fear or favour, irrespective of
what or whom it might offend. Nothing should be shied away from, not even the invasion of Hungary in 1956 or
Czechoslovakia in 1968, events to be seen in the context of the Western threat to ‘roll back the frontier’, the US
attacks on Latin America and the cold war which with the onslaught on Vietnam and the Korean conflict
seemed about to erupt into very hot war from 1950 onwards. In any case, Marx never pretended that the early
victories of Marxism would not have to be defended with physical force against the agents of capitalism.
It is sometimes asked, in the superficial way of the media commentators, why there was no pressure for people
to emigrate to Soviet Russia, a question which could only be answered in a book examining Russia’s history, its
ancient underdevelopment, the politico-economic experiment that required protective frontiers, the preGorbachev policy of full employment, the perpetual threat from the West and the strange phenomenon prior to
Vietnam that the planetary movement of mankind has historically been East to West, with the sun (a rule to
which Israel alone is, as in so many other matters, the exception, with its main movement of immigrants going
eastward, as happened previously with the Jewish migration from Germany to Poland and Russia in the 12th
century). Furthermore, we in the West are the inheritors of a 2000-year-old Latin civilisation, with its ancient
customs, culture and languages, to whom Russia was not merely another country but almost another planet,
where, in addition, we would not have been allowed to exercise the disease of acquisitiveness which has become
innate to our nature. We hear no such criticism of a country such as Israel where there is also no rush of
foreigners apart from Jews seeking to become its citizens.
Similarly, the media gorged us down the years with the gory details of life in Soviet psychiatric prisons but they
keep largely silent about conditions in, say, American jails, as, for example, in the prison for women political
prisoners at Lexington, Kentucky, where, according to Richard Kord in a Report on the National Prison Project,
of 25 August, 1987, the prison programme dealing with women involved in civil liberties work for Blacks and
Porto-Ricans implements (translated from French copy) ‘a series of aims, ... designed to reduce the detainees to
a state of submission essential for their ideological conversion, to reduce them to a condition of psychological
incapacity that will neutralise them as independent and effective opponents. In case of failure the sole solution is
their destruction, preferably by means of despair so that they will destroy themselves’. Among other degrading
humiliations and physical, mental and moral deprivations, these unfortunate women are confined in
underground cells, without light of day, 23 hours out of the 24, with one hour in a tiny overground yard.
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Neither has there been much publicity for the fact that the International Commission of Jurists has stated that
under the much-vaunted system of British justice an average of at least 15 people a year are wrongly condemned
to heavy prison sentences due, inter alia, to police misconduct, perjury, the extortion of false confessions and the
use of witnesses paid to provide false testimony.
Today’s evolution of Soviet society shows that the Russian Establishment has lost faith in the capacity of
LeninistStalinist state capitalism to compete in the Western-led rat race, but it is far from certain that corporate
capitalism will provide an answer to the country’s eternal problems any more than it did during the centuries of
Czarist tyranny.
One of these days the Western media will no doubt be forced by the sheer weight of the facts aired in Russia, to
report, however sad it may be for the Western Establishment, that from the beginning there has been a
considerable groundswell in the USSR, even among intellectuals, against the importation under Gorbachev of
the Western rat race. The range of new benefits extends at one extreme to the glory of fast food, since
McDonalds have built a chain of hamburger restaurants, washed down with Pepsi-Cola, because the Pepsi-Cola
corporation similarly established twenty manufacturing plants in ‘the Evil Empire’, all the way across the board
to the wonders of unemployment and the escalation of Western-style crime which was unknown in Russia up to
a few years ago. In the face of the new capitalist-triggered crime now striking the country, some of the Western
media have been busy trying to persuade the public that this was also prevalent under communism but was kept
hidden, knowing that few of their readers or viewers ever had experienced the peace of Russian streets (at any
time of day or night) in pre-Gorbachev days.
Rape, drugs, suicide and alcoholism, other glories of the rat race, are now developing rapidly in the Soviet
Union. The latest triumph of Americana invading the country are videos distinguished by horrific scenes of
brutality and carnage.
Past Western hype about the inferior status of women in Soviet Russia quietly ignored the fact that the
backroom position of women was an ancient Russian tradition, notwithstanding Catherine the Great, one of the
exceptions that proved the rule, that the Revolution gave the vote to women before they got it in Britain, and
that communism did much else to bring women forward, culminating in the arrival of Raisa Gorbacheva who at
the beginning was not always popular among Russian traditionalists precisely because of her prominence,
sometimes compared with the unpopular prominence of Czarina Alexandra.
Regarding our much-adulated Western ‘freedom’, Russian individuals are now also becoming free to reach
millionaire status, to drive big cars and own big houses, while the poor will perhaps have the freedom to pay for
medical attention and other essentials hitherto provided free. The people will also be able to thrill to the wonders
of pornography, according to the sacrosanct ‘freedom of expression’ dictated by our intellectual terrorists, when,
in fact, this is often nothing more than a money-making racket for a small minority against the silent masses
who are left to cope with the resultant mental and moral confusion as best they can. In this connection there is
strong evidence from prison visitors in France, for example, that a large number of detainees who had become
violent sex maniacs did so because of the ambient culture practising ‘freedom of expression’. The victims of this
freedom should also have a right to freedom from what drives fragile minds into despair, and the question could
be raised as to whether it is not often the innocent who are behind bars while the guilty distil their poison with
impunity.
One of the innumerable examples of the catch-phrase ‘freedom of speech’ which might be quoted as symbolic is
that of the US drug and tobacco companies a few years ago quoting ‘freedom of speech’ to torpedo the
Television Code which had tried to introduce a sensible standard of ethics into American television. On a more
general plane, much modern writing constitutes a new ‘opium of the people’ to distract attention from the real
issues. One of the results of the new ‘freedom’ is that the quality of Russian cinema has now declined rapidly,
partly because the new ‘freedom’ is basically freedom to make money. The old Hollywood adage that ‘sex sells’
is being applied with vigour and one American producer at the 1989 Moscow Film Festival had the
forthrightness to state bluntly on a public platform, ‘I’m in the film business for lust and profit’. Western
money-grubbing writers speak loudly of the freedom of the imagination, and we shall have an opportunity later
to discuss the vital importance of imagination in every field of human activity. But we did not have to await
Andre Breton or even Rimbaud to discover that the untamed imagination is a wild mistress leading towards the
precipice unless harnessed to reality (though judging by most of these writings the authors could hardly be
expected to understand what ‘reality’ means). The Soviets may have gone too far in the past in their emphasis
on realism but they produced some of the world’s greatest cinema and literature. For, if imagination is important
in the arts, as in all creativity, there is something else even more important: the quiet life, interiority and absence
of agitation, triviality and money-grubbing, to attract the silent visitation of the Muse.
Notwithstanding the media hype, there has been another side to recent Russian developments. Pravda, the
official party organ, has frequently admitted the groundswell against party secretary Gorbachev as, for
example,in its edition of 18 January, 1989, when it published a letter from six of the great names among the
Russian intelligentsia, including remarkable writers such as Valentin Raspoutine and Vasssili Belov,
denouncing the danger of ‘a revision of the socialist achievements of the people’, of a denial of cultural
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accomplishments and of ‘disparagement of our spiritual values’. It is too early at this writing in 1989 to see what
may be the outcome of the counter-revolution. For all we now know, the country could be heading towards the
kind of capitalism which formerly held the people in bondage, with the Orthodox church being used as before to
serve as opium for the people and with the return to the homeland of the inheritors of the Masonic conspiracy
which, though it had participated in the Revolution in the hope of destroying Russian christianity, had to flee the
country when the new authority outlawed Freemasonry and, in addition to becoming integrated with the
Masonic Brotherhood all over the West, founded its own Masonic order in France. The counter-revolution could
also spell the end of the Marxist hope for the underdog throughout the world and result in the extension to most
of the planet of the dictatorship of money, since Russia is withdrawing from its former commitment to social
justice in the Third World which it inherited from the Marxist component even in Leninist-Stalinism. For,
however difficult it may be for many people to accept after three quarters of a century of anti-Marxist
indoctrination, Marxism, by definition, cannot but be radically on the side of the exploited and the oppressed.
That fundamental fact remains even after the hijacking of Marxism by Leninist-Stalinism and its abandoning by
Mr Gorbachev. ‘Because doctrine and conduct diverge, it does not follow that to examine the former is to hunt
abstractions. That men should have thought as they did is sometimes as significant as that they should have
acted as they did.’ Tawney’s words are as applicable to Marxism as they are to christianity. In both cases there
always remains the possibility that the original teaching might be resurrected and perhaps even implemented.
Apart from Marxism, one must also consider the Russian character. The ageing Prince Viazemski once said to
French Ambassador Paleologue: ‘The Russian people are the most docile in the world when they are sternly
commanded, but they are incapable of governing themselves. Loosen the reins and they fall into anarchy’. The
French writer, Michel de St Pierre, who has a particular knowledge of Russia, states: ‘It is part of the Russian
character to demand reforms and then to turn away from them; to burn what they adored and adore what they
burned’. It is part of the Russian character to be eternally dissatisfied and never to settle for what Yeats referred
to as the fingers in a greasy till. Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, when she was living in the United States
wrote: ‘We are all attached to that land and none of us will ever betray it or abandon it in exchange for some
soulless comforts.... Wise, cruel Russia, my love.... Without the eternal light of truth and goodness which is
yours I would long ago have put the hangman’s noose around my neck’ (translated from French text).
Few people have understood the Russians as well as their own Maksim Gorky did. ‘I know the frailty of the
Russian character’, he said, ‘I know the passionate wavering of the Russian soul and its leaning, in its torment,
weariness and despair, towards all contagions’. If it is tempted towards the ultimate contagion under
Gorbachev’s successor, the blame will lie partly at the door of the Western Establishment which has been
pushing it towards the precipice for three quarters of a century. Listen to the warning of one of Russia’s greatest
poets, Andrei Siniavski, now living in Paris, and dissident though he is: ‘The religious renaissance in the USSR
frightens me. For a very long time, the Russian spirit in general has been effusive. For this reason I fear
Fascism. I am a practising believer but am very frightened when religion combines with politics. It is the most
terrifying thing of all’ (Interview with the French catholic daily, La Croix, of 11 January, 1989). Indeed the very
birth of Orthodoxy in Russia in 988 AD was a political affair. Vladimir I, the conqueror prince of Novgorod, in
his campaign to exclude his brother from power, to subdue the peoples of the area and to win the hand of Ann,
sister of the Byzantine Emperor, Basile II, and conscious of the role of religion in subduing the people,
requested Byzantium to send him an ecclesiastical delegation, to which he submitted in a solemn baptismal
ceremony before proceeding to install orthodoxy as the official religion of his kingdom of Rus. Vladimir was
duly canonised by the Orthodox church as St Vladimir in the 13th century.
After this parenthesis, let me return to the immediate question. George F Kennan says that Russia was
profoundly sick of war in 1945 and thinking of nothing but the mammoth task of reconstruction. The danger, he
says, did not lie in any possible Russian attack on Western Europe, no more, I might add, than it did
subsequently when Russia had immense problems in keeping its old Czarist empire together, maintaining an
army of a million men on its Chinese frontier, controlling its southern Muslim republics and securing its hold on
its protective sheath in Eastern Europe. Even Henry Kissinger, one of the leading Western arms promoters, in
his memoires of his years in the Whitehouse with President Nixon, admitted that the Russian leaders greatly
feared the economic consequences with which the arms race threatened their country. And Sir Oliver Wright,
then British Ambassador in Washington, in a speech in April 1985 to the American Naval Academy said the
Russians were cautious, defensive and possessed of a ‘siege mentality based on repeated invasions'.
World War II had a traumatic effect on the Russians and is as fresh in their minds today as the holocaust is in
the minds of the Jews. It was a trauma the Americans have never known, not having experienced such a bloody,
life-and-death struggle fought house by house in the ploughed up mud of their own neighbourhoods and
gardens. In Stalingrad alone they lost over a million of their people. It is significant perhaps that the 260ft high
statue dominating the city —renamed Volgograd — is not of Marx or Lenin but of Mother Russia and down the
years she has had more than 3 million pilgrims per annum come to pay her homage. And in Leningrad’s
Piskariovskoye Memorial Cemetery, where the graves are aligned row upon row by the tens of thousands, more
victims lie buried (in that one cemetery) than the total number of Americans — 300,000 — killed everywhere
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during the war. The heroic Russian resistance is assimilated in the popular mind with the resistance to
Napoleon. Even if one were to accept the claim that the bomb had to be used in 1945 because the Japanese were
determined to fight on, this may be largely ascribed to the allied demand for unconditional surrender, a policy
that was indeed likely to force the Japanese to fight like cornered rats. Their peace feelers were an honourable
lifebuoy thrown out for survival. The American refusal to grasp the opportunity was part and parcel of the
decision to use the atom bomb. With regard to the policy of unconditional surrender, Aldous Huxley recounted
that when the fifth Marquis of Lansdowne wrote a letter to The Times during the First World War suggesting
that the war should be concluded with a compromise as most previous wars had been, The Times refused to print
it, and Huxley added that ‘The nationalistic radicals had their way, with the consequences that we all know —
Bolshevism, Fascism, inflation, depression, Hitler, the Second World War, the ruin of Europe....’ Such is the
seemingly losing battle in our struggle for sanity.
A major factor in the launching of the nuclear arms race was the money and scientific effort that had been
poured lavishly by the US into the invention of the A-bomb: over a hundred thousand people working with the
most sophisticated equipment in closely-guarded secrecy for several years. Oppenheimer and Teller — the latter
one of the architects of President Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ programme — were electrified with excitement and
refused to be satisfied with anything less than a spectacular mega-demonstration of the fabulous new power they
held in their hands. These and other scientists involved were never psycho-analysed but it is possible that some
of them may have been suffering like Hitler from necrophilia. When the first successful test went off at
Alamagordo, Oppenheimer cried: ‘Now I am become Death ... the Destroyer of Worlds’. Dr Hans Bethe, a key
architect of the first atom bomb whom a 1940 Time magazine described as ‘one of Nazi Germany’s greatest
gifts to the United States’, later became adamantly opposed to nuclear weaponry. He said that in the production
of the first bomb not much thought was given to ‘the time after the bomb. But I think that once it was made it
had its own impulse — its own motion that could not be stopped’20. The atomic gangrene then spread from
country to country, beginning with the United Kingdom, where socialist foreign minister Ernest Bevin declared,
‘We’ve got to have this thing ... we’ve got to have the Union Jack flying on top of it’.
The momentum of ever newer nuclear armaments is as true today as it was 40 years ago, and it carries its
Faustian fascination with the apocalyptic. In the United States, where productivity, money and power then
constituted the three pillars of society, there was an overriding desire to see the enormous expenditure of time
and scientific work suddenly emerge from the secrecy in which it was enshrouded and stun the world with
overwhelming returns. And what returns were in sight: the sudden capitulation of Japan and a great mushroom
cloud of death rising over Russia just across the straits, close to its eastern pearl of Vladivostok. Japan on its
knees and its next-door neighbour threatened with nuclear blackmail. Two magnificent goals with one fell
swoop. Peter Wyden, author of Day One: Before Hiroshima and After, has said that a further factor was hate:
Then as now, many self-righteous, bible-toting Americans hated what they perceived as an ‘evil empire’.
Over three hundred thousand men and women today in Hiroshima carry certificates of survival which give them
certain privileges, if one may so misuse the word ‘privilege’. They suffer from a variety of cancers, heart
problems, lung and liver diseases, skin afflictions and splitting headaches. According to Clyde Haberman of the
New York Times Service, they ‘offer a mosaic of despair, hope, pain, relief and resignation’. Each year,
continuing the series, several thousand new cases are added to the growing list of the victims which includes
those born since 1945 because of hereditary transmission and chromosomal aberrations. But Dr Teller,
according to Wyden, believed that the dangers of radiation from nuclear bombardment were ‘largely myths’ and
said so in a Readers’ Digest article. This is the Dr Teller who was President Reagan’s advisor on nuclear
warfare. Nowadays, whenever civilians are trapped or killed by what the Establishment calls ‘terrorists’ when
they are from the other side as distinct from ‘freedom fighters’ when they are of the Establishment System, there
is an outburst of self-righteous indignation about the harming of innocent civilians, when a fundamental cornerstone of Establishment strategy is a position that has been preparing for the eventuality of the sudden,
indiscriminate and massive annihilation of untold millions of innocent men, women and children — a potential
act of planned, institutionalised terrorism unparalleled in history. The military appetite grows by what it feeds
on and the existence of our huge armies spurs the warlords to belligerency. No general ever cheerfully dismissed
his troops. Solutions turn out to be problems.
Hiroshima did not force Russia to its knees. The atom bomb and the demonstration of its devastating power for
destruction and blackmail prompted Russia to launch efforts to catch up with America’s leap in the direction of
what some members of the Establishment, including President Reagan, choose to call Armageddon. ‘We will
have an arms race, declared John Foster Dulles, President Eisenhower’s secretary of state, ‘and we will win it,
because the Russians will go broke first’. According to Mr Richard Nixon, a close friend of Eisenhower’s, the
latter was himself far from being the dove he tried to appear at the end of his career.
After 1945 Stalin launched a crash programme to make a nuclear device because, he said, ‘the Americans have
upset the balance’. And so, every time there was near equilibrium the US gave a new twist to the spiral to raise
the stakes. Symbolic of the West’s leadership in the arms race is the fact that while NATO was established in
1949 the eastern bloc did not respond until 1955 with the setting up of the Warsaw Pact. Dior had launched his
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long, expansive skirt for women called the New Look and the Americans adopted the title for their escalating
military build-up during the 1950’s, when they added no less than two thousand B47s and seven hundred B52s
to their Strategic Air Command. The Russian development of a primitive inter-continental ballistic missile and
the launching of the world’s first satellite, the Sputnik, provided a new opportunity for the arms manufacturers
to up the ante notwithstanding their stunning superiority in intercontinental jet bombers compared with Russia’s
handful of old propeller models. Intermediate-range ballistic missiles capable of hitting Moscow were installed
in Britain, Italy and Turkey. In response, Russia tried to install missiles in Cuba in 1962 but had to back-pedal in
the face of overwhelming American superiority. What was permissible for the United States on the Russian
border in Turkey was not permissible for the Soviet Union in Cuba. The encirclement of capitalist Germany had
produced two catastrophic world wars; it can only be hoped that the encirclement of a capitalist Russia bent on
appeasing its citizenry does not produce a third. These are matters which the new Western euphoria excludes
from the debate.
American superiority in the fifties included two hundred intercontinental ballistic missiles and the world’s first
nuclear submarines equipped with Polaris missiles. The Russians did not develop their first nuclear submarine
for another 10 years. The United States was then riding on the crest of a mighty world wave in the economic,
technological and military fields. General Maxwell Taylor developed the doctrine that a nuclear war was as
winnable as classic war, through the use of missiles of great precision and limited power. This opened a new
phase in the production of tactical atomic weapons. According to an article in the New York Times in October
1984, Robert McNamara, formerly head of the Ford Corporation and US Secretary of Defence in 1964 said in a
1984 interview that if he had been Soviet defence minister at that time, America’s superiority would have
‘scared the hell’ out of him. And all you have to do is to check in the newspaper archives to discover that this
recently-admitted American superiority was at a time when a new Washington administration, like all the
administrations before and since, was running a campaign to persuade the public that there was a ‘missile gap’
that put the US in an inferior position. Mr McNamara has also said21 that when he was Secretary of Defence he
was frequently obliged to take decisions on the basis of simple speculation and information that was incomplete
and often contradictory.
The budgetary figures themselves are eloquent, as revealed in The Military Balance 1956—1966 (Institute for
Strategic Studies, London), the French Revue de Defense Nationale and publications of the UN which you can
check for yourself: Compared with today’s approximately $300 billion, the US military budget was $13 billion
in 1949, 50 billion in 1953 and 58.4 billion in 1965 (before the Vietnam war took effect). In the last-mentioned
year, the comparative Russian figure — for the 58.4 billion budgeted by the US — was 40 billion. It should be
added that comparisons between Russia and the United States do not provide a full picture. Russia’s allies have
very small comparative production but the enormous production by America’s allies must be added to the antiRussian total, giving devastating superiority in quality and quantity.
Even Stalin who was a tyrant was also conservative and prudent and did not wish to risk the further destruction
of his country by initiating dangerous foreign adventure. Most of Russia’s foreign initiatives were merely in
reaction to Western provocation, such as the Berlin blockade in reaction to the Western occupying powers in
Germany creating a new German currency, the post-war communist takeover in Prague in reaction to Western
efforts to eliminate the left, the protective Berlin Wall due to the fact that Berlin was an aggressive Western base
within the communist world, that its hotels and government agencies were a hivebed of spies and that the
Western establishment used it as a recruiting base for ‘dissidents’ from all over Eastern Europe.
Between 1965 and 1975, the non-nuclear arms manufacturers did not have to worry about a market. Vietnam
had come to the rescue, when arms production was accompanied by verbal escalation, President Johnson
declaring in a speech on 7 April 1965 that ‘We are going into that country to reinforce world order’, a sentiment
that was advanced only four months later (9 August, 1965) to, ‘We are going into that country to stay’.
In the 70s, even after Breznev had tried to narrow the gap — according to John B Anderson, chairman of the US
National Unity Party, in August 1984 — ‘America was clearly ahead of the Russians’ notwithstanding the
subsequent Reagan administration propaganda that the 70s had opened ‘a window of vulnerability’ on the US.
In the 40 years since 1945, the combined total of atmospheric and underground nuclear tests was 800 for the US
against 593 for the USSR. Many people believed the propaganda that Russia was the equal of the United States
on the seas, whereas the first full-sized Russian aircraft carrier was built when the US had thirteen, by the mideighties the country had 15,000 marines compared with America’s 200,000. Faced with the pressure from the
arms lobby to increase European arms expenditure, WEU (Western European Union — note the innocence of
the title) was finally, in self-defence, driven a little out of its war lair in November 1987 and published a more
realistic picture of the power of Soviet arms than had been fed to the public for 40 years. Instead of the
‘crushing superiority’ of Soviet power, we had the admission that 50 per cent of Russia’s tanks were 40-year-old
T54s and T55s fit for the scrapyard and utterly outmoded by NATO’s fleet of super-modern M1s and its highly
sophisticated anti-tank guided missiles. Having thus performed its little exercise in realism, however, WEU
launched back into what is its vested interest, a plea for more European arms. Having suffered a temporary
reverse in their 40-year-old argument of Russian superiority on land, the warmongers retreated to sea and to
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chemical weapons to show Russian dominance. Let us examine the facts as given by a man in a unique position
to know them, ex-Vice Admiral of the French Fleet, Antoine Sanguinetti.
Using the most authoritative and official figures from French data, from the US Naval Institute in Annapolis and
from other sources, Sanguinetti lays bare the methods used to deceive the public with numbers of ships in gross
figures which are meaningless to a naval officer. He shows that the age, nature and quality of the Soviet fleet
left Russia extremely vulnerable against the crushing superiority of Western fleets and especially the AngloAmerican. Russia was particularly weak in the quality of its submarine-supporting surface attack vessels. The
power of a navy is not measured by numbers, except when necessary to mislead the public. In addition to the
coordination between the various surface and submarine elements, the age and quality of the ships, the
firepower, the finding and homing technology and the air cover, there is also the vital question of tonnage,
which is decisive in relation to long-distance support capacity, radius of operation, length of time that can be
spent far from base, crew endurance, speed under stormy conditions, number and range of weapons carried, and
detection distance. Under all these headings, ‘the Soviets are very far behind the Western fleet, or even the
American fleet alone'. Furthermore the vast majority of the Russian crews before Gorbachev were relative
amateurs on their 3 year military service period, compared with the more competent, full-time professional
crews in the West. Full-time professionals in the Soviet fleet then amounted to only 8 per cent of the total crews.
There was also the geographical problem of encirclement of the Russians, who have no open, all-weather port
except Vladivostoc and to some extent (because of the Gulf Stream) far-away, non-strategic Murmansk, and
whose other exits to the high seas are controlled by the Western powers in the Baltic and the Mediterranean.
All in all, the US pointless overkill capacity meant that 11,786 warheads (1987 figure) on missiles, planes and
submarines were targeted on Russia’s 220 main urban and industrial centres, to the point that these centres could
be destroyed fifty times over. Finally, the Russians had very few powerful naval bases around the world such as
the West possesses throughout its empire.
Regarding chemical weapons, which have the capacity to instil particular fear in the ordinary public, ViceAdmiral Sanguinetti points out that the propaganda emerging from the three main Western sources, the
Pentagon, the London Institute of Strategic Studies and WEU are not objective. He indicates that the West was
probably far superior in stocks, a fact which no doubt explains why the US refused until 1975 to ratify the
Geneva Protocole prohibiting the use of chemical arms22.
I have heard the ridiculous argument made that if all this was so, Russia should have publicly admitted that it
was only a paper tiger! As if the country could afford to make itself a laughing-stock at home and abroad and
simultaneously drop its guard in the face of its declared enemies.
Referring to US naval power, Lieutenant General Bernard E Trainor, when he was US deputy chief of staff
under the Reagan administration, said: ‘We have a legitimate right, a legitimate interest to operate on the seas of
the world and touch the continents of the world. That’s our lifeblood, our economic lifeblood. This is not true
for the Soviet Union’. One is left wondering whether this legitimacy is conferred and this denial applied because
God is on the side of the big battalions. The US Strategic Air Command gives much of its time and energy to
rehearsing World War III, building confidence in US nuclear war fighting prowess, activities designed to lower
the anxiety threshold and render the military more trigger-happy. They also render Doomsday more probable.
Much of the research is in secret places with an innocent disguise, such as that at Livermore operated by the
University of California for the Department of Energy, employing over 7,000 scientists. It is easy to understand
the resistance by the West’s warlords to the Russian peace campaign of 1987—’89 because the West’s arms
manufacturers were and still are investing heavily in a vast range of new arms research and are determined to
reap the profits.
The military programme has been aimed at an increasing weight of Western science and technology being
brought under military control in the Fascist manner — an unprecedented military mobilisation of the Western
economy. Pressure on its allies from the Washington power base has been brutal. In 1985 they received a letter
allowing them 60 days to signify their participation in the new technological launch. Simultaneously there was a
threat to draw off scientists and engineers in case of any allied refusal. European and Japanese industrialists
were invited to become subsidiary contractors for the controlling American corporations. Europe responded
with its own military technology programme, officially to counter American hegemony but, in the view of many
observers, in reality to create a European pillar to support the American project. In addition to the industrial
participation, state military expenditures were constantly increased, and here in socialist France, for example,
amount to approximately 20 per cent of the national budget. A large part of national scientific research is
financed by the military for military purposes. All this is accompanied with subtle propaganda by politicians,
journalists and secret agents working for the arms manufacturers in the media in the same way that the people
were brainwashed to overcome European resistance to the installation of American Pershings on the Continent
by being harangued for ten years about the mortal danger of the Russian SS 20s. When both the SS 22s and the
Pershings were removed in 1988, we were told that Europe was being left naked and defenceless.
Strobe Talbott, author of Deadly Gambits, identified a Pentagon official in charge of international security
policy, Mr Richard Perle, who resigned in March 1987, as having had ‘more impact on policy in arms control
76
than any other official in the US Government’, who had a wide circle of ‘former associates, proteges and
mentors’ scattered throughout the administration, known as the ‘Perle Mafia’ and who was appointed by the
Secretary of Defence as head of the arms control section. The ‘Perle Mafia’ prided itself on being ‘hardheaded
enough to accept the possibility that the planet might not, in the end, be big enough for both superpowers —an
appalling confession, with frightening implications. G F Kennan refers to the congenital subjectivity which
marks America’s perception of the outside world and his discussion opens a question which we shall have to
investigate later: the psycho-sociological problem of The Other as a mirror image and cruel revealer of The Self,
becoming intolerable because of his gaze. He diagnoses a primitive urge in some high officials which indicates a
morbid obsession for destruction, suggesting a desire for suicide because of the fear of death. We had a little
glimpse behind the mask in the revelation that one of soft-spoken President Reagan’s favourite films was
‘Rambo’, whose hero he received in the White House, a film that was sodden, soaked and reeking with violence
and nothing but violence from beginning to end, with the most rocketing body count of individual murders ever
seen on the screen up to then.
Perhaps another hint at Establishment mentality may be seen in such things as the sick joke of having one of
America’s most devastating nuclear submarines blasphemously named ‘Corpus Christi’. Some believe that we
are led by men who climb the power structure in an effort to compensate for pathological insecurity, which also
leads them into the protective arms and secrecy of the Freemason Order. The writer Kurt Vonnegut has said that
political action is in the hands of people who are sick, hungry for power as alcoholics are for alcohol, ravenous
for situations that cause their bodies to release exciting chemicals into their bloodstreams, tragically hooked on
preparation for war, compulsive warmongers. This psychology filters down via the media to the public, creating
a generalised sense of insecurity which suits the arms manufacturers as the people develop a vaguely vicarious
sense that their deep-seated metaphysical insecurity will somehow be attenuated by the existence of a great
nuclear ‘umbrella’ overhead, when in fact the opposite is the case, as the most aware people know —that far
from being an umbrella it is a sword of Damocles which aids the warlords by adding to the fear and the
insecurity.
When in certain spheres Russia finally came close to achieving near parity with Western power, the Westernproclaimed ‘threat from Russia’ became self-fulfilling ‘sui generis’. The militarisation of all Europe had already
been assured through America’s satellites in the western half and Russia’s in the east. Yalta paid handsome
dividends to the arms merchants, and western Europe became consolidated as the second transatlantic pillar.
If De Gaulle had been listened to in the 1960’s when —against decisive opposition from the Anglo-American
camp and its supporters in western Europe — he was demanding that the Yalta agreement be reversed and a new
Europe established ‘from the Atlantic to the Urals’ independent of overseas powers, linking western Europe
with Russia and the eastern European countries and therefore able to reduce European warmongering and
transfer part of its arms expenditures to generous cooperation with the Third World, Europe could have set its
youth alight with the challenge and exhilaration of a new vision and the hybrid vigour of marriage with a new
system and culture. Instead of that we have had the continued exploitation of the poor countries and the regular
alternation of blowing hot and blowing cold —hot when new budgetary debates for arms were approaching,
cold when the Establishment wanted to soothe us into believing that they were interested in peace. Almost any
argument was used to serve this purpose. in 1984 the American administration said that it had to have the devastating nuclear MX missiles because the Russians were not at the bargaining table; in 1985 they insisted on
having 21 more because the Russians were at the bargaining table and the US had to negotiate from strength.
That has been one of the catch phrases all these years: ‘to negotiate from strength’. As if Russia did not equally
need to negotiate from strength, giving us the ongoing paradox of two negotiators vying with each other to
‘negotiate from strength’.
As the British Government had changed the rules of war in 1941, the US changed them still more
overwhelmingly on 6 August, 1945, the day Hiroshima was taken off the map. It now believes it has changed
them radically again with its ‘star wars’ programme and a new generation of super weapons. The arms-race lull
of 1987/89 was brought about entirely by the determined Russian campaign for an end to the race. It was a long,
persistent campaign that counted guns but did not limit itself to that. It was also backed by a broad humanistic
appeal, of which the following quotation is merely one example:
We are realists. The fundamental contradictions between the Soviet Union and the United States will remain.
So will the differences on many concrete issues. But it is certainly not necessary to quarrel and balance on
the brink of war all the time.... The Romans used to say: ‘If you want peace, prepare for war’. This is how it
has been so far. But why not try and prepare for peace? After all, this is not a new idea either. ‘There is more
glory in slaying war with the word than in slaying people with the sword. The real glory is in achieving
peace through peace’. This was not said by Lenin, nor by Gorbachev. It was said by St Augustine.
(Alexander Bovin, political commentator for the Russian government newspaper, Izvestia, in the course of
an article in The Independent (London) of 27 May, 1988)
77
Not bad from ‘the Evil Empire’. How did the West respond?
Agents from eastern Europe with good Slav names, angry over their losses under Stalinist regimes and eager to
return to their positions of power and prestige were employed to write articles in the Western press in the name
of liberty, to confuse the issues. The then US Secretary of State, George Schultz, addressing a NATO meeting in
Madrid, complained that Europe’s war effort was inadequate and that military force was ‘the best means of
discussion’. Shortly afterwards, the US presidential candidate, George Bush, took up the refrain, with the
support of The Washington Post and other media, saying, ‘The Cold War is not over’ and if he were elected
president he would prepare the United States ‘for protracted conflict’.
Not to be outdone, the Democrats re-echoed the strain and Zbigniew Brzesinski said that the cold war was not
ended and that Russia was still ‘the Evil Empire’23. Even so, Russia was not discouraged and on 8 December,
1988, at the General Assembly of the United Nations, President Gorbachev announced new drastic unilateral
cuts in Russian military equipment and a reduction of half a million men in the army, all to be verifiable and
witnessed.
The Establishment and its mouthpiece, the media, frightened that the people might have time to think, rushed
into the breach the following morning on television, radio and press to denounce the Russian proposals even
before any calm analysis could be made of the facts. It was done in unison as if commanded by some unseen
hand in these days of instant global communication when a few late-night ‘phone calls are enough to decide the
morning news as described by George Urban, quoted in my last letter.
It is always fairer to the opposition to meet them on their own high ground, so instead of quoting the gutter press
or the multitude of media organs known to be biased, let me quote the BBC, which many think to be objective,
when of course it is as British as Stilton cheese and an essential part of the Establishment. As early as its 9
o’clock radio news the morning after Mr Gorbachev’s historic announcement, the BBC had the NATO
secretary-general, Mr Manfred Worner, declaring in answer to the pointed questions, without any critical
challenge or probing of such an historic issue, that NATO did not have any capacity for surprise attack (!) and
expressing other distortions, knowing that a misinformed public would believe him. Subsequently, on 20
January, 1989 the Russians took another major step forward, announcing the withdrawal of tactical nuclear
weapons from eastern Europe. And again, without allowing time for critical examination, the BBC counterattacked in its 5 pm radio news the same day, when it had one of Mrs Thatcher’s sharpest hawks, Sir Geoffrey
Howe, to answer leading questions which pretended to show interest in the Russian proposals but in fact merely
gave Sir Geoffrey the openings to forestall any questions in listeners’ minds. As we turned into the last decade
of the century, even while the Russians were struggling on the home front to prevent the disintegration of their
country, NATO forces in Germany kept their heads buried in the sand and continued with their massive
manoeuvres at the rate of several hundred war games a year, battling against imaginary invaders uniformed in
red and designated as coming from such countries as ‘Northland’, doing considerable damage to the countryside, scarring the land with tank tracks and littering fields with rusting remnants of military vehicles, used shells
and barbed wire, as if through some subconscious nostalgia for the glorious days of 1945. The US armed forces
at home announced their intention to purchase a further six million acres in sixteen states to add to their existing
twenty five million acres of training grounds. The air arm declared their need for an additional seventy five B2
Stealth Bombers at $815 million each. Plans were made for a further ten thousand nuclear warheads to be added
to NATO’s overkill capacity, and the organisation decided to continue expanding its arms expenditures at the
rate of 3 per cent per annum (in real terms).
Faced with the Russian peace offensive, NATO’s military strategy was also changed to make a big transfer of
nuclear weapons into the oceans in response to limitations on land-based missiles. A further tactic to defeat the
east European peace initiatives without being seen to do so was to replace barred weapons with new inventions,
as with the plans for the development of a devastating new short range tactical air-to-surface missile (TASM).
Finally, when President Gorbachev’s conversion to capitalism seemed clear he was hailed as a friend of NATO
and invited to address the organisation in Brussels. Here the Indian proverb applies, that whether two elephants
are fighting or making love it is the same for the vegetation they trample.
Man is a creature of habit but the 500-year-old escalating habit of warmongering is encouraged by the vested
interests with a great stake in the warmongering business, driving the world with their philosophy of one last
‘war to end all war’ as in 1914, behind a façade of Establishment rhetoric about peace, while the arms
manufacturers and their subsidiaries in big business, backed by the high financiers, continue their march
towards the ultimate precipice. At the very moment when an unprecedented military build-up was taking place
in the Gulf, ostensibly to stop one man’s aggression but in reality to pursue the ongoing aggression against the
Arab peoples by plutocratic puppets using Western aid and Western arms to protect Western interests in the
region, naturally supported by neo-capitalist Russia with its begging bowl held out to the West and by the media
whipping up popular enthusiasm against the mini-aggressor to better hide the strategy of the major — at this
very moment, ten thousand police were mobilised here in Paris to seal off large sections of the city from the
populace for a meeting of the heads of government of the 34 nations of the industrialised North, come together
for a 3-day extravaganza to sign another Declaration, inaugurating what they called ‘a new era of peace’, in a
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30-metre-long hall of mirrors — the symbolism being lost on them — resembling Versailles, while a latter-day
Marie Antoinette entertained the leaders’ wives in Versailles itself. The Declaration, almost frightening in its
flights of lyrical fantasy, stated for the umpteenth time in Western rhetoric that ‘human rights and fundamental
freedoms are the birthright of all human beings, are inalienable and are guaranteed by law’ and that every
individual has the right ‘to enjoy his economic, social and cultural rights’ (sic). The Declaration, or Charter of
Paris as it was called, went on to say:
Freedom and political pluralism are necessary elements in our common objective of developing market
economies towards sustainable economic growth, prosperity, social justice, expanding employment and
efficient use of economic resources.
The success of the transition to market economy by countries making efforts to this effect is important and in
the interest of us all. Preservation of the environment is a shared responsibility of all nations. We reaffirm
our commitment to settle disputes by peaceful means.... We pledge to intensify our endeavours to protect
and improve our environment in order to restore and maintain a sound ecological balance in air, water and
soil.
In France itself, Mr J M Boucheron, the socialist president of the parliamentary defence committee stated that
‘the difficulty now is to maintain the (military) effort when the atmosphere is rather towards relaxation’,
subsequently adding, as if in a kind of prophetic afterthought, that there were new dangers on the horizon, ‘due
to the aggravation of the situation in the Third World’. Mr Boucheron went on to deplore the fact that French
arms exports had declined by 17.5 billion francs in 1989 compared with 1988 (due perhaps to the ‘unfortunate’
ending of the highly profitable Iran-Iraq war) and hoped for an upturn in exports by the planned sum of 20
billion francs in the following fiscal year.
As in the case of the recent Paris ‘peace conference’, there are regular times in this blowing-hot, blowing-cold
strategy that has marked the arms race for 45 years when the Establishment considers it wise to change tack in
order to better mislead the public, but the pacifying statements and promises cannot be taken any more seriously
than the promise by secretary of state Dean Acheson during senate hearings in 1949 on the North Atlantic
Treaty: asked whether the US might have to base its NATO troops in Europe, the secretary of state said the
answer was ‘a clear and absolute no’. A year later American NATO troops landed in Europe under General
Dwight D Eisenhower as supreme allied commander.
The media everywhere have given heavy coverage to fraudulent figures issued by the London-based
International Institute for Strategic Studies (largely financed by the arms manufacturers and their subcontractors
in big business). The data have been examined by the qualified hand of Admiral Sanguinetti24 who showed how
the figures for the respective forces of East and West had been falsified, using such techniques as discounting
certain Western divisions for arbitrary reasons and inflating Eastern forces with nonoperational divisions which
would require months for call-up and preparation and with divisions involved in civil defence, railroad
maintenance etc., tactics which bloated Warsaw Pact forces by the respectable figure of 1,896,000 men.
Western experts also claimed that Russia’s proposed massive reduction in tanks and other equipment would
only concern useless and outmoded material, though a year earlier the same experts had denied the existence of
any such material.
Former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau (who was intensely disliked by some of the Western
Establishment for his tendency to occasionally blurt out a truth which good Masons would never reveal), in an
address at the award of the Albert Einstein Peace Prize in Washington in 1984, said that the leaders of the
NATO alliance, at the summit meetings in which he participated over a period of 15 years, almost never
addressed the question of war and peace but ‘meet only to go through the tedious motions of reading speeches
drafted by others with the principle objective of not rocking the boat’.
The fact is that apart from the arms manufacturers with which it is linked by a powerful lobby, NATO now has a
virtually incurable vested interest in the maintenance of a war atmosphere. Staff are carefully handpicked and
their background researched for their right-wing opinions and political reliability. They are kept at a peak level
of awareness by their heads of services and divisions and fed with an abundance of information and
disinformation. Tax-free salaries, diplomatic status and ‘perks’, office accommodation and so on, especially for
senior and middle-level staff, are far beyond anything they could hope for elsewhere. Restaurants, cafes, inhouse tax-free shops and other facilities are designed to keep social mixing as much as possible within the
organisation. They know that their outside contacts are watched and therefore tend to mix particularly with
themselves, all of which encourages an unhealthy, introspective atmosphere of suspicion of the outside world,
and reinforcing the idea that any threat that peace might break out is a threat to their careers. Beyond the staff
vested interest there are the committee meetings, and behind them the arms lobby and a million-dollar-a-minute
industry at stake. Many of the meetings are held in top-secret code and protected by the Masonic oath which
lays down appalling penalties for any revelation. Obviously I cannot hint at my source of information here
because the source would be in danger.
79
The world is thus faced with the dramatic situation that the very body set up to defend peace is now its greatest
enemy and thinking has become locked into warmongering under the pretence of peace. It is supported, with
clever nuances and splitting of straws by the ISS, WEO, the Heritage Foundation and various organisations
attached to the Reverend Mr Moon’s Unification Church and many other groups. Through their contacts with
the media and their undercover journalists, they are able to constantly manipulate public opinion, which in turn
supports the politicians in the right direction and the vicious circle is closed. The only ray of hope on the
horizon as far as NATO is concerned is that the enormous US debt may reduce American belligerency, but the
arms manufacturers and their subcontractors in big business, foreseeing this possibility, have been feverishly
operating behind the corridors of the EC governments with a view to ensuring that European warmongering,
subtly encouraged by Israel, and by a South Africa that sells essential raw materials for modern weapons, will
more than fill any decline in the American rate of arms expansion.
This Western warmongering is encouraging right-wing militarists in the Eastern bloc to plan for a possible coup
and a new upsurge in defensive armaments, which would make the Western philosophy self-fulfilling and
delight the arms manufacturers and their big-business subsidiaries and financiers.
European warmongering had already been stepped up with the coming to power all over the continent at the turn
of the decade of reactionary parties from different parts of the political spectrum, from Mrs Thatcher of the
British right to President Mitterand of the Masonic left. The latter broke the socialist campaign promises and
greatly strengthened the militarisation of the alliance. Mitterand’s brother, General Jacques Mitterand, in a
process of career promotion and lobby building now normal practice all over the West, had already left the army
to join the arms manufacturers, and one of the president’s close personal friends, Charles Hernu, beloved of the
military and of the leading arms merchants, in his luxurious defence ministry residence at Hotel de Brienne,
became an aggressive minister with responsibility to increase the power of French arms and arms exports to the
Third World. It is not insignificant that he was also a leading Freemason like a large number of the politicians
and officials in the new administration, even more than in the old. The following letter (of which I have a
photocopy) will give you some little hint of how the Masonic wind was blowing (my translation from the
French — I do not know what the Masonic codes ‘TT’ etc., mean and have therefore left them as in the
original):
The Grand master
16 rue Cadet
of the Grand Orient of France
75009 Paris
Confidential
l6July 1981
To the TT’. III. FF’. Members of the Council of the
Order.
T.’ III.’ and T.’ C.’ F.’.,
I am advised that our FF’. occupying positions of responsibility in the Elysees, Matignon and the Ministries
have been receiving numerous requests from Freemasons.
It is understandable that such correspondence is disturbing on various counts, not least the fact that, written in
Masonic terms, it falls into the hands of non-Masons.
I am not in a position to say that Freemasons of the Grand Orient of France are alone the ones guilty of such
irresponsibility [— a reference to other Freemasons not in the Grand Orient], but I consider it our duty to remind
the Lodges on the widest and most discreet basis possible of the obligation of reserve imposed by the rules as
well as by seemliness.
This is the least we could do to enable our politicians,
our FF’, to operate in full freedom.
I shall advise the latter at the same time to return all applications which they may receive henceforth, without
following them up. Furthermore, I am informing the responsible authorities in the other French Masonic Orders
of the contents of the present letter. I am counting upon you, ¶I’J2’. III’. FF’. to act, of course
with discretion but with firmness and determination.
Roger Leray
Several important books have been written in recent years showing how the warmongering Establishment is in
the hands of Masons even in the most unexpected quarters. Your research into the power behind the throne will
not be complete without some attention to this influence.
80
David Yallop’s In God’s Name: An Investigation into the Murder of Pope John Paul I in September 1978 by
Freemasons operating inside the Vatican (Corgi Books, 1985), is one of the most stunning books of our time,
where truth is indeed stranger than fiction. Apart from issuing one or two brief communiques in answer to
criticism appearing in the world press, it took the Vatican 4 years before attempting any answer to Yallop and
even then it was only an indirect attempt, through an invitation to an English author with whom Vatican
officials and bishops were instructed to co-operate (A Thief in the Night, by John Cornwell, Viking). This reply
was chiefly a rather vague collection of hearsay evidence and defensive comment from members of the religious
establishment and was pointedly accompanied by articles in the British Press on the theme that it was time to let
John Paul I sleep in peace. This is not surprising in view of what follows about the involvement of British
Masonry. Yallop’s book describes the masonic conspiracy which John Paul I was determined to root out of the
Vatican. It had, and no doubt still has, the entire Italian state — as it has most of the Western states and those in
its ambit, from the NATO command down — entirely at its mercy. Martin Short in his well researched Inside
the Brotherhood25 has this comment:
‘At a future date I hope to portray the political, military and commercial rackets which P2 (the Roman Masonic
lodge) members have continued to perpetrate years after P2 was officially dissolved. Here I show how the
reactionary forces, in Italy and America, which created P2 are tied in with British intelligence and British
Freemasonry’. British Intelligence, he says, had succeeded in misleading Stephen Knight (the dead author of
The Brotherhood) into believing that P2 was a KGB plot when in fact it was ‘a nexus for the Italian right to
seize control of Italian society’. There were ‘frequent P2 meetings where the politics of destabilization and
subversion were discussed by police chiefs, army generals, security service bosses and appeal court judges’. At
that time, ‘many of the horrific acts originally blamed on the left turned out to be acts of black propaganda by
the extreme right’. When powerful evidence came to light that P2 was an occult wing of the CIA in Europe, the
Italian head of state, President Francesco Cossiga, was forced by public opinion to ask the government for an
enquiry.
In his 3 years of research, David Yallop uncovered ‘a chain of corruption that linked leading figures in financial,
political, criminal and clerical circles around the world in a conspiracy of awesome proportions’. If one accepts
the compelling case made that John Paul I was murdered as a result of a Masonic conspiracy, backed by the CIA
and British Masonry, it is almost an automatic conclusion that concordant plans may have been made for the
choice of his successor. The legitimate question therefore arises as to what ‘horse-trading’ may have gone on
between the first John Paul’s death and his speedy embalming and burial without an autopsy, and the equally
speedy election of his successor, with a view, perhaps, to having an anti-Marxist, anti-Russian-leaning Polish
bishop at one of the West’s chief nerve centres, the Vatican, as described by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan
Witts in The Year of Armageddon — the Pope and the Bomb.
There are still large numbers of sectarian ‘christians’ of every denomination who hesitate to criticise the head of
their particular church and there are many others who feel so lost in these confused times that they feel criticism
of their leader as a weakening of their own position. This is very unchristian, for Christ was the most radical
critic ever born, not hesitating to enter into a head-on collision with his own race, with the chosen people of God
and with their established Church, in the interest of the truth, a collision that cost him his life. Human heads of
churches no more than the rest of us cannot place themselves above criticism. More than that, people at the top
in every domain must be subject to it more than we ordinary mortals because of the power they exercise in
leading men for better or for worse.
It is fairer to meet the Establishment on their own high ground rather than on ours, and therefore, in reference to
John Paul II, let me quote one of his own predecessors, Pius XII, regarding the need for that open debate which
the politico-religious Establishment is frightened of for fear it might reveal the truth, because, as the bible says,
‘the truth will set you free’. In an address to the International Congress of Catholic Journalists held in Rome
from 16 to 19 February, 195026 Pius XII said (my translation from French document):
‘Public opinion is an ingredient of any normal society composed of people who, conscious of their personal and
social conduct, are intimately engaged in the community of which they form a part.... Wherever there is a lack
of manifestation of public opinion ... this should be seen as a vice, an infirmity, a sickness of the social fabric’.
He then went on to hope for informed public opinion in the church, because ‘the church is a living body and its
life would be defective if it lacked public opinion’. Referring to this text, the Second Vatican Council stated that
the church was the People of God and encouraged laymen to speak out. John Paul II seems afraid of this, and it
is difficult to come to terms with his ambiguous reign, not only regarding the manner of his election but also in
relation to his words and actions. He is a good Establishment man, beloved of the governing authorities even in
most protestant countries. He is naturally supported by the Vatican-appointed bishops and their appointees in the
clergy. Non-thinking laity who use religion as a refuge follow him to the point of almost obliterating the Christ
whose vicar he claims to be. But he has lost the confidence of most thinking catholics.
Without going so far as accepting many unproven charges in The Year of Armageddon the evidence seems
convincing that the Vatican is closely involved with the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies, where it
has had at least one advantage over the KGB, a network of dedicated bishops, clergy and laity around the world,
81
eager to supply information against ‘godless Marxism’. In addition, according to The Year of Armageddon,
every week John Paul II is handed a report from the Rome office of the CIA delivered by special courier, which
we can guess from other revelations no doubt contains a great deal of disinformation carefully spiced with
verifiable truth. Never before, say Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts, two long-established Vatican
watchers, has the CIA, and through it the White House, had such a powerful group so close to the pope. It is
therefore hardly surprising that Rome restrained the American bishops in their condemnation of nuclear
weapons in 1983; that in the same year the French hierarchy made a statement in favour of such weapons; that
archbishop Hunthausen of Seattle, an outspoken critic of nuclear arms, was removed from his post in October
1986 (on the pretence that he was preaching wrong sexual morality), being reinstated in May 1987 following
pressure on the Vatican from American catholics; that in the early eighties the Jesuit and other religious orders
were severely admonished and whipped into line from their left-leaning tendencies on behalf of the Third World
poor and oppressed; that in March 1989, the key megapolis of Sao Paulo with its great network of basic
christian communities taking inspiration from liberation theology under the leadership of archbishop Arns, was
split up into five dioceses so that four could be removed from archbishop Arn’s influence and placed under
conservatives faithful to John Paul’s dogmatic centralisation (which was not at all the original proposal from
archbishop Arns to have auxiliary bishops operating under his authority); that John Paul II’s representative in
Managua, Cardinal Obando y Bravo, mobilised the Nicaraguan church to help bring about the downfall of the
legitimate government; that the liberal Jesuit theologian Paul Valadier was removed from his position as editor
of the French Jesuit review Etudes in March 1989; and that the Latin American church was forced to abandon
the opening to the liberal left launched by the Latin American Bishops’ Conference at Medellin in 1968, an
abandonment that resulted in a new escalation of violence by the impoverished masses who now felt betrayed
by the church as they had already been by the state.
These are merely examples of a doggedly-pursued strategy to stifle criticism and recreate a monolithic church of
obedient yes-men, where no voice must be heard except that which echoes John Paul II. It is coupled with
‘pastoral visits’ to country after country, during which signs of demagogy are far from absent. It is perhaps not a
coincidence that under John Paul II full diplomatic relations were established between Washington and the
Vatican for the first time in the history of the United States, partly, it was suspected by liberal American
catholics, to enable the American ambassador to influence the Vatican, and to have a papal nunciature in
Washington with leverage to stifle and counteract criticism by the American church of Washington warmongering. One of the last outposts of resistance was the courageous church of Brazil, defending the poor and
the oppressed against the cruelty of the imperialist system and its offer of pie in the sky to those who obediently
accepted the jackboot on their throats here below. In January 1989, in an effort to get the truth to penetrate the
walls of the Vatican, the retired Cardinal Aloisio Lorsheider, former president of the Latin American Bishops’
Conference, published his view in the Italian religious monthly, Jesus. Here he criticised two Vatican
documents attacking liberation theology, and added that every member of the Vatican Curia should live for a
time — and not just on a flying visit — ‘in a real diocese, if possible in Africa, Latin America or Asia, in other
words in the Third World’. He also criticised the newly-vamped Latin American Bishops’ Conference, in which
little Costa Rica had the same strength as enormous Brazil with its three hundred bishops. Clearly it is easier for
John Paul II and his right-hand man, Cardinal Ratzinger, to exert their influence through one central body rather
than among hundreds of widely-scattered bishops. It is worthy of note that Cardinal Lorsheider had to wait to
issue this criticism until he resigned his episcopal seat on reaching the age limit. It is also noteworthy that when
John Paul and Cardinal Ratzinger met a representative group of American bishops in the Vatican in March
1989, one of the main things that filtered through to the public was the news of a co-ordinated attack on liberal
theologians and religious, combined with a firm invitation to the bishops to rein them in. This is supposed to be
‘the truth that will set you free.
Not entirely in the same order of ideas but related to it is the ambiguity of this pope’s frequent references and
actions in relation to ecumenism. Coupled with his positive gestures towards protestantism, John Paul II has
been leading his church backwards towards the very things that are rightly anathema to all good protestants
(though it must be added that some protestant churches are no less culpable in this and other directions): his
stifling of theological freedom of speech; his claim to the anachronistic, obscurantist and anti-christian notion —
as we shall have an opportunity of seeing in the second half of your thesis — of papal infallibility in matters of
faith and morals; his promotion — to use Luther’s term — of the ‘Babylonian captivity’ of sacerdotalism,
sacramentalism and sacriflcialism; his refusal of free intermarriage between christians; his love of religious
ritual, pilgrimages and other pagan practices; his appointment of conservative, dyed-in-the-wool supporters to
episcopal sees everywhere; and his interpretation of ‘the church’ as a hierarchical structure in which the pope is
supreme and the People of God are merely an obedient appendage — all of which is producing a ghetto-like
institution that alienates most people except those who are unable to think for themselves. Times have changed
since Leo X, but the question may be asked as to whether the subtle methods by which John Paul stifles
criticism may not be as damaging to his church as the more brutal ones of his sixteenth-century predecessor. To
complete this parenthesis on John Paul II and the Vatican, it should be added that not all the problems are John
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Paul’s own creation: some of them are due to the fact that the Vatican like all the other institutional churches,
especially the mainstream ones, are part of The System, operating structures which they have inherited rather
than created. Thus, the fact that the pope is a head of state who exchanges ambassadors with most countries in
the world greatly ties his hands and subjects him to constant pressure from governments.
Let me now return to the main theme, beginning with a very brief recapitulation of the post-1945 development
of nuclear weapons.
In January 1946, five months after the Japanese surrender, General Dweight D Eisenhower submitted a paper to
his government which gave a strong keynote to the future. Among other things, it said: ‘If there are to be nuclear
weapons’ [a peculiar conditional clause, since the US alone had them] we must have the best, the biggest and
the most’. This was the same Mr Eisenhower who according to Dr J P Oppenheimer urged scientists in the fall
of 1951 ‘to make atomic weapons available’; the same Mr Eisenhower who after his inauguration as President,
according to his then Vice President Mr Richard M Nixon, threatened to use nuclear weapons on Korea; who
launched the US on the greatest nuclear stock-piling ever, from a thousand warheads when he took office — for
which he was already at least partly responsible — to 18,000 when he handed over the reins to President
Kennedy; who, according to Mr Bromley Smith of the National Security Council staff, gave 15 jupiter missiles
to Turkey because ‘we had so many of them that they were coming out of our ears and this was a good place to
get rid of them’ — sabre rattling close to the Russian frontier
— and who, belatedly, in his farewell address to the nation tried to redeem himself for posterity by deploring the
armaments build-up by the American military-industrial complex. Somebody has been telling lies — either Mr
Eisenhower or those close to him who have reported on his activities for the 15 years prior to his valedictory
address.
Here in France, the former head of intelligence made a similar confession: ‘The politicians are incapable of controlling the military-industrial complex. They are unable to put it in its place as an executant of policies decided
by the civil power and prepared through democratic process. They are unable to denounce it publicly for the
benefit of public opinion.’27 And Vice Admiral Sanguinetti has said that instead of arms being produced in
response to defence strategy developed at political level the opposite is the practice: ‘Strategy adapts as best it
can to the use of the arms that are produced’28
Nobody can foretell who may become the new victims of the military escalation that has been developing. At
the individual as opposed to the mass level it will probably never be known with certainty whether the man was
acting alone or being manipulated who murdered OlofPalme, ‘our beloved dove of peace’ as the Swedes called
him. All we know so far is that an ex-CIA agent, Dick Breneke, said the CIA were involved and that at the trial
of a suspect 3 years after the event, one of the witnesses, Ulf Spinnars, gave evidence on 13 June, 1989 to the
effect that the police offered him a bribe of $7 million if he told the court, contrary to the facts, that the accused,
with whom he stayed, did not arrive home on the night of the crime until 1.00 am, which would have given him
time to shoot Mr Palme at 11.21 pm, that the accused had a motive and that he was in a position to obtain the
new, extremely rare and extremely deadly, military-issue gun used in the attack.
What is also clear is that whether Palme’s assassination was a gift from the gods or organised by an
international conspiracy as some experts believe, his disappearance was a good riddance to those who never
forgave him for the fact that he spent a lifetime of activity for the cause of peace doing such unforgivable things
as allowing the Russel Tribunal judging American war crimes in Vietnam to operate from his country and
organising the Independent Commission on Disarmament which roundly condemned the arms race in its report,
which you ought to read for its calm evaluation of the issues. At least we know of well-documented cases where
other men of peace were assassinated by hit squads, such, for example as archbishop Oscar Romero of El
Salvador, an outspoken opponent of violence, whose planned assassination was known to Washington for 3
years before, according to the liberal minded American ambassador on the spot, Robert E White, who accused
the Reagan administration of deliberately ignoring detailed information on Salvadoran death squads operating
from the US. Naturally, Mr White was withdrawn from his post shortly afterwards. But a former Salvadoran
death squad member, Cesar Vielman J Martinez, fled to the US and gave several days’ testimony before
members of congress to the effect that agents of the US government work in close daily collusion with the death
squads. Martinez was speedily arrested with a view to his deportation. And the CIA refused to hand over the
relevant documents on the death squads.
The System has blood, big blood, on its hands, which includes — without going back further than our own time
—Martin Luther King, Salvador Allende, Pope John Paul I, perhaps the Kennedy brothers, Olof Palme and
innumerable lesser and unsung victims. Media men, obeying orders from the occult power, used to go after
every breach of justice in Soviet Russia with great enthusiasm but show less enthusiasm investigating the much
more subtle Western system by which troublesome individuals are ‘taken out’, to use the cynical euphemism for
political assassination. Even the much vaunted Watergate, far from being a media attack on the system was in
effect the media rushing self-righteously to the defence of the system and the defence of the Democratic Party
when President Nixon foolishly broke the 11th Commandment, ‘Thou shalt not be caught’.
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One of the organisations that had been working, in the face of every kind of obstruction by the powers who
govern it, to reduce the dissipation of resources in the arms race and promote a transfer from military effort to
the development of a more genuine process of help to the Third World was UNESCO. An example of
UNESCO’s work on disarmament was its edition of the International Social Science Journal on ‘Burdens of
Militarization’ published in 1983, the year the United States government decided to withdraw from the
organisation. This publication came hard on the heels of Many Voices, One World: Towards a New, More Just
and More Efficient World Information and Communication Order, prepared by a distinguished international
commission under the chairmanship of the late Mr Sean MacBride. It may be noted that in addition to
publishing such reports UNESCO was a persistent critic of Israel for many years, a fact that may not be foreign
to America’s withdrawal, followed obediently by Britain’s and by criticism of UNESCO from other Western
powers. This incident is now past history but, recalling Hitler’s ominous withdrawal from the League of Nations
to free his hands for unilateral action, it is worth considering briefly as an illustration of the serious undermining
of the UN system’s work for disarmament and Third World development that has been subtly developing behind
a façade of lip service in order to leave the way clear for direct influence from the imperialist powers.
The Director General of UNESCO, Mr M’7Bow, was accused of ambition, inefficiency and of travelling too
much. This leaves one wondering how an organisation of the size and complexity of UNESCO could be
adequately directed by an unambitious weakling, how an energetic leader could properly manage the
organisation without leaving the bureaucracy behind and making contact with the real problems in the field, and
how the US body responsible for UNESCO, the state department, often referred to in Washington as ‘foggy
bottom’ or ‘the fudge factory’, had reached a position of such efficiency in its own much more enormous
bureaucracy that it proposed to deal with inefficiency by running away from it. A sign of UNESCO
‘inefficiency’ was declared officially by the US administration to be the organisation’s expanding budget. The
budget for 1984 / 1985 which the US refused to vote before leaving the organisation was $374 million, less than
that of the previous year which the US had accepted without a murmur.
There was one other argument in the US attack on UNESCO: the small number of Western employees
compared with over-representation by the countries of Eastern Europe. Here are the figures at the time of the US
break with the organisation: 62.8 per cent of staff from North America and Western Europe; 4.1 per cent from
the Socialist countries; 8.3 per cent from Latin America and the Carribean; 8.7 per cent from Asia and the
Pacific; 8.6 per cent from Africa south of the Sahara; and 7.5 per cent from the Arab countries.
The man who headed the US delegation that broke with UNESCO — a cultural and educational organisation —
and presented the report attacking the organisation to the House of Representatives was none other than a senior
executive of the Mobil Oil Corporation, third largest of American big business companies. And a major role in
the decision was played~ by the extreme right-wing Heritage Foundation (which you can visit at 214
Massachusetts Avenue in Washington;DC) founded by the multi-millionaire Francis Mellon Scaife, one of the
functions of which is to defend the interests of American multinational corporations (including those involved in
subsidiary production for the arms manufacturers).
If you will bear with me in adding a word of personal experience from the few years I spent in the UN system of
which UNESCO is a part, I would make a distinction between two kinds of multilateral work. First there are the
centrally-placed officials such as the World Bank ‘whiz kid’ missions jetting from luxury hotel to luxury hotel,
packing their cases with government publications to impress headquarters in Washington and rarely making
contact with the real situation in the field. On the other hand, there are the hard-working staffs of the various UN
agencies in the field, including those of UNESCO and some World Bank development projects, struggling
against heavy odds to achieve something. Their greatest obstacle arises from the actions of the colonialist
governments who see the multilateral work as competing with them all the way through the hierarchy from the
Secretary General in New York, via the Directors General of the Agencies to the UN Resident Representatives
and Agency Representatives in the countries concerned. I can say from personal experience that the destruction
of the Secretary-General’s official authority as the independent head of the secretariat by the big-power
governments is echoed right down to the remotest multilateral staff in the field. The result of this conflict of
interests is that a field staff member cannot have firm support up the line through his hierarchy, which is obliged
to bend to intrigue at every level between governments, particularly between the host government and the
colonial powers who continually slip sand, and sometimes real spanners, into the multilateral works.
Part of the problem with Mr M’Bow of UNESCO was that he was a Director-General of a UN Agency who
dared to stand up for an honest multilateral approach to the problems of the Third World against bullying by its
most powerful member government. With particular reference to the MacBride Commission~s report, as an
erstwhile journalist I must enter a plea of clemency on behalf of journalists, who have to earn a living as best
they can and cannot be expected to bite the hand that feeds them. Even so, some of them succeed in maintaining
a united front for a time against the covert dictatorship from The System. The admirable struggle for freedom of
expression by the staff of the BBC under their director Alasdair Milne merited the applause of the world in 1985
and 1986 but eventually, of course, the Establishment won the battle. Even though the BBC had the advantage
of being free of advertising, the Establishment had other means of pressure. Most journalists work in an even
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more vulnerable situation as employees of the private media corporations and multinational newsagencies which
are the mouthpiece of The System and commonly have major other interests including those in arms production.
It must also be added that we have the media we deserve and if we allow them to impress us because of our
mental laziness we have only ourselves to blame.
Between the morning and evening newspapers, the weeklies and monthlies, the big weekend reading, the daylong radio and television, the evenings in front of the television set, the media now possess dangerous power
over the sub-conscious minds of the masses. They used to be referred to in France as ‘the fourth power’ (after
the 3 traditional ones of the Revolution) but no less a person than ex-President Valery Giscard d’Estaing said
they were now ‘the first power.
The media must therefore be held up to the sharpest scrutiny and all the more so because their effects are usually
of the subtle kind that work their way not by the blatancy of their message but by the proverbial drip ‘that wears
away the stone’. Sometimes they know when to abandon subtlety and strike the masses with heavy hammer
blows of propaganda, as, for example, the programme AMERIKA in 1987, about which former US ambassador
in Moscow George Kennan, in an open letter, wrote as follows:
According to press reports, the ABC television network is preparing to broadcast in the near future over its
many stations a mini-series of some 12 hours under the title ‘Amerika’. Here, we are told, the United States will
be depicted as groaning under the yoke of a supposed Soviet military occupation, enforcement of which is
entrusted to the armed forces of the United Nations, the latter organization having also now been taken entirely
under Soviet control.
If the reality corresponds even approximately to what the reports suggest, this is a serious disservice to the
clarity of public understanding on issues of vital importance and to the prospects for a constructive and peaceful
resolution of differences between this country and the Soviet Union.
The scenario is devoid of reality. An occupation of this country lies neither in the intentions, nor the desires, nor
the capabilities of the Soviet leadership. To suggest otherwise would be confusing for American opinion and
undeservedly offensive to the Soviet Union, and this at a moment of extreme sensitivity in relations between
that country and our own.
The implied involvement of the ‘forces’ of the United Nations, aside from the outrageous reflection it casts on
the organization itself and on the many fine men who have served or are serving in its peace-keeping contingents, is a grotesque absurdity.
What good purpose could be served by feeding this unreal nightmare hour after hour into the minds and
imaginations of a considerable portion of the viewing public, with the implication that the dangers portrayed are
sufficiently real to deserve its prolonged attention? Do we not have enough real problems without conjuring up
fictitious ones to muddy the waters of international understanding?
It is hard to see how such an effort could bring anything other than discredit on all concerned: those who
produce it, those who sponsor it and the network that has so little sense of its responsibility as to make possible
its appearance.
One may hope that the good sense of the American people will deprive this undertaking of much of its intended
sting; and, surely, to some extent, it will. But it is useless to suppose that 12 solid hours of such suggestions will
not leave their marks.
With everyone of those marks the prospects for a better Soviet-American relationship, and with them the hopes
of people everywhere for a more stable and peaceful world environment, will have been needlessly diminished.
GEORGE KEENAN
Princetown, N.J., Dec. 26, 1986
Such media productions take their inspiration from the large volume of fiction, cleverly written in realistic terms
to impress the Western subconscious, which used to provide scenarios of Russian invasion. The end result was
to convince many people of the veracity of such a threat. The intelligence services were not foreign to such
productions nor to the stories in the media. In the 70’s a Senate Intelligence Committee determined that
hundreds of American journalists were habitually receiving payoffs from the CIA to plant stories. In addition to
ordinary secret service agents, the cream of these services are hired at handsome supplementary salaries by the
million-dollar-a-minute, all-powerful military industry. Wheels within wheels, moles within moles. The result,
according to the well-informed Mr Tony Benn, is that the media ‘increasingly acts as a propaganda machine
rather than as information services’29. Except for the gutter press and the blatantly partisan organs and
journalists, media style is rarely glaring — it is a matter of relativity, depending less on what is said than on
what is not, to distort truth, the seemingly careful weighing up of pros and cons, the cautious tone, the splitting
of surface straws, subtly keyed in the present context to the essential message of the arms manufacturers and
their aim of expanding the market for ever more sophisticated, more costly weapons. When occasion demands,
however, some such journalists give the impression of going after their prey with a vengeance that would be to
their credit if it dealt with any fundamental criticism of The System.
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There are exceptional journalists and film makers who have the courage and authority to row against the tide up
to a point. In the film industry one thinks of men of the stamp of Richard Attenborough and his great films on
Gandhi and on apartheid. One must also pay tribute to the small marginal papers struggling to make ends meet
while defending truth. In addition, there is the occasional prestigious editor or columnist who manages to
achieve an odd flash of independence. There are also well-meaning journalists and papers trying to survive the
rat-race against the giants but being inundated with the daily message of the big news-agency corporations: the
paper must be ready for the printers before a certain hour and the struggling staff have little choice but to take
what they get. In addition, the major advertisers have powerful means to exert pressure on disobedient organs
which criticise unduly — withdrawing their manna and transferring it to more co-operative media, severing the
jugular vein. Nevertheless there are one or two proudly free journals which succeed through endowment,
through the dedication of their staffs and contributors or through skilled management in keeping costs low, to
function with little or no advertising. Here I am thinking particularly of the French monthly Le Monde
Diplomatique which, under the inspired leadership of Claude Julien, is probably unique in the world for welldocumented, in-depth and fearless investigation of major world issues.
Contrary to the opinion created by the well-orchestrated media and newsagency campaigns at the time, there
was no question in the MacBride report of restricting liberty of information for the public. But an important
distinction has to be made between the democratic right of the people to the objective facts and the monopolistic
right of the media barons to their selective censorship.
The Big Five Anglo-American giants, Messrs Murdock, Turner, Maxwell, Pearson and Bond, have vast
enterprises in the airline business, oil, armaments, film production and are involved in one or other of the major
multimedia corporations such as British Sky Broadcasting system, Granada, ITV, ITN, WTN, NBC, ABC and
the Bond Corporation. Between them they are gradually taking control of the collection and distribution of news
and news commentary on a world scale. This is an extremely dangerous concentration of mind-manipulation
potential in very few hands. Western govern-ments are providing strong backup support, not only through their
embassy staffs and press attaches around the world, but also through such government agencies as Worldnet,
launched by the Reagan administration in 1982, which includes, in its satellite system, programmes beamed
directly at the world’s youth by the United States Information Agency. Worldnet has been described by an
American government spokesman as ‘an unprecedented and unlimited means of reaching the minds and hearts
of the peoples of the world ... and winning them over to the ideals and objectives of the United States’ (my
translation from French copy). Worldnet programmes are being used by over a hundred European cable services
reaching into more and more households both directly and through national television stations. Regis Debray in
his latest book30 denounces the alliance of money and media as among the chief enemies of France.
At a time when the Anglo-American Empire, now through the EC becoming the new Western Empire, is
increasingly monpolising both the collection and diffusion of information on a world scale, when it has a vast
number of secret service informants and staff working in the media and a still greater number providing
feedback through international Freemasonry, and when it is beaming a massive range of programmes direct
from satellites and cables into virtually every television set in the world, they are requiring too much of us when
they ask us to believe that the MacBride report constituted a threat to their freedom. On the contrary, it was an
appeal for freedom in the face of the Western Establishment’s information assault on the world.
Another dangerous principle is now becoming accepted in certain countries, notably the United Kingdom, that
journalists and cameramen may be called upon to give evidence, if necessary from behind screens, in court
trials. In some cases the BBC has supplied tapes to the prosecution even without a court order. There is also the
problem of hiding messages in films and records. The secret services manipulating public opinion once put out
the idea that it was ‘forbidden’ to hide subliminal messages in film. How long would it take, where, when and
by whom, to prove that there was such a message even in a single film? In addition to television and cinema
there is short-wave radio reaching the remotest people with their transistors, and the ‘national’ press of the Third
World which, in the poorer countries especially, is subservient to big business advertising and control, to the
point that they also have become adept in laying down the now-classical smokescreen of animated debate of
non-essentials to better give the impression that they constitute a free press. The media in general are included in
criticism by Mr Tony Benn. Speaking at a meeting in Chesterfield he put his finger on the pulse, if you read
Western Establishment as a whole instead of the Tories whom Mr Benn was speaking about:
For the strength of the Tory party does not lie on the green benches on the government side of the House of
Commons, but in the multinationals and the banks, the upper reaches of the civil service, amongst the military
and security chiefs, in Washington and Brussels and, above all, in the hands of the media which clearly seek to
persuade us that we have got to accept our fate.
Note the words ‘above all’. It is not surprising that Mr Benn who has something to say to the world gets scant
mention in the media while Mr Kinnock, leader of the Labour Party, who has nothing but rehashed slogans,
receives ample coverage even in the conservative organs, which recognise in him one of their own even while
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criticising him for the sake of politics on matters that do not matter, knowing they would be as safe with him as
prime minister as the French conservatives have been with President Mitterand.
I shall not extend this letter unduly by entering into further details but merely mention some of the subjects dealt
with in a study of the subject by Yves Eudes31 which reveals and unravels the strategic role of the cultural
weapon in America’s affirmation of world leadership. Here are a few of the subjects, which will give you a
rough idea of the general theme:
The conquest of the mind of man
The various types of action
The Federal Government and the ‘free flow’
Multilateral action
Military and civilian networks
Collection and storage of information in mega data banks
The dissemination system
The choice of key targets for penetration
The broadening of bridgeheads
The US International Communications Agency and its linkage with major power centres and the private
sector
Foreign press centres
The International Visitors’ Program for foreign journalists and others
Academic and Cultural exchange
The US Travel Service
The role of the Development Assistance agencies
The Peace Corps
The CIA’s role in information collection and diffusion
Youth and student operations
Information research and evaluation services
The old days of colonial land-grabbing have given place to the more subtle means of world dominion launched
by Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressives — economic and political domination backed by Western power
and supported by the conquest of consciences, lifestyles and thought. The subliminal stimulation used in
television and cinema film combines with short-wave radio, the local media, school texts, teacher training and
bilateral projects to promote a system of values, needs and consumption patterns which further enhance
economic domination. One must continue, however, to entertain the hope that the country which has massively
accelerated the disease may yet help to develop a cure. There are courageous Americans at work trying to
redress the balance against heavy odds: those keeping alive the memory of such men as Martin Luther King,
peace marchers and protesters, bishops holding out against reactionary laity and many more who put us tired old
Europeans to shame. It is Americans and nobody else who elect the governing authorities, but there is a minority
of freemen standing firm against The System, men of the stamp of Noam Chomsky, the world-renowned
linguistic scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and E S Hermann, Professor of Economics
in the University of Pennysylvania, authors of a well-documented work — I am translating the title from my
French copy — The Washington Connection and Fascism in the Third World.
It is over half a century since Sinclair Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here to warn America that it could go down
the same road as Hitler’s Germany, and prophesied a peculiarly American type of Fascism with a winsome, allAmerican leader speaking the language of American democracy: the soft-spoken President Reagan could have
been a foreshadowing of the future. Chomsky and Hermann spell out the danger signals now accumulating on
the horizon. They dissect, inter alia, the nefarious role of the US media in promoting the evil indicated in the
title. An indicative detail of the venomous influence at work within our body politic is the great difficulty they
had in getting their work published in ‘the citadel of liberty’, the United States, operating behind a smokescreen
of freedom of speech and a political system which effectively enrols the people and keeps them arguing with
one another rather than seeking out the secret fountainhead which manipulates them from behind the scenes.
When the mainstream agencies and media attempt an analysis of matters of vital importance such as the arms
race, it is usually done with great skill, pretending to balance on the tightrope between the pros and cons. The
time factor is important in this. They are not flurried or in a hurry; they know they are in control and know how
much rope to give to challengers in letters to the editor and when to cut the rope. The editor is always firmly in
charge and staff quickly learn what they may or may not write. I was once told by an editor:
‘You may say that in the pub, because it is true, but you will not say it in my paper’. There is always a certain
proportion of articles by well-known journalists or public personalities such as former secretaries of defence
having qualms of conscience in their old age, criticising the arms race. They attack mostly superficial
technicalities without stirring up the truth from the depths where it is kept hidden. They have the semisoporific
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effect of persuading the people that all is well, that The System has what is hypocritically called ‘checks and
balances’ against excess and that even the people at the top indulge in debate. Such articles also have the
advantage of stimulating impressive reaction from Establishment agents and their supporters. With the passage
of time and the continuity of the ever-so-subtle massage, the message slowly penetrates the social subconscious,
that, for example, the arms merchants, the warlords and big business are perhaps, after all, our strong right arm
defending our hearths and homes. The slow subtlety of the poisoning increases its efficacy like a negative
homeopathic drug, gradually weakening readers’, listeners’ and viewers’ mental immunity and lowering their
guard until they become willing accomplices of the very action that is undermining independence of judgement
to the point that people are being engulfed. To those like me who were once hooked on the media drug, breaking
loose into the refreshing air of that mental and emotional freedom where a man can be himself may be as
difficult as kicking any other drug but I can testify that it is possible and to be adequately aware of essential
developments in the world by reading a marginal or alternative weekly or preferably monthly review — in my
own case the monthly Le Monde Diplomatique. If for the purpose of these letters to which you led me I seem to
have lapsed into my daily dose in addition to research in the press archives, this has been occasioned by the
necessity of temporary circumstance and as soon as our present correspondence is terminated I shall once more
regain my freedom and breathe the clear air of uncontaminated thought.
There are three main kinds of media manipulation: that which is operated by journalists who, unknown to
editors and programme presenters, are also members of secret services or of the super-secret service run by the
arms manufacturers; that which merely happens when media men are misinformed by the powerful
newsagencies and foreign representatives; and the mind jamming caused by the massive output of material that
would be harmless were it not for the fact that the non-stop bleating is destructive of thought and initiative
among the audience. Much of the material is, unfortunately, captivating, however superficial and ephemeral it
may be, some of it is useful and some of it entertaining. This is its danger. Combined with the consumerism,
pollution and rape of the earth promoted by the media ads and ad-related articles, it all adds up to anaesthetising
the public, keeping them hooked on the media drug and thus helping to render them innocuous. The
insidiousness is largely due to the fact that truth is distorted not by blatantly wrong data but by what is omitted,
what is merely glanced at and what is emphasised. There are a great many ways of telling lies without being
caught by readers in a hurry. When, for example, the world’s press, radio and television had our attention
riveted to the famine in Marxist Ethiopia in 1984, we were not so well informed of capitalist Sudan or that the
famine death toll went on mounting in the countries throughout the Third World which continue to be the
victims of capitalist imperialism. After the pro-West puppet regime in Sudan was replaced in 1989 by a leftleaning fundamentalist Islamic government friendly to Lybia and Iraq, the media naturally began to switch
emphasis from the Third World catastrophes to the famine in Sudan. It is perhaps not surprising that Janet
Malcolm has described all journalism as ‘morally indefensible’ and the journalist as a kind of ‘confidence man’
preying on people and ‘betraying them without remorse'.
There has rightfully been considerable excitement in Western political and military circles and the media down
the years over a relatively small number of Western hostages held by Palestinian sympathisers driven to despair
in the Lebanon, but there has been little about the appalling plight of the approximately 300 hostages held by the
Israelis, particularly in Khiam. Some of them have died under torture and been secretly buried in quicklime but
a few have managed to escape, physically, mentally and morally broken after years of confinement in boxes
They have given evidence to United Nations officials and humanitarian groups but verbal evidence has not been
necessary — the sight of their emaciated, broken bodies has been enough to indicate that the Israelis have added
to the techniques of the Nazis and among the ignominies inflicted is the passing of electric charges through the
penises of the captives. Most of these hostages were not captured in retaliation for Israeli or Western hostages
because Israel has been holding hostages at least as far back as 1982 when the Israeli invasion of the Lebanon
produced chaos.
Requests by Amnesty International and the International Committee of the Red Cross to be allowed to visit the
camp at Khiam, where human degradation has reached an all-time low, have been rigorously refused. And the
media have remained largely silent.
When countries like Nicaragua, Angola or Vietnam left the imperialist camp and were continuing to have
serious economic problems, we were given the impression that the pros and cons were being carefully weighed.
But essential facts were omitted or submerged in the main message, facts such as: previous imperialist dominion
which had impoverished the country and reduced its people to hungry slaves; the Western economic blockade
since the liberation; the actual or threatened military attack which crushed the country under the weight of
unbearable military costs; the fact that, in Nicaragua, for example, 60,000 people were killed in the Contra war
which cost $1.2 billion in economic damages (certified by the International Court of Justice); the nature of the
demanded ‘freedom of expression’ and a ‘free’ press to allow Western money and Western secret services to
control the flow of information to the people of the country and stir up rebellion; the prevention of outside
industrial development and trade under the Trading With the Enemy Act, and so on.
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On the other hand, we get little information on the real achievements of such small, poor countries in their uphill
struggle against imperialism, such as the fact, for example, that in its first few years, before the full effects of the
economic blockade and the Contra war, Nicaragua achieved a high level of basic education and other services
for the poor and a health care programme which enabled the World Health Organisation to name Nicaragua in
1984 as one of five model countries for primary health care, where a few years previously the poor, the sick, the
children and the elderly were submerged in the most degrading indigence. Cuba made a similar achievement in
the early years after the liberation.
One of the media techniques used to decry the gallant efforts against insurmountable, Western-organised odds
was the old trick of damning with faint praise, such as referring to the new regimes as ‘romantic revolution’,
when, in fact, they were nothing if not realistic. In the early stages of the revolutionary regimes the media were
inclined to hedge their bets, but, now that they have been quashed, the media are less reticent, believing that in
the system of social Darwinism operating in the world for the past 4 ½ centuries since the launching of modern
capitalism, history is written by the winners, whereas in the long term it is written by the victims.
Thus, a new and constructive approach to a solution of the problems of Third World poverty, unemployment
and oppression was eliminated by the West’s big stick. In Africa, the countries which left the imperialist camp
had to devote their vital energies and resources to defensive action against the anti-government terrorist
movements which were organised, financed and armed by South Africa, Israel and the CIA, discretely supported
by the other Western powers. The member countries of the Coordination and Development Conference of
Southern Africa had to use half the value of their desperately-needed exports and approximately half their
stringent budget resources to finance their defence. This together with the horrors of war, the destruction of
families and the children carried off to fight, effectively broke the momentum of independence and the will of
the people. Zimbabwe had to spend over $¼ million a week to protect its Beria corridor, five times more than it
could on development projects, at a time when the West was accusing various countries of supporting terrorism
to deflect attention from its own terrorism.
One of the most persistent sources of ‘terrorism’ is that by the Palestinians, who have been trying to retrieve the
ancestral lands and homes they had owned for over a thousand — some, two thousand — years before the
massive invasion of people from Europe and the Americas which began from Lord Balfour’s offer and gathered
momentum during the subsequent 25 years. One of these Palestinians, Mubarak Awad, under expulsion order,
has had this to say before an Israeli court (my translation from French text):
I am a Palestinian before an enemy tribunal. I am a christian before a Jewish judge. I am a native of occupied
Jerusalem before an Israeli court. I agreed to come to the court knowing the risks involved, recognising your
legitimacy and recognising your State. I have recognised your high court because I am searching for peace. Only
peaceful means can win peace. If peace is a symbol of victory, victory must be that of both Palestinians and
Israelis. Both must be winners; there must not be losers, this would be the true measure of justice.
Moral and judicial responsibility is not a historical or religious question. It is the reality which I have to confront
today with all other Palestinians. You have the power, the law and the gun pointed at me. I am armed with hope,
truth and non-violence pointed at your conscience. If the Intifada does not open your eyes or your hearts to tell
you that we are hungry for liberty, I know not what can do it.
I am here to oppose my expulsion order. To uproot me from my family, my homeland, my friends and my
culture is a shame upon you. As a government, Israel is doing all in its power to eliminate the Palestinians from
their land. It is calculated, with the help of disloyal ruse and practice and unjust laws which we cannot change.
You are depriving me of my fundamental human and religious rights. As a Palestinian, I never hated you. I do
not hate you now. I will never hate you. But I tell you, as a native of Jerusalem, I shall be back.
To Mubarak Awad and thousands of students and others throughout the exploited countries, the real terrorists of
the world are sitting in well-cushioned presidential and prime ministerial offices in Washington, London, Paris,
Tel Aviv and other Western capitals and in the Third World capitals where puppet regimes are maintained by
the West. In a world governed instead by men of vision, you can imagine how the exciting new experiments in
the uplifting of the oppressed such as the early experiments in Nicaragua, Angola or Mozambique would be
cherished, aided and guided rather than crushed by the politicians acting for faceless big business, high finance
and the arms merchants. The blindness which tries to hold these peoples in subjection builds frustration and hate
for the future even among Western students and unemployed. The act resembles the physical law of the
application of pressure to a soft mass which forces an eruption elsewhere, in this case sometimes within the
West itself where the terrorist movements are partly in reaction to imperialist oppression in the Third World.
The world is now a planetary village and, as the new science of chaos is showing, all things are interrelated and
any action anywhere can have repercussions at the other end of the earth; there seems to be no such thing as a
neutral act. Disgruntled elements among the unemployed and students in the West are sometimes known to
‘take it out’ on The System at home in retaliation for its bullying tactics abroad.
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I must press on. But before leaving the subject, remembering UNESCO and President Reagan’s ‘half-joking,
whole-in-earnest’ threat, as was his cunning, against the UN in New York — ‘We will wave you a fond
farewell’ — allow me to express the hope that history may not be about to repeat itself and that the American
and other governments’ negative attitudes to a world-wide, democratic approach to the world’s problems does
not foreshadow something of the nature of what was inherent in Chancellor Hitler’s withdrawal from the League
of Nations with a view to having his hands free for more effective unilateral projects for the defence of
capitalistic enterprise and its blue-eyed Arian whiteman.
The question becomes pertinent in that we have a Western power bloc made up of the EC, the OECD and
NATO, bent on controlling the world though it represents only some 15 per cent of the world’s population.
Through the Anglo-American empire, Israel and South Africa, it takes much of its inspiration — as we shall be
considering in detail in a later chapter — from a powerful American right rooted in the Bible Belt, believing, —
as President Reagan, his defence secretary and other members of the cabinet did not hesitate to say, though the
Bush administration has learned to be more circumspect and secretive, in a coming Armageddon against some
‘Evil Empire’, the last great battle when whosoever is not found written in the Book of Life will be cast into the
apocalyptic Lake of Fire and the good people on the side of God will destroy the evil men of the earth and dwell
in peace with the Lord in the New Jerusalem, the Novus Ordo Seculorum, as it says on the Great Seal of the
Republic.
Prior to the formation of the EC, there was opposition to the American empire from certain European
governments. This is now evaporating and cooperation has increased with a United States where fundamental
policy has not changed since 1940 when power slipped to the arms manufacturers who share it with big business
and the high financiers, a development whose roots go back to Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressives’ plan
for world dominion.
Even the Carter administration, considered by many to have been a kindly old regime, strengthened the
economic blockade of eastern Europe, threatened western Europe with reprisal for an economic opening to the
East and in 1977 intensffied the campaign in favour of the MX missiles which some later thought was a Reagan
initiative. While the Reagan administration was more strident and squander-maniac in relation to armaments, the
ultimate philosophy was not changed. Reagan was applauded by supporters and attacked by critics in the early
80s for doubling the production of nuclear warheads, which, in fact, had been planned and ordered by the
‘peace-loving’ Democrat, Jimmy Carter. If President Carter seemed to plead for more human rights in Latin
America, this was merely his brand of strategy to maintain exploitation. It is arguable that the warlords of
Europe are worse than those in America, greeting Reagan’s election in 1980 and again in 1984 with positive
excitement. Anti-Reaganites among the people, however, reacted with a mixture of anger, fear and shock, as if
Reagan were some freak fallen from the clouds. In fact he was a product of The System, groomed, packaged and
manipulated by the secret lobby which had no intention of disappearing with him into the trash-can of history in
1988.
Ingrid Carlander, writing in Le Monde Diplomatique of June 1988 states that the basic problem of the United
States is ‘the relation between religion and the State. Many thinking Americans ... admit that they are terrified of
seeing one day at the head of the State a Fundamentalist or Pentecostalist president ready to rush for the nuclear
trigger at the first call of Jehovah’. Thousands of missionaries and millions of dollars are sent to Central
America to fight against ‘communism’. Fanatical sermons are in the tone of the following example from
evangelist Jimmy Swaggart (the multi-millionaire tele-evangelist who subsequently ‘fell from grace’ when
caught with a prostitute at a motel near New Orleans in 1988) pouring into millions of Latin American homes
through simultaneous translations: ‘Jesus is the President, your general, your field marshall. In the name of
Jesus I order the devil (ie the spirit of revolt) to go out of your lives, out of your houses, out of your hearts, out
of your cities, out of your government and your country’32. Such preachers are firmly on the side of big business
against the lower classes, as evidenced by the following typical words quoted by Ingrid Carlander: ‘Respect the
boss. Honor him. Be fair with him. Hide nothing from him. Remember that inside his walls he is always right.
Work for your boss as if he were God’. (Quotes translated from French version.)
Highly-charged references to moral weapons have been becoming part of the American military lexicon. In the
years of the Reagan administration, General John W Vessey Jr, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was
urging audiences at prayer breakfasts around the United States to ‘enlist in God’s army’. Admiral James D
Watkins, Chief of Naval Operations, used to declare in speeches, ‘I am a moral man’, and blamed the death of
US servicemen in Beirut on ‘the forces of anti-Christ’. A large part of ‘these forces’, by the way, were
christians, not perhaps as self-righteous as Admiral Watkins but christians nevertheless (and there is even a
Palestinian catholic priest, complete with Roman collar and black suit, Fr Elia Khoury on the executive
committee of the Palestine liberation movement FATAH). General John A Wickham Jr, when he was Army
Chief of Staff reported: ‘We have a prayer breakfast for general officers every two weeks, and there’s a prayer
breakfast once a month for the Chiefs of Staff and their Vice Chiefs and also the Service Secretaries’.
The Generalissimi of Latin America are often denounced for their excessive penchant for politics, but ‘brass
hats’ in US uniform getting involved in the idea that America’s enemies are God’s enemies is a dangerous step
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on the road to a new religious fanaticism parallel to Islam’s militant faction. It is also reminiscent of the ‘Gott
mit uns’ that the men of the German army once wore on their belts. All this is not far removed from the
blasphemy on the dollar: ‘In God We Trust’.
Luther’s heritage of the protestant prince as supreme under the God of his choosing set a dangerous precedent
though hardly the one intended by Luther. In case this sounds anti-protestant, I shall have much to say in later
correspondence about catholic error in other spheres. At this point I would merely say that the so-called Moral
Majority (re-named the Liberation Federation) of the American Bible Belt has dangerous parallels with Hitler’s
self-righteous, racist religion of power and faith sliding to the fanaticism of the goodies against the baddies that
throws reason to the winds and culminates in passionate ignorance. ‘The blacksmith stands again at his anvil,
the farmer walks behind his plough, and the scholar sits in his study, all with the same effort and the same
devotion to their duty’. This could come from the protestant ethic of a Moral Majority in the 20s before modern
mechanisation. In fact it is from Adolf Hitler. And who can accuse Hitler of being undemocratic? ‘Nobody has
set me to be above the people. I have grown from the people, I have remained in the people and to the people I
will return. It is my ambition not to know a single statesman in the world who has a better right than I to say that
he is a representative of his people.’ Or again: ‘We have the right to stand before the Almighty and ask Him for
His grace and His blessing. For this is the utmost any nation can do: when each man fights who can fight, and
each man works who can work, and when all together are prepared to sacrifice and all are filled with the one
thought of safeguarding the freedom, the honour, and thus the future of life’. It could be a Jerry Falwell just as
well as Adolf Hitler.
Prior to 1933 Germany also had a love affair with the Jews and Jewish capitalism, when, as J P Stern put it in
Hitler, ‘the sheer size and importance of the Jewish contribution remains without parallel in any other country’.
Hitler was the horrible backlash. According to Professor Norman Birnbaum of Georgetown University, writing
in Le Monde Diplomatique of September 1984, the Jewish community sees its success in the US as part of the
grand design of Jehovah for Israel and in this they are supported by Biblical Fundamentalism.
The relationship between powerful politicians and certain wealthy religious figures is also disquieting. A case in
point is that of the Rev Sun Myung Moon, a presbyterian billionaire who proclaimed himself the Messiah. This
world movement operates under many different organisational titles to suit each particular context, from helping
South African terrorists in Angola, Zimbabwe and Mozambique to aid for the Contras in Nicaragua and rightwing institutions in Europe and the United States, behind a façade of the most high-sounding and innocent
labels. One of the aims is to win over the intelligentsia of Europe, particularly through the media and such
bodies as the World Media Center, which, inter alia, organises the World Media Conferences, founded and
funded by Moon, aimed among other things against the development of pacifist movements. For its European
operations, the movement chose France as its main bridgehead. This may not be unconnected with the fact that
since the socialists came to power in 1981, France has recovered a new-found aggressiveness, a mantle gladly
taken over by the right which has no intention of allowing itself to be outmanoeuvred by the socialists in the
militarism that the right considers to be its own. The relaunching of France as a leading arms producer and
exporter by the socialists surprised nobody but those who naively believed that socialism was different or that
the French were essentially a pacifist people. They have been re-educated in the ways of nationalist militarism
during the past 20 years by the New Right ideological movement, not to be confused with Le Pen’s political
party. It is fiercely pagan and considers ‘the pale-faced Galilean’ to be a softy who caused the fall of the Roman
Empire and every subsequent effort by nations to climb to power and glory.
When you come over here by the way, to pursue your research, you will be able to obtain first-hand
disinformation at Moon’s European headquarters, the luxurious offices of CAUSA-Europe, Place AndreMalraux, in the most chic and expensive part of downtown Paris, within walking distance of the Hotel Ritz, the
Elysee Palace, the prime minister’s residence and all that. Moon’s world headquarters is in the United States,
where he arrived in 1971, cultivated the friendship of Dwight D Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and leading rightwing congressmen and organised demonstrations supporting the Vietnam war and President Nixon, for whom
Moon’s followers held a 3-day prayer vigil in front of the Capitol in the thick of the Watergate scandal in
August
1974.
I have here before me a photocopy of a letter, full signatures to boot, written by leading US Congressmen at the
time:
Congress of the United States
House of Representatives
Washington DC 20515
September 13, 1974
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The United States today is in need of strong moral leadership. The great moral and spiritual values upon which
this nation was founded must be renewed at all levels of American society. Moreover, our nation seeks a
clarification of its national identity and the role it must play as the leading nation of the free world.
Many of us have been impressed with the work of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon from Korea. We well
remember the three days of prayer and fasting on the Capitol steps conducted by young people last month, in
which they sacrificed food and rest to ask God’s guidance for each of us on the critical decisions we were facing
at that time. Beyond the exuberance and dedication of those young people there is a deep concern for America
and a fresh new vision of America’s role in God’s providence, which stems from the teaching of Reverend
Moon.
We in the Congress now have an opportunity to hear the message of this dynamic man. He will speak on
Tuesday, October 8th, 1974, in Room 1202 Dickson Office Building, Topic — ‘America in God’s Providence’.
You and your staff are invited and we sincerely hope you will attend. The meeting will begin at 3.30 pm and
before the meeting coffee, tea and sweet rolls will be served.
The United States claims, and indeed has been from 1945 until now by virtue of its unique power and influence
all over the globe, to be the leader of what it calls ‘the free world’. Whether it has the moral, intellectual and
spiritual capacity to lead us is another matter. John Foster Dulles, in what appears as another death-bed
conversion, said before he died when his hands were no longer tied, that America’s spiritual image in the world
had waned and that the country had become confined ‘to the area we can reach by material things
— guns and goods’. That is not enough for leadership. And below the visible tip of the iceberg, beyond the
media, outside the domain of big business, high finance and power politics, many people believe that the world
will not follow America down the road trodden by the power Establishment. The youth of America as well as
the youth of the world have been hoping vaguely for another way. Between 1955 and 1965 the youth of Europe
were alight with excitement about the great
new United Europe being launched. It turned out to be another chimera, lacking all vision, spending itself over
the price of buttons and butter, consolidating our politico-military-business Establishment as an obedient partner
of the United States while pretending to be bidding for European independence.
Notwithstanding the efforts of the Establishment to indulge in cheer-leading among the youth, they no longer
have their heart in it, except in spasms during electioneering time. Their last real attempt at a plunge out of The
System, however, was into political and philosophical romance in 1968, when they threw themselves into a
mere vacuum with their youthful energy and idealism, but it was perhaps a warning for the future that, unarmed
and unsupported, French students held Paris for a week. It was a lost cause from the start — a generous ‘beau
geste’ without substance. The time was not ripe and the effort was localised and isolated. The Third World had
won what looked like independence and a premature hope was on the horizon. The first Development Decade
had not yet run its course. American students were resisting on the campuses, though not so much from altruism
for a cause as to prevent themselves from being sent to die in the rice paddies of Vietnam. Arms sales to the
Third World were still only a trickle.
In UNESCO’s Burdens of Militarization, a French Nobel Laureate in physics, Alfred Kastler, draws attention to
the fact that the poor countries are now being crushed by the weight of arms purchases, the value of weapons
sold to them having attained a figure that is ‘more than ten times the aid
— not to be confused with the loans — granted by the industrial nations to the developing countries.... Half the
scientists and engineers in the world are working for military research and development. It is no longer, as in the
past, the strategic needs of the military that govern the development of weapons, but the technological
innovations that are imposing strategies on the military and compelling political decision-makers to step up
arms expenditure year after year’.
The industrial-military complex which President Eisenhower could not discourage when he was president and
had his lips sealed by The System was denounced by him when his race was run and he had no further political
ambitions, in an attempt to wash his hands of his guilt. The combination, he said, ‘of an immense military
establishment and a large arms industry’ was ‘new in the American experience’ and had ‘grave implications’.
He had been frustrated in his ability to resist ‘the combined impact of pressures from the military, industry,
Congress, journalists and veterans’ organisations to buy more weapons’. In all this, General Eisenhower conveniently forgot to mention that before he became ‘ex-officio’ Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces he was
‘de jure’ number two and ‘de facto’ number one in the military establishment he decried. Senator John Tower,
on retiring from the Chairmanship of the Armed Services Committee, said that many armaments programmes
were ‘perpetuated because powerful members of Congress often argue that they shall be, beyond military need’
and that the Pentagon included certain weapons requests because it was blackmailed into including them. Again,
it might have been more useful if he had spoken thus when in office, or before he himself became linked with
the arms manufacturers, or during the period when he was secretary of defence in 1989.
Strobe Talbott, author of Deadly Gambits and Endgame, paints a picture of the American administration staffed
mostly with officials interested only in appearing serious about arms control without any genuine intention of
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reaching an agreement that would impede the arms buildup. The 320,000-strong arms manufacturers’ lobby,
with the backing of the Sun Myung Moon empire, the Heritage Foundation and innumerable hidden persuaders,
have powerful representatives in every State of the Union, Congress and, of course, in the Administration itself.
Their financial means, from the most powerful industry in the world, is enormous and, says Dr Kastler, ‘enables
them by exerting pressure on the mass media to manipulate public opinion and counter the timid attempts to
support disarmament which would threaten their profits’. One of the principle economic indicators in the US
economy is the volume of orders from the Pentagon to private industry. In other words, to stimulate the
economy it has become essential to promote arms production; and to avoid the accumulation of unwanted stocks
active warfare must be encouraged, preferably in faraway places such as the Third World.
Arms manufacturers mobiise local community leaders and labour unions to put pressure on their elected
representatives to get contracts and new business to increase production in local factories. Another form of
pressure comes from political action committees set up by the corporations to influence election campaigns and
from the arms lobby affecting legislation. Without entering into the moral arguments, used powerfully by
archbishop Hunthausen of Seattle before he was silenced by John Paul II, perhaps under pressure from
Washington, as to the rectitude of gaining ill-gotten wages from the production of instruments of death, from the
economic point of view the arms industry is deleterious in the long-term. The people concerned about jobs and
local development have been led blindly up the alley of arms production as a means to an end but it is a shortterm and contradictory argument. First of all, the money required comes ultimately from the people and the
economy, in the form of various overt and covert taxes either to provide the necessary funds directly or to pay
the interest, as in the US, on the debt created largely by the arms industry. Secondly, not all the people’s money
so collected can ever return to them because in between there is the great rake-off. Thirdly, wages earned
producing useless, non-civilian goods are a powerful stimulant to the price spiral and consequent inflation,
which robs the people of purchasing power.
From a military point of view, however, the Establishment
remains unrepentant. Mr George Bush was interviewed in
January 1980 about nuclear war (inter alia):
Question:
Don’t you reach the point with these strategic weapons where we can wipe each other out so
many times and no one wants to use them or be willing to use them, that it really doesn’t matter whether you’re
10 per cent or 2 per cent lower or higher?
Answer: Well, if you believe there is no such thing as a winner in a nuclear exchange, that argument makes little
sense. I don’t believe that.
Question:
How do you win a nuclear exchange?
Answer: You have a survivability of command and control, survivability of industrial potential, protection of a
percentage of your citizens, and you have capability that inflicts more damage on the opposition than it can
inflict on you. That’s the way you have a winner, and the Soviet’s planning is based on the ugly concept of a
winner in a nuclear exchange.
Question:
Do you mean 5 per cent would survive?
Answer: More than that — if everybody fired everything he had you’d have more than
that survive.
Not to be outdone, Dr Henry Kissinger, former national security adviser and former secretary of state, spoke in
November 1984 of the need to break down the atmosphere of special horror which surrounds the use of nuclear
weapons, the same Dr Kissinger, be it added, who, in reaction to the slaughter of at least hundreds and possibly
thousands of young students in Peking in June 1989 by a group of Fascist tyrants masquerading behind the name
of communists, said:
‘No government in the world would have tolerated having the main square of its capital occupied for eight
weeks by tens of thousands of [peaceful, let me add] demonstrators.... China remains too important for
America’s national security to risk the relationship’ on What Dr Kissinger dismissed as ‘the emotions of the
moment’ over the slaughter. This is the slaughter and this the policy which Dr Kissinger ‘et al’ describe as
‘realpolitik’, the ‘realpolitik which is driving us deeper and deeper into the tunnel.
One of the papers in Burdens of Militarization deals with military Research and Development communities. ‘Of
all the money devoted to scientific R & D, 40 per cent is appropriated for purposes directly or indirectly related
to the military.... Science has become a major element in the system of armed global confrontation.... That
military R & D is a growth industry is of decisive importance. Military R&D is one of the few industrial sectors
with no limits to growth. A secure future is assured for the person who opts for military R & D.... The common
belief that they are working within an area with a future which is tied in with the most advanced segments of
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technology, if it is not in fact pioneering technological progress, forms a substantial part of the self-perception
of scientific and technological personnel.... This common belief is important for the socialisation of the next
generation in the manifold processes which accompany the day-to-day activities in R & D centres, technical
training centres and the armed forces’. People within the military R & D community ‘exhibit much stubbornness
when externally challenged, as well as a high appreciation of their collective identity’. Notwithstanding the
publicity which the Establishment and the arms industry have been obliged to indulge in since the Russian peace
offensive, regarding conversion from military to civilian production, what has been called ‘a peace bonus’ for
the people, it will be clear from what I have already said about NATO’s determination to pursue military
expansionism and from what we are increasingly hearing from EC leaders about European defence that the
prospects are slim. Furthermore, Burdens of Militarization points out that ‘military R & D people priced their
products and perhaps even themselves out of the civilian market.... Conversion would involve the formidable
problem of adapting to unknown standards of cost-consciousness’. As Seymour Melman of Columbia
University has been pointing out for a long time, the arms manufacturers are on an upward sliding scale of highcost production: their research scientists and engineers are constantly turning out ever larger, more powerful and
more complex weapons. This appeals to their bosses because it gives them greater profits and to the military
customers because it offers more high-level jobs for officers.
There is also the arm twisting. Some people believe that the arms manufacturers are inspired by patriotic
motives. Evidence abounds to the contrary. I shall quote merely one morsel: When France was fighting for its
life and the flower of its manhood were dying in the trenches in 1915, the arms manufacturers blocked their
production programme to blackmail the government to accept the prices they demanded. Today the military
brass in league with the arms merchants have been arguing that the most expensive weapons are a good
investment because operational and maintenance costs are lower, an argument that does not withstand factual
analysis, as the US Congressional Budget Office showed in a July 1988 study which did not produce a ripple on
the waters as far as the media were concerned.
We have an historic warning in relation to all of this in the power exercised in Germany by the Krupps arms
manufacturers who maintained German militarism for over 3 ½ centuries and in 1933 led the industrialists with
a gift of a million marks to Hitler to help finance his election. There could not have been a 1914 or 1939 without
the almighty Krupps dynasty which supported Kaiser and Fuhrer alike, or perhaps it would be more true to say
made Kaiser and Fuhrer alike. German governments had risen and fallen but the Krupps remained forever at the
service of every new ambition.
There are, no doubt, many merchants of death now scouring the earth in the footsteps of the infamous Sir Basil
‘Zaharoff’, Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Bath, arms dealer and high financier of the first 3 ½ decades of
the 20th century, who was one of the richest men in the world, if not the richest. Described as ‘the mystery man
of Europe’ operating under assumed names, he used his enormous wealth to buy himself into the friendship of
the leading statesmen of the day and then employed this friendship to encourage warfare. His cordiality with
Lloyd George, for example, was used to promote the Greco-Turkish war. He perfected the tactic of whispering
in the greatest confidence to one government that his employers had concluded a deal for a large quantity of
ultra-modern weapons with that country’s enemy, then going to the latter with a copy of his contract with the
former, and so on in an ever-expanding spiral. Modern techniques backed by double agents paid by the arms
manufacturers and working as moles in the secret service agencies and newspapers have added a new and
powerful dimension to ‘Zaharoffs’ methods.
In France, Mr Francois Mitterand, having spent the 20 years of his struggle for power attacking the French
government for its participation in the arms race, proceeded as soon as he gained the presidential palace in 1981
to push arms sales to record levels, 61.8 billion francs of orders in 1984, double the figure of 1983. Ninety per
cent of the sales were to the Third World. Cynicism was pushed to the point of advertising French arms with
gory details under such heartwarming headings as ‘Exocet succeeds again’ (The London Economist of 8-14
September, 1984) after a devastating Iraqi attack on Iran with this latter-day French glory. This should not
surprise anybody: in all the Western countries, the opposition is part of The System, committed when it gains
power to do no more than tinker a bit with the machinery to play to the gallery; politicians know what was one
of Hitler’s principles, that the people’s memory is short.
A study by the US Congressional Research Service, released on 13 May, 1985, showed that supplies of arms to
the Third World from non-communist countries in 1984 totalled $17.3 billion compared with $13.2 billion for
all communist countries. The military-industrial complex is in the process of extending its arms production to
the poor countries under contract. Poverty-stricken Egypt, for example, with its hungry millions of people, now
exports over $2 billion worth of arms annually. India and other poor countries are similarly having Western
arms manufacturers bringing them the ‘benefits’ of this form of industrialisation. The arms merchants have
published pseudo-scientific studies to show a correlation within a narrow range of time and place between
economic growth and arms expenditure, confident in the inability of most bourgeois readers and journalists to
distinguish between linear cause and effect and the complex relationships which increase exponentially with the
number of parameters. In such studies, two of the many factors suppressed is that a buoyant economy permits
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more arms purchases rather than vice versa and that arms in the Third World have a deleterious effect on
poverty levels among the masses, military expenditure tending to benefit only a coterie of the governing elite.
All this is not to be wondered at in view of the turnover and profits in the arms industry and the governmentsponsored benefits, reflected for example in the fact that five US arms manufacturers with profits amounting to
$10 ½ billion in the first three years of the Reagan administration either paid no taxes or received refunds and
benefits in lieu. The enormous profits also enabled the manufacturers like other big business giants to spend vast
sums on bribery The temptation to war itself is also great, considering that a British general, Sir Peter Whitely,
estimated that a single American division at war would consume approximately a thousand tons of ammunition
and cognate hardware a day.
The CIA has admitted and the former Secretary of Defence, Mr Robert McNamara, confirmed, that the
Pentagon deliberately exaggerates the magnitude of Russian armaments in order to pressurise Congress into
increasing military expenditures. The day the first Reagan-Gorbachev summit meeting opened in Geneva, The
Washington Post published a story under the headline — ‘Defense Contractors Are worried Arms-Control Plan
Could Cost Them: Lucrative Contracts Might Be Affected by Superpower Talks’. The story said that defence
contractors viewed the proposals for 50 per cent cuts in nuclear weapons as ‘ominous’. This is reminiscent of
the situation when the United States was engaged in its last major war, in Vietnam, when Texas Instruments,
closely associated with President Lyndon Johnson who launched his armies on that country in 1965, made its
fortune in war production, when the Boeing Aircraft Corporation reached to the heights manufacturing B52
bombers for the destruction of North Vietnam, and when state orders for the war industry in general reached
such a level that there was panic on Wall Street on 19 January, 1966 when a false rumour went around that
peace talks were threatening as a result of Indian mediation. Former US ambassador and adviser to five
presidents, Averell Harriman, said in 198434 that the behaviour of the American administration raised serious
doubts as to whether it ever had the intention of reaching a proper arms agreement.
In addition to the big business of arms manufacture, the most powerful and most open-ended industry in the
world, with no limit to the potential market, there is also the problem of military vested interest. Army life has
become a thing apart, almost a religious sect, a sub-society within society, sometimes more powerful than civil
society. Military life has a discipline and ceremonialism beloved of the officer corps who cannot experience it
elsewhere. They live in a community that has little in common with other ways of life. The great financial
resources enable the military to have the most modern research institutions, factories, warehouses, hospitals,
schools, canteens, restaurants, transport, communications and equipment. The ‘war-games’, as they are aptly
called, add the further dimension of meeting a need for violent action and play. It is well known in military
circles that men get a great thrill driving a sixty-ton tank: it makes the adrenalin flow. With reference to a BBC
television documentary on the British Army in Northern Ireland in August 1989, ‘For Queen and Country’, a
commentator in The Irish Times reported a conversation with a British soldier in Edinburgh to whom he
remarked that presumably he was not looking forward to being sent to Northern Ireland. The soldier demurred:
‘You’re in the army to shoot people and Northern Ireland is the only place where you’re allowed to do it
anymore’. The documentary itself quoted a soldier in the North as saying: ‘... Firing in anger. Its good fun, it
makes the job worthwhile’. The soldiers, it said, tend to project their tenderness onto their guns, of which they
speak affectionately: ‘We take better care of it than a woman’. As professional torturers are taught to enjoy torturing until it brutalises them, soldiers are taught to enjoy killing until it dehumanises them. Ex British soldier
Michael Asher’s book, Shoot To Kill — A Soldier’s Journey Through Violence, also provides a chilling account
of the professional soldier’s cold-blooded hunger for violence, a theme supported by another soldier, Anthony
Beevor, in Inside The British Army. And it happens to be a recorded fact that a large number of soldiers in
Northern Ireland volunteer for several consecutive tours of duty there.
The glamour of officers’ uniforms, stripes and stars is not to be denied. Hovering over all is the love of the
military mind for power, discipline, salutes, ceremonial parades with impressive equipment, and the excitement
of jet formations roaring overhead. And under them they have the satisfying existence of a large mass of
obedient manpower which, as you know from your year’s military service in the Pacific, finds its consolation
for its lack of initiative in never having to use any. Symbolic of all this is the fact, quoted by the renowned
American economist Ervin Laszlo in The Final Crisis that in the United States the annual budget for military
bands is greater than the combined total of state expenditure for all the country’s symphony orchestras, theatre,
dance and associated arts. When the state over-invests in a violent solution of the world’s problems and underinvests in non-violent action it is choosing the path of catastrophe and forfeits its right to the citizens’
allegiance. Rome also followed the path of militarisation before the collapse. When the great foundations were
being laid by the Republic and the early Empire, Rome had a part-time yeoman army. The development of a
professional army accompanied the increased size and wealth of the landed estates, the decadence in letters and
the arts, the intensifying hedonism and the expansion of the mass of the idle poor, until, when the collapse was
near, the average citizen regarded the army as a nuisance, ‘something with which he had nothing to do. It lived a
life separate from himself' (Belloc). The Roman garrisons then became distinguished, like our modern ones, by
a large segment of ‘married quarters’.
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Before ending this letter I must add a word on war versus terrorism from an authority of the standing of Henri
Laborit, not any revolutionary firebrand but a patient scholar and academic with some 20 works to his name. In
La Colombe Assassinee he says that of the two kinds of violence, the state-sponsored form known as war and
the makeshift reaction known as terrorism, he prefers the latter. War, he says, is so pretentious, arrogant,
triumphalist and senseless that one cannot but be clement with terrorism, which does not aspire, per Se, to socioeconomic dominance but only to signal to the powerful of this world the existence of people who are poor,
oppressed or dispossessed, and all they can do is give their lives without hope of monuments, memorials or state
ceremonies such as those used by the Establishment to honour its war victims (so that others will be motivated
to become victims in turn when the economico-military needs require them). A further aspect is that the media
are interested mainly in the spectacular, thus calling for spectacular action to gain attention. There is, however, a
deeper dimension to the matter, what anthropologist René Girard refers to as the contagion of violence arising
from a deep-seated psychological mimetism. We have lived in such an intensifying warmongering atmosphere
for so long, sponsored by the Western Establishment, that we are now faced with runaway contagion leading
towards what Girard describes as a planetary sacrificial crisis (which we shall be discussing in a later chapter).
‘You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you’, wrote Trotsky, referring to the vortex inevitably
created by war until it sucks in whole communities of unwilling citizens.
In view of the fact that the US Establishment responsible for the military industrial complex is built on
Freemason foundations and that the nation was originally conceived as the ideal hieratic political structure
postulated by Masonry, with the state being seen as an extension of the Lodge, it will be important for you for
this reason, as well as the fact that the West as a whole and most of the puppet governments of the Third World
are controlled by the Masonic conspiracy, to explain in greater detail what you perhaps accurately describe as
the most deadly evil at work in the body politic, making a mockery of democracy and liberty, destroying the
transparency without which true democracy cannot function, loading the dice against freedom, promoting what
many of the rising generation and the workers see as the phoniness of our institutions and helping to spread that
doubt and frustration which are among the remote stimulants to violence. How to deal with this secret evil at the
very heart of society is one of the gravest issues facing the world. Making Masonry illegal would be insufficient,
as indicated in Martin Short’s book: although made illegal in Italy it succeeded in virtually taking over the state.
Since, according to Stephen Knight and others, it largely controls the British (and, no doubt, other) police and
judiciary as well as the political and economic sectors, the law would be powerless against it. The public,
however, is not totally defenceless; it can inform itself from the few objective books on the subject. Here
perhaps more than elsewhere ‘the truth will set you free’. The problem is in the word ‘objective’. Most of the
books on Freemasonry are written by avowed or unavowed Masons. They are often critical of the Brotherhood
so as to better get the message across to the unwary. Masons sometimes point to the known lodges, officials,
institutions and activities to pretend that Masonry is not secret, but these are only the visible tip of the iceberg.
There is no way the uninitiated can penetrate behind the façade, and the initiated have their lips sealed under
pain of terrible death. Following a spate of adverse publicity surrounding macabre revelations, and in an effort
to convince the public of their innocence and gain recruits, Masons have recently been opening some of their
lodges to public viewing, as if the contents of the buildings bore any relation to the content of the discussions
when the doors are closed.
A few dogged researchers, by dint of extensive, secret interviews, questions and cross questions, keeping the
identity of informants strictly anonymous, have been able to piece together some of the facts, including parts at
least of the frightening initiation and oath-taking ceremony during which the postulant is interrogated by hooded
men whose identity he cannot suspect, subjected to alternate light and darkness and finally sworn in, as a result
of which he accepts the most terrible torture and death in case he divulges a Masonic secret. Here is one part of
the Masonic oath taken during the initiation ceremony (from an article by David Yallop): ‘These several points I
solemnly swear to observe, without evasion, equivocation or mental reservation of any kind, under no less a
penalty, on the violation of any of them, than that of having my throat cut across, my tongue torn out by the root
and ...‘ etc. This is the minimum penalty, as indicated by the ‘no less ... than’; there are other even more
persuasive forms.
This is at the core of the Satanic conspiracy that has been controlling the world for three centuries. The West has
fallen to a tragic nadir when the people who govern at the pinnacle of power are in reality such frightened
weaklings that they must band together for protective security and surround themselves with the shield of such
an awesome oath to prevent the world from knowing who they are and what they are doing, behind the
smokescreen of known spokesmen and lodges to create a public façade of good intentions. It becomes easy to
understand how socialist governments such as those of France and Spain in the 1980’s became such enthusiastic
collaborators with right-wing regimes like Mrs Thatcher’s and the Reagan-Bush administration.
Masons practice their mortal secrecy not only with the outside world but between their 33 Masonic degrees,
and, according to Knight’s research work, the majority of Masons who belong to the three lower degrees are not
even aware of the existence of the 30 degrees above them. Each degree has its own secret communication code
composed of certain words, phrase structures, postures and gestures unknown to those in degrees below. Most
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Masons are also unaware that, according to Stephen Knight, devil worship seems to be practised by the small
handful of world figures at the pinnacle of Masonic power (Grand Inspector General, Sublime Prince of the
Royal Secret, Grand Inspector Inquisitor Commander).
The following are some valuable works from which you might wish to choose one or two for study: In God’s
Name, by David Yallop (Corgi Books, 1985); The Brotherhood, by Stephen Knight (Panther Books, 1985);
Inside the Brotherhood, by Martin Short (Grafton Books, 1989); Web of Corruption, by Raymond Fitzwalter
and David Taylor (Granada, 1981); Their Trade is Treachery, by Chapman Pincher (Sidgwick and Jackson,
1981); Freemasonry — Of God or the Devil? by Rev A W Rainsbury (Substance of a sermon preached in
Emmanuel Church, South Croydon).
Regarding French Freemasonry a useful study is La Republique du Grand Orient — Un Etat dans l’Etat, La
Franc Maconnerie, by Henry Coston (La Librairie Francaise, 1976).
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6 -
THE TIMEBOMB ABUILDING
The United States is the proclaimed leader of the West. As leader, it would be expected to have something in the
direction of an enlightened vision for mankind. The state department’s official think tank of high-level experts
has been working on the problem. In the summer 1989 issue of National Interest the think tank’s director, a
futurologist from the prestigious Rand Corporation, a man versed in Hegel, Marx and other leading thinkers,
revealed the outcome of its deliberations in an article that created a great stir in Washington and in other capitals
through translations circulated in the world’s main languages (I am reading it in Le Monde of 27 September). A
densely-argued document made the case that mankind had come to the end of its history and life may henceforth
be an extremely boring existence of flnetuning economic prosperity, tinkering with technical problems and
tidying up the environment. Hitherto, history had been a Manichean struggle between the forces of light and
darkness. Now, the forces of light, those of liberal Western capitalism, the good guys, had won, and the bad
guys had lost. We may be witnessing ‘not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of
postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution ... and ...
for our purposes, it matters very little what strange thoughts occur to people in Albania or Burkina Faso’.
And yet ... and yet....
A thread tracing to the threshold of all major revolutionary conflicts in history is the development of a situation
where there is an accumulation of wealth on one side, considerable poverty on the other, and — the decisive
factor, of capital importance — the latter becomes conscious of its own power. More and more people in the
Third World are now beginning to develop an awareness of their potential power, the power of numbers, the
power of sheer size and the power of immense natural wealth, including the fact that the Third World is a vast
storehouse of essential minerals, oil and primary commodities which constitute the lifeline of Western industry
and Western arms and which have hitherto been exploited at give-away prices under the terms of trade imposed
by the West. With regard to the power of numbers, Marxist thinkers are not alone in believing that modern
history is being forged by the masses: Tolstoi and others believed the same. And numbers are massively every
year weighing heavier in the Third World balance, soon to be 5 billion against 1 billion. At such a stage,
according to Marx, demographic power is no longer merely quantitative but becomes qualitative.
James Connolly told the workers of Dublin prior to the Easter rising: ‘The great seem great to us because we are
on our knees; let us rise’. The Utopian Socialists of the early 19th century in France, Germany and Britain,
believed that the governing class of privileged property owners would voluntarily surrender its privileges to the
lower orders, were it only a matter of enlightened self-interest. It did not work out that way and the lower orders
had to wait for the bomb-shells of revolt, revolution and strikes to start exploding from 1848 onwards before the
privileged classes were frightened into considering the claims of social justice, a first positive fallout from the
much-derided Marxism.
Before the French Revolution the people had come to believe that there was too much misery on their side, that
there was too much wealth on the other and that they had the moral, physical and, above all, the numerical
strength to overturn their exploiters. It was only partly true but the critical factor was that the people considered
it to be so and thought, for example, that the King had been trying to starve them by speculating on rising grain
prices. In fact the Crown was growing poorer — perhaps a little like the position of the US state today — and
was forced to borrow to pay for its arms production, and its decisive participation on the side of America’s
struggle for independence was carried out at such great cost that before the outbreak of the Revolution the
servicing of the debt absorbed over half the income of the Crown — an indication of planetary linkage even 200
years ago. This did, in fact, hasten the Revolution by reducing the state’s capacity to meet the crisis as food riots
developed among the poor. The mechanism of collective psychology completed the groundwork. A rich-poor
confrontation also prepared the way for the Revolution in Russia where the powerful logic of Vladimir Ilitch
Oulianov, popularly known as Lenin, galvanised the people.
When the modern moloch of the arms race was being launched in the 40s and 50s, the idea was bruited abroad
that the rise of Hitler and World War II were due to a deficiency of allied armaments in relation to German
power. But Hitler did not begin his revolution with power and arms in his hands. He began in 1919 with an
economically and militarily prostrate and confused Germany after the Dictat of Versailles had finally sealed the
defeat of Germany’s first effort in 1914 to break out of the suffocation in which it had been placed by the most
powerful bloc the world had ever seen, the triple alliance of the three empires that ruled the globe, the AngloAmerican, the French and the Russian, virtually cutting the country off from access to the high seas. In Great
Britain, Shaw and others accused the Establishment for having led the country into the 1914 war. ‘The Tiger’
Clemenceau has been similarly accused in France. Regarding Britain, then the most powerful empire in the
world, Ted Turner has pointed out that the war was ‘largely about powers which had previously been squeezed
out by Britain demanding more of the global pickings’.
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Prussian militarism is an attested phenomenon, but in the matter of material power which I am talking about
here Germany was encouraged by its naval weakness and encirclement to build a navy. This in turn prompted
Britain to escalate the arms race to a new superweapon, the Dreadnought. The British admiralty knowingly
overstated the strength of German forces to persuade Parliament to provide further appropriations — as the
NATO powers have been doing in reference to Russia. But of the three powers that had Germany surrounded
and threatened, it was perhaps Czarist sabre-rattling that became the decisive element. The French Beauty, it
was said, was dancing with the Russian Beast. The subsequent defeat of Germany on the battlefield followed by
the crushing terms of Versailles plunged Germany into an abyss of poverty and distress from 1919 onwards.
Against this background it required only the alchemy of a man with the magic of Hitler’s electrifying oratory
and mystique to inflame the masses. He began his rise to power as a twice-decorated, twice-wounded World
War I volunteer who intensely felt the humiliation of his country and straightaway denounced Versailles. In
1919 he joined the German Workers’ Party and in 1920 took charge of its propaganda. He then had it renamed
the National-Sozialistiche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (Nazi Party) and in 1921 became its president with unlimited
power. Shortly afterwards he began dictating Mein Kampf to Rudolf Hess, in which he set out his detailed
programme and the systematic step-by-step way in which he would apply it — and did — and proceeded to lift
a prostrate country from the ground through a mass movement whose mystique constituted its force in the
absence of the military power denied by the treaty. It should be noted in relation to today’s context that one of
the factors that helped to hoist Hitler to power was the large number of unemployed, over 8 million by 1933.
The Krupp arms manufacturers also came to his aid but even in 1938 after 5 years of German rearmament, the
rest of Europe was still materially stronger than Germany and even France and Britain together were more than
a match for German arms, as pointed out in Le Mal Francais by Alain Peyrefitte, academician and former
government minister. If the Germans had by then gained a strong edge in the air, Britain had greater capacity to
produce higher quality planes, and the greatest navy in the world. Britain and France had more and better tanks
than the Germans and more manpower under arms as soon as the call-up began, without counting the vast
resources in men and material available from the British and French empires. Moreover, after Hitler attacked
Russia, the German forces fought the war split between two fronts — or three if it is considered that they also
had to fight on the weak southern or Italian front, Greece and North Africa. To this situation must be added the
power of American arms brought to the allies through ‘Lend-Lease’ even before the US entered the war, not to
speak of the allies’ overwhelming superiority as soon as the three empires, the French, the Russian and the
Anglo-American, virtually the whole world except Japan, Italy and Spain, joined forces. What the allies
essentially lacked at the outset was not equipment but the German’s zeal of a people on the march, fired with the
desire for victory and steeled by the prospect of dethroning the pinnacle of power in the world, much like the
Vietnamese were later to overthrow the greatest military power the world has ever known.
The stunning allied victory by military power in 1918 had also helped to demobilise not allied military and
economic power but the allied people in a similar way to that in which the nuclear umbrella has now largely
demobilised the peoples of Western Europe. The French danced their way through the gay inter-war years
behind the security of the Maginot Line, the impregnable fortress along the Rhine. But the attack came from
elsewhere, from the North, via the Ardennes, making a mockery of the impregnable fortress. Since 1945 the
West has been busy expending its resources building a nuclear mirage facing East, when the real threat is
developing both within the walls of the West and from its Third World hinterland in the South. The people have
been demobilised and it could well be that it is the people rather than the arms merchants and warlords who
might be needed tomorrow. Will the people, the youth, the unemployed and the growing army of the poor be
ready to render allegiance to the profiteering Freemasonry that controls The System? Or will they, if the match
is ever put to the powder, turn their energies against it?
As mentioned already, it is too early to say at time of writing what may be the outcome of Russia’s new counterrevolution and convergence with the West but it is possible that it may be now making the mistake that the West
has made for over 40 years, largely ignoring the gathering NorthSouth threat and disengaging itself from its
historic partnership with the Third World at the very moment when the latter may be about to become the power
of the future.
The Western Establishment considers the Russian neoliberalism as a blessing. It might well be a selfish turning
in on itself in imitation of the West, to meet the desires of the newly-developing consumer society at home,
perhaps a logical culmination of seventy years of Fascist style LeninistStalinism masquerading as Marxism.
Russia’s aid to the Third World, which, notwithstanding what I have said, contained a remnant of Marx’s
generosity to the poor, was becoming a burden. In the mid-eighties, economic and military aid to its Third
World allies was costing Russia 1.4 per cent of its GNP as against 0.3 per cent in the case of the US35. Until the
coming to power of Gorbachev, for better or for worse, the Soviet Union represented a great hope for the Third
World, which is now largely thrown back on itself. This seeming convergence and disdain for the impoverished
Third World by Russia and the West do not augur well for world peace. Three quarters of the human race are
not going to be so easily put off by East and West. The energy of desperation and self-reliance could well
replace the aid previously provided by the Russians, who, despite appearances to the contrary, exaggerated by
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Western propaganda, also exercised a certain restraining influence on Third World countries, because, as
pointed out in my previous letter, Russia has always been frightened of an ultimate confrontation with the West.
Contrary to the doctrine of Western wishful thinking, the Third World is now being released, through Russian
withdrawal, for a more self-reliant phase of revolutionary struggle.
On the Western side, unilateralism and the Rambo doctrine are also dangerous symptoms. As Anthony Lewis
said in The New York Times of 10 October, 1985, Americans have become tired of world complexity and
confusion and long for a simple world of the frontier myth, the gun, and a man tough enough to set things right
on his own.
This goes hand in hand with the slow erosion of the rule of law in international affairs and its replacement with
the big stick. The Washington power base rejected the jurisdiction of an elaborately and painfully constituted
World Court, withdrew from the Law of the Sea Treaty and UNESCO and consistently denounced the United
Nations after working for decades at its erosion from within. It is now again cooperating with the UN after
bringing it back into line.
One of those who have made a study of the rise and fall of civilisations is Jean Gimpel. In relation to the
increasing militarisation of the world led by the West, he says that the relay of civil by military investments
seems to be a law of history related to the decline of civiuisations. In the tiredness of old age and the desire to
enjoy their pleasures in traquiity, they turn to militarism for protection. At the decline of the great medieval
civilisation in the 14th century available capital began to be invested in war production. That was on the eve of
European expansionism, so the worm seems to enter the fruit at its conception. Today, our million-dollar-aminute military industry may be hastening our demise. Lenin said that the capitalist West would give the world
the rope to hang it. Part of the rope may be in Western arms sales to the Third World.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the Third World, as I mentioned in a
previous letter, has had some $300 billion of its debt forced on it for arms purchases. The IMF, watchdog of
financial rectitude regarding Third World government spending, condones spending on arms. The arms
merchants selling their wares to Africa encourage and are encouraged by the profitable ethnic wars due in part
to the boundaries originally drawn by the Western powers, the US included, when they carved up Africa at the
Berlin Conference, introducing Africa to the myth of the artificial nation state which they had established in
Europe during the previous four centuries. Not a single African was present at the Berlin Conference to speak
against the artificial frontiers and the break-up of ethnic groups.
Having rejected the peaceful proposals of 1974 for a new world economic order that could have been of
incalculable symbiotic value to both North and South, the West has become belatedly aware that the threat to the
present world order, dominated by the arms manufacturers, big business and the high financiers, is now
developing from the South, but are once more refusing to face up to the fundamental causes and are striking not
at the tap-root of the problem but at its external manifestations, like a mad surgeon applying raw skin lotions to
cure a deep-seated cancer. Thus the Pentagon and the CIA prepared plans in a 1,000 page document compiled at
the Army Training and Doctrine Command at Fort Monroe in Virginia and discussed at a special conference at
Fort McLair in Washington DC on 14 and 15 January, 1986, to organise Low-Intensity Conflict (LIC) in the
Third World, to deal with what it persisted in pretending to be the old Russian scapegoat rather than Western
exploitation and oppression. True to the West’s hypocritical ‘speaking softly’, the US military refer to the new
concept as ‘violent peace’. It includes designing weapons and encouraging local right wing rebels with money
and supplies, supported by US naval and air power, and follow-up entertainment in captured areas with fairs,
dances, street parties, rallies and musical events. The last-mentioned aspect of LIC was tested in a ‘liberated’
Salvadoran village in a trial operation featuring clowns, a Mexican mariachi band and skimpily-clad dancing
girls.
One of the most important arms markets is, of course, the Middle East, where a major world flashpoint was
developed with the installation of Israel in Palestine in 1948, the series of wars ever since and now the highlyprofitable semipermanent state of war in the region. A news report in the International Herald Tribune of 30
May, 1984 in reference to the murderous war between Iran and Iraq said that ‘Israeli officials readily
acknowledged that they were helping Iran to prolong the war and to see the two potential Israeli adversaries
drain each other in prolonged conflict. Many administration officials agreed that the US interest in the war was
that both sides should lose’. While Israel was supplying arms to Iran, the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ithzak
Shamir, stated that ‘the war between Iraq and Iran served Israel’s interests and enabled it to consolidate its
position in the region’. At a press conference in Jerusalem on 28 October, 1987 he added that Israel’s defence
establishment saw the gulf war as ‘a blessing’ for Israel.
Naturally, the media had already been insinuating these sentiments, as when the so-called independent daily,
Haaretz, of 27 November, 1986, wrote that it would be best for Israel that this war should continue as long as
possible. When the war began to threaten Western oil supplies and shipping in the Gulf, the Western powers
tried to bring the fire under control, when the obvious way to stop it long before would have been to organise an
effective arms embargo on both sides. Behind a hypocritical embargo, over $400 billion worth of arms was sold
to the two belligerents between 1980 and 1988, with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and China joining the Western
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powers, notably socialist France and Israel, as main suppliers. When a ceasefire was finally announced in July
1988, Israeli leaders reacted with grim disappointment. The arms merchant Yaacov Nimrodi said unabashedly,
‘It is a hard blow’. General Aharon Levran hoped there would soon be a new war between Arab powers, and the
Israeli secret services are no doubt already working on some such project. Indeed, at time of writing it seems to
have already advanced beyond the planning stage.* Behind that there is almost unlimited scope for stimulating
war between the Arab powers across towards the West through Lybia, Tunis and Algeria to Morocco, and
southwards through the Muslim zone of influence to meet up with the conflicts in the southern half of the
continent.
Having actively participated in the destruction of Iran and Iraq through its arms sales the West subsequently
reaped a second harvest by participating in the equally profitable reconstruction.
The arms race goes hand in hand with the government-supported shows and exhibitions of military equipment
organised every year in an expanding number of countries. Here in France, the annual military exhibition was
given added prestige by socialist president Mitterand. The ordinary public would be well advised to visit such a
show at least once and read the high-sounding publicity placards attached to the exhibited hardware, such as:
‘Submarine to Surface Anti-Ship Missile; All Weather, Fire and Forget, Sea Skimming; Fitted Ready-to-Fire in
Nuclear and Conventional Submarines’ etc. etc., offering visions of the apocalypse which the West might well
be preparing for tomorrow. The Defence Marketing Department of BARR and STROUD had this typical
sentence in an advertisement in the Revue Internationale de Defence (December 1985): ‘At your service into the
depths of hell’.
Apart from Israel’s interest in the mutual destruction of the Arab powers and the fact that warmongering has
been second nature to the capitalist West for 500 years, any real arms blockade in the area is inconceivable
because it would run counter to the interests of the arms merchants, including Israel’s. That country obtains an
expanding proportion of its foreign income from arms exports, particularly to the impoverished Third World,
which, as I have already pointed out, uses loans for the purpose from Western agencies. Israel’s privileged
customers have been the Fascist regimes of Latin America, the white racists of South Africa and the right-wing
terrorists and potential terrorists opposing the legitimate governments of Nicaragua, Angola, and Mozambique,
ostensibly, according to Western propaganda, to defend ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’, but in reality to enable
Western big business to continue exploiting land, timber, minerals and slave labour.
Let me give just one or two examples of this particular arms market: the pilotless South African plane, Seeker,
used devastatingly against the people of Angola, was developed by Israel; Israel converted Boeings to refuel
South Africa’s French Mirages and Israeli Cheetahs backing the Angolan right wing terrorists; Israel has been
the kingpin in joint arms production with South Africa, Chile and Taiwan; the UNITA contras in Angola were
organised, paid and armed by the Western powers, with the US providing deadly Stinger missiles ‘inter alia’
(data from the Norwegian-based World Campaign against Military and Nuclear Collaboration with South
Africa). In addition to all these activities, opposition to regimes in countries which tried to break loose from the
imperialist system was stirred up among the people from clandestine radio stations financed by Western secret
service agencies (as came to light, for example, in September 1989 when there was a clash of interest in Angola
between Voice of America and Voice of the Black Cockerel financed by the
CIA).
Israel and the West are not alone in helping South Africa’s racist regime: the West’s friendly dictatorships
among the oil-producing countries of the Near East also supply it with an abundance of oil.
The long-oppressed peoples of the Third World, living in misery for centuries under Western ‘enlightenment’,
wanted nothing so little as the new, West-organised terrorism to kill and maim them. One of the worst features
of it was the new slave trade, the young boys, mere children, captured in the villages, carried off, separated from
home, family and friendship, trained to kill, and then forced by the contras into their murderous enterprise. Did
we hear much outcry from the Establishment media?
With regard to the economic sanctions voted by the United Nations against the South African racist regime,
most of the Western governments and Israel secretly got around them in a multitude of ways, including highlevel deceit and forgery (see Undercutting Sanctions: Israel, the US and South Africa, by Jane Hunter,
Washington, 1987). At time of writing it is too early to say what may be the longer-term outcome of the victory
of reactionary Western forces in the southern cone of Africa organised in collusion between the West and the
new Soviet regime, designed not in the interests of the expropriated and the oppressed but, inter alia, to ensure
continued access to an area which is the world’s richest in terms of strategic mineral resources, number one for
vanadium, chromium, andalusite and gold, number two for platinum, manganese, vermiculite, titanium and
uranium (source: l’Afrique Australe Dans la Tourmente, by P Bas and D Tersen, Documentation Francaise,
1987). South Africa also has immense reserves of iron, coal and other commodities, and the combination of its
extraordinary climate and soil resources make it a rich agricultural producer. In the arrangements granting socalled ‘independence’ to Namibia, negotiated in 1988, South African big business is ensured of a continuing
strategic role in economic exploitation and will hold the vital lifeline of a base at Walvis Bay, Namibia’s sole
deep-water port. It has been said by those from the inside that Namibian independence is merely ‘an anthem and
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a flag’. Behind all this economic strength lies one of the world’s most powerful military machines, with its own
arms production industry, which places South Africa among the world’s 10 leading arms exporters, offering
buyers a range of over 140 (one hundred and forty) types of munitions and equipment, with Israel its number
one customer (Le Monde Diplomatique, February 1989).
It is necessary at this point to recall to mind that the African National Congress was formed in 1912 on the basis
of non-violence and negotiation with ‘a christian government’ on a christian basis as a means of solving the
national dispute amicably. Forty nine years on into non-violent negotiation the ANC had to admit that its policy
had failed and that large numbers of Blacks were continuing to be killed. And so, in December 1961, it was
decided ‘The time comes in the life of any nation when there remain only two choices — submit or fight’, and
UMKONTO WE SIZWE, the Spear of the Nation, was born. As Mr Nelson Mandela pointed out, the armed
struggle was reluctantly begun, after half a century of peaceful efforts by Blacks, as a defensive mechanism
against government violence.
State terrorism is still as rampant in South Africa as before the gesture was made to international opinion of
‘releasing’ important political prisoners. The old practice of ‘divide et impera’ is also widespread, with Blacks
being incited to fight Blacks in order to develop a state of civil war between them, the security forces providing
the weapons (Victoria Brittain in Le Monde Diplomatique of February 1989). Ms Brittain’s book, Hidden Lives
and Hidden Deaths
—South Africa’s Crippling of a Continent, is essential reading for understanding the nefarious role not only of
South Africa itself but also of the West in general and the United States in particular in that part of the world.
The encouragement of division within the Black community as well as South Africa’s relative success in
reducing antipathy in the West notwithstanding its intolerable racist oppression are due in great part to the fact
that South Africa has a very powerful secret service operating at home through paid Black agents and abroad
through international Freemasonry.
The overall policy goes hand-in-hand with the doctrine which the Western Establishment would like the public
to believe, that the peoples of the Third World and particularly the Arabs are racially inferior. This has been
discussed by Professor J G Shaheen, Professor of Mass Communications at Southern Illinois University, author
of The TV Arab who says that ‘it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle’ than for a screen Arab
to appear as a genuine human being. Hollywood paints them as shiftless vagabonds or, as in the film Wanted
Dead or Alive, as people who wanted to poison the good citizens of Los Angeles, or, as in the minds of some
White House staff, according to the memoirs of former education secretary, Terrel Bell, as ‘sand niggers’.
Arabs, as oppressed and exploited victims of imperialism, have certainly fallen from the pinnacle of their great
medieval civilisation when they were — with Europe and largely as Europe’s teachers — in the forefront of
almost every invention. It is necessary to recall this great civiuisation in order to counteract Western propaganda
about genetic inferiority and incompetence, the old excuse used by the imperialists who destroy and exploit and
then point the finger of disdain at those they have reduced to slaves.
Racism and racist superiority and inferiority were inventions of Western imperialism. There was social injustice
and religious discrimination in the ancient world but no suggestion of genetic racism. The Greeks rightly saw
the barbarians as culturally inferior but they did not consider them as biologically inferior. Greeks and Romans
had slaves brought to them by conquest but again they were not considered genetically inferior. The Jews of old
regarded themselves to be the chosen people of God but for religious reasons and not because they considered
non-Jews as biologically deficient. Similarly, the Middle Ages distinguished on a purely religious basis between
christians, Jews and infidels. It was left to imperialism to invent the nasty concept of the racial inferiority of the
peoples of the Third World to better justify their exploitation.
With regard to the Arabs in particular, it may be recalled, in relation to modern Judeo-Western propaganda of
racial inferiority, that the first paper manufacturing was established in Bagdad as early as 800 AD, that all our
thoroughbred horses are derived from Arab sires and that the common numerals we use every day, an Arab
invention, symbolise the Arabs’ early prowess in mathematics. Astronomy, medicine and chemistry reached a
new peak with the Arabs and Arab doctors were successfully treating diseases like cataracts as early as the 8th
century. And so on through all the sciences that flowed into Europe via Cordoba and Toledo, whence books by
the hundreds were translated into Spanish and Latin and thus made available to scholars all over the Continent.
Our Western, particularly Anglo-Saxon, imperialism, subsequently took credit for many of these Arab
inventions. If, for example, you check our encyclopaedias you will find a good Anglo-Saxon, Harvey, credited
with the discovery of blood circulation, which had been fully described by the Arab doctor, Ibn En-Najis (who
died in 1288). To the Arabs science was for man, not the other way round: to help man, not in his Promethean
pride to exploit the world but to live in harmony with it and with his fellowman. It was not a struggle for
individual power and glory.
Roger Bacon (1214—1294) learned Arabic because, he said, the study of the Arabic language and sciences was
then the essential path to knowledge. Thomas Aquinas and the elite of the time knew likewise. The Arabs
considered science an integral part of the fabric of human knowledge and wisdom (which has been torn apart
largely by the ignorance of today’s Western specialists, confusing means with ends). The linear mechanistic
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manipulation of matter along specialist lines in disregard of the total mesh of reality was inexistent. The
hundreds of thousands of scientists now engaged in the snowballing arms race is a logical outcome of a process
that has been gathering force for several centuries, ever since growth for the sake of growth became our religion
and the ‘How?’ displaced the ‘Why?’ The spirit of conquest and possession over the world of nature finds its
natural continuation in the conquest of man by man.
It ought to be a warning to us to remember that the decline of the Arab civilisation set in when it began to lose
its creative impulse towards ultimate ends and to turn around in circles. It then became ripe for external attack
and domination, which it tried to resist by an obsession with law, order and physical force, canonising theocracy
and making the Koran the literal and unalterable Word of God as the Fundamentalists have made the bible in
our times, practising a new idolatry.
Bishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Laureate, a moderate man, has said: ‘The indisputable point is that we who
are oppressed will be free. That is not in question. The logic of history ... dictates that this is so. All that the
Whites can do is decide whether they want freedom to come reasonably and peacefully or through bloodshed
and armed struggle.’
The South African government used the INKATHA movement to force Black to fight Black in the same way
that it has used RENAMO in Mozambique and UNITA in Angola as surrogate forces. But the strategy could
boomerang. The Pan-African Congress, vying with the African National Congress for the people’s loyalty, is
becoming polarised, uniting Blacks with inflammatory language against the settler as the enemy. The general
secretary of the PAC, Mr Benny Alexander, declared that the settlers have never suspended their armed assault
on the indigenous people and that to shoot a settler means, ‘There remains a dead man and a free man’. The
Whites are using the strategy that has served the West so well in the world, retreat a bit in order to better control,
particularly because of the immense reserves of strategic minerals in the southern cone of Africa and because
South Africa controls 50 per cent of industry in the African continent, though the Establishment and the media
tried to convince the public that it was Soviet Russia that was the demon.
The World Council of Churches has taken a liberal stand in relation to the Third World since 1968, though it is
not always successful in persuading its member churches to adopt its recommendations. The American catholic
bishops also made a courageous effort to break through to freedom of speech, but now seem to be hindered by
the exchange of ambassadors between Washington and the Vatican. Liberation theology, however, contrary to
the conservatism of John Paul II, may well become the most dynamic revolutionary factor of the end of the
century. Its main thrust is developing in Latin America though it is not a Latin American monopoly. There is
also a Black theology of liberation in the United States, a liberation theology in South Africa, a rural liberation
theology in the Philippines and a theology of the people in South Korea. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the
opposition to liberation theology arose simultaneously with a reactionary pope, a reactionary American
administration and a reactionary swing all over Europe, even among the socialists, all seeming to fall into
obedient line behind Washington. The latter threw its weight against liberation theology through the
Washington-based Protestant Institute for Religion and Democracy. Vatican II had raised the concept of The
People of God to a position of importance; John Paul II reacted adamantly in favour of Roman dogmatism
handed down from the summit.
Liberation theology is not, as both the Vatican and most protestant churches have tended to paint it, merely a
matter of a violent versus a pacifist exit of the oppressed from their condition. It is far deeper than that and
includes a movement towards a popular church, an ecclesia or assembly of the people as in the early church
when the ‘episcopoi’ were organisers and overseers, as the Greek word makes clear, rather than doctrinal
dictators. And the ministers of the Word, or theologians, were then not priests, though some translations of the
New Testament substitute ‘priests’ for ‘elders’ in the Acts of the Apostles, or confuse priest with converted
priests. In all these matters the doctrine of the Vatican is consistent, exemplified in its attitude to Luther from
1518 onwards, giving first priority not to the painful search for the truth but primarily to obedience to pope and
hierarchy, holders of the keys to the ‘deposit’ of faith, a law-and-order demand for compliance rather than the ‘I
have come to spread fire upon the earth’ words of Christ (though I am not suggesting that those words mean
anything other than a sweeping, all-consuming fire of love).
To return to the general question, the term ‘Third World’ has a sinister ring, the world of the poor, the excluded,
the inferior, reflecting the French Revolution’s Third Estate, about whom the Abbe Sieyes, intellectual
inspiration of the Revolution, said, ‘They were a people who were nothing and wanted to become something’.
The US secretary of state in the early 80s, General Alexander Haig, of NATO fame, even said as much when he
declared that the so-called Third World was non-existent: the world, he said, was divided into East and West.
Jean-Paul Sartre put it another way, in a preface to Les Damnes de la Terre, in which he declared that the world
had a minority who were men and a majority who were mere natives. In a work to which I have already referred,
Professor Wilfred Cantwell Smith said that the fundamental weakness of the West is its inability to recognise
that it shares the planet ‘not with inferiors but with equals’. In round figures, General Haig’s ‘non-existent’
Third World has 75 per cent of the world population against the West’s 15 and Russia and Eastern Europe’s 10.
Almost 50 per cent of this Third World population is under 25 years of age. It occupies a vast area of the
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world’s land, holds enormous resources of oil, minerals, timber and virtually every conceivable production
potential. Yet its people are hungry, deprived and oppressed after five centuries of Western capitalistic
dominion. It is the long arm of the lever balanced delicately on its fulcrum by the material weight of the wealthy
West. But pride in military strength is no more protective than it was for Louis XVI or Czar Nicholas II.
With regard to Latin America, President Reagan spoke of the danger of a massive northwards flux of what he
called ‘the foot people’. The then commanding general of the US Southern Command, Paul F Gorman, in
official testimony before Congress, said that Mexico could become the No 1 security problem for the United
States towards the end of our century. The Director of the CIA stated: ‘What you are looking at for your
children is the ... prospect of a hundred million hostile people immediately south of the border’36. Doubling the
problem of the oppression, of Western economic exploitation and of the massive poverty all over Latin America
is the matter of the southern states of the US, taken from Mexico, and which a new revolutionary Mexico might
claim. Texas was a Mexican province before being made independent and then annexed by the US. In the US
war of conquest of 1848 one-third of Mexico’s remaining territory was appropriated, to become California, New
Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and parts of Utah, Wyoming and Colorado. This was in the name of the doctrine of
Manifest Destiny, which unilaterally declared it the destiny of the US to possess the whole North American
continent, which was an understatement, since President Theodore Roosevelt, arguing that ‘No triumph of peace
can equal the armed triumph of war’, extended the empire even as far as the Philippines, taking the Caribbean
simultaneously in his stride. Many people of Mexican origin in the southern United States still consider ‘Los
Anglos’ or the WASPS as usurpers and barbarians, who colonised America well after the Spaniards had
established fine cities in what is today the southern United States. When Mexicans cross the river they do not
feel they are emigrating to a foreign land: they merely say, ‘Vamos al otro lado’.
It is claimed in some official quarters that the US would be obliged to withdraw its forces from Europe in case
of a massive invasion across the Rio Grande, with the consequences one can imagine. According to many
authorities, for example the demographer Michael Teitelbaum in his book Latin Migration North, there is an
immigration clock ticking. If the southern border of the US is not controlled now with calm and humane
concern, he says, it will have to be closed later with xenophobic venom. According to a poll published in 1986
by the leading Mexican newspaper Excelsior, the majority of Mexicans consider the United States an enemy
country. It has followed a constant pattern of economic exploitation bolstered by military power. The Marines
who invaded Nicaragua in 1910 stayed for a quarter of a century. The invasion of Grenada in October 1983 was
no less than the United State’s 33rd attack on Latin America. The general process is typified by US action in
Guatemala, where there was a a reform-minded president in the early 50s, Colonel Jacobo Arbenz. When he
began legal proceedings to expropriate the lands of the United Fruit Company, offering to pay the corporation’s
own book value of the land as compensation, the corporation, with media backing, skilfully converted a
business dispute into conflict with communism, the old red herring, and the CIA promptly engineered the
overthrow of Arbenz.
If war spreads in the central American areas there will be a threat to shipping in the Caribbean, the most vital
lifeline of the US. The Navy and Air Force would, no doubt, be able to meet such a single threat but hardly if
there were simultaneous eruptions all around the globe in addition to a land explosion in Mexico and an onrush
across the border. Government in Mexico has been monopolised for over half a century by the Partido
Revolucionario Institucional which is riddled with corruption and ripe for revolutionary overthrow.
At this side of the Atlantic, if you look at the map you can see what a small promontory Western Europe is,
jutting out from the enormous Eurasian land mass and bordered on the south by a Muslim ring extending all the
way from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean and beyond, via Pakistan, to China. Dr Marvin Zonis, Director of the
Middle East Institute at the University of Chicago is only one of an increasing number of observers who believe,
as he said at a state department seminar, that the message from revolutionary Islam is ‘the most impressive
ideology of the 20th century since the Russian Revolution’. Since General de Gaulle’s disappearance, his
powerful ‘planetary’ speeches and the gradual replacement of his policy by a pro-Israeli one, virtually the whole
Western world has managed to ignore the fact that 67 countries and nearly one-fifth of the world’s population
give allegiance to Islam. In the face of Western economic, military and technological might, the Muslim world
no longer feels inferior. On the contrary, it considers itself to be a swelling tide rising across the earth. To meet
it, all the West can offer is a monstrous and cumbersome arsenal of heavy arms such as that which got the US
bogged down in Vietnam against a determined people with sometimes little more than their bare hands for
resistance. Where Islam is a spiritual force the West is merely materialist, and history has taught us which of the
two is the stronger. More and more Third World thinkers are speaking increasingly in the terms used by one of
them, Sheikh Saeed Shaaban of the Lebanon, in placing responsibility for his country being torn asunder: ‘There
is no doubt that this is the civilisation of the West, America, Israel and the Phalange’. And Dr George Habash,
the christian physician leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, put it as follows: ‘We want to
tell the United States, France and the whole West, look what you have created. Your Israel has become a savage
beast. Come and see this beast. Do something to stop it. Show us you have a conscience.’ The whole West is
thus being associated ‘en bloc’ with imperialistic oppression. The cases being highlighted are multitudinous, a
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random example being Nelson Mandela’s arrest, organised almost a quarter of a century ago by the CIA which
continues its close co-operation with the infamous Bureau of State Security in South Africa.
At the same time Western governments often pride themselves on ‘friendship’ with such-and-such a Third
World country, as if the friendship were with the country and its people rather than with the puppet regime
maintained in power and subservience by the West for strategic purposes or supplies of raw materials. The
danger of such a policy is that in the minds of Third World revolutionary thinkers and organisers their own
oppressive regimes thus tend to be associated with the West. Today’s ‘friendships’ could come home to roost.
Furthermore, because we are seen to be democratic countries where the people freely choose their political
representatives, we can hardly blame revolutionaries if they fail to make a distinction between governments and
public and direct their violence indiscriminately as in the Paris bombings in 1986.
This is strengthened by the fact that the peoples of the West allow themselves to be manipulated by the political
parties and media so that acts of aggression raise the popularity of our leaders among many voters, as in the case
of President Reagan on the occasion of the bombings of Tripoli, or Mrs Thatcher’s armada on the Falklands/
Malvinas. Our manipulated masses can hardly be expected to take time off from football, discos and television
(which is rather accurately described by the well-known joke referring to our living room as ‘a womb with a
view’) to ask themselves how many new young Muammar al Quadhafis have been in gestation as a result of
such bombing or what revolutionary movement will result from the FalklandsfMalvinas. How many thousands
of new enemies have thus been created for the United States, Britain and the West? How many Arab, Asian or
Latin American freedom fighters will commemorate such dates and take inspiration from them? Even without
the bombing, the causes that produced Quadhafi yesterday will produce more Quadliafis tomorrow because of
the rising consciousness of oppression and poverty.
I do not have any crystal ball to tell me what may happen in the future, but one possible scenario that could
come into focus within the next 10 years is what might well be a natural alliance between China and the Muslim
world. Russia’s former, half-hearted rapprochement with the Arabs may have been merely a tactical shift forced
on it by Israel’s alliance with the US and the pressure exerted by Jewish organisations to allow Russian Jews to
emigrate freely.
Muslim recollection that the USSR was one of the first countries to recognise the new state of Israel, Russia’s
fear of its large population of Muslims becoming infected with rebellious Islamic behaviour, Muslim opposition
to Marxist atheism, and the USSR’s alliance with India, seen as antiMuslim, are factors which combine to
suggest the possibility of Russia’s retreat from its former pro-Arab policy and its replacement by China, which
has an old territorial score to settle with Russia.
The demise of a deformed type of communism in Russia and China and its threatened replacement by
expansionist capitalism after a period of chaotic transition is not a good augury for peace, notwithstanding
present ‘friendship’ arrangements akin to Chamberlain’s peace pact with Hitler prior to the outbreak of the
worst war in history. The plain people of the world, hungry for justice, liberty, equality, and fraternity, will
never be content with peace at any price, imposed by any Eastern, Western or other Establishment eager to
maintain the status quo from which they benefit in their pocket, in their pride and in their prestige. Radical
problems require radical solutions and if the powers are not prepared to apply these radical solutions peacefully,
examining deep-set causes, then a sudden explosion could replace dormant tension notwithstanding the
superficial peace pacts. Only 10 years before Munich the West had been on the crest of a money-making wave
of euphoria in an unprecedented economic boom, which suddenly crashed in one day in 1929. Being thus
realistic in today’s world is, however, unpopular with the same class as that which refused to see the writing on
the wall from 1918 to 1928 when the worst catastrophe the world has so far known could have been prevented if
there had been a few voices to counter the cloud of optimism that had covered the world and left the problems
unsolved.
Islam and China combined have almost 2 billion people. Napoleon declared that ‘when China would wake the
world would quake’ (‘Quand la Chine se reveillera le monde tremblera’). The former commander of the Warsaw
Pact forces, Marshall Koulikov said that China remained Russia’s ‘potential enemy number one’. The meteoric
rise of little Japan in our time could pale beside that of giant China with over four times the population and
much greater resources. While rapidly modernising its army with sophisticated equipment from abroad, China is
itself producing large amounts of basic weapons and has moved into fifth place among the world’s arms
exporters. Its products are heavily weighted in the direction of multiple rocket-launchers, self-propelled guns,
anti-tank missiles, rifles and grenades, all suitable for guerrilla warfare and sold particularly to Muslim
countries. As J M Boucheron, president of the French parliamentary committee on defence, has stated, the
relative cheapness and maniability of the most sophisticated missiles means that they can now be operated by
almost anybody and practically every country can use them ‘provided their people are motivated’37.
China’s fleet has expanded in a few years from insignificance to a position where it is already larger than Great
Britain’s, the former mistress of the seas. The country has the largest army in the world, capable of further
expansion by the call-up of reserves and militia. It makes no secret of its old frontier dispute with Russia, dating
back to Czarist times, which keep a million Russian military men pinned down to guard it. Réne Cagnat and
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Michel Jan38 quote a Russian lieutenant at Oussouri on the Chinese border as follows: ‘In front of me I see their
fortifications, their fields and their villages stretching away to the horizon. Behind me there is only a railway
line and the forest, nothing but forest’. The old border dispute and China’s claim to some of Russia’s eastern
empire is compounded with the clash of interests in Vietnam. China also has a long-standing border problem
with Russia’s ally, India, in the Ladakh Valley, and went to war over it in 1962. This helps to further consolidate
Chinese friendship with Pakistan. The most significant aspect of this friendship, however, is that it runs deep
into the grass roots at popular level. Love is hardly too strong a word to describe it. Pakistanis seeing Chinese in
the street will fraternise with them like long-lost brothers. Talking to Pakistanis, I have never been able to get a
rationalisation of this popular affection. ‘It’s just like that, we love them’, is about the nearest you get to an
explanation. It transcends even certain localised conflicts, as after the June 1989 massacre in Tiennamen Square
when the Chinese government felt compelled to clamp down on one or two rebellious Muslim movements. On
the contrary, such movements tend to be seen by Muslims in Pakistan in the same light as their own fundamentalist attitude against the authorities in Islamabad.
Speaking of transcending conflict, it might be added here that Israeli and Western intelligence agents have been
working hard to stir up antagonism throughout the Muslim world between Shias and Sunnis. This antagonism
certainly exists even without Western stimulation, but there is a Muslim saying which puts it in context: ‘Me
against my brother; me and my brother against our cousin; me and my brother and cousin against a common
enemy’.
Jean Gimpel says39 that China has completely reversed its policy towards its Muslim minority, excluding them
from the official family planning and ‘mobilising Islam against the Soviet Union’. It beams radio programmes
into the Soviet Union from Sin-k’iang denouncing white Russian colonialism in its Muslim republics. And a
massive highway capable of taking tanks and of acting as a landing strip for the heaviest troop carriers has been
built by the Chinese and Pakistan armies from deep inside China all the way via Islamabad to the Indian Ocean.
The largest and, for its great size, the most homogeneous mass of people in the world, all of Mongoloid stock
and 95 per cent of the Han ethnic group, sharing the same ancient culture, traditions and written language, and
progressing rapidly to the generalised use of mandarin, now spoken by over 90 per cent of the population with
only three variants, China also has old scores to settle with the West. Ever since the British East India Company
monopolised the opium trade in 1779 and launched its opium smuggling on China, followed by military attack,
by the Anglo-French operation and by later Russian participation, Chinese history sees the Europeans as
enemies and former purveyors of poison.
Since the beginning of the Russian Revolution, when Sultan Galiev, the Muslim Marxist companion in arms of
Joseph Stalin and professor in the University of the Peoples of the Orient, prepared a plan in conjunction with
the Muslim revolutionary movement for a semi-independent Muslim entity east of the Volga, which was
subsequently outlawed by Moscow, when its leaders were imprisoned, there has remained a strong undercurrent
of anti-Russian feeling among the Muslim populations in the South-East of the USSR. Even when atheistic from
either genuine conviction or political opportunism, they have more in common with those of their traditions in
Muslim countries than they have with the old European enemy in the Kremlin, successor of the Orthodox
oppressors. The memory is still alive of the pogroms of Tatars, Azeris, Kazakhs and Turk-mans form 1928 to
1940 when the war brought a temporary closing of the ranks against the worst enemy from further west. To
these eastern peoples, the rulers in the Kremlin are white, European and of Christian ancestry and traditions. I
have met Poles as well as Russians who seemed sincerely frightened for the future because of what they referred
to as the Yellow Peril of the ancient Asiatic horde. General de Gaulle also believed that the day would come
when ‘Holy Russia’ would once more mount the guard on Europe’s Eastern flank. China certainly does not want
war for the sake of war, but the combination of its enormous population, its need for ‘lebensraum’, its claim on
Russia’s ally, its friendship with Pakistan and its historic antipathy to the West, in which it includes Russia, all
combine to indicate a possible Chinese-Muslim alliance.
The Muslim recipe of revolution and war for the glory of God is an explosive prescription, besides which all
Western talk of GNP, the price of buttons and butter, ‘democracy’ and the rest, might suddenly become
irrelevant. It combines heaven and earth, the mosque and the marketplace, transcends mere earthly money and
power, provides a passport not to more acquisitiveness on earth but to everlasting glory in Heaven, replaces the
West’s instant concoctions for ‘paradise now’ with the incomparable capacity to postpone the harvest to
hereafter, making ecstatic happiness here below dependent on its utter fulfilment on death. The West has
nothing to match it. The Establishment is making a blunder of historic proportions if it believes that such a force
can be stopped with aircraft carriers and bombs.
The pressure from the poor South on the wealthy North could well become simultaneous on both sides of the
Atlantic and could coincide with vertical upheaval inside the North. The combined populations of Blacks and
Hispanics in the United States is some 50 million. The Blacks are becoming increasingly aggressive, as
expressed recently by the Black writer and film director, Spike Lee, who said that ‘nonviolence and that stuff
had its time ... but I just don’t think that nowadays young Black America is going to turn the other cheek’ as
they did in the days of the non-violent Martin Luther King who was eliminated by White violencc. There is not
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now, as there was in the past, any ‘Western frontier’, any new settlement territory, any great primary
undertaking needing abundant manpower. In Jefferson’s time, the US population was 2 million. The enormous
road and rail network built by former immigrants is completed; mining is now relatively insignificant; in an age
of automation new workers threaten to displace others and thus swell the ranks of the unemployed and the
disgruntled. ‘We could have a terrible period of repression’, warned the Rev Theodore Hesburgh, who was
Chairman of a Select Committee on Immigration established by Congress. Even the Army is becoming
‘coloured’ like Rome’s before the Fall, and coloured people have been entering West Point. Los Angeles has
more Mexicans than any other centre except Mexico City. Some Spanish language programmes are reaching top
rating on independent television, many courts have to provide interpreters and new immigrants are beginning to
gain political punch. They are also a young and fertile population.
The US-Mexican border is barely 20 short of 2,000 miles long. The river that traces half of the frontier declines
in dry seasons to a muddy stream which is easy to ford. In case of revolution or repression in Mexico, still less
of an organised attack, the border could not be effectively defended all the way across from the Atlantic to the
Pacific. It is a zig-zag line with some 7 million people constantly coming and going, sharing a hybrid socioeconomic infra-system. Many families straddle the boundary. The relative harmony between the two cultures
could break down in case of a violent upheaval affecting both sides. The Hispanics carry with them, and the
millions to follow will continue to carry with them, the memory of US exploitation and despoliation in the
South. But US Blacks north of the border carry with them something, perhaps, more dangerous: the deep, bitter
roots of the humiliation they were forced to in the long night of slavery. And both Blacks and Hispanics bear in
mind the savagery with which the Indians were destroyed by the WASPS. To better understand all this you
ought to read To Be A Slave by Julius Lester.
In August 1989, Professor Gerald Jaynes of Yale University, director of a National Academy of Sciences study
on race relations, said their findings showed that since 1970 the status of Blacks relative to Whites had
deteriorated and that full integration of Blacks into US society was unlikely in ‘any foreseeable future’.
Naturally, some self-righteous Whites, especially among right wing Fundamentalists, point the finger of
accusation at Blacks for drugs, drink, violence and dissolute living. This is a classic ploy by the privileged class
to confuse cause and effect. In his book, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, Manning Marable
foresees a violent revolutionary struggle in the United States, combining Blacks, other ethnic minorities and
liberal and deprived Whites. President Reagan said in 1985 that with over 8 million unemployed, the US could
not afford to extend unemployment compensation and would have to concentrate on job training. Then he cut
the job-training programme by 28 per cent. In a series of lectures delivered in Harvard in April 1985, Senator
Patrick Moynihan stated that one-third of all American children born in 1980 will be dependent on welfare at
some time. The proportion was much greater among coloured people than among white. The trend, he said, is an
ominous one for all races. And he added that whereas earlier families earning 10 per cent above the poverty line
were exempt from income tax, today families well below the poverty line are taxed. Payments under aid to
families with dependent children, a main US welfare programme, have declined by more than 60 per cent since
1969.
It was partly the revolt of young people which stopped the war in Vietnam, inter alia bringing the then powerful
President Nixon out of his bed in the small hours to talk to those milling around the gates of the White House. A
new generation of young people is now getting angry. One of them, Mark Featherman, referring to the
‘standing-tall’ decade of Reaganism, wrote recently in The New York Times:
'Finally, let the politician beware. Though we are as yet inchoate and dormant, the
twentysomething generation will soon awaken and howl with rage. Then we will have our own
march on Washington. And when we get there we will want to meet those who had a fun-filled
decade — and stuck us with the bill.'
There is also the problem of the American farm debt, reminiscent of the situation towards the end of the 20s
when another Republican administration tried to balance the budget partly at the expense of the farmers. The
result was a surge of farm belt lawlessness that was not unconnected with the events of the 30s. It is a matter for
conjecture as to what form farmer estrangement might take tomorrow. Agrifinance magazine estimates that by
1991 a quarter of US cropland will be farmed by Management Companies on behalf of big corporations.
In France, as I write, Muslims are becoming victims of the racism being orchestrated by the National Front and
the right wing media. Muslims themselves are not blameless in so far as many of them reject integration by
refusing marriage with non-Moslems for their women folk, but this in itself is significant and heavy with the
possibility of future conflict between the two civilisations. In any case they did not choose to emigrate for
preference. Their presence to date is mostly France s own responsibility, being partly a relic of French
colonialism and partly one of the causes of France’s economic boom in the 60s. Previously they were needed to
fight France’s wars, particularly against Germany and in Indochina.
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Present antipathy towards the Muslims now will no doubt be remembered if and when the day that many of
them are beginning to see as the day of revenge dawns and the present trickle of clandestine entry becomes the
unstoppable flood predicted by such authorities as Professor Pierre Chaunu and Alfred Sauvy of the French
Institute of Demography, who have prepared projections to the year 2015.
Apart from a possible influx of refugees fleeing from the new capitalist ‘paradise’ in eastern Europe, these two
authors foresee a massive assault on fortress Europe from within and without beginning around 1995, arising
from an increasingly imbalanced and destabilising cohabitation between an impoverished and expansionist
Third World and a devitalised, demoralised and ageing Europe. In 1984, the Third World gave birth to
112,000,000 children, and the whole Developed World (including Japan, East Europe and Russia), to some 15
million. This is compounded with the age factor. In France, only 18 per cent of the European population will be
under 20 years of age in 2015 compared with 45.5 per cent of the non-European sector. 26 per cent of the
French European population will then be the elderly, against only 9.5 per cent of the non-Europeans. One of the
leading commentators on social affairs, Mr Michael Debre, de Gaulle’s prime minister, said in 1985 that in 5
more years of France’s present birthrate it would be too late to launch the recovery: ‘If we allow the proportion
of youth under 20 years to drop to 25 per cent of our population, we may say goodbye to France’. But the
proportion of youth projected for 2015 is 7 per cent lower than 25 per cent. Professor Chaunu states that the 3child family is the minimum necessary to save the nation and anything less would be only ‘a bank of sand
against a tidal wave’. The 3-child family, however, is disappearing, the number of third child births falling by a
further 24.6 per cent in the brief period from 1981 to 1983 for example. The political right is both promoting the
crisis and profiting from it. The racist demagogue Jean-Marie Le Pen is certainly not of Hitler calibre but his
consolidation of the National Front, directed particularly against ‘the Muslim menace’, might well provoke
more radical fanatics whose hunger for power could feed and feed upon the racial hatred that has lain latent
since France’s defeat at the hands of the Algerians. To add to the comparison frequently made with Rome before
the Fall, attention is being called to the developing situation in the army where a serious racial problem is
expected to arise during the next 15 years. Some are speaking of a new Lebanon, but this time at home and on a
very large scale.
Turning to the southern side of the ‘mare nostrum’, the projections comparing the combined total population of
Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Turkey with those for France, Italy and Spain — I do not have the
data for Greece and Portugal — give total annual births respectively of 8.3 million and 1.6 million; children
under 15 years of 113.8 million and 25.4 million; and women of childbearing age of 81.1 million and 35.6
million. The addition of Portugal and Greece would not make any significant difference to the pattern,
especially as additional countries could be added to the southern balance. The practical result of the exploding
birth rate south of the Mediterranean are indicated by the population data for Algeria: 9 million in 1962, 25
million in 1987, 45 million projected for the end of the century. By contrast, Europe is losing altitude in a
demographic tailspin. West Germany’s population growth is negative, —0.19 per cent per annum, Denmark’s
+0.08 per cent, Great Britain’s + 0.03 per cent, and so on. As an indication of what these rates mean in practice,
West Germany’s population is projected to fall from approximately 60 million in 1985 to about 50 million in
2015, and the relative buoyance of the immigrant birthrate will create an accentuating ‘colour’ problem*. The
United Kingdom is also expected to have an irreversible colour problem by the turn of the century.
At the other side of the Atlantic total births for Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean will increase to 6.9
million in 2015, when US births will have declined to 3.1 million. The number of young people under 15 will
rise to over 92 million in the former area while it will decline in the United States to 46 million.
Even at the basest level of pure self-interest, Europe and the United States should have been cultivating the
friendship of the peoples south of their borders during the past quarter of a century. Instead of that, the US has
continued its economic exploitation and here in Europe de Gaulle’s vision of a Third Force friendly with the
Arab world has largely evaporated. Particularly since the coming to power of the French socialists in 1981, the
European pendulum has swung sharply back to Israel and the Anglo-American camp, behind a façade of
independence rhetoric. The EC is now increasingly a supporter of both Israel and the Washington
Establishment, and under the Single European Act the smaller countries have lost any independent voice they
previously had. The masses in the Arab world believe that a large slice of European foreign policy decisionmaking has been transferred to Tel Aviv, supported in all but unessential detail by Western media. A dangerous
polarisation has thus been developing between Western governments and the Palestinian people and supporters
throughout the Muslim countries who now feel that they and the poor and the oppressed of the world are being
abandoned by the West and pushed to the despair that is the breeding ground for revolution. They remember
that de Gaulle’s pro-Arab policy was merely a short interlude in a long-term strategy and have not, for example,
forgotten that British, French and Israeli troops combined to invade Egypt in 1956. Neither have they forgotten
that before Israel became a US protectorate it was another Western power that begot Israel with Lord Balfour’s
declaration and introduced Hebrew and English into Palestine as official languages alongside Arabic.
The slogans that can be read on gable walls in Islamic countries are of the kind:
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To Allah the victory;
Our triumph is approaching;
Islam is an eternal tree flourishing on the blood of its martyrs.
And the men are being told that if they do not stand up for themselves and eliminate Western Quislings from
Arab lands, the West’s soldiers will come and ‘sleep with your daughters, your wives and your sisters as they
did with the women of Vietnam’. These people are aware that, almost as if by coincidence, the number of young
Vietnamese girls bought into prostitution during the Vietnam war was the same as the number of American
soldiers at war’s peak and that notwithstanding the free GI distribution of condoms included among the ‘perks’
for military service, these good christian soldiers fighting against ‘the Evil Empire’ left 30,000 Ameraisian
babies behind them. The military pleasure centre in Saigon, then the Rue Catinat, ran for a quarter of a mile
from the Caravelle Hotel down to the Saigon River, and documents found at the abandoned US Embassy in
1975 showed that 300,000 young girls, a great many 11—12 years old were registered ‘to work’ at pleasure
centres in the suburbs of South Vietnam’s 12 main towns. Dr Nguyen Thi Ngoc Phuong, deputy director of the
Tu Du Obstetrical and Gynaecological Hospital in Saigon, has said that in that one hospital there were up to 5
cases every night of vaginal tearing which led to venereal disease in these little children.
Similarly, the still flourishing sex industry in Thailand was created by the Vietnam war. ‘Behind Thailand’, say
the Vietnamese, ‘is the US: they will bring their strip shows and their decadent way of life’. With Western
capitalism now returning to Vietnam after 15 years of an economic blockade that crushed the new regime and
cut off all trade, the Vietnamese have been bracing themselves for a return of the sex industry and drugs and the
arrival of Aids.
In case the Arab fear might appear nonsensical and Vietnam an exception, here are the words of an American
veteran, Jerry Genesio, in a letter to The New York Times of 29 April, 1988, concerning the American presence
in Honduras: ‘Bars and brothels have been built by the hundreds in the vicinity of our military encampments.
Honduras is one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, second only to Haiti. Many young,
attractive Honduran women have been drawn to the wealth they can earn as prostitutes for gringo soldiers’. So
much for the blessings of our Western military presence overseas.
In one of the West’s outposts, Morocco, there are some 30 clandestine movements, thus divided to escape
destruction, all with the common objective of revolution. They spread their slogans the way the Ayatollah
Khomeini did, with cassettes recorded in Paris. They teach the doctrine that the king is an Israeli agent kept in
power as the Shah of Iran was by Western arms, Western money and Western trained secret police. In Tunisia
one of the most important publishing houses was closed by government order in August 1986, when over
100,000 books were seized, many of which dealt with revolutionary Islamic fundamentalism. All across the
south shore of the Mediterranean, religious practice is watched with suspicion by the state authorities and in
some countries control has been established over the hours of prayer in the mosques. University students and
organised labour are two other sources of worry. Washington believes it has bought out Egypt and secured its
friendship for Israel but the popular backlash could come anytime. Demands for a return to Islam and for the
rejection of ‘decadent Western materialism’ are growing more strident. More and more women are wearing the
chador and the higab as a political statement. Pakistan and Turkey are two other Western bastions that are being
held with difficulty. an OECD consortium has kept Turkey bailed out economically and NATO keeps it
militarily aligned, but it is a seething cauldron, especially in the teeming shantytowns around Istanbul where it
once brought Europe’s Eastern Empire to its knees and launched the conquest that led it to the gates of Vienna.
Some revolutionary leaders preach that their nation’s decline was due to the closing of the old trade routes by
Britain and Holland and the flooding of the country with cheap Western goods. And all over the Third World,
clandestine videos are being used as a powerful new weapon, not only by Western secret services to stir up right
wing rebellion in left leaning countries, but also by revolutionaries against reactionary regimes. One
commentator summed it up succinctly: ‘The potential to subvert the state by using videos is awesome’.
A glimpse into the Muslim mind is perhaps provided in The Year of Armageddon, previously mentioned,
describing the daily monitoring in Ascoli Piceno prison in Rome of Mehmet Ali Agca, condemned to life
imprisonment for the most famous assassination attempt in recent years, that on the life of Pope John Paul II.
The Italian judiciary and the various secret services gathered every scrap of information that could be gleaned
from Agca, to be fed into their coordinating computers. He was encouraged to write in his diary, to write to his
mother and, by his psychiatrists, to speak his thoughts aloud before going to bed, as a child might recite its
prayers. They explained to him that this would help him to cope with his bouts of loneliness and depression.
They did not tell him that ‘every word he utters is picked up by a microphone wired into the ceiling light fitting’
and that each morning the spool of magnetic tape was removed from the recorder in a nearby room and
transcribed by a secretary. His nightly recitation was a hate list which enabled him to unburden himself of all his
favourite phobies.
The list included the President of the United States (at the top), American news magazines, the products of
Hollywood, NATO— ‘an instrument of the devil’ — the Saudi Arabian kingdom and its links to the US, the old
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Russian Czars, South Africa, the Queen of England (as representing the ruling classes), Israel (of course), and
the American CIA agent, Frank Terpil, who instructed him how to kill the pope. In a way, it is not altogether
surprising that Agca considered himself to be a new incarnation of Jesus Christ, the lover of the poor and the
oppressed, who was persecuted and finally killed by the politico-religious Establishment in Jerusalem. The
accusation was scattered all over the world by the Western media during President Reagan’s first term of office
that the attempted assassination of the pope was engineered by the Soviet Union through the so-called Bulgarian
connection, a theory now being promoted by the new Western-oriented Bulgarian government although
authoritative books have been written to indicate CIA involvement.
In addition to the Third World population in Europe there are also, as in the US, swelling ranks of native
disgruntled, the unemployed and the youth who are watching the rich getting richer and the poor, poorer. This
situation seems likely to deterioriate further, with its humiliation of millions of people and its waste of human
resources flowing from the division of society into the Haves who are determined to have more and the Havenots who are destined for the scrap-heap of unemployment. A 1989 report from the OECD has warned of the
danger that the long-term unemployed might be consigned to ‘near-permanent social oblivion’. The neo-liberal
economic regimes that took power in Britain and the United States with Prime Minister Thatcher and President
Reagan at the turn of the decade into the eighties has since spread over most of the West, urged on by the
competition between countries. High finance, big business and arms production are victoriously riding in the
saddle while the role of the politicians has increasingly been to follow obediently behind, enact legislation to
tidy up the loose ends and, broadly supported by the media, keep the people excited and divided through
partisan politics. Improvement is always made to seem to be just round the corner, after the next election. In the
meantime, hundreds of thousands of the new poor are trekking the roads all over the West, sleeping rough or
packed in slum rooms, sinking into hopelessness and hunger.
At the other end of the spectrum the number of wealthy people has been increasing steeply. In Britain, for
example, the number of millionaires increased in the 3 years between 1983 and 1986 from approximately 7,000
to over 20,000 and is still rising. The richest 5 per cent of the population own some 95 per cent of the wealth,
including real estate, works of art, extravagant jewellery, shares, bonds and bank investments, while the poorest
50 per cent own only 6 per cent; I gave you the corresponding figure for the US in a previous letter. Money
magazine says that the wealth race in Britain is led by Queen Elizabeth II, whose personal fortune is estimated
at $5.88 billion. The example is given from the top. Those just below try to follow suit and so on down through
the social climbers until it achieves that ‘mean subservience to wealth and social position’ castigated by
Tawney, which is not a monopoly of the British but is seeping down from the top everywhere and is as rife
among the socialist establishment as it is on the right. Mr Tony Benn has this to say: ‘Britain is still a very
primitive society and is class-ridden from top to bottom. The institution of monarchy lends legitimacy to a mass
of medieval class distinctions that we have never been able to eliminate from our system. Even the leaders of the
labour movement expect on retirement to receive peerages and knighthoods and when thus co-opted they serve
to prop up the very structures which they were initially elected to dismantle’.
Those, however, who are caught in the rat-race trap and who are seemingly successful in climbing the greasy
pole are not necessarily to be classified as the non-disgruntled. Since it is often said in business circles that ‘the
very walls have ears’ most climbers prefer to keep silent but if an explosion were to occur their silence could
turn to something else. In Men at Midlife (Sidgwick and Jackson, 1989), John Clay analyses some of the myths
surrounding the yuppies as they advance into midlife, when they paper over the cracks in their lives and try to
maintain a happy façade to fill the inner void, retreat into melancholy and self-absorption or make compulsive
efforts to remain young. Such men are in reality lost in Dante’s dark wood.
Some of the more informed people are concerned about thinking in the advanced echelons of management
studies relating to the post-Taylorism by which it is planned to harness the 21st century labour force for greater
productivity in order to conquer markets at any cost almost on a war footing. It can only be hoped that it will be
an improvement on the concept of Frederick Winslow Taylor who was the chief initiator of the time and motion
studies which hitherto guided mass factory production. An insight into the philosophy behind his system may be
gleaned from his own words: ‘The worker should be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles
in his mental make-up the ox than any other type’. Taylor’s assumption, impeccably accurate, was that human
intelligence is subversive. And so, what is man’s most sacred attribute, the ability to think for himself — in
Taylorism’s technical jargon the ability ‘to design his personal circuitry’ — was seen by Taylor as a liability to
the production process. One of Taylor’s advocates, Robert Boguslaw, was told by systems engineers that what
was needed was ‘sufficient handles on human materials so that we can think of them as metal parts, electrical
power or chemical reactions’ with a view to ‘placing human material on the same footing as any other material.’
(see: Architect or Bee?, by Professor M Cooley.)
It is hardly surprising that the mass education system and mass media seem designed to prevent people from
thinking and thus from becoming subversive.
Returning to the problem of Western poverty, the European Community, much lauded by the West European
Establishment and its media as the great thing of the future, already has over 40 million poor and the number is
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increasing simultaneously with the increasing power and wealth of the upper class. This is postulated in Marx’s
analysis as a necessary pre-condition for revolution. There is frequent talk about ‘workers with their hands on
the levers of society’ in power-generating stations, communications, transport and elsewhere. In reaction to this,
the socialist parties, a natural part of The System, are struggling to maintain control of the working classes, a
considerable number of whom, however, accept the inevitability of conflict. In Britain, Jack Taylor, who was
head of the National Union of Mineworkers in the Yorkshire area, may perhaps have been giving voice to a
widespread sentiment when he declared: ‘We can vote for a bloke who will negotiate. But if we do we toss in
our dignity and come to negotiate with our hat in our hand. We would be taking a step back into history, giving
back what our fathers fought for’. The Bishop of Durham has pointed to the danger of a police state where the
rich have to be protected against the growing throng of the poor. The preference given to big business
profiteering over human welfare and the increase in both chemical and pathological pollution is having a
deleterious effect on health. The primate of the Church of England, echoing the opinion of many others, said
some time back that the fear of disease, death and disaster was no longer confined to the Third World, and he
returned to the charge on 1 October, 1989 with reference to wealth creation, stating that ‘there is no automatic
connection between wealth creation and a happy society’, that there is increasing polarisation between the
wealthy and the poor and that the system was creating a pharisaical society in which the successful tend ‘to
regard their success as a sort of blessing or reward for righteousness. This can lead to judgements being made
about the unsuccessful, the unemployed, the poor and the unintelligent which are both uncharitable and untrue.’
London is no worse than other large cities throughout the West and so the position there may be taken as fairly
representative: in the midst of the ‘Tory success story’, hostels are struggling bravely against heavy odds and
contracting resources to give shelter to the poor, often with 10 or 12 people to a room sleeping on the floor, and
still having to turn away thousands who are forced to find a place to sleep down under the South Bank or
elsewhere, sharing the space and their scraps with roaming dogs. At the same time, the prime minister, no
different in this from prime ministers, presidents and royalty in other countries, recently commissioned
expensively crafted silverware, cutlery, candlesticks, wine coasters, pepper grinders and so on for No 10
Downing Street, because the pompous Establishment class in all countries have to impress one another at
official banquets: there was no protest, of course, from Mr Kinnock, who hopes to be able to relish this luxury
himself after the next election. Simultaneously the Prime Minister castigated miners and others on strike as ‘the
enemy within’. As a non-partisan economic correspondent, Cliff Taylor, put it, the unemployed and others left
behind by the so-called economic recovery ‘were seen as irrelevant, with a philosophy that the market decides
who makes money, regardless of regional or social divisions'.
In addition to the socio-economic factor, the general disgruntlement may also be related to the ongoing Western
war hysteria and its reactive violence within society as indicated by the data on crime. By lumping various kinds
of lawbreaking together and ignoring the increasing cost of policing, governments sometimes produce data to
indicate an improving situation, but this is not borne out by the real statistics, notwithstanding expanding police
forces and a strong increase in the quantity and range of police equipment. As I write, the British Association of
Police Officers is requesting 1,500 more men to deal with violence in the villages of England and Wales, a new
phenomenon. Soccer and race-course hooliganism and school violence are other indications of a tough,
rebellious mood among the youth. Great Britain is not the West’s worst country for crime, but I happen to have
the data for that area. Since crime recording began in 1857, and notwithstanding the poverty, the horrors and the
criminality of the industrial revolution era, British criminality has now reached an all-time high of over 4
million cases per annum along a rising zig-zag curve.
In spite of the declining birthrate and jobs being created throughout the West, many of them temporary,
underpaid and without social security protection but sufficient to enter into the statistics as employment,
unemployment is rising on a saw-tooth curve. Every dip is heralded as a rounding of the corner but every dip is
followed by a subsequent rise. There are some 35 million people in the US below the poverty line. Claude
Lewis put the problem thus in The Home News of 13 January, 1987, addressing the president:
"Our nation is far more threatened by heroin, cocaine, crack and alcohol than the ‘communist aggression’ that
seems to preoccupy your administration. One of our problems, sir, is that in most instances presidents are
isolated from reality. You read speeches that somebody else wrote, you ‘live’ on television where you sit in easy
chairs saying all the right things. But what is missing is a real sense of what’s happening in the streets of this
deeply troubled nation. There’s almost no understanding of what’s going on in the shadows and in the alleys and
barrios of our country.
Mr President, we are harvesting despair. Sometimes I think it should be required that every president roll up his
sleeves, loosen his tie and take a walk down the Godforsaken streets of New York and Philadelphia and Boston
and Detroit and Miami — and the Washington just outside your White House windows. It is a frightening
scene...."
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Such cries of despair are meaningful to the wealthy ‘Homo economicus’ who holds the reins of capitalist power
only if they can be quantified in monetary terms. So let us do that:
over $150 billion per annum spent on drugs in the United States, 500 billion in the world, not to speak of drink
and the rest of the range of instruments of the new holocaust. Drugs are in second place after arms sales, two
major instruments of death, the one belonging to the Establishment, the other in reaction to its system.
At a time of increasing world poverty, the ostentatious display of luxury goods, jewellery, perfumes, furs, big
cars, holiday offers and so on, in the pages of our glossy weekend magazines and on television does not help to
calm the disgruntled and the deprived. I have typical samples here before me in the weekend Figaro magazine
which for many years has been pouring scorn on efforts to help the poor, seeing a Marxist plot even in the
Church’s aid to the Third World.
There is the additional problem in Europe of the independence movements in Northern Ireland, the French and
the Spanish Basque country and Corsica, as well as other places which are quiescent but which could come to
the boil with increased socio-economic stress — Wales, Scotland, Brittany, Alsace. ... Beyond all these
identifiable categories of malcontents, there is the explosive mass of the hidden iceberg of subconscious or
barely conscious violence, slumbering in many people, which requires but a spark to set alight. This will be a
main subject in one of your later chapters. The thrones of France and Russia and the power of Franco and
Salazar, among others in history all the way back to Rome, were undermined, inter alia, by the privileged
classes who had made it their puppet while the poor became conscious of their inferior status.
Capitalism depends on enough people maintaining that naive confidence in The System which they placed in
Goldman Sachs and company right up to the crash on Black Tuesday 1929, which resulted in the depression that
might perhaps have triggered a Marxist revolution if Adolf Hitler had not come to the rescue. There are now
accumulating signs that history may record that depression merely as coming events that ‘cast their shadows
before’. The real crunch may lie ahead. Some of the most independent and penetrating economic analyses are
predicting the greatest economic crash of all time, caused by the same factors that produced the crash of 1929:
the concentration of great wealth in few hands, sweeping industrial and financial mergers, massive borrowing, a
rise in speculative investment, the hunger for quick profits and buoyant confidence among the wealthy in the
notion of ‘unlimited expectations’. Throughout the eighties, when, according to the president of the United
States, it was ‘morning in America’ and the country was ‘back and standing tall’, big business went on an
unprecedented credit binge to finance buyouts and stock buy-backs. Debt-ridden corporations are now in such
deep trouble that the crash could come even before you get your thesis to the printer. One of capitalism’s ways
to deal with debt is to borrow more to pay for it, often at higher interest rates, but many banks have been caught
in the crunch and others are frightened. The crisis is also being passed back to the people through cutting the
payroll.
The great difference between today and 1929 is that the people of the world are now more aware of the situation
and will be unlikely to stand idly by watching what seemed in 1929 to be an inexplicable fatality. A crash today
would almost certainly trigger a massive social and political upheaval, with dire consequences particularly for
the wealthy class. John Kenneth Galbraith, one of the world’s greatest economists, if not, perhaps, the greatest,
in an article titled ‘The 1929 Parallel’, in The Atlantic Monthly of January 1987, points to the possibility of total
economic disaster, noting that ‘among those suffering most will be those who regard all current warnings with
the greatest contempt’. Thousands of wealthy people in the United States are building themselves mountain
retreats stocked with large supplies of ammunition and canned food.
In Britain as I write, the debate is no longer about the reality of the impending problem but whether it will be a
soft landing or a crash. Professor Wynne Godley, professor of applied economics at Cambridge believes that
Britain is about to be involved in ‘something like a military disaster played in slow motion ... simultaneously a
great human tragedy and a gigantic cock-up’. And Professor John Griffith, emeritus professor of public law at
the University of London and chancellor of Manchester University, writing in The Guardian, says, in words
applicable to every country: ‘Today we are faced with problems more serious even than those of the mid-l9th
century. They concern poverty and unemployment, homelessness, vagrancy, the decline of health care and
provisions for the old and mentally ill, pollution of the atmosphere, of rivers and beaches, the destruction of
natural resources, dilapidated and underfunded schools, escalating rates of crime and of drugtaking.... We are
supposed to welcome free enterprise, open markets, deregulation, individualism, privatisation, profit-taking,
capitalist adventurism, company take-overs, city deals. These activities are not only incapable of resolving the
crisis, they are its cause. We are being urged to embrace as solutions the very practices that have created the
problems. What is put forward as the way to a prosperous future will accelerate the decline for all but a few.’ In
the face of this coming disaster most people bury their heads in the sand, desperately fending for themselves or
indulging in one of the innumerable forms of escapism, from workaholism to football, from drink to something
else, and usually several combined.
Notwithstanding the Establishment and the media crowing from their dungheap about the demise of what they
choose to call ‘Marxism’, it is capitalism that is now entering its world crisis in accordance with Marx’s
predictions, overextending itself on a planetary scale, lurching towards the cliff, building on its million-dollar-a-
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minute military industry, spreading itself onto shifting sands, going out to the remote corners of the earth to
draw its sustenance, surrounding itself with millions of human beings to whom it means nothing, who have no
vested interest in buttressing it up and who, on the contrary, seeing it round about them in other people’s hands,
may want to destroy both it and them. Since they have nothing they have nothing to lose. Even life becomes
worthless when it is a life without hope, lived in the all-pervading presence of disease and death, oppression,
pollution and the rape of the earth.
Third World neo-Marxism, not Leninist-Staliism, holds the appeal that it is based primarily on people, people
who can be made conscious of their power, who can set out to produce the next wave of the ‘dialectical
materialism’ which is more spiritual in essence than the materialism of Western capitalism. At the other side of
the barrier the possessors of power and wealth have no more intention of abandoning their privileges at home
than they have of surrendering their economic interests throughout the Third World and are therefore set on a
collision course with it. Several centuries of escalating conflict and ‘wars to end war’ have not yet taught us that
this is a slippery slope where we might suddenly lose our footing. For the present, a US invasion of little
Grenada, a British attack on the tiny Falklands or a detachment of French paratroopers in Togo is sufficient to
quench a few fires, but if the blaze becomes general we shall be faced by an entirely different situation. Those
whom the Establishment dubs as terrorists are also encouraged to success by the example set in the past that the
best way to become respected is to succeed, as when one of the greatest terrorist blitzes in modern history
succeeded in establishing the now-respected state of Israel.
It would be an illusion for the Masonic Establishment to think that the only people who are against them are the
revolutionaries, the ‘terrorists’, the poor, the deprived, the Marxists and the unemployed. Notwithstanding the
efforts of the political parties, big business and other sectors of the Establishment to enrol the youth behind
them, the best of them, the most independent minded, the real elite, are standing aloof or forming their own
protest groups. Thus, at a christian youth congress in Versailles in March 1988, 10,000 young men and women
of the educated flower of France roared their applause for a speaker who said the time was coming when the
world’s Establishment would be brought to trial for crimes against humanity.
The world is increasingly developing an oniomorphic structure in the planetisation of man, of which Teilhard’s
noosphere is one of the components. Kindred spirits around the earth are slowly breaking down the myth of the
all-powerful nation state. They include students, the unemployed and the army of the poor, in the Third World,
Europe and the United States. Some of the leaders among these categories within the West are beginning to look
upon the burgeoning masses south of the Mediterranean and south of the Rio Grande as their potential allies of
the future, as much as the Western Establishments are beginning to see them as possible enemies. The lines are
perhaps being drawn. On the other side of the coin, reports on Western military morale and education raise
doubts about the fighting capacity of the soldiery against guerrilla fighters with modern explosives. LieutenantColonel D Evans of the US Marines has described the unpreparedness of even the Marines, America’s pride. He
said, for example, that when a suicide truck laden with explosives drove into the marine compound in Beirut it
was able to pass by ‘guards fumbling with empty weapons’ whose pockets contained ‘Rules of Engagement’
cards with fine-print rules that were ‘perfect —and irrelevant’. Colonel Quadhafi’s former appeal to the 400,000
Blacks in the American forces to mutiny and desert with their arms will hardly be answered at present but it is
an eventual possibility not to be discounted.
Instead of launching the world on a massive humanitarian development crusade, the Western powers,
simultaneously with their stirring up terrorist warfare in left-wing countries, have been digging into defensive
positions, as reflected in the US spending over $3 billion to improve security at its embassies in the Third
World. But if the shantytowns should ever repeat on a massive scale what they have sporadically done in a
minor disorganised way and launch a savage irruption into the rich neighbourhoods, fortified embassies will
hardly stop the riots. And there could be a new flood of both white and coloured refugees by land, sea and air, in
which it would be difficult to distinguish between genuine refugees and agitators.
Class conflict in the West could add a further dimension. An example of the urban problem everywhere is
provided by the Federation of New York Judges which said that the homes of New York state residents ‘have
become barricaded places in which they live behind chained and bolted doors:
the streets have become the lawless marches of robbers, rapists and felons of every kind who victimise men,
women and children’. The psychic energies of Europe were formerly poured out into economic and other forms
of expansionism and empire-building abroad and into agricultural and industrial development at home. These
energies now lack open-ended outlets and are being bottled up at home, accentuated by unemployment and the
frustration of job seeking. This is a further factor in the compression of the spring. With regard to arms, we
could be hoisted on our own petard: thanks to the money, licences, factories and training provided by the West,
the Third World is now manufacturing increasing quantities of arms. If and when Islamic revolutionaries take
power in Muslim countries, they will not be forced as Iran was to go shopping for arms, ammunition and spare
parts around the world. They will have their own.
Arms manufacturers are also turning out an ever more sophisticated range of electronic devices, explosives and
grenades perfectly suited for guerrilla warfare. They include such things as mortar shells for firing accurately on
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target by remote control, leaving attackers relatively immune. The trail towards small, handcarried nuclear
bombs will not have been opened by those who are labelled terrorists: the United States army already has them
and Israel and South Africa are reported to be also producing them in secret, the former in its nuclear site hidden
under the Negev desert. Frightening new chemical and biological weapons have also been invented by the
West’s arms research scientists. If such weapons fell into the hands of new regimes in revolutionary countries it
would introduce a radical alteration in the strategy of insurrection and ransom. René Guenon, in a work already
referred to, La Crise du Monde Moderne, said it is logical that what the West has spread around the world
should return against it as a boomerang. ‘This is how modern civilization will perish in one direction or another;
it is of little importance whether it will be due to dissension within the West, dissension between nations or
social classes’, through attacks from a Westernised Third World, or again, as the result of a cataclysm provoked
by scientific ‘progress’; in any case, the West is in peril from what had its origin in the West itself. The only real
question, says Guenon, is whether the Third World will suffer merely a passing crisis as a result of the modern
spirit or whether the West will bring down the whole human race with its own collapse.
The enormity of the arms industry is having a serious side-effect on morals. The sales to Iran by France, Israel
and the US, uncovered in 1986 and 1987, were nothing new. The sordid Lockheed bribe scandals in the 70s,
which involved members of the Japanese government, implicated high world figures such as Prince Bernhard of
The Netherlands and toppled Italy’s president, have disappeared into history. In between, one of America’s most
prestigious corporations, General Electric, pleaded guilty in court to defrauding the Air Force of nearly $1
million: not much for either the Air Force or General Electric but indicative, when taken in conjunction with
other facts, of a virus that is already eating at the West’s entrails. 45 of the 100 largest US military contractors
are under criminal investigation at time of writing and this action may be dealing only with the most blatant
cases to better conceal the worse. Pentagon officials alter contracts regardless of cost and then find employment
with the corporations they have helped. Careerists populate the bureaucracy. Opportunists value a sub-cabinet
post as a springboard to a lucrative job with an arms contractor. And, as the New York Times, quoted by the
IHT of 17 May, 1985, said, ‘Through contractor lobbying, Congress is made a party to a system greased by vast
sums of money, in which weapons are procured by favours and influence.
Because of the size, power and wealth of the arms industry, the whole pyramid is involved down to the people
themselves at grassroots because of the job opportunities. And the people are being corrupted by the virus
seeping down from the top, as evidenced by the increasing hedonism, the drug and drink problem, the mania for
the media and their spectators sports — the old Roman ‘circenses’ — the hunger for the sensational and the
passions aroused by the ephemeral, the desire for easy money, instant pleasures and the quick fix, and the
declining work ethic as indicated, for example, in a 1985 survey by the World Health Organisation. This showed
an absenteeism in the labour force going beyond 10 per cent in some Western countries. France, for example,
had an absenteeism rate of 9.2 per cent. This means that almost one-tenth of the labour force is permanently
absent from work at great cost to the economy and society, people who continue to draw their wages or salaries
while receiving social security benefits and being replaced by costly overtime or by temporary employees, with
the result that absenteeism is considered to be one of the important causes of bankruptcy. ‘Sick leave’ naturally
reaches its peak in the July-August period. In one supermarket chain, Carrefour, the equivalent of 1,105 people
were absent for a whole year, corresponding to the permanent closure of two large supermarkets. Any effort to
rectify the situation is demagogically denounced by the power-hungry politicians in the labour movements
(when they are out of power, that is). Unemployment and underemployment in the medical profession
encourages many doctors to provide false medical certificates for fear of losing a client, his family and his
friends to a more ‘co-operative’ doctor, who thus increases his clientele cheaply because of his reputation for
leniency in this matter.
It may appear that in these letters I have been unduly attacking the Establishment and insufficiently criticising
the working classes for the breakdown of morality in their ranks too, the decline of the old ethic of a fair day’s
work for a fair day’s pay and the corruption in seeking for more money at any price, however dishonest, as, for
example, in the widespread practice of people drawing unemployment allowances while continuing to work
unofficially, with the connivance, be it added, of the employers, who thus obtain cheap labour. It is clear that
fraud is widespread and that there is a collapse of morality at all levels, but the deterioration of values among the
labouring classes is due particularly to the example, the values and the media which these classes have been
offered by the Establishment. It is akin to what I already said about corruption in the Third World being largely
due to the activities of the imperialists. It is also akin to the problem of violence and terrorism: the way was
shown by the Establishment through its warmongering, its arms megalomania and its state-sponsored terrorism
and oppression.
The corruption of the youth is also a risk in view of the fact that giant corporations manufacturing military
equipment are producing school textbooks, manufacturing electronic equipment for the army and owning
publishing houses producing school software. This is not as innocent as it may sound and is already having
recorded repercussions for the rising generation. In France, for example, a survey has shown that whereas in the
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60s and 70s young people were being educated through school texts into some of the realities of the Third
World, today matters of vital importance have disappeared from school books.
With regard to terrorism, Robert Kupperman of the Georgetown Centre for Strategic and International Studies
has said that the infrastructure for terrorist attacks is already in place in the United States and a Pentagon study
of 1986 shows that the government authorities lack the equipment, the training, the organisation and the
cohesion to deal with guerrilla warfare. The terrorist network is also being put in place in Europe and the hitand-run attacks of the 70s and 80s may have been mere pump-priming probes to test reactions, perfect methods,
gain publicity and recruits and force the Establishment into repressive policies which strengthen the opposition.
In addition, our jails and judiciary system are strained almost to the point of physical and financial suffocation.
Furthermore the West’s network of power stations, cables, telephones, railways and storage depots is fragile. In
reaction to the accumulating dangers, the Establishment accelerates the production of arms and falls to
increasing reliance on police and military, for the ‘Homo economicus’ has no vision for man but ever more and
more of the same.
Some years ago a seminar was held in the Woodrow Wilson International Centre in Washington on the theme
‘Why did Rome fall? Are we next?’ The participants on the whole replied to the second question in the
affirmative. In the late 60s, the eruption on the campuses of the US and Europe gave a hint of student power at a
time when they did not have the possibility of support from a massive body of the unemployed such as they
might be able to mobiise today. In Paris they held the city for a week against no less a man than General de
Gaulle himself. The Establishment likes to believe that the rebellion was a flash in the pan, quickly quenched.
Some serious commentators, including the writer Olivier Clement, the world-renowned philosopher Jaques
Maritain and the writer Maurice Clavel, believed it was the first sign of the coming labour pains in a new birth
of Western civilisation, an eruption of the spirit into a world weighed down by materialism and the dictatorship
of money. It came like a thunderbolt out of the blue without any doctrinaire preparation. 20 years later, however,
at least here in France, it is still providing food for thought. Next time round, such a revolt would be unlikely to
be so ill-prepared. The world has also grown smaller in the meantime and any serious student outbreak
anywhere could produce a broad transfrontier movement across the world, this time perhaps, unlike the 1968
outbreak, supported by the more disgruntled labour classes who were riding the economic boom in the 60s and
refused to come out in support of the students.
It is true that the world student body dishonoured themselves in June 1989 when they sat passively in front of
their television screens watching from the comfort of their arm chairs as their fellow students were being
massacred in Beijing. As far as I could find out no students’ union in any country raised a cry of alarm or protest
and they stood idly by as the unfortunate Chinese expatriate students organised the protest marches on their
embassies all by themselves. Time was when the Molotov cocktails would be flying through the embassy
windows. Was there here a proof of racism among Western students or, as some cynics suggested, were they too
busy clamouring for free condoms and free abortions? Perhaps one important observer might be nearer the mark
when he said that today’s Western students are like spinning tops, neither self-propelled nor self-governed.
However, when the storm comes raging closer to them they may be roused from their hedonism.
Jean Gimpel foresees a situation where the US may have to institute martial law to control urban
insurrectionary forces. The race riots a few years ago in Britain and the US may be another foretaste of things to
come. We cannot foretell what spark might set the tinder ablaze. A single shot in Sarajevo launched World War
I and a bout of snowballing that got out of hand initiated the chain of events that led to the American
Revolution. In 1989, the mere publication of a book almost set the whole Islamic world alight.
I have here before me as I write, a report in today’s paper of an official French rehearsal, involving the president
in person and 15 ministers, addressing the French people by radio from a secret dug-out 250ft below ground.
The scenario conveniently places the war outbreak at the other end of the earth but euphemistically expresses
the fear that it might affect France. We can be sure that there will be no spectators in any future world conflict.
One recalls the remark ascribed to Einstein: ‘I don’t know how the next war will be fought but the one after that
will be fought with clubs’. Simultaneously with war preparations and the piling up of arms all around, the
authorities everywhere are clamping down on terrorism and co-operating around the world to the point of
edging towards a Fascist-style imposition of order, another little step in that direction being the recent
introduction in some countries of trial without jury for terrorist acts, an immense change, with incalculable
implications, in the democratic principle of justice not only being done but being seen to be done by the people.
There is a justifiable and increasing breakdown of confidence, among the people everywhere, in the
Establishment’s administration of justice, as indicated, for example, in Britain and Ireland in 1988 by the public
outcry against the failure of the ‘Birmingham Six’ appeal by men widely believed to be innocent of the crime
for which they received life sentences, and by the so-called Stalker affair in which Masonic influence was
evident for having an honest police chief removed from investigating police corruption in Northern Ireland. Bob
Woffinden’s Miscarriages of Justice is pertinent reading in this connection. ‘There is in Britain today’, says
Woffinden in a supplementary article, ‘a new brazenness about the administration of legal and political affairs,
as though no one even bothers to pretend any more’.
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This situation is not peculiar to Britain. It is also increasingly true all over the West and beyond. The consequent
polarisation between government and people could be part of the developing atmosphere for upheaval. Rigorous
regimes and the injustices, misconduct and police brutality which they tend to bring in their wake, appeal to the
revolutionaries as creating the climate for a backlash, gaining popular support and building up the necessary
pressure to produce an explosion. But there is more to it than that. Daniel Rops, the brilliant French historian,
with the great sweep of his penetrating pen covering 3,000 years (the opposite from our latter-day specialists)
pointed out: ‘Contrary to widespread opinion, it is not the troubled periods which are the more favourable for
the expansion of a new doctrine in a given society. Times of crisis, misery and disorder may permit the
crystallisation of a revolutionary hope in outward events. But if such events are not to be reduced to more or less
vain agitation, if they are to emerge with creative results, doctrine must first take hold in the minds of people
who order them towards an objective, and if this doctrine is to penetrate properly, it requires time and a certain
stability. This is one of the paradoxes in the government of men: by imposing order and peace in its body politic
and notwithstanding all the police precautions it may take, a society thus facilitates the very forces within it
which are working for its destruction.’40
A man who has a lifetime of experience working with the poor, the famous Abbe Pierre, said: ‘For years we
have been talking about declaring war on poverty; now it is too late — poverty is about to declare war on us’. In
the face of all this, the governing establishments of the EC and NATO are closing ranks. A law of physics says
that to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. What if the students, the unemployed and the
disgruntled of the world were one day to close ranks too? Whatever may be coming, there is a sense of
foreboding in the air, a sense of an ending, of a world cracking on all sides, of forces beyond our control. Preechoing Daniel Raps, James Connolly, an expert in that field, said that revolutions are the resultant of forces
long in the ripening. But the spark that produces the final explosion is always small, sudden and unexpected,
unleashing what Lenin in 1905, before he compromised with The System, called an outburst of ‘festive energy’,
inter alia against the bulwarks built by the media, The System’s first line of defence. This outburst must catch
the imagination of people at all levels and not just the proletariat.
A century and a half of anti-Marxist indoctrination has used simplistic slogans taken out of context to deride
Marx. One of them was ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’, a concept taken out of context to frighten the
liberals. This idea was not invented by Marx but by Auguste Blanqui and his Universal Society of
Revolutionary Communists, but even then it was not what the Establishment and the media have managed down
the years to convince the public of. It was a foretaste of Leninism, dictatorship by an individual or an elite on
behalf of the proletariat and, in any case, was destined to disappear with the advent of communism. To Karl
Marx, the overthrow of what Hilaire Belloc called ‘the vile cancer of capitalism’ and the dictatorship of money
would be merely a preliminary to the elimination of class antagonism by the disappearance of the classes, and
the mass of the people taking their own destiny in hand as adults.
Every hopeful revolutionary movement is driven by a broad impulse of enthusiasm aimed at the emancipation of
humanity from all forms of domination and oppression. As Cohn Barker put it, it ‘reaches out to suffering
humanity at large and draws it behind its banners’. The middle classes are now more involved in the souldestroying rat-race massification of capitalist individualism than they were when the bulk of businesses were
small, locally-controlled and often in family hands. Large numbers are now affected by redundancy and its
frequent results of crippling mortgage and hire-purchase payments, educational costs and the desperate efforts to
maintain a social veneer behind which invisible poverty is increasingly proliferating. In addition, most of those
who are so far successfully climbing the greasy pole are suffering from a deep malaise, fear of crashing and
being thrown in turn on the scrap heap. And the young yuppies who maintain a façade of confidence as part of
their strategy to succeed are often frightened of what may be in store for them.
All this is part of the accumulating tinder.
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7 -
A CASE STUDY
In your examination of the world situation Ireland is of little importance ‘per se’, and your Irish case study will
have no business dealing with that country’s situation in any narrow nationalistic context but only in so far as it
may represent an element which might throw further light on the world problem.
One of the great orators of the English language, having listed some of the things the world owes to what he
called ‘the little five feet high nations’, added, in relation to the subject that concerns us here: ‘The heroic deeds
that thrill humanity through generations were the deeds of little nations fighting for their freedom’. Without
indulging in posturing or comparing Ireland with any of the great historic beginnings, but merely considering
the general principle as background, among the innumerable cases of the power of the small, there is the
example of the West having its roots in the little city-state of Athens, a strip of marshland on the Tiber and the
out-of-the-way place that was Galilee; the Renaissance arising from tiny Florence; and the Reformation from an
unimportant backwoods town in the forests of the North. It seems that when great countries and empires become
weighed down with wealth, power and armaments, the little places are often driven to react with intensity and
creativity to rehight the spiritual fires, and while the mental vision of people in the large expanses tends to get
lost within the extensive horizon of national boundaries, the small peoples are not so limited.
Ireland is not only small, it is also unique in the family of nations in being engaged in history’s longest war of
socio-economic and political liberation against capitalist imperialism.
Through the Right versus Left struggle in Northern Ireland and the working class population in Britain, allied
with nationalist elements in Wales and Scotland, the Irish problem could conceivably become a catalyst in
Britain when considered in the context of the Neo-Fascist tendency discussed below. This could implicate the
EC and NATO. Furthermore, many of the 45-million-strong Irish diaspora in the United States who have felt
historically involved in the Irish war could constitute a trigger mechanism for major discontent in the world’s
most powerful country if there should happen to be a serious worsening of the Irish problem. Great upheavals
have started from smaller sparks.
Sinn Fein has links with separatist movements in Brittany, The Basque country, Corsica and elsewhere in
Europe. It also has strong contacts with the Palestinians and radical Arab groups. Ireland as a whole has long
memories of deep relationships with the outside world going back to the 6th century and in modern times to the
flight of the Earls to Spain, the involvement of France and Holland in the Irish war, the ‘Wild Geese’ that
‘spread the grey wing on every tide’, and the Irish Brigades in the French and American armies. Since spiritual
forces are more powerful than material ones, mention might also be made of the 18th century Romantic
movement, following MacPherson’s ‘translation of Oisin’ — ‘vraie ou fausse’ — which set all European
literature and art alight and even penetrated into the political and military struggle through the copy of Oisin
which Napoleon carried with him on all his campaigns. Irishmen played such a prominent part in the American
War of Independence that Lord Mountjoy lamented in the British parliament: ‘We have lost America through
the Irish’. Today, British ministers responsible for Northern Ireland affairs have frequently made the point that if
the IRA were allowed to win their war, it would send a disastrous message all around the world.
In fact Northern Ireland is already sending a disastrous message around the world. For example, a member of
the Norwegian Committee of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, Mr Reaulf Stein, said in
reference to Northern Ireland that if we were to ‘accept that the violation of human rights is an internal affair in
Great Britain then we should adopt the same principle for the situation in the Soviet Union, Guatemala, Chile,
South Africa and everywhere else’.
Nelson Mandela has spoken of the effects of the Irish experience on Africa and the anti-apartheid leader and
civil rights activist, Kader Asmal, has said that the Irish struggle had been an inspiration in Asia, Africa and the
Middle East and that ‘there is a logical continuation from Pearse to Mandela to Arafat’. Apart from such indirect
influence, Ireland has also been a direct participant in the struggle against imperialism, sometimes militarily but
in the 20th century through agitation, such as the post-war action in the United Nations. It ended in the late 50s
and early 60s when foreign minister Frank Aiken and his UN delegation took a strong stand with Third World
countries in favour of liberation movements all across Africa from Algeria to the Cape. With Ireland’s first
candidature for membership of the EC in 1961, the neo-capitahists, sensing the prospects for enrichment on the
horizon, took control of the Establishment, one result of which has been that, of the Western donor countries to
the Third World, the Irish state’s Official Development Assistance as a percentage of GNP is the lowest of the
18 members of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee. As I hope is clear from a previous letter, ODA
is largely an imperialist instrument and not necessarily a measure of a country’s care for the Third World. Of
greater significance in Ireland’s case is that with EC membership the new capitalist class have developed an
imperialist mentality, while non-governmental assistance relative to GNP and population is the highest in the
world, largely due to Ireland’s missionary work in defence of the poor and the oppressed. As one commentator
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put it, ‘The missionaries were there when Salvador Allende fell. They saw Oscar Romero shot’. One of the
world’s leading journalists, William Pfaff, wrote in The Los Angeles Times in 1989: ‘The Irish Church is the
last great Catholic missionary church. Irish priests, brothers and nuns are active in most parts of the Third
World.... Their influence has been decisive in forming the opinion of Church leaders at home and of the
Catholic population in Ireland’ about the suffering of the impoverished peoples and their exploitation by the
imperialist countries.
Since capitalism is frightened of having the skeletons in its cupboard uncovered, this article promoted violent
criticism of the church from the Irish Establishment, through the voice of a chief executive of Ireland’s largest
new multinational, the aircraft leasing corporation, GPA. It is of more than passing interest to note, in relation to
the composition, interests and aims of the new Establishment, that this executive was formerly head of the
diplomatic service after being Ireland’s ambassador in Washington, where he played a leading part in lobbying
the Reagan regime in relation to Ireland’s new role as a pillar of Western capitalism. One of the directors of
GPA is the former head of the government, the man who has been conducting an intensive crusade in favour of
the EC and of a military role for Ireland in Europe. Part of his propaganda, lavishing praise on Brussels, has
been the argument that Ireland has been receiving higher subsidies per head of the population than any other
member country, an argument which, significantly, has not been challenged by the rest of the Establishment or
the media for its absurdity in relation to an island country of 3 ½ million people on the extreme periphery.
Another director of GPA, indicative of its international ramifications, is a former British chancellor of the
exchequer. These directors and executives, as in the other multinationals, are drawing enormous salaries, fees
and perks from a corporation headed by a multi-millionaire, offering little employment in relation to its huge
turnover (generating profits of $250 million in 1989) and paying an income tax rate of slightly over 1 per cent
by being based at Shannon’s tax-free airport, enabling shareholding executives to leave the corporation several
million dollars richer after a few years service.
Another modern Irish tycoon hired the giant Cunard super-luxury ship Sea Goddess for a champagne cruise in
the Aegean Sea at $ ½ million a week. Such trend-setters are admired and envied by the snobs lower down the
ladder. Not to be left out, state action is added to private: the head of government of that small, poor country, is
having a whole building restructured as his luxury prime-ministerial office, complete with outside floodlighting,
fountains and a helicopter pad on the roof, at a cost of £17.6 million to the struggling tax -payer. One of the
architects said: ‘The whole project is lavish and Napoleonic in scale’.
Side by side with this megalomania is the deep indignity and despair felt by those thrown on the scrapheap. The
new Ireland, like other countries, is thus being split horizontally between the people and their ancient aspirations
on one side and the profiteering Establishment on the other. Such men, bent on benefiting from the ‘status quo’
are naturally worried for their pride, their pocket and their prestige about any revolutionary threat taking
inspiration from the past. They would hardly wish to understand the vital importance of the cultural element for
balanced development and the people’s need for psychic sap from deep historic roots.
The man who more than any other launched the Irish resurgence at the turn of the century, Dr Douglas Hyde,
said that minds can only be emotionalised through their own ancestral culture and unless minds are
emotionalised they cannot function properly. Ireland can draw its inspiration from as far back as the time when
the country had a rich intellectural culture, and Gaelic literature was the oldest in Europe after the Greek and
Latin, so that having peacefully and speedily grafted on christianity in the 5th century, the nation became the
source of Europe’s chief civilising influence after the fall of Rome, when for 3 centuries it taught the northern
half of Britain and the central half of the Continent how to read and write, until its elan was stopped by the last
of the barbarian invasions. It was not limited to reading and writing, for Irish scholarship was then extensive.
The arts were part of the programme, as were philosophy, theology and scientific studies. For example, Fergil,
usually known like his contemporaries by his Latin name (Virgilius), who ended his days as archbishop of
Salzburg, taught the sphericity of the earth nearly a thousand years before Galileo; Dicuil was distinguished as a
metrician and astronomer who produced a geographical treatise of great value, and so on as described by
Hyde41. The German scholar, Zimmer, wrote of the Irish as ‘instructors in every known branch of the science
and learning of their time...
...the possessors and bearers of a higher culture than was to be found anywhere on the Continent’, adding that
they ‘laid the corner-stone of Western culture’. And a French authority, Montalembert, said it was due to the
untiring energy of the Irish ‘that half of France and of an ungrateful Europe has been restored to cultivation’.
For all this the Irish were rewarded with 8 centuries of invasion and expropriation by the last waves of the
barbarians, culminating in nearly 3 centuries of persecution unparalleled in history for the combination of its
brutality, its duration and its demonstration of capitalist imperialism in its most frightening form.
It is necessary to mention these facts not only as background to this chapter but also because one of the
continuing arguments used to justify imperial exploitation everywhere is that the imperialist peoples are
inherently superior. Dr Hyde described how at the end of the 19th century he had difficulty in gaining access to
the archives and his historical research was hampered in the University of Dublin, where one of the staff
declared that ‘the sooner the Irish recognised that before the arrival of Cromwell they were utter savages, the
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better it would be for everybody concerned’. Again today the new Irish Establishment is busy with the revision
of history, in an effort to persuade the people to forget the revolutionary idealism of the past.
Apart from Hyde, Yeats, Pearse, Connolly and others, it required foreign historians such as Daniel Rops, Hilaire
Belloc and various Germans, French and Americans to reveal how Ireland was the great exceptional entity that
developed an advanced culture without having belonged to the Roman Empire. In Belloc’s words, it was not
compelled to the European culture as were the German barbarians, by arms, for it was not savage like the
Germanies. ‘It was not a morass of shifting tribes; it was a nation ... already possessed (before becoming
christian in the 5th century) of a high pagan culture of it’s own.’
Ireland belongs to Europe and the West in its style of living, its politico-economic system, its infrastructures, its
institutions, its educated people and other things. But it belongs to the Third World in having been conquered
and exploited by capitalist imperialism, its lands expropriated, its nascent industries destroyed and its people
brutalised, humiliated and reduced to the level of impoverished beggars. It was the first of the colonies to
attempt a break out of this straitjacket in the 20th century, achieving a measure of political independence 25
years before India, where Gandhi took some of his inspiration from the Irish struggle. The African colonies soon
followed suit. As Sean MacBride said:
‘Michael Davitt, John O’Leary, Roger Casement and my own parents were all closely involved in the
development of the early movements which inspired the fight to demolish colonialism throughout the world.
Indeed, because of the close links between Irish revolutionaries and the Boers and later Indian revolutionary
leaders, Ireland was blamed by Britain for sowing the seeds of anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism in Africa
and India’42. The links between Ireland, France and America were maintained into the 19th century by the
Fenians, when James Stephens and others, exiled after the failure of the Irish rising of 1848, hatched their
Fenian ideas in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Their ideas were carried back to Ireland by the younger Irish clergy
returning home from their Continental seminaries, notwithstanding the hierarchical condemnations such as that
of Bishop Moriarty of Kerry who said, ‘Hell is not hot enough nor Eternity long enough to punish these
miscreants’. The Fenian brotherhood spread to America, where it was known as Clann na Gael, under the
inspiration of men like John O’Mahony and O’Donovan Rossa. Its world reach was symbolised by the invasion
of Canada by several thousand Fenians in 1867, the chartering of the ship Catalpa to sail to Australia in 1876 to
rescue Fenian prisoners, and the commissioning by the Fenians of the first American submarine, the Fenian
Ram, invented by the Irishman John P Holland and launched in 1881.
Marx and Engels saw the international importance of the Irish cause. They first believed that the revolution
could begin in England but subsequently came to the conclusion that the English working classes were not
revolution-minded, especially after the newly-enfranchised workers had voted for the Liberal Party in the
elections of 1868! Henceforth Marx and Engels believed that the lever to England would have to be applied via
Ireland. The Irish Marxist who, with Pearse, led the 1916 Revolution, James Connolly, was as dedicated to the
poor of Britain and Belfast as he was to those of Dublin, and was equally trenchant in denouncing the William
Martin Murphys of the Dublin media and the southern Roman church as he was in condemning the protestant
propertied class in the North for using religion and sectarianism, then as now, to keep the protestant working
class subdued and obedient. It is hardly necessary to point out that there is no conflict and never has been
between the peoples of Great Britain and Ireland, both of whom are gradually coming to realise that they are
alienated by the same Establishment, including the ‘socialist’ Establishment.
A further factor adding to interest in Ireland as a case study is that country’s ambiguous European Community
participation both as a neutral country in a developing military bloc and as a victim of capitalist imperialism in a
new imperial alliance. Here Ireland is seen as a dangerous loose horse on Europe’s flank, which helps to explain
the efforts being made to draw it into military alliance by the politicians and the media.
The country was, with France and the United States, one of the first three modern revolutionary countries of the
18th century. While the other two revolutions are long since over, absorbed into the capitalist undertaking,
Ireland’s revolution is part of it’s unfinished business. To every force there is an opposite counterforce, and in
Northern Ireland, supported by elements of the Southern Establishment, there is a powerful, Fundamentalist,
neo-Fascist movement around the Reverend Ian Paisley and his supporters with extensive links in Britain, South
Africa, North America and Israel. There are naive people who believe that in these matters the media might be
the guardians of our liberties. I think we have said enough already to demolish the idea that the mouthpiece of
The System, now heavily under the control of a few multimillionaire tycoons, will be the guardians of anything
but their own power, but in the present context let me add a little item typical of the applause that greeted the
arrival to power of Adolf Hitler, the capitalist saviour of Germany against communism. It is not from any of the
common-or-garden hacks but from Walter Lippmann, one of the leading journalists of his day and Jewish to
boot. On 19 May, 1933, having heard a Hitler speech which he qualified as ‘genuinely statesmanlike’ he wrote:
‘We have heard once more ... the authentic voice of a genuinely civilized people’, and went on to add that even
if the Jews had to be sacrificed it would not be too high a price.
We already discussed various aspects of the linkage between religion and the state and such details as military
men at prayer breakfasts considering the Almighty to be a true-blue white God operating with the goodies
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against the world’s baddies. This deeply-embedded belief sometimes breaks off the lips even of the highest
dignitories, as when Adlai Stevenson in his 1952 acceptance speech for nomination in the presidential race
compared himself to Christ in Gethsemane, asking ‘the merciful Father, the Father of us all, to let this cup pass
from me’. As it turned out the Christ comparison ended there and Stevenson was spared the agony of having to
drink the cup in the White House.
The United States is a very religious country. It has some 40 million ‘born again’ christians and a much larger
number of Fundamentalists. H L Menchen said that if you threw an egg out of a train window almost anywhere
in the US you would hit a Fundamentalist. And a popular saying about the WASP society is, ‘Scratch a
protestant and you will find a Fundamentalist’.
As pointed out already, the Roman catholic church supported right-wing tyranny in Latin America up to Vatican
II and beyond it in some countries, notably Argentina. But notwithstanding the efforts of John Paul II to install
conservative bishops, that phase is now largely ended. While liberal protestantism everywhere is also
magnificently on the side of liberation, right-wing protestant Fundamentalism of the Paisley brand, however,
buttresses big business, arms manufacture and right-wing political movements not only in the United States but
also in South Africa and the United Kingdom.
It will be clear to most observant people that there is a grave danger from the right in the US and South Africa.
But why the United Kingdom? Surely, it will be said, the ‘mother of parliaments’ and the grandmother of
democracy, as we are led to believe, will never tolerate interference with popular liberty and social justice.
Here is what Mr Tony Benn MP has to say: ‘Our own security forces, which are now one of the most powerful
political institutions in Britain, taxing us heavily, computerising their dossiers on us and always standing ready
to take power if the status quo were really challenged, are actually taking control of us in the guise of protecting
our liberties.... We have to re-establish the rights of freedom of thought, freedom of speech, the right to be heard
and the right to be different, partly in our statutes but more fundamentally in our minds’43. The Charter 88
movement, launched in 1988 to coincide with the tercentenary of the last British constitutional change, arising
from the coup by William of Orange in 1688, beloved of the Unionists in Northern Ireland, has been
campaigning for a Bill of Rights to secure civil liberties, freedom of expression, trial by jury and freedom from
discrimination to be incorporated into a written constitution as a protection against what they call ‘elective
dictatorship’ and abuse of power by government, parliament and police. It is in the logic of things that these
minimal requests are opposed by the 2nd pillar of the Establishment, the Labour Party, which is now exhibiting
a new appetite for power at almost any price. Downing Street commented that the new demands should be
treated with ridicule and indifference. And a former editor of the Sunday Telegraph said that ‘the British people
prefer order to liberty’, an ominous sentiment pregnant with potential tyranny. Although the French
Establishment is hardly in a position to point any self-righteous finger, it is of interest that our prime minister,
Michel Rocard, stated in an interview with London Weekend Television, 14 July, 1989: ‘I am ... concerned
about the British government’s current trend towards social cruelty, which I fear may damage the relationship
between Britain’s different social classes and regions and in time possibly even the very quality of Britain’s
political democracy’.
When the Northern Ireland struggle is stripped of its flagwaving and the religious bigotry whipped up by the
capitalist bourgeoisie in order that, as many commentators from James Connolly down to Tony Benn have
indicated, the workers may be kept divided, in a Marxist analysis it is essentially a class struggle. The area has
very high unemployment and as Marx made clear the unemployed are always good recruiting material for what
we now call Fascism because they are outside the discipline of the workers’ class in the factory. Fascism would
probably never have succeeded as it did in Germany and Italy without the unemployed, and it is important to
remember that both Mussolini and Hitler began their political careers as socialists and that today in France Le
Pen and the National Front have found their mass support among the deprived part of the population. The
danger could increase all over the United Kingdom, as it did in France, after a new Labour government had been
a couple of years in power and shown that they were basically of the same capitalist dye as the right and equally
incapable of solving the worst of society’s problems, including unemployment. The unemployed, among others,
could then transfer their support to a Fascist demagogue as in France. Marx pointed out in the Communist
Manifesto that the conditions of life of the lumpenproletariat and its susceptibility to facile promises ‘prepare it
... for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue’.
The religious mystique of men like the Reverend Paisley serves the useful purpose of mystifying the people
with the classical slogan of the right, ‘Faith and Fatherland’, a façade behind which the bourgeoisie can continue
their control, and then, in Marx’s words, ‘The silent compulsion of economic relations sets the seal on the
domination of the capitalist over the worker’. This is the process to which the frightened Southern
Establishment all across the political spectrum, from Fine Gael on the right to the so-called Workers’ Party on
the left, is lending its support as it profits in its pocket, its pride and its power from the capitalist ‘status quo’
with the backing of big business, the media and the state through ‘the centralised state machinery which, with its
ubiquitous and complicated military, bureaucratic, clerical and judiciary organs, entoils in meshes the living
civil society like a boa constrictor’ (Marx). In addition, the capitalist control of the economy sets bounds to what
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the state can do. If the capitalists do not like state policies, they can, for example, transfer their business and
their money to a more profitable environment, now facilitated in Europe through the EC. The class struggle is
thus transferred to the international plane but the socialist parties are slow to carry it there because their votecatching is mainly on the home front and because any full-blooded internationalisation of the problem might
carry the risk of real people power, the defeat of capitalism, and the loss of their privileges by the politicians.
To understand the right-wing politico-religious movement one does not have to go further than Northern Ireland
where the Reverend Paisley has been its controlling power for a quarter of a century. A Northern Ireland
commentator writing in The Irish Times of 15 July, 1989 referred to the Presbyterian Grand Master of the
(Masonic) Orange Order, the Reverend Martin Smyth, as flaunting the idea of racial superiority and ‘the selfservicing casuistry on which Orangeism has thrived for over 150 years’. The white South African journalist and
writer, David Beresford, has revealed that he learned much about South Africa from the 3 years he spent in the
early 80s in Northern Ireland, where, he said, the politico-religious movement closely resembled that in his own
country. Both regimes are of identical religious origin. It is an extremely dangerous amalgam when a law-andorder neo-Fascist style movement takes its inspiration from its god. The National Front demagogues here in
France similarly use their particular brand of a god taken from the excommunicated bishop, Marcel Lefevre.
The Reverend Paisley likes to make an analogy between Northern Ireland and old Testament stories such as that
of Naboth’s vineyard, which was coveted by Ahab. Jezebel slew Naboth to give it to him. To Mr Paisley, the
Irish republicans are the Ahabs, but the Unionists, he says, ‘are not prepared to surrender the heritage of our
fathers’ and ‘the blood of Abel cries from this ground’.
When Vorster was South Africa’s minister for justice, referring to his country’s coercion acts he said he ‘would
be willing to exchange all the legislation of that sort for one clause of the Special Powers Act’ (in force in
Northern Ireland for half a century until the explosion of 1969—’72). And a Northern Ireland unionist described
Mr Nelson Mandela as a ‘Black Provo’ (member of the Provisional IRA).
In the words of Now magazine for July 1989, there has been ‘a wave of silent emigration’ from Northern Ireland
to South Africa where thousands of Loyalists are bringing with them their experience in handling security as
members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the Ulster Defence Regiment, with a view to defending the pure,
blue-eyed, white-skinned Aryans against the claims of ‘mere Blacks’, and the Reverend Paisley ‘is to set up a
branch of his church in Durban’. Such co-operation does not end there, as shown by the arrest in Paris in 1989
of Northern Ireland Unionists involved in arms trading with the South African regime. At the other side of the
Atlantic, the Paisleyites have strong ties with the right-wing Fundamentalists. Mr Paisley holds a bachelor of
divinity degree from the Pioneer Theological Seminary in Rockford, Illinois. In 1969 he told a gathering at Bob
Jones University in South Carolina: ‘What is happening in Ulster today will happen in America tomorrow.
Make no mistake about it. May God open our eyes to see the conspiracy, the international conspiracy, that is
amongst us. May He help us to see that there is a deliberate association of attacks against law and order and for
revolution and anarchy and Marxism in the land’.
The Bob Jones University is one of those where the dogma is taught that God created the world literally in six
days as described in the Old Testament, a doctrine supported by many people in the US administration. It is also
the seat of the four-yearly gathering of the World Congress of Fundamentalists. The battle against the theory of
evolution has been led in Northern Ireland from the Reverend Paisley’s home town of Ballymena. Here one
must not confuse modern theories of evolution with Darwinism itself, which is being challenged by today’s
evolutionists as a too-simplified version. In the tiny territory of Northern Ireland the Free Presbyterian Church
has no less than 7 Fundamentalist schools which have separated themselves out from the mainstream
educational system, attacking any science that seems to them to be against the literal words of the bible and
censoring works of literature for material that does not correspond to their beliefs. This obscurantism based on
the demands of a terrifying Old Testament Jehovah exists at a time in the history of man when ecumenism,
tolerance and pluralism were never so important. It should be added, however, that liberal ecumenism in
education is not a virtue of catholicism either.
Mr Paisley's Free Presbyterians have mission churches in the Americas, Canada, Britain and the British
Commonwealth, and taped recordings of his sermons can be heard on evangelical radio shows in many
countries. These Fundamentalists, like their South African brothers, believe that the separation of the races is
ordained by God in the Old Testament. Mr Paisley is, no doubt, a man of many virtues, but christian humility
does not seem to be among them. E Moloney and A Pollak44 point out that he is happy to portray himself as a
modern Moses leading the people to the promised land. ‘Fear not, little flock, it is the Father’s good pleasure to
give you the kingdom.... When I die, God will send some Joshua to lead you into the promised land.... The walls
of Zion are breached and its doors are burned with fire’. Such words are addressed, of course, to the elite of the
saved; all others will be damned and particularly all liberals and progressives. Progressive and liberal’, he says,
‘are Satan’s pet words.’ When one of his adversaries dies an untimely death, Mr Paisley and his followers like
to point to it as evidence of God’s vengeful hand behind them. But when a friend is ousted, it is otherwise:
according to Free Presbyterian Minister Allister Lucas, the downfall of (Fascist tyrant) Marcos of the
Philippines was orchestrated by Cardinal Sin, the symbolism of the cardinal’s family name not going unnoticed.
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The same Mr Lucas said about Oliver Cromwell, the barbarian who swept priceless architectural treasures off
the map the way he put entire town populations to the sword in the name of God: ‘Oliver Cromwell was God’s
man. And I feel that’s what we need today; men of God who are dictators of nations, men to direct them in the
right way.... I believe that Ian Paisley too is a man raised up by God, like Moses, Elijah and King David’. And
Mr Paisley himself: ‘If you compromise God will curse you. If you stand God will bless you’. And after an
election victory: ‘This is a victory of true evangelical protestantism against the apostasy of ecumenism.... I
believe we have come to the kingdom for such a time as this’. On the death of the liberal pope John XXIII:
‘This Romish man is now in hell’, he roared, to cries of ‘Hallelujah’ and ‘Amen’ from his audience. Or, again:
‘The Lord will not deliver Ulster while her people do not realise that there are strange gods among us in the
form of ecumenical clergy ... who lead the Protestants of Ulster astray’. When the British Post Office issued an
EC stamp in 1984 using figures from Greek mythology showing Europa as the daughter of the King of Tyre, Mr
Paisley called it ‘a remarkable prophetic fulfilment ... the woman is an unclean woman, the woman is a brazen
woman, because her garments are “see through” garments showing her naked breasts and naked legs. It is a
whore that is upon the beast
the woman of Babylon, the bride of the antichrist, the Church of Rome herself.
We must now briefly trace these matters back to their roots.
At the instigation of Edward Carson in 1913, the protestant Ulster Volunteers drew up a solemn covenant which
was signed by almost half a million men, including most of the Anglican and Presbyterian clergy. It was a
solemn covenant before God to resist the Irish Home Rule Bill, ‘humbly relying on the God whom our fathers in
days of stress and trial confidently trusted’. Many signed it in their own blood in remembrance of the Scottish
followers of John Knox, Calvin’s friend and disciple, who in the 16th century formed an army which captured
Perth and Edinburgh and with the help of Queen Elizabeth I established a Fundamentalist parliament. This was
the foundation myth of Scotland, whence the Cromwellian planters were sent into Ireland. The sealing of a pact
in blood is characteristic of many occult rituals which open the door to the demonic. Modern psychology is
throwing increasing light on the disturbed personalities involved in such action and in the banding together of
‘christian’ groups for self protection in the face of The Other, using the Old Testament law of an eye for an eye
and a tooth for a tooth. The psychologist, medical doctor and exegete, Marc Oraison, has this to say on the
subject:
There are human groups which constitute ‘defensive blocs’ against the dizzy demand of love. When these
groups are ‘christian’ they establish themselves around a moral law ... which they fiercely defend against
everything that might rightfully remind them of the requirements of interpersonal relationships and awaken in
them the intolerable anguish of such a challenge to their fortress.... It is not surprising that such defensive groups
always confound a certain social or political ‘order’ with the Kingdom of Heaven ... and go as far as committing
the most crying injustice, and even crime, to defend what they believe to be ‘christian’ civilisation and morals.
It will be important for you to examine the political, economic and military implications of these matters
through authorities who have been observing Ireland from the perspective and in the context of the world
situation as a whole. Three with whom you might begin are: Mr Tony Benn, who needs no further introduction
here; the late Mr Sean MacBride, Nobel Peace Laureate, founder of Amnesty International, author of the United
Nations Declaration on Human Rights and former Assistant Secretary-General of the UN, Commissioner for
Namibia, consultant to UNESCO and other international organisations, and a leading statesman of his time; and
Mr Raymond Crotty, formerly lecturer in agricultural economics at the University of Wales, Fellow of the
Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex and consultant to a score of Third World countries.
There is also some work by the British author, Geoffrey Bell, and perhaps one or two others to which I shall
draw your attention.
Crotty has made a particular study of the origin and development of imperialist capitalism and its disastrous
effects on every one of the former colonies of the West throughout the Third World and in Ireland. One of his
published works deals with the economic consequences of the conquest both in the Third World and in
Ireland45. Part of it is devoted to a proposal to save an almost hopeless Irish situation by radical reform of such a
sweeping nature —including the wrenching of power from the Establishment and the bloated state bureaucracy
and its restoration to the people — that there is little possibility of its being accepted by the entrenched vested
interests which now control the national economy. No significant privileged class has ever surrendered its
privileges unless forced by violent revolution and that is what Crotty, speaking as an economist, sees as the only
alternative to his proposal for radical reform.
This is not to say that violent revolution would necessarily be successful. Apart from the failure of Ireland’s
revolutionary uprisings in 1798, 1848, 1867 and 1916, in our own time we have seen the failure of violent
revolution in Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique and Vietnam, through the economic blockade and Contra wars
organised by the West. The Western powers, through the old technique of ‘divide et impera’ and through what
has recently been called ‘low intensity conflict’, sometimes also surreptitiously goad individual countries to
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premature rebellion or revolution so as to crush them one by one, knowing that if they were allowed to wait to
rise together in Marx’s world revolution Western capitalism would be overwhelmed.
In the economic sphere, Crotty shows that ‘countries that have not been capitalist colonised develop; countries
that have been capitalist colonised undevelop’, what I referred to in an earlier letter as ‘developing backwards’.
Development takes place under very different regimes, from that of ‘laissez faire’ Hong Kong to centrally
planned economies. Crotty shows that there is no case in the world where a capitalist colonised country
develops. Such countries have been running down at all times since they were colonised, notwithstanding or,
more accurately, because of, governments and experts and all the measures pretending to promote development.
The reasons, I hope, are clear from previous letters, in which I also discussed how a governing minority in each
profits at the expense of society, which Crotty specifically identifies as a factor in Ireland’s undevelopment.
Joining the EC has been like going for a ride on the tiger’s back. The Establishment class are of course very
enthusiastic about it, because they gain handsome benefits: the subsidies from Brussels are paid out via the
government, which permits political patronage; executives working for the new multinationals receive very high
salaries, fringe benefits and attractive travel; ministers, academics, civil servants, parliamentarians and lobby
representatives with generous expense accounts jet to-and-fro between the Continent and Dublin; higher civil
servants transferred to the EC obtain tax-free salaries enabling them to make off-shore tax-free investments
which allow them to retire wealthy; the EuroMPs can do likewise. They have been indulging in a great deal of
propaganda about the benefits of EC membership, naturally supported by the media, an offshoot of the
Establishment.
Prospects for the ordinary people, however, are bleak. Among the innumerable new problems, mention might be
made of the competition from powerful neighbours; the threat to the environment and tourism from the
multinationals; the rise in prices and costs that have been detrimental to all but a few; wealthy foreign interests
buying up Irish urban assets and property; and the threat to the farm family, 160,000 of whom have had to flee
from the land since accession to the EC. The same domestic and foreign capitalist imperialism which destroyed
family farming in the Third World and the United States now threatens the same in the new Europe, unless a
worse plague from environmental destruction swings the pendulum to even more disastrous penury. There is
also the question of flight capital which promises to become acute after 1992. This is related to the relatively
great wealth now in the hands of a few. If an upheaval were to occur the Establishment class would be able to
retire abroad without financial worry for the future.
A paper by Sean Byrne, Wealth and the Wealthy in Ireland (1989), shows that 5 per cent of the population own
72 per cent of the wealth. At the other end of the scale, according to an episcopal committee and the Conference
of Major Religious Superiors, one third of the population live below the official poverty line. Mothers sacrifice
themselves to provide their children with the barest necessities in food, school clothes and books. There is a 2tier health and education system, one of the best in the world for the wealthy, with declining services for the
poor.
In addition to the foreign multinationals, new Irish-based multinationals are being created with the aid of Irish
grants, Irish tax reduction incentives and subsidies from Brussels, but many are using the international context
to invest profits abroad rather than at home. Regional Fund and FEOGA money from Brussels is being paid to
some of the country’s wealthiest private operators, who are often subsidiaries of foreign multinationals.
Raymond Crotty has considered the unconstitutional nature of modern credit and made a comparison between
the activities of the ‘fly-by-night’ operators, here today and gone tomorrow, and the words of the Constitution:
‘The State shall, in particular, direct its policy towards securing that, in what pertains to the control of credit, the
constant and predominant aim shall be the welfare of the people as a whole’. The profiteering individuals, says
Crotty, striving to get to the top, and banks concerned to expand their assets regardless, have one thing in
common, an equal disregard for ‘the welfare of the people as a whole’.
The begging bowl held out to Brussels goes hand-in-hand with the Irish slave mentality, now in the ascendancy
again after the stirring years of the resurgence during the first two decades of the century. Symbolic of this
mentality is the attitude to the national language. To judge from a recent article by Fintan O’Toole in The Irish
Times and from other evidence, Ireland stands out as the unique case among the 25 countries of Europe which is
ashamed of its national language. O’Toole says that ‘the Irish language is a crucial part of our self-contempt and
until we resolve something of our confusion about the language we will never lose the self-contempt that makes
a phrase like “an Irish solution to an Irish problem” so withering’. This slave mentality is willing to see the
people’s individuality lost in a European melting pot, when, as many observers have pointed out, the greatness
of Europe lies largely in the fact that it has always resisted such reductionism and cherishes all its national
languages, the cultures they enshrine and the dynamic creativity that arises from this rich fabric in such a
relatively small geographical area as Europe is.
As O’Toole has also shown, anybody who happens to be in a position to penetrate behind the media rhetoric and
consider the economic processes at work in today’s EC will discover that it is going to be a shootout, a
battleground where the multinationals are planning their strategy over maps criss-crossed with axes, arrows and
zones for the march of capital as was once done for the march of the Panzer Divisions. In these plans, what may
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be called the Celtic coastline, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, Brittany, Northwest Spain and Western
Portugal is classified as the ‘less-developed Atlantic periphery’ and thus perhaps being prepared for potential
upheaval, while the European Community as a whole might well become the theatre for spreading violence, as
classes and countries struggle for their share of the cake. Notwithstanding pious intentions such as those
expressed in the theoretical draft Charter on Fundamental Social Rights, there is likely to be severe social
dumping by which multinationals would desert those countries where workers’ rights are best protected.
Opposition politicians everywhere, in a bid for popularity, tend to say things which they later conveniently
forget when in power. Thus, the leader of the main Irish opposition declared on 24 August, 1989, that 20 years
from now we could find the EC an area with ‘a substantially increased level of damage to human freedom, to the
environment, to peace and to the Third World’. He was of course merely giving public expression to what is
inevitable. Notwithstanding the ‘-ism’ rhetoric used to justify the monstrous wars of the 20th century, they were
primarily wars of economic competition for control of the world’s raw materials, markets and trade routes, and
the increasingly aggressive capitalist alliance of big business, high financiers and arms producers, known
euphemistically as the European ‘Community’ is likely to eventually find itself on a collision course with other
powers and, once more, as in all the major wars, the main victim will be the ordinary man in the street.
Alain Minc, author of La Grande Illusion about the EC, sees the Community as containing the seeds of unprecedented violence, ‘a Darwinian nightmare’. Another commentator, G H Hogberg, points out that cut-throat
competition coupled with aggressive feelings is a dangerous combination.
In relation to Ireland, Matt Merrigan has said46 that the EC offers no way forward ‘because that system is
canabalistic: the smaller and more vulnerable states will go to the wall’. Indigenous manufacturing has been
largely eclipsed and the new industrialisation is mainly from low-labour-input and high-capital-input foreign
industry benefiting from a combination of the tax haven provided ultimately from the people’s resources and the
price manipulation that enables these industries to make very large profits. There is also the problem created for
the future of the people in a small weak country that won a measure of political ‘independence’ only 70 years
ago after centuries of foreign exploitation and impoverishment. How much of the vital decision making has
been automatically transferred in practice to the head offices of multinationals abroad, restoring the foreign
capitalism which the Irish nation fought for so long to shake off?
If the world depression predicted by John Kenneth Galbraith, Erwin Lazlo and other independent economists
should materialise, Ireland could be faced with a massive return of emigrants which would increase the
revolutionary potential envisaged by Crotty:
A crisis ... will rapidly develop when government can no longer contribute, from borrowed funds, the one fifth
or more of national income it has regularly done in recent years.... The crisis will be the more intense in that the
population is now immeasurably wealthier and more literate.... The teguments of Irish society are about to be
sundered ... in a rapidly developing revolutionary situation.
In an effort to meet the crisis, the governing classes in all parties, to borrow Mr Benn’s words again, are
huddling nervously together, ‘united by a denunciation of all those who question the central tenets of the
Establishment’. The fear is that a social revolution in the South could link up with a ‘volcanic explosion’ in the
North and would then be difficult to prevent spreading across the Irish Sea.
It is not difficult to understand the fears of the Irish Fine Gael Party, the traditional party of collaboration with
capitalist imperialism, extending back, under different names, to the post-1922 puppet government and further
back through the 19th century. It is even easier to understand the leaders of the Labour Party, seeing themselves
excluded forever from the pleasures and profits of power and forming an unnatural alliance with their historic
capitalist enemies in Fine Gael, which they have supported in government on and off for over 40 years. What is
more surprising at first sight is to witness the old ‘republican party’, Fianna Fail, under Mr Charles Haughey,
borrowing its policies from Fine Gael. What may seem to the naive to be most surprising of all is to see the socalled ‘Workers Party’, which pretends to be the most radical party, adopting the same stance behind a façade of
auction politics and electioneering propaganda by which the party leaders benefit handsomely so that they and
their families are enabled to join the profiteering class. In point of fact, as we have discussed in previous correspondence, a party like the Workers Party, while naturally contested by the other parties seeking power, is in
reality the most valuable to the maintenance of the Establishment and its system because it helps to tranquilise
the dangerous and disruptive segment of society, the segment which is at once the most courageous and the
most numerous and has least to lose and most prospect of gain from revolutionary upheaval.
If the Irish revolution described as a probability by Raymond Crotty is to be headed off by the capitalist
Establishment, the left wing of that Establishment will be its most secure anchor and this is clear from the
pronouncements of its leaders. In their lust for power, the party has made some strange somersaults, among
them managing to side with the oppressive ascendancy class in the North, ignoring the fact that the road to
peace is to struggle for political, economic, and social justice for the oppressed. The party also offers votecatching sops and an abundance of promises for the dim, distant day ‘when the Left captures power’. What the
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common man needs, however, is not paternalism, handouts or bribes to keep him quiet, but an uplifting
opportunity for self-fulfilment, if not for himself at least for his children, and a prospect that he will be allowed
a say in the local ordering of society without manipulation by party politicians, be it called the Workers Party
itself. Politicians, invented as the solution, turn out to be the problem. Doles, handouts and other bribes designed
to pacify the poor and prevent them from overturning The System are in reality insults to their dignity, an
encouragement of the destructive begging-bowl instinct and a moral corruption of the self-fulfilling work ethic
by which, according to Karl Marx, man creates himself.
It should be added in favour of an internationalist approach to the fundamental socio-economic problem and
against the politicians’ piece-meal tinkering with it, that worthwhile improvements in workers’ wages, hours
and conditions can wreck a country’s, especially a small poor country’s, capacity to compete in capitalism’s
international rat race and thereby wreck the workers’ own chances of a better life. And when workers point to
the big salaries, high-powered cars and luxury houses enjoyed by the bosses, they do not seem to realise that
without such incentives their company would have difficulty against international competition in retaining
executives of the highest calibre and influence to keep it competitive. Only a mass international movement of
the people can solve the problem of the underprivileged. International capitalism cannot be fought at national
level; the multinationals can only be met by the multinationalisation of the peoples. Partial strikes have no
damaging effect on the power of international capitalism, which can regroup its forces elsewhere, transfer to a
more hospitable climate and recoup any losses suffered through trade union action. Not so in the case of the
workers: the prolonged strike cuts deep into the community and weakens the union’s power to pay, so that the
strike weapon, conceded to workers as a concession, is in reality a poisoned concession. When a full-scale effort
was made in Britain in 1926 to extend it where it could hurt it was defeated by the combined operation of
Freemasonry and the Labour Party and the doors of the Masonic lodges were opened wide to Labour Party
politicians. Similarly here in France the socialists are deeply integrated with Masonry and, for example, as
recounted in Stephen Knight’s The Brotherhood, Valery Giscard d’Estaing joined the Masons in 1974 because
he was advised that he could not otherwise defeat the socialists in the presidential election.
Notwithstanding the anti-Marxist hype emanating from the Establishment, it was the threat of Marxism that
produced a first positive fall-out by forcing acceptance by the Establishment that the proletariat were a little
better than donkeys. But the revolution was stopped there. Lenin and Stalin saw to that in the East and the
socialist parties blocked the road in the West. Having progressed from being treated like donkeys, the proletariat
were imprisoned in The System as second-class citizens, subject to the eternal wrangle over wages, hours and
working conditions. It cannot be denied that the rich are getting richer and the poor, poorer, even in socialist
countries, that the exploitation of the Third World peoples continues, that pollution is worsemng, that the arms
manufacturers lobby and their big-business subcontractors continue to waste the world’s resources on a massive
scale, that warmongering is as rife as ever, that robbery, crime and violence are growing and that the ills of
society which we have been considering in this correspondence are deepening. The situation will not be changed
through cosmetic surgery by socialist politicians. To them as to the others, power is the name of the game and,
as Goebbels and others have explained, the leaders’ power depends on continuing discontent among the masses.
Socialist politicians have a vested interest in discontent. As Chomsky said writing about endeavours ‘to delay
the final catastrophe’, the fraud about ‘socialism’ both East and West is one of many mechanisms that have
served effectively to undermine any such endeavour’.
Here we are not dealing with any minor matters of mere political in-fighting between the parties. We are close
to the taproot of the whole problem. Goebbles understood it in a pragmatic manner, from having experienced it,
but others have examined it as a vital aspect of fundamental psychology. Freud considered it but declared
himself mystified. René Girard has finally explained it with his theory of mimetic desire. There is a real transfer
of psychic energy to the leader from the led, which demobilises the latter and energises the former. It is
therefore basically the exploitation of the weaker by the stronger, which is the essence of the imperialist
relationship, as indicated by Desmond Fennell (already discussed) in his analysis of the apathetic provincial
mind subdued by the power brokers. It also explains the importance attached by the greatest revolutionary
teachers, back to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Marx, to the prevention of the hijacking of a revolution. Rosa
Luxemburg was assassinated by the German parliamentary left with the impeccable logic of those who know
where to look for danger to their power. She had shown that revolution is doomed unless the local community,
in cooperation and co-ordination with other local communities, seizes the initiative, holds it and establishes a
massive unshakeable base built on the three essential principles of knowledge, preparation and consciousness of
the people’s own power. The primary factor is knowledge leading to a theory, theory, she showed, being the
essential image of the phenomena of the exterior world, to the point that the entire strength of a revolutionary
movement rests on theoretical knowledge. As long as theoretical knowledge remains the privilege of a handful,
the movement cannot but be hijacked by opportunists. Let a revolution rise to the top and become centralised in
a political party, a trades union or other bureaucracy and it will be snuffed out like a candle, the way the British
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revolution was snuffed out in 1926 by the combined operation of the parliamentary left and the Masonic lodges.
Even the very terminology used to launch the revolution will then be used to destroy it.
In Ireland all the politicians are frightened of the threat to their pockets and their power from the Northern revolutionaries, but it is natural that the Workers Party is most hysterical because it sees Sinn Fein on its left, too
close for comfort, as the chief threat to itself. Sinn Fein takes its inspiration largely from James Connolly, who
triggered the 1916 Revolution when he threw the workers into the balance on the side of the nationalists. Such
action was also advocated by Trotsky — considered by most leading Marxists to be the 20th century’s greatest
interpreter of Marx —against both the armchair socialism of the parliamentary left and the Stalinist dictatorship
of the totalitarian communists. Connolly was an internationalist who contributed much to international Marxist
thought, but he came to see that capitalism could not be defeated unless a country being exploited by it took
sovereign control into its own hands. This helps to explain why the Irish Establishment, using the Labour Party
and the Workers Party as its chief instruments, are doing what they can to stir up antagonism between the parties
and movements on the left, on the old premise of ‘divide et impera’.
Humanity is now reaching a climactic culmination of 5 centuries of violence: the violence to the environment
from nuclear and chemical pollution, the violence to the world’s limited resources through exploitation and
despoliation, the violence to the peoples of the Third World through imposed starvation, the violence to the
mass of the West’s own poor through their being condemned to second class status, the violence that ‘takes out’
protesting voices from among the leaders, the violence to consciences from media indoctrination, the violence of
escalating war which has killed over 60 million people in this century alone, the violence to peace by the halfcentury-old threat of nuclear annihilation, and the makeshift reaction producing violence from the revolutionaries. When Nazism had completed its nasty enterprise, the media men, the intellectuals and the silent majority
woke up saying hypocritically, ‘We didn’t know, nobody told us’, when the real crime was to have believed
what they were told. Today again, with the ‘panem et circenses’ of media mania, money and professional sport,
the new opium of the people, we are in danger of being lulled once more into gullibility. We can be helped out
of it by bringing the revolutionaries into the debate who make a radical challenge to The System. Their
exclusion through official and semi-official censorship means that the safety-valve is flawed and fundamental
problems are swept under the carpet of Establishment rhetoric, playing into the hands of extremists, who see no
hope of radical debate and peaceful revolution against the dictatorship of money and power, driving them to
seek strength through integration with the world revolutionary movement. Without taking sides one way or
another on nationalistic issues, it would therefore be useful at this point, in the context of the subject matter of
your dissertation, to open up the discussion by briefly considering the revolutionary arguments of Sinn Fein,
denied to the public through official censorship by the government combined with voluntary censorship by the
media.
The president of Sinn Fein, Mr Gerry Adams in his book The Politics of Irish Freedom (Brandon), in which he
quotes liberally from Connolly and from the revolutionary founding father of the Republic, Wolfe Tone, shows
that the subjugation of the working classes was achieved through national subjugation, that this was continued
from 1922 onwards by splitting off the proletariat of the industrial North from the people of the South, and that
it is carried on today by the divisiveness in the North between Unionist and Nationalist, aided and abetted by
religious bigotry stirred up by the Northern capitalists. The great danger to the Dublin, Belfast and London
Establishments would arise, as it did in 1916, from a union of the two traditional strands in Irish republicanism,
the Marxist strand and the nationalist strand. That is why they must be kept divided.
Among the tactics of the Establishment Left used to impress the international Marxist movement is to brand
Sinn Fein as a kind of jingoistically green jacquerie, whereas a perusal of Sinn Fein literature shows the
opposite, and Sinn Fein’s links with leading British Marxists add visible evidence of its internationalisation,
further shown by its relationship with revolutionary movements worldwide.
In addition to the political strategy to keep the left divided, the religious arm is also employed. Adams gives
incidences of this. For example, working class people from the protestant and catholic communities on the
Springfield Road in Belfast came together to form a tenants’ association and, inter alia, organised a small
campaign to have safety rails and a children’s crossing put in place after a child was knocked down by a car.
When news of this co-operation between the two communities reached the Unionist Establishment, one of the
Reverend Paisley’s men arrived on the scene with talk about ‘papists’ and ‘pope-heads’. The protestants ceased
their involvement, and Adams concludes pointedly: ‘If the state would not allow Catholics and Protestants to get
a pedestrian crossing built together, it would hardly sit back and watch them organise the revolution together’.
Similarly, after the IRA dumped its arms at the end of the 50s and decided to confine itself through the 60s to
peaceful political organisation for justice in relation to housing, one man one vote, elimination of the old
gerrymandering of the constituencies, freedom for the protestant and catholic working class to combine for
social action, the movement was rebuffed and finally a peaceful civic rights march brutally attacked by the
police, which triggered the return of the IRA to the violent path. Establishment strategy was then able to proceed
to have the liberation movement ostracised internationally as merely terrorist. The plan succeeded admirably.
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As an illustration of the relationship between Sinn Fein and the ultra-left in Britain, the following comment from
Britain’s Marxist Ken Livingstone is interesting:
“If you sit and watch Gerry Adams in a group of people, he does not dominate it. He lets other people talk,
he hears a consensus emerging, he doesn’t try to provide charismatic dominating leadership. I've never been
to a Sinn Fein Ard Fheis (conference), but others have expressed surprise at how everyone queued before the
microphone, waiting to speak. What was remarkable, they said, was that when somebody had made the point
that Gerry Adams wanted to make, he left the queue and returned to his seat. There are few male politicians
who would behave in that way. The classic position of the Left in Britain is characterized by men who feel
that no issue can be resolved until they have had their say.
It seems to me that Adams and Morrison represented that alternative position which has a concept of a much
more decentralized and more collective leadership. Part of it has to do with a perception of how much
influence they have. If you have popular support, you don’t need to shout that loudly; people will listen. It is
also an awareness that things can’t be achieved by individuals, and that is a lesson for us all (from Ireland
After Britain).”
Adams describes how we began to develop a view of the class nature of the struggle and of the relationship
between its social and national dimensions.... As part of a major review of strategy the whole relationship
between revolutionary struggle, armed struggle and mobilisation of the masses was discussed at length.... The
impact of this major review was that Sinn Fein began to define its politics more, to the extent of talking about a
‘workers’ republic’, ‘a workers’ and small farmers’ republic’, and a ‘socialist republic’ or a ‘democratic socialist
republic’. He adds significantly that they decided: ‘We could not free the Irish people. We could only, with their
support, create conditions in which they would free themselves’.
The internationalist action by Sinn Fein included rallies against the Vietnam war and in favour of the US civil
rights campaign and of the South African Black struggle against which the Northern Ireland Unionists take the
side of the White racists, because the Unionists, says Adams, ‘have the same problem as the white regime in
South Africa’.
He quotes James Connolly: ‘If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag ... unless you set
about the organisation of a Socialist Republic your efforts would have been in vain’. Capitalist imperialism
would still rule ‘through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions ... even while your lips
offered hypocritical homage at the shrine of that freedom whose cause you have betrayed’.
Production, says Sinn Fein through its president, must be based on human need rather than private profit.
‘Socialism includes and is a stage in advance of republicanism’ and ‘you cannot be a socialist if you condone,
support or ignore the colonial stranglehold.... Those who profess to be “Northern Ireland Socialists” are
involved in mere parochialism of the gasworks and waterworks municipal variety’. Furthermore, the
‘relationship between socialists in Ireland and Britain should be a relationship of equals’. Finally,
All socialists must be internationalists and antiimperialists in a meaningful way. Long distance ‘revolutionaries’ will not help to free the oppressed peoples of the world if they cannot help to free their own
people and class in Ireland.
A free federation of free people is the only conception of internationalism worth struggling for. So socialists
must struggle for freedom and political power in the country in which they live and give a lead to struggling
people elsewhere.
For all these reasons and because I am a socialist I continue to be a republican. Republicanism is a
philosophy in which the national and the radical social dimensions are the two sides of the one coin.
In its effort to divide and confuse the left, the Irish Establishment tries to depict the leader of the 1916
Revolution, Pearse, as the greenest of the jingoistic jacqueries. Adams provides proof to the contrary, as, for
example, from Pearse’s The Sovereign People:
So that the nation’s sovereignty extends not only to all men and women of the nation but to all material
possessions of the nation, the nation’s soil and all its resources, all wealth and all wealth producing processes
within the nation. In other words, no private right to property is good against the public right to secure
strictly equal rights and liberties to every man and woman within the nation.’
Pearse’s ideas were so revolutionary that nobody today, Marxist though he be, could advocate their
implementation.
Adams then goes on to refer to Pearse’s revolutionary ideas in education, by which he planned an ongoing
peaceful revolution from generation to generation. Pearse’s educational ideas are more necessary than ever
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today when adolescents are such mentally brutalised people that, as Emer O’Kelly put it, most are unable to
withstand any real intellectual or emotional shock and, by becoming indistinguishable from one another,
paradoxically become isolated, thrown back on the vestiges of personal resources which have been demolished.
The murder machine, says Adams, ‘is still with us seventy years later. There has always been a blatant
hypocrisy in the 26 county state holding up Patrick Pearse as a national hero while clearly contradicting all the
tenets of his philosophy. But now there is a more dangerous development in the fact that since revisionism has
become thoroughly established in the schools, the next generation may not even know who Patrick Pearse was,
let alone what his ideas were’. This revisionism, he says, is the work of the profiteering Establishment which
came to power on other men’s wounds, ‘careerists jockeying for the Ministerial Mercedes, using the taxpayers’
money to send Christmas cards to constituents, pretending to have obtained for constituents housing that should
be theirs by right and which they actually obtained through no effort of any TD (member of parliament), voting
themselves automatic salary increases, earning large pensions long before any thoughts of retirement.... In the
26 counties we have a neo-colonial state in which the imperial foreign government was exchanged for a native
one based on business interests.... There was and remains no change in the civil service, the judicial system or in
legislation. There was merely a change of managers.’ As Lord Birkenhead described it, the treaty arrangement
was ‘protecting British interests with an economy of British lives’.
Adams states that the armed struggle in the North is no more than a tactic or ‘armed propaganda’, an agent of
bringing about change.... ‘There is a realisation in republican circles that armed struggle on its own is inadequate
and that non-armed forms of political struggle are at least as important.... There are considerable moral problems
in relation to armed struggle’. ‘I cannot’, says Adams, ‘conceive of any thinking person who would not have
scruples about inflicting any form of hurt on another living being’, even though ‘it is nothing like joining a
“regular” army with a whole ethos about being trained to kill’, compared with civilian volunteers facing almost
certain suffering, imprisonment and death. Against them are aligned not only the military forces but the southern
Establishment, its academics, its media men and its political parties worried over the threat to their status quo,
which they have reached partly by saddling the people with the monstrous national debt which has caused the
country to lose the semblance of independence it formerly had. One of the results is that it is being led by the
nose into the new European militarism.
In this context, it would be important for you to consider the revelations of those in a key position to know the
inner manoeuvrings, such as Mr Tony Benn and the late Mr Sean MacBride.
Mr Benn, speaking from his knowledge as a leading MP and former cabinet minister in London, states that he is
‘absolutely certain that the reason Britain is in Ireland has nothing to do with the reasons given to the public.
Britain is there for military purposes’, occupying ‘a military colony of the Western alliance’. He further believes
that police and army activity in Northern Ireland are a preparation for its domestic application in Great Britain
and that ‘the RUC are going to be used to train the British police in techniques of searching and surveillance....
Gradually we are seeing a complete transfer of the whole apparatus of repression from Northern Ireland to
Britain.... The Loyalist veto is a very clever technique. Keeping the loyalists on a string means that sectarian
divisions can always be whipped up.... If the Republic decided to join NATO, I think it (the Loyalist veto)
would be brushed aside...
Mr Benn’s case is supported by another British authority, Geoffrey Bell (The British in Ireland, Pluto Press,
London) in an analysis that also throws useful light for today on how democratic evolutionary developments if
thwarted by nondemocratic forces can lead to an unending spiral of violence, on how parliamentary procedures
can be manipulated, and on the role of the military which many people think belongs to the ‘banana republics’
of Latin America.
Referring to the 75 per cent majority of the Irish people who voted for an independent republic in the British
elections of 1918, Bell points out that during the Home Rule controversy there was also a majority in favour of
it in the London House of Commons. But ‘the wishes of the Irish majority and the votes of the majority in the
House of Commons had been brushed aside’ by a conspiracy which included the leadership of the Conservative
party, the House of Lords, the King of Great Britain and Ireland, and the British military establishment. Tory
leader Andrew Bonar Law informed the monarch of his royal duty. Because of the Liberals’ Home Rule
proposals, he said, it was imperative that His Majesty either dismiss the government or refuse his assent to the
Home Rule Bill.’
The King ‘wrote to Prime Minister Asquith and warned the Liberal leader of the monarch’s “residual right” to
dismiss the government’. Lieutenant-General Sir George Richardson, a veteran of many imperialist adventures,
commanded the UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force). It was partly financed by the British League for the Support of
Ulster, which also attempted to recruit former army officers to the cause. Among the members of the wealthy
Establishment who subscribed to this fund were Waldorf Astor, Lord Rothschild, Lord Iveagh and the Duke of
Bedford.
‘Against such pillars of the establishment, as well as the Tory Party, the army, and the House of Lords,
Asquith’s alliance — the Liberals, John Redmond’s nationalists, and the majority of the House of Commons —
caved in’.
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Among the military supporters of ‘No surrender’ in Northern Ireland were General Wilson, director of military
operations in the War Office, General Paget, commander-in-chief of the army in Ireland, and General Gough,
commander of the Third Calvary brigade. In the North, Carson was able to inform the government that the
Unionists had ‘pledges and promises from some of the greatest generals in the army, who have given their word
that, when the time comes, if it is necessary, they will come over and help us to keep the old flag flying’. At the
Curragh barracks near Dublin, General Gough, his three colonels and 55 other officers declared that they would
not move against the Unionists if instructed to do so. They received a written reply assuring them that they
would ‘not be called on to enforce the Home Rule Bill in Ulster’, and they were allowed to retain their
commissions.
To further help to understand the problem, the following is a quotation from a British Cabinet minute of January
1949 given by Mr MacBride:
So far as can be foreseen it will never be to Great Britain’s advantage that Northern Ireland should form part of
a territory outside His Majesty’s jurisdiction. Indeed, it seems unlikely that Great Britain would ever be able to
agree to this, even if the people of Northern Ireland desire it48.
The last phrase contains the operative words. The lesson of all this, concludes Bell, is that ‘the rich and the
powerful sections of a democracy will use every weapon at their disposal to overturn a popular majority,
whether it is expressed inside or outside parliamentary debating chambers’.
After Pearse, Connolly and the other revolutionaries were executed or killed in action, the revolutionary fire
could not be maintained among the mass of the people submerged for centuries in the slave mentality. To
complete the process a civil war was engineered by London and when it seemed not to start, due to the
possibility that de Valera and Collins —the two men who had stepped into the leadership breach after the
revolutionaries had been killed — might come to agreement, ‘Lloyd George sent over word to ask why not,
what was keeping it from starting”49. There is evidence that it was the secret service, distrustful of the dynamic
and dedicated Collins and eager to get rid of a man who might prove difficult to manipulate, who organised the
ambush which killed Collins and simultaneously stimulated a continuance of the civil war by having it blamed
on the then IRA. Shortly after the civil war had been started, both de Valera and Collins were trying to stop it
and this seems to have been their mission to Cork on the fatal 2 1/22 August 192250. Mr Churchill was then
secretary of state for the colonies with special responsibility for Ireland and he prepared a memorandum for the
Government on the Irish situation. Not wishing the memorandum to run the risk of being ever scrutinised by
researchers, he summarised it in a note to the cabinet dated 5 April, 1922 from which it is evident that civil war
was one of the planned options to defeat republicanism.
For the purpose of clarifying the record, it would be no harm at this point to answer the Northern Unionists’
charge, to maintain their sectarian hold and keep the people divided, that protestants were being persecuted and
had to flee to the North (as catholics were fleeing to the South). Only those protestants fled who had put
themselves in danger, by being active collaborators. (A country that, though 96 per cent catholic, had a
protestant as its first head of state and so far has had two protestant presidents out of six, can hardly be accused
of anti-protestantism especially when it is remembered that the idea of a catholic prime minister or monarch is
inconceivable in the United Kingdom, and that all across northern Europe there are both confessionalist political
parties and state-paid clergy, both non-existent in Ireland.)
In 1922 an obedient puppet government — not really a government, it was called an Executive Council — was
set up in Dublin whose members pledged under the oath of allegiance ‘to be faithful to His Majesty King
George V, his heirs and successors’. Ireland assumed responsibility for a portion of Britain’s public debt, left
certain ports in occupation by British forces, promised to give whatever assistance Britain might require in time
of war and agreed to leave one fifth of the national territory in British hands at least temporarily. The vice-regal
office and governor-generalship supervised the interests of the capitalist colonial class, which continued to
exploit the little resources Ireland had. The land was mainly used for typically-colonialist ‘dog-and-stick
farming’ to export livestock to Britain and much of the food continued to be imported.
Not least of Ireland’s lessons for revolutionary forces everywhere is to see how the hijacking of a popular revolution by a political party destroys the revolution. In British author Margaret Ward’s description, they began
forming an oppressive state in their own image, ‘lacking any trace of the idealism which had been at the heart of
the nationalist cause. Law and order and the necessity to impose harsh economic measures, particularly amongst
the poorest sections of the population, replaced the old ideal of the Republican Proclamation that all the children
of the nation would be cherished equally’. As the writer Francis Stuart said, the people who gained power ‘were
appalling — it wasn’t that they had never fired a shot, as is often said, but they had never gone short of a meal,
and that was more significant’. 1916 was well and truly buried although the country had to wait for another half
century before the capitalist Establishment class and their supporters in the Labour Party and the Workers Party
came out into the open and began to show their true feelings, because, as the great Maud Gonne MacBride put it
prophetically, ‘In Ireland an obscure prejudice, born of slave teaching, surrounds the words Socialism and
Communism, which even the clear thought and noble life and death of James Connolly failed to entirely dispel.
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Humanism in this case would be a true title, for Communism is the apotheosis of Christ’s teaching of the
brotherhood of man and the upraising of humanity’.
When de Valera came to power in 1932 he restored the people’s confidence in their ability to produce their
food, stopped paying the land annuities to British landlords, triggered an Irish industrial revival and won back
control of the Irish ports. But he was a separatist rather than a revolutionary, leaned heavily on the church in his
social ideas and used his influence with the masses to prevent the revolutionary forces from upsetting the ‘status
quo’. There is now however new revolutionary thinking beginning to appear and new lines being forged not
only with the radical left in Britain but also with the Irish in America to whom Mr MacBride referred in the
following terms:
Irish Americans are, in fact, more representative of the true Ireland than many of our slave mentality academics
and politicians.... The Irish who came to live in America escaped the psychological constraint of the slave
mentality from which so many of our people in Ireland suffer. They became free to think independently and to
speak out their minds without having to look over their shoulders51.
Among the Irish and other strands of the liberal left in the United States and Great Britain, there is a
groundswell against imperialism’s military arm, as there is a movement in its favour in the Irish Establishment,
fuelled by NATO and the militarists of the EC. The NATO softening up pressure on Ireland began in the mideighties. In May 1986 a British Tory member of the European Parliament made a strong attack on Ireland’s
neutrality and this was followed in June by a statement from the London-based Institute of Defence and
Strategic Studies, which, as I have said, is largely financed by the arms manufacturers and their big business
associates, characterising Irish neutrality as ‘essentially a national symbol with persistent anti-British flavour
arising from its irredentist claim to a United Ireland’. The Single European Act then committed Ireland to bow
to the major EC (and NATO) powers in political and ultimately military co-operation designed to turn Europe
into another war zone following the dictates of the arms manufacturers. Leading Irish politicians, taking their
orders from abroad, joined in the propaganda.
Here we have a typical example of how the politicians operate. When the referendum on the SEA was being
held, they combed the country denouncing those who maintained that Ireland was taking the first small step
away from military neutrality. Two years later the same politicians were kite-flying in order to get the public
accustomed to the idea, subtly supported by the media. Former cabinet minister Kevin Boland said in Now
magazine of August 1989 that ‘someone should look at how the media have manipulated political
developments.... Examination of the last two decades in particular would show the development of the media
“pundit” from the role of reporter and commentator to the now-established role of manipulator of the actual
course of politics’. Many senior media men are now so prosperous and influential that they naturally want to
buttress The System which rewards them so well. As for participation in European militarisation, directly or
indirectly the media get their money from big business, including the business of subsidiary production for
arms; and the first step on that road is involvement in militarisation or what is euphemistically called ‘defence’.
We have already discussed the linkage between Third World debt, armaments and the media, and if Ireland
should eventually allow itself to be dragged into arms manufacture, the money will not be wanting and the
people will be left with the bill.
At the present writing the EC has made a tactical retreat on its militaristic policy in view of the approaching
accession of Austria and Sweden to membership. It has to be borne in mind, however, that all the leading
powers of the EC bloc are massive producers and exporters of arms, have a vested interest in militarisation to
defend their economic colonies in Africa and the Middle East against disruption and have economies with a vast
infrastructure of subsidiary industries dependent for survival on arms production. They also form the major part
of the aggressive NATO alliance, while some of them also belong to the militaristic Western European Union.
The conjunction of all these powerful forces, the national arms and military vested interests combined with three
criss-crossing international military blocs, is bound eventually to swing the pendulum. In the words of an
editorial in the International Herald Tribune (Paris), ‘Europe tends to forget how vehemently it swings from one
mood to another about its future’.
In another couple of years, no doubt, the specific plans, already prepared, for military force and an integrated
arms production programme will emerge into the open in Paris, London, Brussels and other capitals. Irish
politicians will take up the matter with renewed vigour, the party whips will enter the fray and the party hacks
will scour the country, speaking within the closed circles of the local party committees. The promises about the
future may include such things as ‘No conscription for Irish youth’, ‘No nuclear bases on Irish Soil’, ‘No British
officers to modernise the Irish army’, ‘No Irish troops to be sent to fight Arabs or help to put down uprisings in
Africa’, etc. Thereafter it will be a matter of mere formality, an election or referendum can safely be held on the
issue, the outcome will follow the dictated lines, and once more it will be said that ‘the people have decided’.
This is the ‘democratic’ process by which they lead the people to forge the chains that bind them.
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The softening up process is continuing. A leading member of the Irish Establishment and ex-European
Commissioner has said: ‘It is difficult, for example, to debate industrial or competition policy or public
procurement without having regard to the defence strategy’, and he went on to quote the British defence
secretary in support of his arguments. The grave suggestion here is the linkage between defence, industry and
public procurement. When will the Industrial Development Authority get involved in the multinational arms
racket?
Considering the media monopoly over public opinion, there has been no national debate on the issue of Irish
neutrality or Irish participation in European miitarisation. What there has been, in the words of historian Ronan
Fanning, is a debate between Mr Haughey as head of the government and Mr Haughey as leader of the
opposition. It is a typical demonstration of political somersaulting. The element of truth that could save the
people from being made fools of is never considered to weigh in the balance or conscience to count even among
the ardent churchgoers. The same politicians who used to say that Ireland could not be neutral in the face of
‘Godless Russia’ have recently been arguing that the neutrality which was defined by military pacts can be
abandoned when these pacts are breaking up. It is always difficult to divine the hidden agenda behind political
pronouncements. In the present instance I have heard 3 lines of speculation coming from Ireland: the prospect of
having the national debt paid off over time in return for military bases on that strategic island; the possibility of
being in a position to draw off into military service the explosive unemployment that would result from any
massive return of emigrants from a world depression (also considered a possible option in dealing with
Continental unemployment, through increased militarisation); the slave mentality of the frightened
Establishment (subconsciously hoping to transfer ultimate authority to a foreign power base).
Be that as it may, France seems to be in the process of becoming one of the leaders in the next round of
Europe’s strategy. Paris is the European headquarters of the militaristic Sun Myung Moon empire and other key
organisms. It is also the home of the native-bred, half-hidden Fascist movement among highly-placed cadres
associated in such groups as ‘Le Club de l’Horloge’ and the GRECE (Groupement de Recherche sur la
Civilisation Europeene), loosely referred to as The New Right (not to be confused with Le Pen’s political party,
the National Front), whose objective is the conquest of the mind of man through a return to the toughness of
pagan times and a rejection of the ‘turn-the-other-cheek’ softness of ‘the pale-faced Galilean’. Through the
cadres of the ‘Grandes Ecoles’, the technocratic Establishment of high civil servants, and politicians of different
parties participating in the Masonic Brotherhood, they cooperate on all essential issues behind the verbal
slogging between personalities struggling for power, outbidding one another in zeal over electoral promises
which aggravate the problems without changing anything in the policies coordinated behind the scenes. The
socialists are the most zealous in maintaining the status quo, as if frightened of any ‘revolutionary’ stigma that
might be attached to them by potential voters. In this connection, it is of interest to recall that French socialism
broke away from the Communist Internationale at the Congress of Tours in 1920 particularly because the
Internationale condemned imperialism and sided with the subjugated peoples. And in the 1950’s the socialists
were among the most vigorous defenders of the empire and fought the imperialist war in Algeria with great
brutality, which included the systematic use of torture.
The ‘socialist’ party politicians take an equivalent stand elsewhere and the witchhunt of the militants in the
British and Irish Labour parties for example is part of the ongoing process of integrating the left into the
imperialist system.
Mr Benn, speaking from first-hand experience in British Labour has said (Ireland After Britain):
The Labour party leadership has in the past used the language of imperialist paternalism which goes right back
to the Fabian Colonial and the Commonwealth Bureau. Liberal imperialism has found its home in those sections
of the Labour Party which believe all the myths that the Tories have used to justify their oppression of other
people.... It’s part of the Labour myth that we ‘granted freedom’ to the colonies when all we really did was to
follow the age-old practice of the ruling class to withdraw when defeat was inevitable, but to withdraw just
enough to defuse violence or revolution and wait for a chance to reassert control another way at a later date.
You can take a domestic parallel at moments when British capitalism is in such trouble that the establishment
makes a tactical retreat to contain the working class. At that moment, in a strange way, they concede the right of
Labour ministers to run the system. They expect — and the Labour ministers often agree and use it as a selling
point — that coming from the Labour movement, Labour ministers would be better able to persuade the
working class to make the kind of sacrifices needed to put the system back on its feet. It is an historic failure of
the Labour Party in Britain that they fail to recognise how they got to power: to recognise that they are a
‘licensed opposition’ permitted to enter government on the understanding that they don’t change the system.
Unwittingly they harness the loyalty of their own supporters to allow the system to recover sufficiently to be
handed back to its ‘rightful’ owners. They think it’s a great working-class victory, and they muddle up having
Labour Ministers in office with having the working-class in power, which is quite a different thing. They fail to
recognise that without a fundamental change in the institutions of the other class you can’t make any real
change’.
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In the May 1982 issue of International Relations, journal of the David Davies Institute of International Studies,
the president of which is His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh, there was an article written by ViceAdmiral Sir Ian McGough, a former Royal Navy Commander for NATO’s North Atlantic Area, which said,
inter alia, that the strategic importance of the island of Ireland could hardly be exaggerated and for that reason it
was important for British governments to take a firm Unionist stand. Referring, no doubt, to the leftward veering
of Sinn Fein, he said that ‘if Britain should once again find herself at war ... she could not accept a militant leftwing government in Eire, with the prospect of military facilities being not only denied to Britain, but made
available to her enemy’. The Irish Establishment accepts these sentiments.
The other side of the coin is that the people of Britain and Ireland are awaiting broad-based leadership at local
level to start the process of change. With regard to Northern Ireland, for example, there is increasing
concordance between the British and Irish peoples. Here is what the English commentator, Paul Foot, says in
Ireland: Why Britain Must Get Out (Chatto and Windus, London, 1989):
There is a strange conspiracy in Britain not to mention this solution [withdrawal]. The government doesn’t
mention it, neither do any of the Opposition parties. The army hates it. The Press seldom discusses it. Television
and radio behave as though they are bound by law not to refer to it.
In spite of the silence, one significant group continues to support the idea: the British people. Opinion pollsters
are nervous of asking the simple question: Should Britain clear out of Ireland? When they do ask it, a majority
of the British people answer, with increasing conviction, Yes. Why do the government, the opposition, the
media and the armed forces so obdurately refuse even to recognise this growing and consistent majority?
They argue that the problems of Northern Ireland are caused by terrorism."
This is the classical answer of the imperialist mentality all over the world, considering every effort by the people
to assert themselves as subversive, which it is the role of the political parties to counteract by weighing in on the
side of the Establishment to restrain the people.
Paul Foot then adds: ‘Violence is not the cause of the problem in the north of Ireland. It is the result of it. Until
the disease is treated, the symptoms will go on breaking out’.
This is putting the finger precisely on the pulse of the world problem. And no less an international authority than
the official Norwegian Committee of the 19-nation (Helsinki) Conference on Security and Co-operation in
Europe stated in a 1989 report that it was wrong to dismiss Northern Ireland as a ‘terrorist’ problem.
I must now turn to Mr Sean MacBride. In A Message to the Irish People, he called attention to the mysterious
Trilateral Commission, the origins, objectives, membership and finances of which are ‘closely guarded secrets’.
Mr MacBride was nevertheless able to discover that its ‘founding fathers’ included David Rockefeller, Henry
Kissinger, Robert S McNamara, the man who pursued the Vietnam war with such brutality, and Zbigniew
Brzenziski, Security Adviser to President Carter. Members are classified into three different groups: North
American, European and Japanese. The European members included the chairman of the Rio Tinto Zinc
Corporation, Sir Anthony Tuke, and two of its high executives, Lord Shackleton and Mr M Litterman QC. This
company is closely linked with South Africa and the exploitation of uranium in Namibia.
‘There are strange shadowy links stretching out from the Trilateral Commission through Dr Garret FitzGerald,
Dr Henry Kissinger, Dr J Kenneth Whitaker, Mr Tony O’Reilly, (the multi-millionaire president of Heinz
Corporation) and the Royal Irish Academy’, which set up a National Committee for the Study of International
Affairs under the umbrella of Messrs Garret FitzGerald and Michael O’Kennedy, typically to include the two
major political parties supported by academics from the National University, of which Dr Whitaker is
chancellor, and by ‘eager functionaries from the Department of Foreign Affairs’. Mr George Berthoin, chairman
of the Trilateral Commission, accompanied by Mr George Ball of the US government, came to Dublin for the
inauguration of the Committee. Trialogue, the official organ of the Trilateral Commission, became, says Mr
MacBride, ‘essential reading for the staff of the Department of Foreign Affairs’, which, during the past 20 years
has become one of the most reactionary such departments in the world and one of the most subservient to orders
from abroad.
MacBride adds that ‘letters began appearing in Irish newspapers questioning the policy of neutrality’. The
National Committee on Foreign Affairs of the Royal Irish Academy organised a seminar on Irish neutrality. Dr
Kissinger was entertained to lunch first by Dr FitzGerald and next day by the Royal Irish Academy at Iveagh
House (Department of Foreign Affairs). All the Irish members of the Trilateral Commission were invited. Four
days later, US Vice-President George Bush visited Dublin and all the members of the Trilateral Commission
also met him at lunch. According to Mr MacBride, the Irish manoeuvrings are supported by large numbers of
Irish informers for the London secret service in the Republic. In the light of the extensive research work
conducted by the historian, Dr T Ryle Dwyer, on the enthusiastic spying for the British and American
governments during World War II by government officials, police and diplomats from neutral Ireland, not much
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imagination is required to guess the now, no doubt, much more enthusiastic spying by officials of an Irish state
apparatus that is neutral only in name.
Some members of the more informed public are wondering about the aims behind the activities of the nuclear
submarines in the Irish Sea. A minister of state for transport dismissed enquiries some years ago, saying that he
had no powers to institute an enquiry into the matter, adding in a perhaps unintended pun that ‘they were
operating in a very grey area’. Several trawlers have been pulled off course when their nets got entangled in
‘mysterious forces’ and in some cases it was subsequently found that trawl wires had been cut by underwater
acetylene equipment. In September 1989 a British Polaris submarine carrying a devastating nuclear load of 500
Hiroshimas narrowly escaped colliding with an Irish fishing vessel. There is an even worse possibility, a
collision with a passenger ferry, horrendous to contemplate. Such activities have to be considered in conjunction
with the fact of reconnaissance flying by NATO aircraft over neutral Ireland, which has been defended in the
Irish parliament with the argument that such aircraft ‘are not supposed’ to carry cameras or nuclear arms.
70 per cent of the US Second Fleet which patrols the seas off Ireland and are regular visitors at Irish ports have a
nuclear capability. So have the other fleets, all playing cat-and-mouse games around Irish waters with no protest
from Irish politicians notwithstanding the ongoing health hazard, not to speak of the danger of a nuclear
catastrophe.
MacBride discovered that FitzGerald had become a governor of the Paris-based Atlantic Institute for International Relations, a right-wing think-tank for NATO. An Irish tobacco firm, long noted for its imperialist
leanings, was amongst its subscribers. Other funding came from the Ford, Rockefeller and Volkswagon
foundations. MacBride also discovered that as a result of negotiations a number of senior British civil servants
were being inserted into key positions in the Irish civil service.
At a meeting in Paris sponsored by the Comité FrancoIrlandais, I put a question to Dr FitzGerald, who had
addressed the meeting on the subject of Irish foreign policy, whether he would be prepared to barter Irish
neutrality for Irish unification. He brushed the question aside with the remark that this was the kind of polemical
question posed in Ireland by the leftist extremists!
The Year of Armageddon, previously mentioned, says that ‘there are powerful voices in Ireland’s defence forces
who envisage Shannon Airport acting as part of an Atlantic airbridge’. This is no doubt one result of the purging
from the Irish forces through early retirement of the remnants of the old republican officer corps. It is therefore
perhaps not insignificant that the neo-Nazi organisation, Social Action Initiative, taking its inspiration from
General O’Duffy’s anti-republican Blueshirts in the 30s, has been active in the Irish army and navy.
In case all this may sound sensationalist, here is another little piece to fit into the jigsaw: On 25 August, 1989, a
prominent Dail deputy and Euro MP, Mr Barry Desmond, recalling his term as cabinet minister in the pre-1987
government, said that there was then strong pressure from the US government to take over Verolme Dockyard
in Cork ‘and turn it into an Atlantic defence station’. This statement was immediately denied by a representative
of the US state department and by Mr Desmond’s then boss, Dr Garret FitzGerald. But Mr Desmond clung to
his statement with vigour. So, once more, somebody is telling lies.
Here it is of interest to note reports of a linkage between American military research and a prominent Galway
politician and physicist who co-operated with US experts working for the military. One of the latter, Bernard
Vonnegut of Albany, has spoken of the matter, and other academics said that this was only the tip of the iceberg.
The government and the Industrial Development Authority admitted under pressure that several Irish-based
companies were already manufacturing components for the US and British military arm.
The Year of Armageddon reports that in addition to the pressures in Ireland itself, the British secret service and
British and American diplomats ‘wage a ceaseless battle in Washington to win the hearts and minds of strong
Irish voices on Capitol Hill’.
Given the general imperialist strategy among the OECD and NATO Establishments, of which the 12 EC
establishments are now the major fraction, and the grand design for world manipulation through media
manoeuvring to colonise the minds of the peoples of the earth, the Irish collaborators seem to consider the
historic Irish identity as a dangerous factor, expressed in such matters as its traditional revolutionary philosophy,
its long-standing neutrality from the belligerent powers, its anti-imperialist history and, above all, its old cultural
identity as expressed in its games and language. The last-mentioned is the greatest obstacle to the imperialist
mind.
The real architect of modern Irish independence was the language enthusiast, Dr Douglas Hyde, the co-founder
of the Gaelic League in 1893, and subsequently independent Ireland’s first head of state, perhaps the first if not
the only one in the world to have been chosen by unanimous acclamation without an election. The leader of the
1916 Revolution stated:’I have said again and again that when the Gaelic League was founded in 1893 the Irish
Revolution began’. And a recent commentator declared that members of the Establishment — enjoying the
wealth, the power and the prestige which they had gathered to themselves from the sacrifices of dead
generations, refuse to use the national language lest it should snowball and smother them.
On the left of the political spectrum, among those who like to be seen paying homage at the shrine of James
Connolly with a view to capturing the working class vote while carefully side-stepping Connolly’s ideas, part of
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the modern revisionism is to depict Connolly, the great internationalist and Marxist, as being neutral about
language and culture. Here is just one extract from Connolly’s analysis of the relationship between culture,
capitalist imperialism and the slave mentality:
"Just as it is true that a stream cannot rise above its source, so it is true that a national literature cannot rise
above the moral level of the social conditions of the people from whom it derives its inspiration. If we would
understand the national literature of a people we must study their social and political status, keeping in mind the
fact that their writers were a product thereof, and that the children of their brains were conceived and brought
forth in certain historical conditions. Ireland at the same time as she lost her ancient social system, also lost her
language as the vehicle of thought of those who acted as her leaders. As a result of this twofold loss the nation
suffered socially, nationally and intellectually from a prolonged arrested development.... Their children were
taught to despise the language and traditions of their fathers. It was at or during this period, when the Irish
peasant had been crushed to the very lowest point when the most he could hope for was to be pitied as animals
are pitied; it was during this period Irish literature in English was born. Such Irish literature was not written for
Irishmen, as a real Irish literature would be, it was written by Irishmen, about Irishmen, but for English or
Anglo-Irish consumption.
Hence the Irishman in English literature may be said to have been born with an apology in his mouth. His
creators knew nothing of the free and independent Irishman of Gaelic Ireland, but they did know the conquered,
robbed, slave-driven, brutalised, demoralised Irishman, the product of generations of landlord and capitalist rule,
and him they seized upon, held up to the gaze of the world, and asked the nations to accept as the true Irish
type.... Be it understood we are not talking now of the English slanderers of the Irishman, but of his Irish
apologists. The English slanderer never did as much harm as did these self-constituted delineators of Irish
characteristics. The English slanderer lowered Irishmen in the eyes of the world, but his Irish middle-class
teachers and writers lowered him in his own eyes by extolling as an Irish virtue every sycophantic vice begotten
of generations of slavery ... the Irish Gael sank out of sight, and in his place the middle-class politicians,
capitalists and ecclesiastics laboured to produce a hybrid Irishman, assimilating a foreign social system, a
foreign speech, and a foreign character....
One of [the resultant] slave birth-marks is a belief in the capitalist system of society; the Irishman frees himself
from such a mark of slavery when he realises the truth that the capitalist system is the most foreign thing in
Ireland."
Connolly then proceeds to analyse Labour in Irish History in his book of that title and shows in the process that
some of the historical practices and beliefs are still relevant today, practices and beliefs which pre-dated Karl
Marx, some of which are post-Marxist in conception, more applicable to present problems and in some ways an
updated version of Marxism. It might also be added that in Ireland decision-making was circular rather than
pyramidal.
Historical development has always proceeded from the great spiritual nucleus of the living cell to the amalgam
with the morphology of the dinosaur, doomed to extinction; from the village-city of Athens, to Greece, to
empire and collapse. The launching pad is the nation state, of the same essence as empire, directing its
nationalistic machismo from its capital city, first over its own people through the ubiquity, in today’s world, of
the political parties, the media which serve them and the educational system which buttresses the building. The
world’s terrorism is largely a reaction to this imperialistic takeover. It is perfectly natural that the Irish
Establishment builds its power on these three pillars and then extends itself into the arms of international
capitalism and extrapolates its ambition into a desire for military participation in the new Western empire. It
must therefore proceed to gradually wean the people away from their roots and the living sap that would give
them sustenance, namely the ancient language and culture. If only the people would abandon these resources
through the El Dorado being held out to those who speak Continental languages, if only they would devote as
much enthusiasm to the opium of capitalism s money-spinning ‘bread-and-circuses’ soccer industry as they have
been devoting to sport for sport’s sake in the ancient art of hurling, if all the schools would follow the example
of the snob ones in imposing a ban on Gaelic games in favour of rugby, if only the people would give their
children ‘up-to-date’ names like Dawn, June, Primrose, Heather and Robin instead of the old Gaelic names, if
only they could forget their ancient cultural roots and the Irish reconquest of Europe for civilisation from the 6th
to the 9th centuries, if only they would abandon their old dream of wanting to change the course of history, if
only they would stop being a thorn in the side of the Western empire, if only the working classes would accept
being manipulated by the Establishment politicians of the Labour Party and the Workers Party, if only
everybody would sit back and allow themselves to be indoctrinated by the press and the presenters of radio and
television chat-shows, then the legendary, Cuchulain-style enthusiasm of the Irish might finally be dimmed and
all might be well for the profiteering Establishment, and since, as the French say, a people without a past is a
people without a future, in some far distant time the Irish phenomenon on the world stage could become an
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exotic subject of residual research for eccentric professors burrowing among the ruins of lost civilisations and
forgotten languages.
In the context of your Irish case study as carrying implications for the world at large, all this would be of no
importance in itself but merely in so far as it symbolised the destruction of all minority cultures, the ultimate
triumph of imperialism, and indeed, as in the US state department’s prediction, ‘the end of history’. The
preservation of minority cultures is essential not only to curb imperialism but also to mobilise the energy,
creativity and enthusiasm of all the peoples of the earth for the development of planetary progress, peace and the
unification of mankind in accord with the scientific Teilhardian principle that differentiation unifies, or, as Eric
Fromm put it, ‘In order to experience love one must experience separateness’.
Speaking in praise of such things as minority cultures, languages and games is not the same as supporting
mediocrity against quality. Frequently it is the reverse. I have already referred to Irish literature being the oldest
in Europe after the Greek and Latin. Similarly in the case of games hurling is not only the oldest extant field
game in the world but also no doubt the fastest, most skilful and most spectacular. Even the rugby Triple Crown
and Lions captain, Ciarán Fitzgerald, now the national rugby coach, has said that hurling was ‘a unique game
that we should show with pride to people all over the globe. No other country has anything like it.’
The Irish slave mind discussed by Sean MacBride and other observers is a particular characteristic of the snobs,
the ‘sans noblesse’ who lack the capacity to be themselves because, reduced to mimetism, they have no Self to
be, and are confined to copying a bogus, borrowed culture and producing in themselves the anguish of
schizophrenia, so that their sons and daughters may perhaps join the rootless yuppies trying to discover their
identity on the psychoanalyst’s couch abroad, as we shall be considering under your next chapter. Living the
pretence of ‘believing in themselves’, in reality they believe in everything outside themselves, in social status,
the trappings of wealth and the lust for power. They are the people to whom Yeats’s ‘lofty self-possession’ is
unknown.
The slave mind and the provincial mind are two sides of the same coin. It has been examined in depth by
Desmond Fennell in a work which we discussed in earlier correspondence. It has also been considered by
Professor Kennelly of Trinity College, who says, writing in The Irish
Independent:
Provincialism is a pathetic state of mind and means that you want to be like someone else and live somewhere
else. It means that all the centres of excellence are never where you happen to be, and that your life must be
spent in a constant act of imitating and pining for that distant location of splendour and perfection.
Also, as a provincial, you feel compelled to knock the efforts of the locals, deride the genuine work of those
who are near at hand, probably cultivate a fake accent, and show what is meant to be an unquestionable
knowledge of the outstanding cultural events of the day. Above all, the provincial is a snob, probably a polished
snob; but under that pathetic polish, there is only a boring vacuum, the tedious personality of one committed to a
life of fatuous imitation. The provincial’s swaggering values are rooted in a deep-seated fear of being exposed in
all his pitiful emptiness.
The tragedy for him is that when he shakes the dust of his native heath off his feet and emigrates to his chosen
‘paradise’ he will be incapable of putting down roots there either. Unable to give himself with the necessary
enthusiasm to the advancement of his own society, he will still be unable to do it elsewhere and will probably
find himself turned in on himself for self aggrandisement with all the woeful personal costs which that involves,
especially in later life when the great show is spluttering towards its end.
In another work, The Revision of Irish Nationalism, Desmond Fennell deals with a related subject, the ‘Dublin
counter-revolutionary movement’ designed to foment revulsion against the Republican revolution, and
representing it as the outcome of nationalist ideology, a cuss-word to the empire builders. The academic
historians ‘began to formalise what had existed previously largely in journalism and chat-shows’. The outcome
has been a deterioration of constructive motivation among the people. Confuse their self-image, says Fennell,
make the people doubt the values they share, who they are or what they are, ‘do that to a people’s self-image
and their society ... falls into mutually paralysing factions, loses its collective will and motivation’ and ends up
with an identity crisis. The revisionists ‘provided a history which, far from sustaining, energising and binding
the nation, tended to cripple, disintegrate and paralyse it’. The identity crisis and the alienation of Ireland from
itself is now no doubt a subconscious factor in the massive brain drain out of Ireland of its brightest sons and
daughters, leading to that ‘internal exile’ which comes through as destructive criticism of everything Irish and
craven adulation of everything from elsewhere.
As I mentioned earlier and as has been argued by Eric Fromm and other leading thinkers, community, self-help
and the satisfaction that go with them are the enemy of both capitalism and the politics that promotes it, whose
ideal is the lonely, dissatisfied individual in a massified consumer society developing the hunger/satiety
syndrome and dependence on the political demagogues. A despairing cry from the heart for the restoration of
community came recently from one of the exceptional journalists, Nuala O’Faolain, writing in The Irish Times
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about the national euphoria surrounding a football team. ‘This state’, she said, ‘was founded with a great deal of
collective hope and joy. But that hardly lasted. The last thing we associate joy with now is anything at all to do
with politics.... This impulse towards neighbourliness, which is easily the best thing about Ireland, is not
reflected at all in our national institutions. It stretches outward from the individual to the family to the locality to
some sub-tribe to the tribe itself.... It is a form of citizenship. But it finds no home in party politics. In fact party
politics are far more sectarian than the individual life [sectarianism being, of course, the very life blood of party
politics though its demagogy pretends otherwise].... Yet I can’t bear to believe that the camaraderie, the joyful
Irishness of the last while have no way of settling into the national life and fertilising at least some part of its
deadly sterility.... Must we be Jekyll and Hyde for ever? Is there no symbol which might integrate us?’
In their effort to confuse the people, academics and media men subtly try to portray the centuries of struggle
against the imperialist takeover as an unworthy thing and constantly seek out detail or an ‘ignoble’ act
committed by individuals fighting for survival against what was the most powerful army in the world. Since
truth is a matter of relativity and can be distorted or destroyed when part of it is suppressed or factual details
presented out of context, the Great Lie results from ignoring the fact of invasion, expropriation, genocide and
the long reign of terror known as the Penal Laws. To read these Irish imperialists one is almost left with the
impression that it was the invaded who were the invaders and that the cry ‘To hell or to Connaught’ was not
driven home by the bloodiest of swords that left a land covered from coast to coast with wailing women and
children and a whole civilisation laid waste. To state this is not to indulge in any nationalistic self-righteousness,
for we are all the same band of brigands capable of the same atrocities: it is merely to indicate the depths of
cruelty to which we can be dragged by imperialist ambition especially when it is allied with religion, and to state
that if the world is not to perish in eternal revenge the facts of our depravity have to be faced fairly and squarely,
not swept under the carpet by the new Irish imperialists pretending they never happened. As Fintan O’Toole has
said in The Irish Times, ‘You don’t decontaminate traumatic symbols by evading them, only by struggling to
get to their factual and psychological core, by exploring what did happen and why....’.
Considering what has already been pointed out about the existence in the United States, as, no doubt, in other
countries, of hundreds of media men working for the secret service, considering Sean MacBride’s revelations
about the large number of Irish agents working for the British secret service — it would indeed be strange if it
were otherwise — and considering that handbacks to media men are now commonplace, the question will
sooner or later have to be very seriously raised as to whose Continental bank accounts may be in the process of
being garnished for Continental holidays in return for services rendered, part of the spreading corruption. The
media will no doubt argue that any such challenge would be an attack on freedom of expression when in fact it
is the opposite, a bid for freedom of expression against the Establishment monopoly.
The problem of what James Connolly called ‘the prostitute pressmen — the hired liars’, has been dealt with in a
scholarly treatment by two scientists already mentioned in another connection, E Herman, now Professor of
Finance in the University of Pennsylvania, and N Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in
their carefully documented work, Manufacturing Consent — The Political Economy of the Mass Media
(Pantheon Books, 1988), in which they expose the double standards and show how strategies are chosen behind
the scenes, issues framed and smokescreens set up.
The media men who specialise in picking out ‘atrocities’ committed by those struggling for Irish freedom
through the centuries rightly admire the British stand in relation to invaders, expressed by Winston Churchill in
his famous declaration, ‘We’ll fight them on the beaches, we’ll fight them on the streets, we’ll fight them in our
houses’, but turn their coats when it is applied to a subject country. They also indulge in tendentious
contradictions. Would they, for example, find nothing wrong with the German World War II occupation of
France, Holland or Norway and everything wrong with the innumerable atrocities committed by these countries’
national underground, nothing wrong with Russia’s post-war occupation of its subjugated territories and
countries and everything wrong with the atrocities of resisters, everything wrong with the atrocities committed
by Americans during their War of Independence, by Palestinians in the occupied areas, by Blacks in South
Africa or by anybody anywhere who ever fought back as best they could against sophisticated, organised
tyranny? Such hacks try to trap their readers in anecdotal bits of information and many of their readers become
willing accomplices in the Great Lie.
As in this letter generally, I am here merely using Ireland as symbolic of the world situation, in accordance with
your use of that country as a case study. We are not considering Ireland ‘per se’; we are dealing with an
infinitely graver issue, world imperialism and the subtle role of the media men in promoting it for their personal
advancement and pecuniary advantage.
Apart from the media, University College Dublin is singled out by Desmond Fennell as one of the responsible
agents in the revision of history. Since he wrote this, however, all the other colleges have obediently joined in
the chase (though in Academia as among the media men there are always the honourable exceptions, such as
Professor Donal McCartney, who has deplored ‘the passive evasion’ by a state department of education in
removing from the school curriculum the Famine, the 1848 Rebellion, the Fenians, the 1867 Rebellion and so
on, creating a truncated version of history). The academic revisionism is not unrelated to the fact that the most
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promising young historians of the post-1922 generation were brought to Britain to be re-educated and on their
return home to the Irish universities sowed the seeds that came to fruition a generation later. The result was a
decline in national self-confidence and the defective moral responsibility of a nation, like an individual, which
refuses to be itself and thus destroys its capacity to contribute anything creative to the onward march of
humanity.
Since ‘life imitates art’ and poets in particular have ever been the catalysts of revolution, as in Ireland prior to
1916, it is natural that those elements of the Establishment with some knowledge of these matters, namely the
academics, the media men and the script writers of the political parties, are especially worried about W B Yeats,
the 20th century’s greatest poet in any language according to T S Eliot, who was in a position to judge since he
was a connoisseur of the poetry of Europe in the original languages.
Yeats began his active public life presiding over the centenary celebrations for the revolutionary Wolfe Tone in
1898. In the view of the Establishment of the time, it was a bad augury for the future. In the view of today’s
Establishment it is still a bad augury considering that the people are now reportedly planning the most
spectacular celebrations the country has ever seen, for the bicentenary in 1998. Yeats, like the world’s eternal
artists everywhere, refuses to lie quiet in his grave, and, in the manner of the 16 dead men celebrated in one of
his poems, is beginning ‘to stir the boiling pot’ that spells danger for the comfortable ‘status quo’ of the
Establishment. It is therefore not surprising that his powerful plays are banned from the school curriculum and
only the innocent parts of his poetry allowed.
At the international Yeats Summer School in 1989, when I happened to be holidaying in Ireland, an academic
from University College Dublin, to the amusement of the distinguished foreign scholars trying to understand
Yeats and his times, cried hysterically, ‘I hate Yeats’. Media hacks, incapable of writing the meanest doggerel,
much less of understanding Yeats’s genius, using the old technique of employing humour to denigrate, the last
refuge of the small mind, cast snide remarks in his direction. One wonders when these revered gentlemen will
begin their demolition work on the last remaining fortress, Dr Douglas Hyde, or when they will desecrate the
graves of Hyde and Yeats with their grafitti.
A former cabinet minister and doctrinaire philosopher of the Labour Party — the man who has the distinction of
being the first in the West to introduce political censorship, who is reportedly proud that Mrs Thatcher followed
his good example, and who, socialist though he is, is a regular contributor to the old imperialist newspaper, now
owned by an Irish-American multi-millionaire, which called for the execution of Connolly in 1916 — objected
to the presentation of Yeats on stage.
‘The 20th century’s greatest poet’ does not need any defence from my modest pen. Suffice it to say in the
context of your present chapter that he has had a powerful influence even in Africa, that the Francophone
president of Senegal, Leopold Senghor, was a Yeats scholar, and that an American from Emory University in
Atlanta has taken on the task of presenting his plays in Dublin, to establish what he calls ‘an Irish Bayreuth for
the nineties’, a refreshing break from the all-pervasive atmosphere of ‘realistic’ rubbish with which the theatres
are bulging at the seams, pandering to the box office and putting the youth to flight.
The American director has said that Yeats is ‘the Shakespeare of the 20th century. To understand the
irrationality of the 20th century you’ve got to understand Yeats, particularly how Yeats dealt with it and then
came back to certain central reasons for living’. The pathway of Cuchulain is a pathway towards wisdom. Our
motor cycle gang leaders and tough young punks may have no inner values but, like Cuchulain in his
extravagant youth, they have a hint of the poetic towards which they could grow. ‘On Saturday nights and
Sunday mornings there are hundreds of 15-year-old drunks passing here (under his window) who never touch
that poetic part of themselves’. Yeats, he says, ‘is what Joseph Campbell calls “the wisdom literature of
Ireland”. He is the mystical vision of the Irish mind, and that is a view of life that has to be explored’.
Let me quote a few comments from the first programme of the festival.
‘Yeats founded the Abbey Theatre in the belief that the life of intellect and art is integrally related to the
political, social and spiritual life of a nation ... to maintain fruitful links with the past while forging an
enlightened pathway into the future’, which is what all great artists have always done. His life was a life of
service and heroic creativity, sustained by the figures from Irish mythology in which the human will faces
impossible odds, the blind forces of nature and the indifference of fate. Cuchulain is the Irish Achilles and
represents the sort of heroism which is ‘not to be equated with the crude versions of nationalist “machismo”
being touted round Europe on the eve of the Second World War’ when he was writing his Cuchulain epics, the
challenge of which ‘is one of the greatest facing contemporary theatre’ (Augustine Martin). It is hardly
surprising that, as mentioned in the programme, even Beckett said, ‘I would give the whole unupsettable applecart (of Shaw) for a sup of (Yeats’s) “The Hawk’s Well”’.
At a time when the arrogance of the West was still undiminished and the rat race had not yet become what it
now is, Yeats was a prophet in being an implacable enemy of the soul-destroying stress imposed on the
individual by the mechanistic materialism of the West. As we go into the last stride towards what promises to be
a dramatic turning into the 21st century, when everybody will need all the character and courage they can
muster, Yeats will be an important antidote to the antiheroic writing that now passes for literature and theatre.
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Two other authorities who might be quoted have the advantage that they are removed from the passions of the
present by being non-Irishmen writing a quarter of a century ago: William Walsh who was Professor of
Education in the University of Leeds and studied Yeats from the important viewpoint of the education of the
rising generation of men52 and Archibald McLeish, poet, scholar and statesman, assistant US secretary of state, a
founding father of UNESCO and three times winner of the Pullitzer Prize, who examined Yeats as the man of
the public world53.
There is now a belated admission beginning to penetrate even the hidebound educational establishment that, as
Pearse taught before he was executed, education is at the very pith of the predicament in which man finds
himself, and that especially at the adolescent stage man has a deep emotional need for mental excitement,
creativity and imaginative challenge. There is a growing awareness that the problems of youth suicide, drugs,
drink, vandalism, delinquency and violence, together with related problems in adult life such as stress,
depression, loss of personality and self esteem, marital breakdown, family dissension, and the need to seek
compensation in the trappings of power and wealth, essence of the imperialist mentality, may be related to
generations of passing false values from father to son in an educational process that stuffs facts into empty,
unmotivated heads, produces hypertrophy of the left side of the brain and human beings who are not only
psychically diseased but also pass the disease to the next generation through the social subconscious, the values
transmitted in the home and the educational and media system that perpetuates the fatal flaw. The vicious circle
can only be broken by a powerful imaginative impulse.
Freud argued that when one compares the healthy curiosity of the child with the closed mind of the adult one
almost loses hope for humanity. As mentioned already, the man who was the chief architect of the European
Economic Community, J Monnet, a practical man with his feet on the ground and his passion for economics,
said before he died, about the Europe he had launched: ‘If it were to be done all over again, I would begin with
culture’. Of such are the dying thoughts that would temper bourgeois optimism — too late. In accordance with
Durkheim’s theory of the social subconscious, the peoples of the West, and, under Western influence, of the
world as a whole, have become willing, if confused, slaves of The System, under the weight of generations of
educational indoctrination, massively supported in the 20th century by the media.
Psychologists tell us that it is vitally important for the adolescent — as well as his community — to construct
himself from within rather than having himself cast into a mould from without, to become a human being
capable of standing on his own feet, conscious of his own cultural roots and confidently looking forward to
building his own future, maintaining his own creativity and retaining the essence of his own spontaneity. The
loss of this capacity under the cold hand of The System is partly responsible for the identity crisis now
widespread among the young and the not-so-young. The fabric of mass education, produced when empire was at
its zenith, coincided with the culmination of that positivist thinking which raised the left or logic side of the
brain to mystic status, neglecting the right side, responsible for what is vital, personal and creative. Modern
neurophysiologists are calling for a restoration of balance.
Words and human logic represent only the skeleton of reality. If the individual is to be whole, psychologically
healthy and capable of creative understanding, he must reclothe them with the flesh and blood of his private
thoughts and feelings, with the quality of vision peculiar to the individual, related to the Rahnerian concept of
the existentialist, intuitional dynamism that grasps reality from within. This was what Yeats meant when he said
that the most important things were too subtle for intellect, or when he wrote
God guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone;
He who sings a lasting song
Thinks in a marrow bone
or when as the pen dropped from his hands he composed his final verse, his own immortal epitaph, related to his
‘stone in the midst of all’ theme,
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death, Horseman, pass by.
One is reminded here of the importance attached even by Nobel Prize winning biologist Jacques Monod to the
statement by the great Bergson that the rational intelligence is suited to examining inert matter but totally
incapable of comprehending the phenomena of life, much less the human phenomena. Yeats himself was under
no illusion that the Powers That Be would know what he was talking about, and this perhaps helps to explain the
fear of Yeats on the part of an Establishment bent on controlling everything and therefore frightened of what it
cannot understand.
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In Walsh’s words, Yeats is the ‘modern writer who is gifted more abundantly than others with what educational
thought most lacks: a quality of imagination which can make the immense, swooping leap, in appearance so
irrelevant, in reality so pointed’, described by D H Lawrence in the following comment: Such an imagination
‘makes curious swoops and circles. It touches the point of pain or interest, then sweeps away in a circle, coils
round and approaches again the point of pain or interest’, like some mighty bird of falconry trying to identify its
prey. Where the materialism of brute facts, which The System obliges teachers to stuff into the heads of our
youth, sees these facts from close up on the surface, unable to distinguish the wood from the trees, imagination
retreats, soars and seizes them simultaneously in perspective, context and depth, using the art of ellipsis which
Yeats brought to perfection, to add great power to his poetry.
‘Easter 1916’ shows this capacity brilliantly. Here we are not discussing political propaganda or nationalism; we
are discussing the imbrications of imagination, character and literature with the heroic world of action as distinct
from the petty world of the greasy till where motley is worn, sentiments which apply to every people, every
culture and every era. Yeats was not involved with the Irish cause because it was unique but because it was
universal.
I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road,
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it,
The long-legged moorhens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone’s in the midst of all.
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
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For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse— MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Such men had the kind of character that Yeats loved and
celebrated in those, akin to Maud Gonne herself,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern.
Instead of the common dream, says Walsh, they have a vision of reality that judges the cult of Pragmatism as a
mere lapse into unintelligibility, ‘the struggle of the fly in the marmalade’. This vision sees character as selfcreating, as distinguished from the passive product of external influences, through a man’s struggle and sacrifice
and the fascination of what is difficult, until
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy:
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly.
A terrible beauty is born.
The tragedy for most people, as Harvey Cox put it, is that they have no structure and drift ‘with the existing
current and the existing options of more or less similar lifestyles.... The heroic choice is a rare one’. Yeats’s
heroic option is reflected by another poet whose name escapes me:
To every man there openeth a way and ways and a way,
And the high soul climbs the high way while the low soul gropes the low,
And in between on the misty flats the rest drift to and fro;
And to every man there openeth a high way and a low,
And every man decideth the way his soul must go.
By contrast, Joycean nihilism and dissipation are now rampant, promoted by profiteering academics, media men
and snobs. Indicative of the antiheroic decadence that dominates society is the fact that while the mediocrity of
the intellectual snobs, brandishing their meaningless jargon ‘I am a Joycean’, has covered Dublin with
Bloomsday trivia and got a ridiculous monument to ‘Anna Livia’ erected in the heart of the city, the capital has
no monument to the man who was Ireland’s greatest inspirer in modern times, Douglas Hyde; Yeats has a —
magnificent — statue by the great Henry Moore, commissioned by a few friends, hidden away where nobody
can see it; Connolly, Pearse and the other pillars on whom the state was founded have nothing; and, typical of
the masculine society that governs, even the female politicians acquiesce in the fact that there is no visible
evidence that Maud Gonne, the greatest woman of the century, ever passed this way. Truly, Ireland merits the
lowly position to which she has fallen.
The capitalist establishment, profiteering from the status quo, frightened of having the skeletons in their
cupboard uncovered or the source of their wealth revealed, dismiss what we are saying as preoccupation with
dead men while happy to live off their wounds, owing their power to the sacrifices of the great.
Archibald McLeish points out that all the great poets of the past were public figures and men of action, and
when they entered the interior world of the spirit it was in relation to the great events of the City, where fate and
man were embroiled together. The Greek poets were all of this mind; Dante took sides in the political ructions
of his day; so did Goethe, Hugo, Byron and so on, and Racine, Corneille and Shakespeare brought the very
world onto their stage. Another example that comes to mind from many is that of Chopin nearly wrecking his
musical career in Vienna by wanting to return to Poland to fight in the uprising against the Russians, being
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finally restrained by family and friends. And several of the executed leaders of the Irish Revolution were
promising young poets, promptly dubbed terrorists by the reigning Establishment.
In our decadent times intellect, art and science have gone their separate ways, to the detriment of all three, each
bent on creating a world of its own and each largely separated from the world of action, leaving this also to its
own designs. McLeish, who knew it from experience, says that the very last qualification for appointment to
public office ‘by and with the advice and consent of the senate ... is, in the eyes of senators, the practice of the
art of verse’. And this notwithstanding the fact that ‘There was never a public world which needed as much as
ours or needed more urgently the kind of meanings poetry is able to discover’. Here in France this theme of the
desperate need for a poet to show the way in the gathering darkness has been taken up even by ‘pragmatic’
commentators on the politico-economic scene such as J M Domenach54.
The best way to know, says McLeish, whether the art of poetry can make sense of the public world in which we
live is to go to a poet who did. ‘The fact that the poet who tried most explicitly and most consciously in our
times was also the greatest poet of the time may add a certain interest to the pursuit’, namely W B Yeats.
All things can tempt me from this craft of verse:
One time it was a woman’s face, or worse —
and it was that woman’s face, that of Maud Gonne, who tempted him into political action, the presidency of the
Wolfe Tone Association and membership in the Irish Republican Brotherhood. For, Maud Gonne was not just a
beautiful face who inspired Yeats as his Muse, she was also an indomitable figure in her own right, an example
for any time or place of the redemptive quality of women and the power of feminine passion hitched to a cause,
as you can discover from a new book, by Margaret Ward, published recently in London:
Maud Gonne — Ireland’s Joan of Arc. There was a lifelong tug-o’-war between the two giants but it was Maud
who had the greater victory because not only did her beauty, her grace and her nobility inspire his poetry but she
also saved him from drifting away with the aesthetes. Maud was one of that extraordinary throng of
revolutionary women, including the beautiful Countess Markievicz, who stood shoulder to shoulder with their
menfolk, endured jail and hunger strike with them and in many ways shook the foundations of The System in a
manner men could not have done — another of the lessons for our times from the Irish revolutionary movement
when the women were partly drawing deep sap from that ancient Ireland in which women also played a proud
role. In 1949, old and feeble, Maud regretted the decline in the power of women in an oppressive masculine
society. She had been one of the first on the scene and one of the last to go.
Nelson Mandela is one of those men of action who has been inspired by the poem I have quoted at length above
but, like most modern commentators, whose wish is father to the thought, he misinterpreted ‘the stone in the
heart’ as making the heart stony with inhumanity, whereas Yeats himself explained it clearly as the firm idea of
down-to-earth reality and ‘its inner fire’ compared with ‘the flashing, changing joy of life’ symbolised by the
metaphor of the stream and its shimmering beauty. It was to the latter kind of life among the aesthetes that he
invited Maud as they walked along the seashore at Colleville. But Maud was made of sterner stuff than he was
and she stuck to her stone. His involvement in her cause was then to be expressed in innumerable practical ways
— for the greatest poets are the most practical men —to rid the people of their slave mentality and restore their
ancient pride, such as the institution of the National Literary Society, with its sub-committee ‘to consult with
Miss Gonne as to the best means of promoting her scheme of Reading Rooms and libraries’ throughout the land,
and, in the words of Margaret Ward, he ‘diligently went ahead with the task he was most interested in: the
selecting of books that would educate the spirit and nurture a specifically Gaelic intellect’.
It was his poetry, however, that was to have the most electrifying effect, powerful hammer-blows of the type:
The wind has bundled up the clouds
High over Knocknarea
And thrown the thunder on the stones
For all that Maeve can say.
Angers that are like noisy clouds
Have set our hearts abeat.
But we have all bent low and low
And kissed the quiet feet
Of Kathleen, the daughter of Houlihan.
In Louis McNeice’s words, Yeats began to use the English language ‘as though it meant business’, in, says
McLeish, ‘poems thrown like a handful of shot into the face of the political enemy’, the bourgeois Irish attacked
in ‘September 1913’ on the occasion of a lockout of strikers by the Establishment, a poem that could well make
today’s Establishment tremble who live by the same philistinism and profit from the same sacrifices of the dead
generations.
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What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till,
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone?
For men were born to pray and save:
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.
Yet they were of a different kind,
The names that stilled your childish play,
They have gone about the world like wind,
But little time had they to pray
For whom the hangman’s rope was spun,
And what, God help us, could they save?
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.
Was it for this the Wild Geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
And that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.
The Establishment do not even seem to understand the meaning of Romanticism — I have met some who
thought it had something to do with romance.
Yeats’s words here are re-echoed by a modern Irish revolutionary, Helena Sheehan, in Has The Red Flag
Fallen? (Attic Press, 1989). Referring to the new capitalism that has replaced what she had apparently believed
to be Marxism in the East, she cries:
Was it for this, I ask myself, that men and women gave their sweat, their tears, their blood, their
lives? Was it for this that they led clandestine hunted lives or were shot in the streets? Was it for
this they endured prison or exile or died of dysentery in the bush? Was it for this that they stormed
the Winter Palace? Was it for this that they buried their dead in the valleys of Spain? Was it for this
that they battled in the hills of Hercegovina?
Was it for this that my own generation marched on the Pentagon, picketed the Miss America
contest, cut sugar cane in Cuba, had our heads battered in Chicago or were fired upon at Kent
State? Was it for this that we have marched so many times to Leinster House, to the US Embassy,
to the Department of Foreign Affairs? Was it for this that we have risked our careers and our
security, endured the wear and tear of an endless round of meetings in cold rooms, spent so much
of our adult lives studying and writing and attending weekend schools?
After what he called ‘the grocers’ republic’ was founded, and notwithstanding his acceptance of a seat in the
senate, which infuriated Maud Gonne and was largely due to extraneous circumstances having little to do with
politics, Yeats would increasingly retreat to mount the winding stair of his great tower at Thoor Ballylee to write
scathing verses on the professional politicians and the corruption of the cause to which he had been dedicated.
Even before 1916, he had been attacking those parliamentarians and demagogues who were using the national
cause as a ladder to power, the eternal threat to revolution. To fully understand his disillusionment, however, it
must be placed in the personal context that finally made him both great and bitter: having pursued the passion of
his life, the beautiful Maud, through the long decades of ardent manhood, having loved and lost, having then
waited till he was over 50 years of age when Maud became a widow after her husband was shot, and again been
rejected, and having in desperation proposed marriage to her young daughter and also been rejected, the proud
man of distinguished family background was wounded to the core and came to partly disown the Revolution
that stole the love of his life, against whom he wrote bitter lines, as he did in a vicarious way against the
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beautiful Countess Markievicz. In his mind, both of them had further strayed from the path of righteousness
when they added insult to injury by becoming catholic Marxists, while Yeats became an elitist who dallied with
Fascism and hated what he called the mob, whom Maud and the countess loved, not limiting themselves to
being fair-weather Marxists but, like Connolly and others, sharing the lives of the common people and working
tirelessly for the poor, the sick and the oppressed, with the countess even partaking of their manner of dying
when she insisted on spending her last days as a patient in a pauper’s ward. The embittered Yeats referred to
such activities as ‘ignorant goodwill’.
These, however, are only details in the life of the poet, and, as McLeish pointed out, the blow which he had
struck at Parnell’s enemies and Ireland’s enemies was the same he struck at Hugh Lane’s enemies and the
Abbey Theatre’s enemies, the artist’s universal struggle against those ‘fumbling in a greasy till’, now as then,
for possession, prestige or professional patriotism, ever since, says McLeish, ‘the industrial revolution and its
consequences turned the old personal world in which the arts could live in public as well as in private into the
impersonal world of the mass society’, and Ireland, its romanticism ‘dead and gone ... with O’Leary in the
grave’, ‘had gained its fair share of the lying, the greed and the hypocrisy which now afflicts us all’.
Thanks largely to Maud, Yeats faced the problem squarely unlike the English aesthetes who retreated into the
clouds through escapist art for art’s sake, setting poetry above the world, making it a terrible goddess whom life
existed merely to serve, for the aims of women, wine or other futility. Yeats, on the contrary, following Easter
week, 1916, understood that the Ireland of the commonplace, the Ireland of the nonentities seen from ‘around
the fire at the club’ which existed to separate them from their betters, who made them the butt of their jokes, was
changed, changed utterly, and a terrible beauty was born, not in terms of propaganda but in terms of human life
and human history. Henceforth, the Ireland of the club and the Establishment which it represented would have
to take reality seriously. And, since the poetic vision is not limited to the narrow confines of its own time and
place, the Establishment everywhere is now being forced to face the drama it tries to avoid as it huddles together
‘around the fire at the club’.
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8 -
PSYCHIC AND RELATED SOURCES OF VIOLENCE
An implicit undercurrent in your material up to now has been the actual and, more significantly, the potential
violence that is being induced among the poor, the dispossessed and the exploited, struggling for survival
against the rich and powerful of the world. The latter category will be your chief consideration in the present
chapter. What Nietszchian superman complex of the Dallas-Dynasty variety drives those with an overweight of
wealth and power, like cancerous cells which function with no higher aim than their own hypertrophic
proliferation, to ceaselessly seek ever more wealth and power, and, if necessary in their feverish, carcinogenous
activity, to crush their fellowman and destroy his environment as they march towards the kind of summit that
has inspired every potential dictator and which, for all we know, may even now be beckoning to some future
tyrant of the Hitler stamp? Another question is how it comes about that the Establishment which has been
responsible in our present century for murder and slaughter on a monstrous, unprecedented scale, which, since
1945, has built a grotesque nuclear arms industry capable of annihilating hundreds of millions of innocent men,
women and children, and which continues to support brutality, oppression and exploitation of the poor to an
inhuman degree, continues on its way with an air of wounded self-righteousness in the face of a makeshift
reaction from what it calls terrorism. In the past these problems have been rather simplistically explained in
certain circles as due to such vices as pride, covetousness, lust, anger, self-indulgence and envy. But whence do
these arise and how might they be brought under some sort of control, not through the futile imposition of any
new religious, ideological or ethical laws from outside but anthropoligically from within?
Marxism, christianity and socialist bureaucracy all seem to have failed in persuading the possessor class to
identify the common good with its own, that is to reverse the philosophy launched with modern capitalism in
Puritan England, when the good of society was proclaimed to lie in the selfish pursuit of power and wealth, if
necessary by force of arms. The catastrophic succession of escalating wars and the almost inextricable situation
in which mankind is now caught should be sufficient to suggest that the doctrine is a disastrous one. But the
profiteers at the top continue to accumulate its benefits and their mouthpiece the media promote this liberalism
as almost synonymous with freedom, notwithstanding the clarity with which it has been laid bare by leading
thinkers down the ages, up to Eric Fromm and others in our own time. The exclusive, elitist mentality of those at
the top in our Western World, hardly hidden by the demagogy seeking popular support, betrays the same kind of
disdain for their fellowman as the racism that hints at the genetic inferiority of the coloured peoples with a view
to continuing dominion in both cases. How this dominant class might be peacefully taken out of their ivory
towers and ghettos and reintegrated into the fellowship of their brethren, of whatever race, religion or class, how
to render the cry of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity a real rather than an ersatz thing, is a subject you will be
treating later. Here you are merely concerned with attempting to point towards a diagnosis, with particular
reference to the most virulent aspect of the syndrome, the problem of implicit and explicit violence. Your subheadings for the analysis seem fairly comprehensive: violence in the animal kingdom; pathological
psychosomatic violence in humans; religion and violence; self-mutilation; sex and violence; the submerged
violence of the public arena in politics, sport and showbusiness; the inter-relationships between the various
forms of violence and frustration.
Beginning with the animal kingdom, you will recall our long discussion sessions sitting for hours in the safety
of the car watching the antics of the animals in the game reserves of East Africa, where we were able to enjoy a
little visible confirmation of the well-known fact that animal violence, unlike its human counterpart, is
essentially pacific, conservative and lacking the human factor of hate and revenge. As everybody knows,
carnivorous animals kill only to satisfy physical hunger and the lion is king of the jungle in the best sense of the
word in that he never throws his terrifying weight around but retires on killing his dinner to a quiet glade to play
with his family until hunger strikes again. And when the strongest member of an animal group or flock fights to
establish his leadership and his possession of the most vital females, this is purely in the interest of the species,
as is the relegation of the old and the weaklings to a declining position. Such is the Darwinian law of natural
selection and the survival of the fittest at the animal level.
Notwithstanding the predilection of Christianity’s founder for the poor, the outcast and the oppressed, social
Darwinism has become a predominant tenet of the so-called ‘christian’ West ever since the founding of modern
capitalism — with this difference: whereas in 16th and 17th century England they made no bones about it,
decried the poor and preached the survival of the fittest as a doctrine, today the Masonic Establishment at the
pinnacle of the pyramid, knowing the danger of a backlash from the lower classes on the lines of the French
Revolution, pay a great deal of lip-service to the poor while going about their business as usual and try to keep
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the underprivileged quiet by preaching a trickle-down process which is accurate in the sense that trickle indeed
it is, reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s ‘You can have the necessities, just leave me the luxuries’. And this is a spiral
of simultaneous hunger and satiety in which the appetite of the rich and powerful grows by what it feeds on.
As indicated before, it would be a great mistake and extremely unjust to the large numbers of generous-minded,
idealistic Americans to suggest that Europeans are any better than they. Nevertheless, it is of special value to
examine the problem at its most acute in a country of such immense natural wealth as the US, where the
controlling Establishment wields stunning political, military and economic power while the masses at the
bottom of the heap suffer such deprivation as they do. A further reason for considering the state of US society is
that for better or for worse what happens there tends to spread quickly to Europe and the rest of the world,
through the media, American power and the American presence almost everywhere.
Social Darwinism is not merely being promoted in spite of "christian" principles but also with their support, as
interpreted by the Fundamentalists from the Bible Belt and propagated by the massive christian broadcasting
services through the whole of the United States and beyond. The Judeo-Calvinist tradition relating misfortune
and failure to divine displeasure instinctively promotes social Darwinism simultaneously with its self-righteous,
religion-inspired militarism that seeks a scapegoat in the outsider, which, according to the modern school of
social anthropology led by René Girard, was the basis of religion itself in primitive society, from which it was
carried over into Judaic sacrificialism and self-righteousness through the good works of the law, and thence via
catholicism to a more virulent form in Calvinism.
I have here before me a few press cuttings referring to this Fundamentalism (which I mentioned earlier in
connection with military prayer breakfasts), where religion, conceived as a cure, becomes itself the malady.
William Claiborne of the Washington Post Service, in an article entitled ‘America’s Evangelicals: More Zionist
than Zionists’, says that the burgeoning Evangelical Christian movement, with some 40 million members, is fast
becoming one of Israel’s most potent allies. Some estimates put membership in the Fundamentalist movement
as a whole at 75 million. They include infatuated rightists who are convinced that the Jewish state will play the
central role in a final apocalyptic chapter of history. Some make pilgrimages to Israel and pay homage to its
leaders, issue warnings that a great conflagration with the Soviet Union∗ in the Middle East is a biblical
prophesy and promise that the United States will come to Israel’s rescue against the threat of ‘godless
communism’, presumably in defence of God-loving capitalism, as indicated on the dollar bill, ‘In God We
Trust’. An Israeli official described the Evangelicals as ‘a pillar that Israel has in the United States’. The most
dedicated of the Fundamentalists move to Israel with their families and set up ‘Christian’ kibbutsim, where they
live and wait for the Messiah. The movement’s proselytism goes over the airwaves of 1,300 Evangelical radio
and Christian Broadcasting Network television stations in the US.
The extreme to which this so-called ‘Christian’ broadcasting can go was illustrated in the International Herald
Tribune by William Pfaff, referring to a radio preacher he was listening to in Iowa who declared that Spain’s
King Juan Carlos was the Antichrist because he foiled a Fascist coup d’etat intended to save Spain from
bolshevism, thereby showing that they — the instigators of the coup d’etat —were on the side of God and
America. This kind of ‘jumbled prophecy, ignorance and political prejudice’, says Pfaff, is commonplace. ‘The
rich and sinister US gallery of cranks and screwballs, spellbinders, con-men and crooks have more than their
share of broadcast time.’ One of the candidates aiming for the presidency in 1988 was the Reverend P
Robertson, who claimed to have the ultimate political adviser: God. Surveys showed that over 30 million
Americans were tuning in to his cable television network and his followers claimed that his televised prayers
‘healed bones, gum diseases and even cancer’, and that when he visited Shanghai and preached in English the
crowd heard him in Chinese. Pfaff singles out major protestant churches as being responsible for the religious
chaos by their insistence that every man must read and interpret the bible for himself, a principle which the
protestant Shaw described as one of the greatest catastrophes ever to strike humanity. All of which is not to say
that the Roman catholic church has made much better hand of biblical interpretation than the protestants have
done, but there will be abundant opportunity in later correspondence to deal with Roman catholic error. In the
meantime, the dangerous ranting of protestant Fundamentalists in the United States seems to exceed even the
religious hysteria of men on this side of the Atlantic such as the Calvinist Ian Paisley and his fanatical followers
(‘Christ was not a peaceful man. Christ was a violent man ...‘ ‘Rise up Oh Lord in thy righteous wrath and strike
down our enemies....’ ‘Raise up the army of Thy Protestant brethren as Thou didst the Israelites of old’, etc.
etc.).
One of the characteristics of these Calvinist-style preachers is, as William Pfaff put it in another article, its
devotion ‘to the casting out of beams from their neighbours’ eyes’. Here he is placing his finger on what may be
the taproot of the problem of violence as expounded by René Girard (‘La Violence et le Sacre’; ‘La Route
Antique des Hommes Pervers’; ‘Des Choses Caches Depuis la Fondation du Monde’, etc.). The pessimism that
replaced earlier optimism, says Pfaff, ‘comes from those Puritan and Calvinist convictions about the nature of
God’s relation to man which formed the minds of 18th and 19th century New England and the Protestant South.
∗
This was written before the dramatic changes in the Soviet Union.
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This includes a strong element of predestination: The few are saved by God’s free grace, and the rest are
condemned.’ Worldly wealth and success being a sign of salvation, it is not surprising that the Judeo-Calvinist
Establishment attached God, of all places, to the dollar bill. Neither is it surprising that the puritan Dutch
Reformed Church in South Africa taught for 100 years that the bible justified racism, thus paving the theological
way for the evil of apartheid. This doctrine was belatedly and half-heartedly withdrawn — too late — in
October, 1986 when the writing was on the wall and the whiteman’s doom was already sealed there. (Some
cynics interpreted this move as another Calvinist effort to transfer to the winning side where God is.)
There are now many symptoms of the self-righteous search for the scapegoat which René Girard sees as the
most fundamental anti-christian vice. To pick a minor example at random at time of writing: the crusade
launched by the US government against drugs as ‘an external attack on America’, ‘a threat to national security’,
requiring the army to be sent into Bolivia to strike the enemy at its base. There was no effort by the
administration to initiate an examination of conscience that might diagnose the real source of the evil within
society itself. This aggressive effort in hygiene for the body politic is related to the similar attempts to find and
strike at foreign bases of terrorism, which, significantly, like the drug problem, has been frequently described as
‘a disease’, ‘a cancer’, a virus’, ‘a leprosy’, that can be eliminated through swift surgical thrusts by the military.
Hovering in the background behind this rhetoric was the shadow of ‘the Evil Empire’ and the attempt to localise
a focal point for possible elimination, to permit the ‘goodies’ to finally rid themselves of the ‘baddies’.
In an article in the International Herald Tribune, Stephen Klaidman discussed the role of right-wing Christian
movements in securing Mr Reagan’s election: Gary Jarmin and his Christian Voice, Jerry Falwell and his Moral
Majority (Liberty Federation), and other evangelical groups. Klaidman interviewed Jarmin, who had been a
member of Sun Myung Moon’s church before becoming a lobbyist for Christian Voice. Referring to the
Christian Right in general, Jarmin sgld: ‘We see the world as divided into two camps, God and Satan. It’s not a
struggle between Keynes and Friedman, liberal and conservative, but between good and evil.... The only moral
foreign policy the United States can have is one that calls for the total destruction of Communism....’
Such a philosophy, on the one hand hitched to the devastating power of the United States, and harnessed on the
other to what its adherents see as divine approval, is a terrifying recipe. It is the essence of what the West condemns as Islamic fanaticism. It is a system that sees no room on this planet for those who do not adhere to its
sinister belief, no room for pluralism, no room that is, for liberty of opinion, only a Nazi-style tyranny dictated
from the top. Klaidman concludes:
The result is the opposite of pluralistic democracy.
Dissent cannot be tolerated because it is inspired by
Satan, even if it is a disagreement about what seems to
be a practical foreign policy question.
‘At first blush it sounds a little scary’, Mr Jarmin said. ‘How can you reduce it to such simple terms? But you
can. You fine tune it so that the moral issue is seen as the key if not the only factor.’
It still seems scary. And not just a little.
Hitler, like all demagogues, understood that you cannot use
logic to lead the masses, turned to a flock of sheep by modern industrial society and the media. They have to be
mystified with a semi-religious mystique such as Hitler used through the Nuremberg night rallies, his inflamed
rhetoric, his racial myths and his pure-blood Germanic Aryanism.
René Girard has made an anthropological analysis of the pagan religious dimension of the world’s new terror,
the nuclear bomb, which lies buried in the earth like the egg of the ancient idol, is covered by the seas out of
sight as it prowls in nuclear submarines, or thrones in the skies above the high priests who manufacture and
control the sacred instrument, ready to apply sacrificial death to designated scapegoats, while the silent masses,
as of old, look on in ignorance and awe as the ‘priests’ make their futile plans to use violence to expel violence.
It is with an interesting sense of apropos, says Girard, that these priests of the new Golden Calf even give
religious names to their idol: Titan, god of infinite power; Poseidon, god of earthquakes and violence; Saturn,
the god who devoured his children.... Further irony is added by using the new nuclear power to send messages
to dead planets from a planet threatened with death.
Instead of denouncing the equivocation, those who most hold the eye and ear of the public, the media men,
delight in distracting the people’s attention with futility and trivia, seeking power as Goebells did by drawing it
from the masses who listen to them, read them and watch them.
Anybody who ventures beyond the media into the halls of Academia, says Girard, are informed that violence
has never so effectively exercised its old priestly role of malady and remedy and are so informed not by any
ancient ‘bourreaux’ like the Greek ‘pharmacos’ or the feathered warriors of the cannibals but by the same
experts in political science and peace studies who preach the natural goodness of liberal humanism according to
the process by which the primitives believed in their own goodness and the guilt of the scapegoat. One is left
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wondering, says Girard, ‘whether it is naivete or cynicism which predominates in the minds of these latter-day
experts’.
Shaw was not far from the mark when he defined the barbarian as the man who sees the mores of his tribe as the
only proper ones for the whole human race. If he sees them as a message from his god he is adding a terrible
new dimension to his barbarism. Flora Lewis, one of the exceptional journalists, writing in The New York Times,
pointed out that the last few years have seen a resurgence of Fundamentalism in many different societies.
"There are certain profound similarities in the theses advanced by the Red Guards who rampaged through China
a few years ago in the name of Mao Tse-Thng, the Ayatollah Khomeini’s wild-eyed Islamic disciples, the
orthodox militants of Israel, and the Americans who call themselves the Moral Majority.
Much as they renounce, reject and attack each othe?s presumptions, they all feel they know better than others
what is good and bad for society on the basis of revealed or nostalgic values. They are all moved to attempt
what they consider purification of what they see as social decay. They all proclaim simple rules defining good
and evil to save their worlds from devilish confusion.... They call for a higher order and bring disorder."
Here Mis Lewis isolated another constituent factor in this brew: the fear of ‘devilish confusion’, also an
anthropological parameter in primitive society at its cyclical crisis stage, as described by Girard.
Naturally you will find a much greater range of literature on these and related problems as they exist in the US
than I can find here in France, but one of the books I would recommend, viewed from here, is The Self Seekers
by Dr Richard M Restak55. Among other episodes, he refers to the Jim Jones cult of the 70s, a front of
benevolence and social activism. Jones was an impostor but given the deepening lust for power we can probably
expect to see the number of impostors increase, according to Restak. He quotes the case of even the prestigious
Harvard Business School which receives 4 or 5 fraudulent requests a week for transcripts and recommendations
from people using the name of a bona fide graduate: once they are received the name on them is changed and
the documents are included in a portfolio sent to prospective employers. This is hardly surprising since the
Harvard Business School itself teaches students ‘strategic misrepresentation’, taking advantage of their
‘willingness to engage in lying and other deceitful practices’. With such a philosophy in the universities, it is
hardly surprising that the Wall Street lottery is being partly played by swindlers, as witness the frauds in 1987
by high -level personages from the world of big business and banking who were involved in stock exchange
swindles amounting to billions of dollars, or that America’s number three car manufacturer was found guilty to
the tune of $7.6 million of selling second-hand cars as new ... and so on and on. Once more let me add that the
US is not the only culprit: Establishment figures elsewhere in the West have also been caught in major scandals.
Imposture is a natural consequence in our Western society, in which power and wealth are symptoms of success
not merely here below but, in the context of Judeo-Calvinism, in the hereafter besides, to the point that
ultimately the appearance of success becomes almost as important as success itself. Such imposturing is
illustrated in the television personality’s representing the pinnacle of achievement, in which a man’s image can
be prepared, packaged and sold to a gullible public as easily as a breakfast cereal. This public is the product of
an educational system, designed, as the Irish revolutionary Pearse showed, to turn out passive consumers,
collaborators and spectators incapable of thought, so that it becomes possible, to borrow Bernadette Devlin’s
words, ‘to dig the ground from under their feet and they won’t know they’re sinking’. Hence, as the rich climb
to wealth on the backs of the poor, the power-hungry are helped into the saddle by the masses of the very people
they exploit.
The climb to ‘success’, power and possession also has its effect on the young and the not-so-young in such
things as drug and drink taking, hippyism and suicide. People have become so indoctrinated with the idea of
competitive success to beat the other fellow, the notion that they are expected, even by their parents and
relatives, to become rich or famous, that they frequently crack under the strain. Psychiatric surveys show that
most of those who commit suicide are suffering from no clinical disorder. The problem often boils down to the
feeling that there are too many equal rats in the rat race. This is the important anthropological question of
undifferentiation studied by René Girard, who posits it as the first of the three phases in what he refers to as the
sacrificial crisis, a matter to which we shall return. Two basic aspects of the undifferentiation in modern society
are the disappearance of the generation difference and the differences between the sexes.
The lust for power and money is no longer confined to the male of the species. A study conducted jointly by the
American council on Education and the Higher Education Research Institute of the University of California,
covering a period of 20 years, 1966 to 1985, reveals that with the surge of women onto campus to outnumber
men, it is no longer primarily to study the humanities or develop a meaningful philosophy of life but for power
and money. Betty Freidan’s second thoughts have gone unheeded and her Feminine Mystique taken hold with a
vengeance she never intended in her starry-eyed youth. Money and power mean big business, salesmanship and
— why not? — the commerce of arms. There is little evidence either from history or modern experience to
suggest that women in power will be an improvement on men. On the contrary, prime ministerial female power
in Britain and Israel suggest that female lust can be as ruthless as the male variety and hardly justifiable by
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previous female subservience. Colette Dowling’s Cinderella Complex bears witness. Perhaps this may help to
explain the rise in alcoholism among women as highlighted recently at a conference in London, where one
psychologist blamed the fact that women were now struggling ‘in the traditional male world of power’.
This brings me to the problem of the sexes and your
subsection on sexual violence.
I shall confine myself to the sexual overspill in the purely human domain and not consider such environmental
aberrations as the killing of many thousands of seals annually for their genitals to provide aphrodisiacs for jaded
sexual appetites.
Dr Restak indicates that part of the violence syndrome is reflected in the conflict between the sexes and the
futile hope of merging with, being absorbed by, dominating or destroying The Other, who is both more
fascinating and more intolerable by being disturbingly different. Anger, envy and a growing sense of futility and
frustration from dissatisfaction with physical sex leads to the repetitive establishment and subsequent breaking
off of romantic attachments, which are often more a morbid fascination than the ‘love’ which our modern pop
culture likes to apply to them. The sex partner thus becomes an object of consumption like any other, a
component of the hunger-satiety syndrome fuelling desire, acquisitiveness and competition. The narcissism
present to a greater or lesser extent in most people — the attribute that drove Narcissus to his doom — also tries
at times to find in the other the ideal image it has of itself and then to hold him or her against competition from
rivals. This, as we have discussed already, is deliberately encouraged by the highly-paid psychologists behind
the media and publicity multinationals, who see in sex the strongest expression of the satisfaction-dissatisfaction
complex that is part of the consumer drive for a never-ending consumption spree that promotes the Keynesian
concept of the modern marketplace. Statistics indicate that physical sex, alcohol, tobacco and other
manifestations of the deviation of the libido tend to go hand in hand: eg data published by the French Centre for
the Study and Observation of Living Conditions show that far more non-married men and women living
together are heavy smokers compared with celebates and married people.
New studies in the human sciences are questioning the popular idea of ‘love’ as distilled by the pop-music
industry, the sexologists, the chat-show ‘agony aunts’ and other vested interests. The world best seller, The
Road Less Travelled by psychiatrist Scott Peck analyses, inter alia, the distinction between love and the
temporary heightened state popularly called ‘being in love’, which particularly strikes vulnerable people and
those in trouble, who may feel a need to regress to a safe condition of infantile dependency such as they had
with their mother as babies. When the ego boundary reasserts itself such people tend to ‘fall out of love’ again.
In this problem as in so much else there is now a tendency to return to the teaching of the Middle Ages, when
‘falling in love’ was considered a form of mental debility. When you ‘fall in love’ you want to bind the other to
yourself; when you really love you want to set them free.
Another study, by Charlotte David Kasl, Women, Sex and Addiction, argues that adrenalin tends to be produced
in great quantity at times of heightened stress, vulnerability or excitement and that ‘falling in love’ is really a
matter of adrenalin, which releases endomorphins in the body that give a feeling of well-being. The trouble is, as
with any drug, the effect tends to wear off. While it is on the addict becomes temporarily blind to the defects of
the other, when it wears off the defects are seen in a clear, rational light. But the mood, while it lasted, was so
ecstatic, that, as with any drug, the addict wants to experience it again in a new relationship, until that in turn
wears off. The problem tends to be particularly acute in those suffering from manic depression, with which it
has much in common.
All the Dantes and Beatrixes of all time, all the Yeatses and Maud Gonnes, are permanent reminders of the
creative power of spiritual sexuality and love, which has fuelled the greatest achievements in every field from
the arts and sciences to statesmanship and mysticism. As Teilhard de Chardin pointed out, a noble passion gives
wings to the soul. Love between people of opposite sex, forming the dyad on which progress is based, as distinct
from the dessicating monad, is the most creative force on earth, and there is, of course, no contradiction between
such a non-physically-consummated passion and physical fidelity to a spouse or to a vow of chastity taken by
religious celibates. The curse of modern times in this matter was the Victorian moralising dating back to the
Puritans and the puritanical Calvin which infected all the churches including the post-Reformation catholic
church. It was an exaggerated swing of the pendulum from the equally-exaggerated dissolute living of
Renaissance popes, prelates and others, in the same way that today’s exaggerated sex is a swing away from
Victorianism. The puritanical theology launched by Calvin called in the Law and authority of an ‘offended’, and
therefore non-existent, god to support a tyrannical human attitude in the eternal search for a scapegoat, using the
Old Testament warmongering Jehovah made in the image and likeness of man. A real God cannot, by definition,
be hurt, but man by his behaviour can hurt himself and those near and dear to him.
The real issue in sexuality, as Teilhard showed, is its role
as a psychic powerhouse or dynamo for the creative enlargement and motivation of the personality by avoiding
the Scylla of dessication that can arise when people try to ignore it and the Charybdis of dissipation when they
use it physically to excess. The uplifting greatness of the Eternal Feminine is ‘the promise that cannot be
fulfilled’. Dante, perhaps the greatest poet ever, raised the feminine to the level of inaccessibility and thus, in the
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words of Professor Liz Butler Culingford, male desire was not only infinitely frustrated but also infinitely
sustained, and thereby became the motive force for the highest creative action. During the ages when the
creative drive had to be channelled largely into the necessity to people the earth, much of it was used in the
production of children and the material activity surrounding the raising of the family. This is no longer a
concern. There will continue to be enough people desirous of founding a family to ensure replacement but more
and more people of both sexes will be able to find self-fulfilment and self-perpetuation in creative endeavour
and dedication to the cause of man.
The present tendency to dissipate sexual energy in orgasm is, no doubt, a passing phase. There are already signs
of a new evolutionary development taking hold of the most advanced growing point on the human phylum. The
snobs with intellectual pretensions, such as the presenters of television chat shows are too cowardly to admit it
for fear of being considered reactionary or being excluded from the flock of sheep mentality that battens on
received ideas. An example of those ordinary mortals not afraid to give expression to the new attitude was Liz
Hodgkinson, a pretty young Londoner at the time, living a celibate life since giving birth to her desired children.
Her husband, a prominent journalist, said that physical sex, which purports to be a bridge uniting men and
women, frequently turns out to be a chasm separating them. And his wife expanded on the matter in her book
Sex Is Not Compulsory56. Combining experience with scholarship, she issued a devastating critique of physical
sex from the point of view not of any religious code, since she belonged to no religion, but from the purely
human point of view in relation to physical and mental health, love and creativity.
Another example from among ordinary mortals is the
comment of rock star, singer and movie actress, Hazel O’Connor, who reached the crest of fame from Los
Angeles, speaking from personal experience: ‘People use sex to run away from themselves. Particularly
promiscuous people, who seem to be forever trying, as I was, to escape from a form of psychic dislocation,
thinking that the blending of bodies will close that gap. It won’t. All it does is to make you a slave of your
senses just the same as if you were addicted to drink, drugs or gambling.’
While the new evolutionary development has yet to emerge from its incipient phase, the principle of the
sublimation of physical sex into higher values is common knowledge since Plato and Aristotle and is
scientifically confirmed by the universal second law of thermodynamics. Furthermore, all energy belonging to
the ‘spiritual’ sphere —the force of gravity, magnetism, electricity, valency and sexually-inspired love —
constitutes a powerful factor of cohesion and construction, just as purely physical sex partakes of the domain of
the material where matter is by nature a factor of separation. In a broader sense, physical self-denial within
reason, including that in eating and drinking, contributes to the construction of the individual, the increase in
mental vigour and the achievement of high ambition.
Liz Hodgkinson draws attention to the modern increase in a form of violence to the human person, including
children, which goes hand in hand with sexual licence, namely violent atrocities such as rape and incest. More
than 1 million children and adolescents are now being kidnapped and sold for prostitution every year in the
world. Incestual practices and rape on young children in the home are spreading and many of these little
children die as a result. Because of the incurable psychic trauma inflicted on most of these youngsters, perhaps
the lucky ones are those who die. Some of the fashionable intellectual snobs — and here I am thinking in
particular of a prominent university lecturer and politician — who parade their sexual kinkiness in the market
place through the media, may, Pilate-like, wash their hands of the violence aspect, blissfully ignorant of the fact
that they are helping to set a pattern with which others may not be able to cope. Unfortunately, in this as in other
matters discussed in these letters, we are our brother’s keeper and the sexual licence demanded by such snobs
for the sake of so-called ‘liberty’ is not the way for those in high position to meet their responsibility to people
lower on the ladder. Another dimension to the problem is that many homosexuals become paedophiles preying
on innocent children, leaving them psychically handicapped for life. Nobody is safe from such marauders.
As I said already in a different context, we do not have either the right or the data to sit in personal judgement
and apportion guilt in relation to anybody and particularly those psychically sick or blemished such as
homosexuals, who, according to modern psychology, commonly acquire their sickness by no fault of their own
through unfortunate experiences in early childhood in the privacy of the home. It is another matter however
when such sick people among pseudo-intellectuals try to reassure themselves at the expense of society by
pretending they are not sick and spreading their disease among the unwary by going out of their way to draw
attention to themselves instead of consulting a psychoanalyst, ignoring the fact that the world authority, the
World Health Organisation, has for many years been classifying homosexuality as a mental disorder in its
International Classification of Diseases and that a characteristic of certain mentally afflicted people is a belief in
their own normality and the abnormality of the common man.
It should be added here that the rising suicide rates accompanying increasing sexual promiscuity is largely
ascribed by social workers to loneliness and relationship problems, perhaps related to capitalism’s ‘unlimited
expectations’ combined with mimesis, the belief that others ‘are getting it’ as seems indicated on television, that
this world is all there is, and that one had better hurry up before the gravy train passes one by. A related
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problem, no doubt linked also with unhappy homes, is the rising number of emotionally disturbed pupils
reported from the schools.
The enriching phenomenon of the passionate spiritual relationship between the sexes must, however, be
understood in the context of equality, not in that of the male domination that prevailed in recent centuries, which
saw the female largely as the passive inspirer of the masculine activist at a time when activism required a kind
of brute force that women did not have. That era is now — hopefully — ending, as cybernation, harnessing the
machine to the computer, takes the drudgery out of work and as a new phase in evolution leads us towards
increasing activism in the spiritual domain, in community work, science, the arts and all the forms of creative
thinking. Here, women can now come into their creative heritage in a new way that is infinitely more important
for humanity than biological creation. The feminine has a capacity for intuition, sensitivity and generosity that is
often superior to the average male tendency to acquire, to hold and to exploit.
You might broaden your analysis here to include a discussion of the pleasure principle per se, particularly in
association with power, wealth, sex and violence. Pleasure is a subject that has been exhaustively dealt with
over the centuries, beginning with Aristotle himself. It is also one on which there is virtual unanimity,
approximately to the following effect: Those of the lower mentality — which is not a reference to the muchmaligned manual work classes, often more dignified in this than the intellectual snobs — tend to enjoy the baser
or physical pleasures of eating, drinking, sport and spectacle as well as physical sex; the high mentality seeks its
pleasures in the things of the mind, in intellectual, artistic or scientific pursuits, in outgoing, altruistic action in
favour of man and his environment, or, in the case of the manual labouring classes, in work well done and
simple family and social pleasures. The snob promoters of free sex like to quote the sexuality of the ancient
Greeks, of the Renaissance artists or public figures such as Napoleon, conveniently forgetting that these men
were exceptions to the common rule, that their sexual exploits were only rare spasms, not a way of life, and that
those such as the decadent kings of the dying Middle Ages who indulged in unbridled sex wreaked their ruin
and sometimes that of their kingdoms in the process. Dissipation is a loss of physical and mental energy no
matter how appealing it may be. By comparison with the Aristotelian man who uses his higher pleasures for a
greater end than self-indulgence and who sometimes in his tense sensitivity falls over the brink, the self-seekers
make the self the final end and in the process lose the self, which they then often try to refind in the power and
possessions attached to the self, or, failing everything, in the futile, whispering of the psychoanalyst. This is the
meaning of Restak’s title, The Self-Seekers.
Some US psychologists described by Restak classify potential businessmen and politicians on a Mach (for
Machiavelli) scale. One of the Mach tests used is to place, say, $100 in the middle of a table between 3 trainees
playing the manipulation game according to the rule that there must be 2 winners who divide the money
between them as they wish, and 1 loser who must receive nothing. The means to the end is manipulation. The
high Mach shows considerable ability to lie and deceive without any outward sign of uneasiness, and, if caught,
to look the part of the innocent victim. The manipulator is so involved in projecting an image that he ‘becomes’
the role he is playing. Role-playing is reinforced through videos which lead the youth to become subconsciously
convinced that reality is what is programmed and fact and fiction are blended to the point that sometimes even
writers and producers of documentaries are not sure of what really happened. In some young intellectuals, this
may be influenced by the belief among certain astrophysicists and physicists that there may be no way of
knowing what the real stuff of the universe consists of and that we may have to limit ourselves to utilitarian,
subjective concepts of a purely theoretical nature, in which protons, photons, leptons, hadrons and all the rest
may correspond to nothing that physically exists.
‘Larger numbers of people are beginning to experience themselves as part of a television drama’ because, says
Restak, bombarded as we are with scenes of violence, both real-life and fictionalised, our nervous systems are
threatened with overload. ‘At this point in our history, the two trends of media hype and psychopathy have
intersected with inevitable results.’ The sheer numbers of people who experience problems with narcissism,
intimacy and the expression of anger are ‘simply astounding’. Their problems are emerging in the media and the
videos in the form of violence and raw sexuality. The disintegration of the individual is identified by Restak as
one of the causes of our collapse. It is a warning to us to remember that the disintegration of the individual was
also a factor that has been identified in preparing the soil in which Nazism took root in Germany. Thomas
Mann, no doubt the greatest German writer of this century, an authority on Western bourgeois culture, warned
his countrymen as early as 1930 that the cultural bankruptcy and the flight of the individual into the kind of
irrationality that is now plaguing us once more was a portent of Fascist tyranny. It was encouraged by the
economic collapse, the unemployment and the bankruptcies. In such circumstances, as in the 14th and 15th
centuries, people tend to seek refuge in the unreal and ultimately to find it in the all-powerful dictator.
The disintegration of the individual is the opposite of the integration of all elements of the human personality in
a harmonious whole and the person’s further integration in society, to which he contributes his talents. By
contrast, the disintegrating individual, like a drowning man, cannot but pull down whatever he touches and
nowhere is this power so strong as in the media. Probably at no time in history, says Restak, have individuals
with recognisable and identifiable mental disorders had such an influence in the shaping of a culture through the
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powerful effect that the media exert on contemporary life styles. The Hollywood community, for example,
particularly its writers and directors, ‘is notoriously overpopulated by individuals of borderline character
structure’. In this culture, sex has become ‘a fix’ rather than a fulfilment, not the giving or sharing which
according to Freud would be damaging to the Ego. The film and video industry, broadcasting around the world
what were originally the twisted personal values of a writer or director, succeed in having such values
incorporated quickly into society so that the media seem to be merely ‘telling it like it is’ and can move to the
next round in the escalation.
Part of the problem is that the media men have the masses by the throat, especially on television, but they are all
part of the same pattern and you will find so-called serious journalists in the written media writing what appear
to be critical analyses of television personalities to provide them with publicity in a game of mutual
backscratching. Such personalities, behind a pretence at openness and fair debate to mislead the gallery, at
which television is beamed to draw in the money through the commercial break, are in a position to operate the
most sinister censorship through their choice of guests and their control of the camera to switch away from
anything challenging their supremacy. Glib showbiz men on chat shows, with a superficial veneer of knowledge
about everything but understanding nothing, are thus involved in trivialising discussion of serious questions
which it has taken 2 ½ thousand years of the world’s greatest minds to elucidate. This bogus culture imposed
hour after hour on the people by the media is a serious interference with free thinking and therefore free action.
It is part of what Peter K Fallon of New York University, in an admirable phrase, calls the Disneyisation of
society. The popular chat show is also at the polar opposite from great tragic drama. Where the latter brings
catharsis the former brings confusion. And confusion, in the Girardian analysis, is the first phase of the violence
syndrome leading to the sacrificial crisis.
The historian Sigfried Kracauer57 has shown the effect of Germany’s weird interwar films in helping to prepare
the irrational ground for the rise of Adolf Hitler. Life imitates art, as Oscar Wilde said. And man imitates man.
We would like to believe that the individual is non-conformist but he is not. With extremely rare exceptions
men are a flock of sheep. In this connection, René Girard goes back to Plato as the root of Western
misconceptions. Plato spoke of mimetism of manners and considered it to be good. But Plato — like Aristotle
after him and nearly everybody since — missed the point in mimetism, mimetism of appropriation or
acquisition, a conflictual dimension — the same servitude of common desire among people unable to choose
their own object of desire unaffected by the choice of others. Mimesis, competition, hate and violence involve
heredity and anatomy, including both the paleocephal and the neocephal areas of the brain, imagination and
impulse, but the mechanism operates only in the social context, where the brain acts principally as an organ of
imitation. As R D Laing pointed out, there are no basic emotional instincts outside human relationships. Henri
Laborit, a French worker in this field, says that there is no instinct of appropriation — it is a matter of
apprenticeship. This is related to the post-natal increase in brain size in the human. Self-fulfilment involving a
constructive role in society is necessary for the construction of the individual. In Teilhardian terms such a role is
at its best in the form of ‘a great ambition held in common’ with society at large. This is related to Exupery’s
statement that ‘Love is not two people looking at each other but both looking out in the same direction’. In the
opposite way, the violence syndrome in the Girardian analysis involves the dilemma of the doubles, which also
appears in writers like Dostoievski, Kafka and Carlos Fuentes, and is related to Hegel’s diagnosis of desire for
the object becoming desire for The Other. The Other can constitute a subject of morbid fascination, a competitor
or an obstacle standing in the way, watching — and producing the situation described by Restak of shame
replacing guilt, and combining with acquisitive mimetism to develop frustration, greed, lust, envy, personal
anger against others and the search for power, leading to that generalised individual and social disintegration
which results in the need for a scapegoat, to be followed by his destruction — sacrificially in primitive society,
by war in more modern times.
We would need a whole chapter to discuss the related and intriguing problem of the modern mass-man in our
‘democratic’ system subconsciously identifying with the politician of his choice, on television or at the political
rally, because he has been rendered incapable of the cerebral effort of distinguishing and discussing issues and
reduces himself to a pale reflection of his political hero. The powerful politician, aided and abetted by his
psychological groom and media men, plays a role which in effect says to his audience, ‘Recognise yourself in
me; it is not necessary for you to speak to me of your problems, I act in your place’. This hallucination of
affective adherence, which short-circuits democratic debate, conveniently confounds the 3 terms of the problem,
the communicator, the communication and the receiver, creating the kind of confusion which has enabled the
Hitlers of history to climb to power as the omnipotent, omniscient man-god capable of solving the problems
which the people were brought to feel as matters of psychic identification with a father figure, the Oedipus
complex in another form.
René Girard points out that for the obscure thing called
mimetic desire to ferment and proliferate as it is doing in our modern materialist society, there had first to be an
attenuation of the prohibitions and differences that pertained in religious societies. What the capitalists like to
refer to in their bourgeois optimism as ‘unlimited expectations’ is merely the first rung of the ladder, the
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opening of the sluice-gates of mimetic desire in which the model eventually becomes the rival in the rat race. As
the Greeks said 2,500 years before Girard, the best way to punish men is to give them what they clamour for. In
the case of mimetic desire they continue following in the wake of their modern gods such as Freud and
Nietzsche to clamour for its liberation long after all the barriers have been pulled down. This clamour is now a
hypocritical one uttered by those who as indicated already are afraid of being considered reactionary in the eyes
of their peers. Instead, however, of any clear-cut obstacle or enemy for attack, there is the dilemma of the
omnipresent enemy on all sides, the omnipresent scapegoat. It includes the family, the Freudian father, the boss
or a competitor at the workplace, the husband, the wife, etc. The problem is exacerbated by the unemployment
problem, the widespread lack of self-fulfilment and the consequent absence of catharsis. Mimetic desire is thus
becoming an endemic disease of modern society compared with the epidemic thing it was in primitive society
where it was periodically expurgated through the lie of the scapegoat mechanism. The scapegoat has become too
diffuse in our day and few people beyond the die-hards believe any more even in the ‘evil empire’ designated by
the servants of the warlords as the enemy we were supposed to be ready to combat. The search for new
scapegoats among the Arabs will prove equally futile.
We are left, says Girard, with the psychotic plague of schizophrenic desire when there is no further unanimity
on a scapegoat that would provide a satisfying bloodletting. The schizophrenia is further accentuated by the fact
that the object of desire is the fruit that is forbidden not in the Freudian sense by a generally-applicable moral
law under the Judeo-christian code but by Everyman, who shows it to be desirable by desiring it for himself.
This non-legal interdiction by our fellowman is the one that really wounds the psyche and all the more so when
the subject sees the rival as justified in his victory because of his seeming superiority. The rival then becomes
simultaneously the model. The rival-model takes on an aura of self-sufficiency, authority, competence or
handsomeness which increases the disciple’s envy. The syndrome is intensified by being based on false
premises since The Other is merely seeking reassurance for his inferiority by means of his conquests. If and
when the losing party gains the upper hand and secures possession of the desired object or position, the appetite
may grow by what it feeds on and impel it forward to further conquests. This often happens for example among
film and media stars largely dependent for their position, power and prestige on the continuing acclaim of the
fickle masses and thereby feeling vulnerable. They are frequently driven for reassurance into repetitive divorce
and remarriage when what is referred to in popular jargon as ‘love’ is a form of mimetic desire. This, like the
adrenalin problem and linked with it, may become so strong that each new victim proves dissatisfying and the
subject has to proceed to a new conquest that offers greater resistance, as when the victim is already possessed
by a powerful rival-model. Ultimately, in his metaphysical hubris, the conqueror may aspire to nothing less than
an insurmountable obstacle.
It thus becomes clear why the most aggressive power brokers are often those who suffer from a gnawing
inferiority complex which needs ever more satisfying proofs of its nullity. Lord Acton was only half right when
he said that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. We are all corrupt by nature and
power merely provides the agar in which it can flourish. At group level the desire for power and position
prompts men to gain access to the ladder by banding themselves together under a terrifying oath in the Masonic
conspiracy to control the world.
Girard points out that in its final phase mimetic desire may be satisfied with nothing less than the climb to
Superman and the dethronement of God, the very conception of which drove Nietzsche to madness by its
dizziness. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing and Nietzsche thought he was copying the Dionysian
principle of the Greeks. The Greeks, however, were men of moderation and the Dionysian ‘ivresse’ was due
merely to occasional ritual, wine or feasting, never to the reasoning will to power as in Nietzsche. This latter is
the hubris that precedes the fall, as it does in a notable manner with tyrants of the Hitler stamp. Hitler is
classified as a necrophiliac, which tends to listen to the siren calling over the cliff. This is the unconscious
pursuit of failure and self destruction, which lower down the ladder often ends in alcohol, drugs or suicide.
Without the revelation that mimetic desire is an endless tunnel, the subject sees in every new object of desire the
ultimate answer, before disillusionment and the beginning of a new search. The futile belief is entertained, says
Girard, that ‘beyond the last fortress guarded by the last dragon the ultimate treasure lies waiting’. At a lower
level, the profiteers of the consumer society batten on this factor in the syndrome of simultaneous hunger and
satiety. But we cannot use them as new scapegoats, for we are all in this boat together, all equally guilty.
In Girardian terms, society is thus entering a planetary sacrificial crisis, which in primitive times was always
preceded by an orgy of indulgence and promiscuous sex that broke all the prohibitions and taboos before the
guilt for the breakdown was placed to the account of the chosen scapegoat prior to his destruction and the
creation of a new religious cult. We can hardly deny that now, as in Rome before the fall, a widespread orgy of
pleasure-seeking is accompanying the competition, the violence, the militarism and the spreading interest in
religion and religious sects, with the ultimate hope of the biblical Fundamentalists to ‘live in peace with the
Lord in the New Jerusalem’ after the destruction of the baddies. The interest in religion and new religious sects
is not limited to the West. In successful, materialistic Japan, for example, the Annual of Religion published
regularly by the Ministry of Education shows 44 religious sects for 1945, 186 for 1950 and approximately 300
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today. What is more, the combined totals of the faithful in all the religions is almost double the Japanese
population, showing that many people have a double or triple affiliation. The youth in particular have no
hesitation in declaring that they address themselves to the gods in time of difficulty with a view to obtaining
specific things. Exorcism is also widespread. Some large-scale industrial undertakings have their own temples at
the workplace, usually dedicated to a protective patron saint. Pilgrimages to holy places are also
common~.
In addition to the spread of religion, we also have a desire, like primitive society, to put an end to violence by
one last act of violence. Failing polarisation on a scapegoat, which with modern weapons would be terrifying
beyond imagination, there is also the danger of that spreading violence which prompted Heinrick Heine to
predict that civilisation faced destruction in an outbreak of fighting for fighting’s sake. Whatever may be
coming or however it comes, there is increasing unanimity among authorities from various disciplines that
mankind is now hastening towards a major upheaval, fruit of several centuries of folly. René Guenon refers to it
as the end of a cosmic cycle which will affect the whole planet and all humanity. The American and United
Nations research economist, Ervin Laszlo [The World System
— Models, Norms, Applications; Goals for Mankind, a Report to the Club of Rome on the New Horizons of
Global Community; (with J. Bierman) Goals in a Global Community
—2 vols.; The Inner Limits of Mankind; A Strategy for the Future etc.] bases his well-documented projections
on numerous authorities from a broad range of subject-matter fields.
At the very moment when a peaceful solution to the world’s problems became of vital urgency, the West
lurched dramatically in the wrong direction. The latent aggressiveness which is natural to it suddenly became
strident under the US president, an aggressive new government in Israel and Mrs Margaret Thatcher, an
insecure, hysterical person who sought compensation in permanent confrontation. Virtually the whole Western
Establishment, including socialist governments such as those in France and Spain, quickly followed suit as if
propelled by some unseen determinism, such as that of the Masonic Order. The reaction from the oppressed
peoples did not take long to manifest itself with renewed vigour, and what the Establishment refers to as
‘terrorists’, compared with its own ‘freedom fighters’, received a new lease of life.
Lazlo sees this aggressiveness compounded with a coming world wave of state bankruptcies and its enormous
consequences in turning the hungry masses into raging revolutionaries. Strikes, insurrections and riots, he
believes, will become so commonplace that police and military will be outmanoeuvred and outnumbered. Some
governments will be in such a financial plight that they will be unable to adequately meet the increasing costs of
police and military, sections of which will revolt due to the combined effects of increasing danger, inadequate
compensation and reluctance to open fire on their hungry fellow-citizens. ‘Coups d’etat’ will not be uncommon,
with leaders demanding greater severity. Armed bands will terrorise the community. Nuclear generating stations
will have to be closed down for fear of sabotage. Electric current will be rationed, creating more difficulty for
factories....
Another renowned scholar, Alvin Toffler, futurologist and historian of civilisations, says (The Third Wave, Pan
Books) that we are facing an era of the most explosive social upheaval of all time, tearing families asunder,
rocking the economy, paralysing our political systems, shattering our values, filling our days with increasing
turbulence and violence. As we are jolted by crisis after crisis, ‘aspiring Hitlers and Stalins will crawl from the
wreckage and tell us that the time has come to solve our problems by throwing away not only our obsolete
institutional hulks but our freedom as well’, sending the forces of tyranny jackbooting through the streets. And
all the while, says Toffler, the men at the top continue squabbling for the deck chairs on this sinking Titanic.
Such predictions join up with René Girard’s thesis of the planetary sacrificial crisis preceding the return of the
divine, and with what other authorities see as not merely a change in society but the most radical mutation man
has ever known. One of the problems is that the ruling Establishment is frightened, behind a façade of bravado
which history shows tends to be adopted like the proverbial dying kick. The bravado has an increasingly
hysterical tone, another sign of weakness. Here is how one US commentator put it in the New Brunswick Home
News of 15 October, 1988: ‘These disparate strands are united only by fear. They seem to be afraid of
everything: the Soviets, the graduated income tax, Dan Rather, unions, Blacks, Latins, environmentalists and
peace activists. Some are so demented they are even afraid of Nicaragua, which has the population of Brooklyn.
It was part of Reagan’s genius that he made this fear seem to be courage.’ Fear, however, is a bad counsellor. Its
counsel for the past 40 years has been the escalation of force. But at the present stage in the evolution of a
planetary problem involving nearly 6 billion people, confining control to crisis management is, as mentioned
earlier in another context, trying to build a bank of sand against a tidal wave. The falling giant lashes out at
everything in sight, as the drowning man pulls everything down with him. The present efforts by the ruling
Establishments to impose order from above rather than elicit it from below is, as quoted in a previous letter,
doomed to failure and can only result in greater disorder.
We are now approaching the end of a bimillenium, always a significant landmark for humanity. The christian
era began a bimillenium ago, the Jewish race a bimillenium before that, urban civilisation a bimillenium earlier
and the neolithic revolution a further bimillenium back, all major turning points for man. According to
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Machiavelli — no mean scholar, whatever may be said of his political philosophy —all institutions must return
to their origins, or they fail. The beginning of the bimillenium which is now ending heralded a situation that was
not very different in essence from our own. The ‘rouleau compresseur’ of the Legions was maintaining a
precarious Pax Romana a little like the Pax Americana today. Violence was being contained with difficulty
through the ‘panem et circences’ that resembles our social security and spectator sports. There was increasing
confusion in men’s minds that was not being satisfied by the rampant religions of Roman, Greek and Jew, in a
world gorged with temples and backed by a powerful politico-religious hierarchy that extended from the
Emperor or Supreme Pontiff in Rome, Head of the College of Priests, to the High Priest and Sanhedrin in
Jerusalem where over 20,000 priests were associated with the Temple. In the Greek world, the elite of thinkers
preached the originally Oriental philosophy of escape through Eros to a heaven of pure spirit above the clouds,
away from a body and a material world that were essentially evil, much as the Oriental gurus are preaching
today. They were all bent on placating a Deity by offering sacrifice, incense and worship and, in the case of the
Jews, multiplying taboos and prohibitions, so that when the christians are first met by history around the middle
of the 1st century, they are found being accused of atheism, pacifism and refusal to participate in the established
cults, with the result that ‘if the Tiber rose too high or the Nile not high enough they threw the christians to the
lions to please the gods’.
These christians proclaimed allegiance to the leader of a group of illiterate fishermen and simple folk and a
larger number of down-and-outs, who was stated to have been executed in Jerusalem as a provocateur. Who was
he, what was his message and how did he speak of the rampant class distinction, religion and violence which he
met head on and which were his undoing? That is the question you will be taking up in your next chapter.
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9 -
THE ORIGINAL REVOLUTION
Notwithstanding our media massage, the constant effort to prevent the masses from thinking, the sensationalism
over straws, the spectator sports mania, the political parties arguing over non-essentials, the spectacular electoral
circuses, the obsession with gross national product irrespective of its use, the endless plans to stop the
haemorrhage of unemployment, the ostentatious display of Establishment confidence about escalating
expansionism in spite of the surpluses of everything, the seeming security behind a Maginot Line of mounting
arms production, the Judases among the intellectuals abdicating their responsibilities as radical critics and
selling themselves for lucre in defence of The System, the consumer merry-go-round and spending spree, there
is a secret suspicion in the body politic that all is not well and that even our much-vaunted ‘progress’ and
technological innovation may be a Frankenstein in the process of turning on its inventors. Nihilism is rampant.
An increasing number of people are becoming aware of the similarities not only with the dying Medieval
civilisation prior to its collapse, which we have discussed already, but more specifically and pointedly with
Rome before the fall. Rome too had its intractable problem with inflation and unemployment, its spectacular
shows, its ‘panem et circenses’, its faith in military might, its politicians vying for power, the hordes watching
across its frontiers, the extravagantly wealthy class with their luxury apartments in Rome and their secondary
residences in the Alban Hills and Ostia, the decadence in the arts, the megalomania in buildings, the effort to
bolster externals when interiority was eaten away, the orgies, the violence and the hedonism, the refusal of
childbirth, the promotion of abortion and the flight into weird religious sects originating particularly in the
Oriental provinces.
When what C A Robinson called ‘the final, overwhelming tragedy’ came in sight and the disintegration began in
earnest, a new organisation was accepted into the cracking structure to buttress it, made up of people who had
been persecuted and decried on and off for the previous 3 centuries. They were known as ‘christians’, after a
certain Khristos, Christus or Chrestus to whom they declared their allegiance, who had been reportedly executed
as a malefactor in Jerusalem round about 30 AD. Through the storm that raged for 500 years, sweeping
everything in its path from the shipwreck of Empire, and through the subsequent 500 years of the
reconstruction, these christians had a combination of three essential things that nobody else had: the organisational structure, transcendent motivation and what was to become the Benedictine work ethic coupled with
the physical, mental and moral vigour issuing from self-denial and austere living. They saved civilisation.
The question must now be asked whether history might repeat itself in the resurgence as it seems about to do in
the collapse, whether the message announced in the antique, Judean-Greco-Roman world 2,000 years ago has
any relevancy to the problems of today and whether christians with either a deformed or improved interpretation
have anything positive to contribute now in relation to the threatened demise of the modern Rome. Since the
14th century, the christians either abdicated from this world and concentrated on the hereafter or joined the
world as in Puritan England and engineered a situation where Christ and Caesar were hand in hand. The
planetary turbulence now intensifying and accelerating is only partly a problem of economics and politics. The
increasingly gratuitous violence and confusion, the drugs, the search for satisfaction in spurious sects and sex
and the upsurge in youthful suicide particularly in the families and neighbourhoods of the wealthy are
indications that one must probe more deeply. For ‘they are as sick that surfeit with too much as they that starve
with nothing’. Shakespeare dixit.
At the end of the tunnel in which we seem trapped, there are many who see no light but that of the train coming
towards us. The military, racial and other external forms of confrontation are partly an expression of an inner
malaise. Man is not merely divided against man but divided against himself. An increasing number of even nonreligious people, non-believers and non-christians in positions of authority are becoming worried about the
breakdown in ethics and rules of public and private conduct, as reflected by alcoholism, drugs, suicide, child
abuse and violence in the home. The decay of public morality includes corruption, dishonesty and a decline in
fairplay at the workplace, where whom you know often replaces what you know and the hidden hand of
Masonic intrigue influences appointments and promotion. Consumers are often the victims of sharp practice in
production, the sale of inferior goods and the adulteration of foods. Some people are beginning to ask
themselves why should altruism be better than egoism, why should truth be superior to lying, why should the
rich or the powerful be concerned about the poor and the weak, why should peace in the home be more valued
than sexual conquest outside, why should self-denial be above self-indulgence, why should suicide be subject to
moral censure, and so on. It is unlikely however that morality can be restored without transcendent sanction,
religious commitment and personal faith. In the absence of these, morality declines into theoretical and
equivocal social customs and conventions, and what one can get way with tends to become the real benchmark.
In social intercourse the Newspeak is more widespread than many people suspect.
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Under these circumstances, an increasing number are losing their footing on the shifting sands. Suicide rates are
notoriously difficult to establish with accuracy, but here in France, where the rate is lower than in several other
Western countries, 35 people are estimated to die every day by their own hand, with 270 attempted suicides in
addition. Large numbers of others in all countries, in a vain attempt to find stability or meaning, have recourse
to clairvoyance, astrology and weird religious sects. One is reminded of Chesterton’s comment that when men
cease to believe in God they are ready to believe in anything. On the other hand christian believers are now a
tiny minority, perhaps less than 2 per cent of the world population after subtracting children, the non-practising
and those practisers to whom sabbatical observance is merely a family tradition, an agreeable social custom or a
pious refuge. ‘How many battalions does the pope have?’ is how Stalin was reputed to have put it. To many
people we are entering a post-christian world, christendom is in the process of passing the baton of humanity’s
relay race to other forces, and popes, presbyters and priests are on the way out. To Freud christianity was a
useful though painful myth that produced European civilisation, an infantile illusion arising from the fear of a
divine genitor as a constituent of the Oedipus complex. To Marx the christian religion, like all religions, was the
opium of the people. To Feuerbach God was an anthropomorphic projection of man. To Nietzsche he was
another name for Superman. All these philosophies contain half-truths: they are accurate to the extent that they
were perhaps legitimate attacks on their contemporary christianity as covered with the dross of the centuries, but
questionable in that they were pronounced by subjective-minded individuals with an axe to grind and a chip on
their shoulder, who did not dig deep enough or wide enough to find the real roots.
To uncover the essence of christianity it is necessary to go
back to the beginning.
History first encounters it around the middle of the 1st century and more particularly in relation to Nero’s
persecution in the early 60s when its chief leaders were executed and many of its (according to Gibbon’s
research) roughly 7,000 members in the city were thrown to the lions, into boiling oil or to the fury of the mob
to be stoned to death.
What were they accused of?
Of atheism, pacifism, impiety and blasphemy. Refusing to participate in the religious practices that formed the
foundation of society, they restricted themselves to private meetings for prayer, discussion of the Word of their
Master and the celebration of what their calumniators called ‘love feasts’. They pleaded particularly for the poor
and the outcasts of society, whom they took freely into their midst, basing their workaday lives on communist
cells where ‘they had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods they gave to everyone
according to his need’, simultaneously insisting on the vital importance of work, a dual philosophy that predated Marx by 18 centuries, but without the violent component in Marx. To these christians all men were
brothers to be eventually united in universal love. They repudiated power, money, violence, and established
religion. Man was the new norm. What was good for him was promoted, what was bad was discouraged. In each
urban centre where they preached the most radically revolutionary message ever heard by man, the new
fraternity set up an ekklesia or assembly of the people parallel to the civil ekklesia — a subversive act. But it
was their irreligious attitude that drew down on their heads the real wrath of the authorities, from the High Priest
and hierarchy in Jerusalem to the Supreme Pontiff in Rome. Some authors have accused the christians of being
at least partly responsible for the fall of the Empire by the corrosive effect they finally had on religion, together
with their turn-the-other-cheek ‘softness’, though whatever it was it certainly was not softness, considering the
persecution, torture and fearful deaths which they constantly faced without flinching. The secular history of
those first three centuries has abundant records of the trials and executions for their anti-religious attitudes.
Interrogated, tortured, ordered to participate in the religious ceremonies, directed to call down the curse of the
gods upon their Christus, threatened with dire consequence of the type, ‘I have lions at my disposal’, and shown
the faggots being prepared for their immolation, they serenely declined to obey. And then they went calmly to
their deaths praying for their persecutors. Gibbon estimates the number of christians executed in the city under
Diocletian alone at about 2,000.
The problem of the intransigence of these people remains
to be examined.
As Dr Johnson said, no man can provide another with understanding; only the means can be offered. Here I
propose to point briefly to some of the means you might wish to pursue in your research into the only real
question of today, the one on which all others hinge, the answer to which determines whether life and human
activity have any ultimate meaning, and which, in the present context, constitutes for anybody who still retains
some capacity for thought, against the mounting indoctrination, either a clarion call to save society from
disintegration or an invitation to join the merry-go-round of the hedonist spree:
By what authority did this subversive fraternity of men stand the world on its head 2,000 years ago? Who or
what was the executed provocateur who elicited their unswerving loyalty?
According to the oral and written reports of his followers, he was from an out-of-the-way backwater called
Galilee, a place whence, it was said, nothing good could come, in the distant Syrian province of Palestine. But
worse than the place was the man: claiming to be the long-promised Messiah of the Jews though he contravened
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almost everything that was sacred to the race; a penniless, homeless knockabout, sleeping rough, at best a mere
manual labourer; belonging to no authoritative class in the ordered structure of society; attacking the Scribes and
Pharisees who were the upholders of God’s Law; denigrating priest and hierarchy; neither trained in theology
like the doctors of the Temple nor ordained to its ministry like the priests; equally keeping his distance from the
nationalism of the Zealots, from the holy monks of Qumran and from the established church; preferring the
company of down-and-outs, reprehensible characters and public sinners; calling for no novitiate, initiation rite
or distinctive clothing among his chosen leaders; setting an example of criminal casualness; holding no mandate
from High Priest or Hierarchy; not content with facile pronouncements on abstract human rights from the
comfort of any palace but sharing the life of the lowly and setting an extremely dangerous precedent in his dayto-day practise of liberty, equality and fraternity; weakening religion by advocating an end to a thousand-yearold theocracy; telling the religious authorities that they had no right to judge and that they would themselves be
judged by the way they judged others; carrying support for society’s outcasts beyond all reasonable bounds;
upsetting the social order and declaring that the first would be last and the last first; denouncing power and
wealth; eating and drinking with non-Jews and strangers and conversing with those of ill repute such as
publicans and prostitutes notwithstanding the biblical injunction that ‘the wicked shall not be thy guest’ and that
‘sinners must be destroyed from off the earth’. The finger of accusation was pointed straight at the man who
‘takes care of sinners and eats with them’. The Psalmist had declared with all the authority of his sacred
function:
‘Blessed is the man that hath not walked in the counsel of the wicked nor stood in the ways of sinners....’, and
followed this by what was to become one of the innumerable JudeoCalvinist beliefs applauding the lover of the
Law who will be blessed in seeing that ‘whatsoever he doth he maketh to prosper ... for the Lord knoweth the
way of the just, but the way of the wicked doth perish’. ‘This was the expectation of your people, the saving of
the virtuous and the ruin of their enemies; for by the same act with which you took vengeance on our foes you
made us glorious by calling us to you.’ The Galilean abolished this retributive justice.
He defied the lawmakers and defiled the sabbath, called God’s Temple his house and emptied it by force of
those who were necessary to its proper functioning as a place of sacrifice, excited the crowds and spread doubt
and sedition in their minds, preached the brotherhood of all mankind, telling the chosen people that they were no
better than anybody else and that they must love foreigners as much as Jews, sinners as much as those who
abided by the Law, demanding the rejection of just revenge and its replacement by unlimited forgiveness of
enemies, condemning rite, ritual and sacrifice, stating that the heart counted more than religious observance,
arguing that true greatness lay in ~justice and mercy and faith’, in humble service of others and in the creative
use of talents. He repeatedly asked for blind faith in himself, blasphemed, making himself equal to the Most
High, announcing his oneness with the One, the Unseen, the Unnameable. He forgave sin without formality or
consultation with the priests, and against the divinely-appointed experts who taught that the Law was the way,
declared solemnly that he was the way. While every founder of movements throughout history said ‘Here is the
truth’, he alone made the strange pronouncement that he was the truth. All the Buddhas of the world say, ‘That
is the way’; he alone declared that he was the way. The slogan of the rich bourgeoisie might be said to be, ‘This
is the life’. Christ announced that he was the life.
The collision was inevitable and the outcome a foregone conclusion. A young trouble-maker with a rag-tag of
followers, who finally deserted him when the pressure came, against no less than 20,000 priests led by the
Sanhedrin and sure of the power of Rome to maintain order if the chips were down. And if his simple-minded
friends had ever been tempted to toy with the absurdity that The System would allow itself to be toppled so
easily, this ‘folly to the Greeks and scandal to the Jews’ was finally quenched on the eve of the Sabbath, when,
as he hung, head bowed, on a hill outside the Holy City, piteously pilloried between two thieves, unable to
move, he slowly reached the last, lamentable spectacle of his impotence as an ignominious death removed him
from the world and his followers dispersed and fled, disillusioned with a short-lived dream. The most aborted
revolution in history. Law and order, religion and sacrifice could again reign under the watchful eyes of the
politico-religious authorities. The disturber of the peace had been eliminated and The System could proceed on
its hierarchical way, in which everybody knew his place and kept it. God would continue to reign in heaven
where, as from time immemorial, He would receive sacrifice through His appointed representatives, the priests.
The hierarchy would reign between heaven and earth, and Caesar, the Supreme Pontiff of the Romans, would
maintain the Pax Romana throughout the workaday world.
Or so it seemed.
But, lo and behold, suddenly, 7 weeks after the execution of the lawbreaker, on the very feast celebrating the
law, his followers, like a wind from heaven, were everywhere, crying from the tops of the little flat-roofed
houses and in public places, right up to the entrance to the Temple, that the Galilean had risen from the dead. He
was God Incarnate now indwelling in all who received His Word and kept it.
Before discussing the new fraternity’s claim that their founder was non other than the Son of God, creator of the
cosmos, and thus the ultimate authentification of their revolutionary message for mankind, it will be necessary
first to consider the plausibility or otherwise of the contention by examining the question whether the very
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existence of a god is sustainable at all. A first question to be elucidated concerns the ambiguous term ‘god’, the
imagery it conveys and the relationship it could logically have with anything bordering on reality. The
expression has been so used and abused down the centuries that an intellectual of the status of Thomas Aquinas
hesitated over its meaning. Buried for a million years in paganism, from which we have been liberated only 20
centuries ago, the social subconscious is so impregnated with pre-Revelation notions of god dating back to the
childhood of the human race that many people find it difficult to escape from an anthropomorphic concept of
some kind of old greybeard above the clouds, fount of wisdom, governor of Law and Order, eternal Eye
watching critically over the affairs of men in the manner of the old Jehovah of the Jews or the gods of pagan
Greece and Rome.
Clarification of the problem of ‘God’ and his/her/its existence and nature can never, of course, eliminate the
mystery before the end of time; elimination of the mystery would be the elimination of God. Nevertheless, it is
the work of science and human reason to push the frontiers of knowledge as far as they can go, until the mystery
really becomes a mystery, transcendent, and man is brought finally face to face with the mystery of the ManChrist, the only plausible case of a man claiming to be the godhead and, at least according to the reports of his
followers, proving the claim in his person, his words and his deeds, a positive figure beside whom all the
Buddhas and Krishnas pale into historical insignificance.
The three branches of learning, science, philosophy and religion which could jointly bring most light to bear on
the question of the existence or non-existence of God have been turning their backs on one another for several
centuries and going their separate ways to the detriment of all three. While the philosophers wander in the
Platonist clouds of abstract speculation, splitting straws of verbosity into multitudinous pieces, and the religious
denominations follow their respective forms of sacerdotalism, traditional authority or biblicism, clinging to their
different churches, the scientists delve deeper and deeper into the recesses of matter, analysing ... analysing ...
analysing ... into electrons, protons, neutrons, photons, quanta, pions, muons, neutrinos, leptons, hadrons,
baryons, mesons, gravitons and gravitinos until reality disintegrates under their gaze and they are left with a
meaningless shambles of abstractions beyond which they cannot go. The universal man of the Middle Ages is
no more and we are suffocating under what Barzun has called ‘a menacing heap of knowledge’. As Chesterton
said, ‘The collapse of intellect is as unmistakable as a falling house’.
It might be thought that the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Science, the highest such academy in existence,
which is in a position to assemble the world’s leading scientists, would be the body to give a lead, but it prefers
to discuss extraneous subjects which could better be dealt with elsewhere. This is strange, considering the
Roman church’s long tradition, from the church Fathers, indeed from St Paul, via Thomas Aquinas and a host of
lesser lights, down to Hans Kung and especially Karl Rahner in our own time, of insisting on the possibility of
intellectually proving the existence of God and the divine sonship of Christ, by contrast with the traditional
protestant attitude dating back to Luther’s burning of Aquinas and condemning reason as a prostitute and the
tendency towards a spill over from the protestant ‘salvation by faith alone’ to ‘faith by faith alone’.
I had the privilege in 1970 of attending a session of the Pontifical Academy for an afternoon in the majestic
grandeur of the Vatican Palace (and afterwards being received by Pope Paul VI). It was a salutary experience to
listen to this eminent body, studded with Nobel Laureates, for several hours without understanding anything, as
they discussed the structure of a humble substance, water, which I had naively thought to be a simple little
combination of hydrogen and oxygen. One can imagine the importance of such an academy bringing together
the world’s leading astrophysicists, Jew and Gentile, atheist and believer, together with atheistic and other
philosophers, and theologians from all the religions, to examine the origin of matter and the processes of
cosmogenesis not as a once-and-for-all dilletante or public relations gesture to science but as an ongoing process
on a regular basis. What a new Renaissance there could be for thought, a pluralistic search for the truth that
could set us free. ‘Diversification unifies and union diversifies’ — that is the scientific lesson from the whole of
cosmogenesis. It applies to the human phenomenon more acutely than to the world of nature. The philosophers
could thus be brought down out of the clouds, the producers of religion and biblical fanatics could be introduced
to a new examination of the facts and the scientific specialists could be initiated into a constructive synthesis
which might reduce the wasteful piling up of what Jacques Barzun, Ortega y Gasset and other leading thinkers
have referred to as our mountains of useless information.
Today’s disintegration of scholarship would have been incomprehensible to a Thomas Aquinas, a man who
stood firmly at the junction between the three disciplines but believed experimental facts to be primary. This is
not to suggest that we should go back to the now largely-outmoded content of Thomism, for Aquinas himself
said that it was less important to know what people thought in the past than to know what science can tell us
about the present. This was also Aristotle’s view, as against Plato’s abstractions. The purpose would be to
restore the art of unbiased synthesis of all the elements necessary for a determined search for man’s benefit
through truth. Aquinas did not hesitate to call in the pagan Aristotle and the philosophers of Islam to participate
in the intense turbulence and hectic discussion of 13th century Paris University, where one of the permanent
delights of the students was to corner and embarrass the professor with the most difficult questions. Compared
with them, our serried ranks of listeners in the amphitheatres of 20th century ‘universities’ are very tame affairs
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indeed. Transposed to the present-day context Aquinas would be the ebullient dean of a science faculty in one of
the world’s leading universities, not presiding over abstract hairsplitting among the philosophers or theologians.
He would probably be no more in favour in the Vatican than he was with the Martin Luther who sent his works
up in flames with the argument that reason was a prostitute, that the world was divided into two separate
kingdoms and that the answers to all basic questions were to be found in the bible alone, the way the protestant
Fundamentalists argue today.
The point of departure for Aquinas was experimental knowledge obtained from the physical world, and his analytical method was inductive, not deductive. The light of inductive reason clarified the facts and further light
was thrown on the process from Revelation. Looking upon matter he ‘saw that it was good’ and that the body,
and its senses, given for observation, were also good. Knowing that there was also a mysterious constituent in
man, an intensity of life, consciousness or interiority known as the ‘soul’, the ‘anima’, or self-conscious,
reasoning life force, he saw that man was much more than matter, that he was a psychosomatic entity and that
he could also be inspired from outside matter. By contrast, the modern positivist scientist deals merely with a
progression of data some of which is useful in the common pool of information needed for an understanding of
reality. He is condemned to discovering partial truths. Without outside checks and balances and long-term
objectives, science cannot but lead to the release of immeasurable forces of a destructive nature. Newton s
mechanical linear, cause-and-effect theory is now being challenged as the disaster it may well have been, that
Hume and Rousseau and others believed it to be. The full side-effects may take generations to unfold
themselves and by then they may be irreversible and their cumulative effects may have done irreparable
damage.
The scientist has to navigate between the narrow promontory of his take-off hypothesis and the shaky landing
ground of his little speciality where his fellow priests assure him that all is well. The more of these separate
islands that are erected into impregnable fortresses, the more the fabric of intellect disintegrates like a motheaten
cloth. Even on his little islet the specialist is not always on such terra firma as he affirms. He had to await
Einstein to discover that his measurements were not necessarily accurate, for length is relative, and some of his
species still seem unaware that the act of measurement perturbs the object measured. But the specialists cannot
continue forever to abdicate from their responsibility like Werner von Braun when asked about the menace of
the atom bomb for humanity: ‘That is not my department’.
As in every other sector, however, there are always the great exceptions that prove the rule. In May 1988 the
world-famous French mathematician Alexandre Grotendieck, who was offered the Crafoord Prize, equivalent to
the Nobel Prize, by the Swedish Royal Academy of Science, with an accompanying envelope of $270,000,
politely refused the award, mainly, he said, because the world of present-day science was profoundly unhealthy
and on a suicidal course. He added that he had no doubt that ‘before the end of the century unprecedented
upheavals will turn science upside-down, including the very notions we have of science, its grandiose objectives
and the spirit in which scientific work is accomplished. There is no doubt that the Royal Academy will then
form part of the institutions and personages who will have a useful role to play in an unparalleled renewal, after
an equally unparalleled collapse of a civilization....’ (my translation).
One of the giants of our times who, like Aquinas, believed that science, philosophy and theology should march
hand in hand was Teilhard de Chardin. Though he certainly did not tie up all the loose ends, he was a precursor
blazing a new trail where, as he said himself, others could follow to diagnose detail. As a precursor, he is
naturally not very popular with any of the three branches which concerned him. To the scientists he is not
materialist enough, to the religious-minded he is too materialistic and to the philosophers he is too down to
earth. This is a classic situation, the golden mean seen as extremist by all the extremisms.
Tomorrow’s science will no more accept religious hocus pocus or biblical Fundamentalism than it will welcome
abstract philosophy. But it will increasingly need the light that synthesis, reason and revelation can cast on its
work. The rationalistic 19th century dream, for dream it was, that science was about to solve all problems is now
dead, and its linear, cause-and-effect, short visioned procedures, lacking understanding of the total mesh of
reality, is beginning to have disastrous effects. But science, in turn, including the linguistic sciences, will assist
in separating the grain from the chaff in the scriptural writings and thus help to serve truth and, inter alia,
undermine the fanaticism that arises from biblical Fundamentalism. As the theologian and thinker that Teilhard
was made a unique contribution to the scientific interpretation of accumulated facts, so the scientist that he was
revolutionised the whole religious phenomenon, which caused him to suffer life-long condemnation from his
own church. One goes on hoping that the days of excommunication — by scientists, philosophers or churches
— of those who do not follow the dogmatic paths may be coming to a close and that the separation walls may
happily disintegrate.
After these general remarks, let me now skim quickly over the scientific evidence to date for and against the
existence of a god, in an effort to discuss the fundamental question, Why is there something and not nothing?
To the Jews of the Old Law, the foundation of faith in God was the Creation, the primary miracle, symbolised
by the Jewish liturgical calendar beginning with the celebration of the feast of the New Year. The old atheistic
argument on the contrary may be condensed, as it was by Engels, to the ancient Greek and Oriental idea of a
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universe that had no beginning. This pointed to the deduction arrived at by the Greeks that the cosmos itself was
therefore the Supreme Being, the One, the All, the Divinity, a claim that nobody could entertain today.
Nevertheless, even if the universe was shown to have had no beginning this would not prove the non-existence
of God, because God being eternal by definition could have initiated the creation from all eternity. Indeed, from
a humanly subjective point of view, it might seem strange that God remained alone through the infinity of
eternity and then suddenly, yesterday so to speak, decided to launch a cosmos.
A second problem that mystifles the mind is the infinity of space. It is impossible for the finite mind to grasp
such a concept but the opposite is even more unacceptable, a finite boundary beyond which there is nothing, not
even space.
When it was shown that the universe as we know it was only some 15—18 billion years old, the atheists
retreated in two directions: one — returning to the Greeks in a new form
— that this universe is merely a phase in a fluctuating, eternal cosmos and that sooner or later it will start
contracting back to the infinitely-concentrated source of energy from which it arose with the big bang, a theory
that proves nothing about the existence or non-existence of God; the other that there was nothing before and the
cosmos sprang into existence ‘sui generis’, by spontaneous generation, ‘ex nihilo’, an absurdity that is not
lessened by the quantum theory arguing that ‘certain’ sub-atomic particles can be born without ‘apparent cause’,
which neatly devalues the key words ‘certain’ and ‘apparent’ and begs the question as to how the original
energy necessary for this came into existence in the first place. This is the positivist, linear, cause-and-effect
obsession which blinkers science and excludes any scientist who dares to question ‘scientific’ dogma. Such
narrow-minded dogmatism, not uncommon among scientists, has even driven some of them to their death who
refused to toe the line, as described by Arthur Koestler in The Midwife Toad. D A Saunder’s words, in his
abridgement of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall ... may be applied here also: The majority of ‘facts’ prove nothing
more than that they exist; there are others that may be useful in drawing a partial conclusion relating to
particular links in a chain; others influence the whole system and are intimately connected. The rare genius is
the man who knows how to distinguish these from the vast chaos of jumbled facts and reach to the highest art,
which is an understanding of the irrational. And quoting Gibbon himself: ‘We should hence learn not only to
acknowledge but to feel the force of prejudice; we should learn never to be surprised at apparent absurdity, and
often to suspect the truth of what might appear to want no confirmation’. It is pathetic to read a Nobel
prizewinner like Jacques Monod and see how he quietly steals away from the quantum question, Nobel Prize or
no Nobel Prize.
Apart from the ‘when’, there are different theories among scientists as to how the universe began. To some the
beginning was a state of infinite dispersion to the point of nothingness, or unstable, quantitative ‘emptiness’; to
others it was an infinitesimal concentration of energy which exploded into matter with the ‘big bang’. The big
bang theory is the one which now has most adherents. If it should eventually be replaced by another theory, this
would not destroy the basic argument behind the big bang, that an initial source of immense, uncreated energy
was required —corresponding to the old explanation of the prime mover —an infinite concentration of electromagnetic force held together by the power of internal gravity. None of the scientists that I have come across has
attempted to grapple seriously with the problem of its source. The book of Genesis, composed nearly 3,000
years before the era of modern science, follows the chronology of creation with strange accuracy, as expounded
by the ‘big bang’ astrophysicists. In the beginning, immediately after the initial action there was light, then fire,
stars, ashes (iron etc. formed from burnt-out hydrogen and helium), earth and water. After this ‘downward’
plunge into inert matter, the upward climb out of the water began with life, which takes a reverse direction from
entropy and culminates in man whose vocation is first to continue the phase of synthesis through the union of all
men in humanity according to the scientific process described by Teilhard, then to reach up for spirit through the
increasing concentration of consciousness and creativity, bending its radial energy in the direction of the Omega
point.
A major question is the speed with which the cosmos, fluctuating or not fluctuating, charged on its way in the
first, almost infinitely small fraction of a second like some supersonic homing pigeon in a hurry, achieving the
virtually impossible task, against all probability, of ‘getting into orbit’ at the first shot, producing such
incredible order in the midst of only apparent disorder that the science of chaos has now discovered order in
what previously seemed to be chaos, in accordance with the ‘butterfly effect’ discovered in 1961 by Edward
Lorenz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is now being found that the precision of the most
advanced time-piece is very imperfect compared with the precision of the cosmos. When astrophysicist Stephen
Hawking was asked what he expected to find from the cosmic equation he replied, ‘The thinking mind of God’.
The universe, or the present version of it if you prefer, began only 15—18 billion years ago. The experts have
calculated that the time since the first appearance of incipient matter to the present has not been sufficient by the
laws of chance for the production of a single living cell. This required first hydrogen, then helium, the rest of the
elements, the first molecules, their combination into larger inorganic molecules, the thermal and cosmic
conditions suitable for the production of the macromolecules in accordance with precise structural patterns and
strict coordination in time, until life suddenly exploded and the astronishing complexity of the cell was reached,
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with its bewildering combination of amino-acids, enzymes and other substances. Consider a single molecule of
albumin, for example, which contains tens of thousands of millions of atoms grouped in a very specific order.
As for the big bang itself, Professor P Davies, the nuclear physicist, in his book God and The New Physics, in
which he certainly does not give the impression of having any religious faith, says the chances against the big
bang producing an ordered universe were so staggering as to make it virtually unimaginable. Most explosions,
he says, are chaotic affairs but the big bang was a precision operation which would have either closed back on
itself or ended in a cosmic cloud of dispersion if the competition between the centrifugal and centripetal forces
had differed in Planck time (10-43 seconds, the smallest unit in which spacetime has any meaning) by the
stunningly infinitesimal amount of one unit in 1060.
With regard to life, if you consider the basic building block, DNA, the chances against it were, according to
Einstein, trillions to the trillionth power, ie, impossible within the time in which it was produced if it was
governed by the laws of chance. David Ossilton, an English author, has said that there are scientists who believe
that a large enough labour force of monkeys banging typewriters for long enough would produce the works of
Shakespeare. When this wild flight of fancy includes the indefinite ‘large enough’ and ‘long enough’ of course
it cannot but be a ridiculously-accurate remark lacking all precision. But a simple calculation shows that the
probability rate is such that it would require over a million monkeys working for a million years to type merely
the name ‘William Shakespeare’. You can have a better idea of the gargantuan numbers of possible
permutations and combinations involved in the construction of matter if you make the simple comparison used
by the Marxist biologist Marcel Prenant59 showing the number of ways a hostess could seat a mere 10 guests —
say 5 girls and 5 eligible bachelors — around her table. She has the choice of 3,628,800 seating arrangements,
and this assuming the limitation of a simple round table where no position is of any greater order of priority than
any other: with an order of priority, say, around host and hostess, the number would be much greater. How long
would it take her to arrange dinner if she was blindly experimenting with the most perfect position to ensure
future matrimonial bliss between all the partners? But the problem becomes a real headache if she has 20 guests,
the ‘hostess with the mostest’, whose dilemma goes up to over 2 billion billion, a figure of nineteen numerals. A
real headache, that is, were it not for the simplifying fact that the same head which can be host to a headache can
also think and plan on the basis of rational considerations and shrewd intuition that John X must on no account
be seated beside Mary Y, and so on, a capacity which permits quick decision and at least some possibility of a
successful dinner party if not much subsequent matrimony.
This is exactly what the constituents of matter have been doing since the beginning, succeeding against rapidlyrising improbability as the complexity increases and the number of constituents grows. The process, known to
science as teleology, means one of two things: that the constituents are either ‘smart’, pre-adapted at each stage
for the subsequent combination — Monod’s ‘necessity’ factor — so smart that the cell does with the greatest of
ease — reproduce itself on a massive scale — what all the biologists of the world are unable to do on an
infinitesimal scale. Indeed, even if scientists were ever to succeed in the task that has so far eluded them,
reproduce a single living cell, they would still not be inventing anything but merely making a carbon copy of
what nature has been showing them all along, with materials produced from those supplied by nature. Cellular
teleology means that the cell knew from the beginning what it was doing and where it was going — compared
by Soviet scientist A J Oparin60 with a smart factory that designed and built itself with the objective of
producing a useful product; or else there was some outside intelligence behind the process. This leads the
atheists into an embarrassing choice: If they opt for the latter they are heading straight for God and if they
choose the former they slide into pantheism which would have God closing in on them from all sides, peeping
out of the very shrubbery, like the primitive religion of the savages, hardly an acceptable option for the modern
scientist.
Edwin Conklin, a biologist at Princeton University, said that ‘the probability of life originating from accident is
comparable to the probability of the Unabridged Dictionary resulting from an explosion in a printing factory’.
It is now known that for the production of the first primitive forms of life, the enormous, complex machinery of
the solar system, if not of the entire cosmos, was first necessary. And C E Guye61’ calculated that for the laws of
chance to produce one disymetrical molecule made up of 100 each of merely 2 kinds of atoms of an average
atomic weight of 10, allowing for the existence of built-in valency (built in by what or whom?), it would be
necessary to have a volume of matter equivalent to a sphere of such size that it would take a ray of light 1082
years to pass through it, ie, a sphere that would englobe the most distant nebulae beyond the cosmic systems of
the Milky Way, meaning that for the production of this single molecule by the laws of chance there is not
enough matter in the universe to enable it to happen. And we are concerned not merely with the formation of
one tiny molecule, but with the co-ordinated production of a dazzling magma of substances necessary in correct
chronological order for the formation of the extraordinary biological fabric surrounding the earth, each particle
of which required a similar complex production process. For one molecular success does not necessarily imply
the success of the others. Our protein molecule would have to hang around for billions of years until its essential
fellow molecules of lipids, sugars, enzymes and vitamins had won their respective games of chance before
getting together to work out the next step. And there is no evidence in physico-chemical evolution that there was
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ever a stage, not to speak of innumerable stages, of such hanging about on the part of the fastest movers while
the slow sloggers caught up. All evolution is marked by unbroken speed in one direction, to produce the
confounding complexity of the biological kingdom, the strange contraption of chromosomes and genes, the
extraordinary device of plant and animal sexuality, the order and endless beauty of nature, the seemingly
gratuitous extravagance of form and colour, the incredibly complicated life cycles of certain species, the homing
of salmon and migrating birds, the harmonious rhythm of the seasons, of day and night, of sleep and awakening,
the co-ordination of climate and the hydrologic cycle, and the intermeshing of the entire fabric of the biosphere
in a pattern forming a whole which the scientists of the middle ages took for granted and those of modern times
are rediscovering in the science of so-called chaos. To Pascal’s infinitely small and infinitely large, Teilhard
added the factor of the infinitely complex.
The mind boggles at the thought of picking examples out of the billions to illustrate either the harmonious
complexity or the beauty. All the libraries of the world’s books in geology, soil science, physics, chemistry,
crystallography, biology, botany and zoology would be necessary to exhaust the subject. Consider the little
commonplace detail that below 40C water suddenly disobeys the universal law of contraction with decreasing
temperature and starts to expand and become lighter: without this ‘miraculous’ about-turn, seas and lakes would
have built up to a solid mass of ice from the bottom upwards, rock disintegration and soil formation would have
been impossible and there would have been no vegetation, no animal kingdom and no human beings.
Regarding beauty, everyone can have his own preference, from a golden dawn to a butterfly’s wings, from the
song of a nightingale to a jacaranda tree. The world-famous French astronomer, Charles Fehrenbach said that
for him the most beautiful object in the universe is Saturn. ‘When you look at that’, he says, ‘it stops your
breath. And you say to yourself:
How can such a thing exist? Such prodigious organization, of such perfection. We know it exists but we don’t
know why’62. Fehrenbach also refers to cosmic space and distance. Laymen look on in amazement at the doings
of the ‘spacemen’, and far be it from us to deny our applause for such achievement, but in relation to cosmic
space these so-called ‘spacemen’ are merely making a microscopic flea-hop close to the tiny speck of dust
known as planet earth. Even the nearest star in our nearest galaxy is beyond the reach of a human being because
he would have to live to be 150,000 (one hundred and fifty thousand) years old to go there and back.
We not only know the age of the cosmos but also the life expectancy of our little planet earth. If all goes well it
could last a maximum of another five billion years, at which time the gigantic nuclear fire that is the sun will
have burned itself out by fusing its hydrogen to helium and will have become what astrophysicists call a red
giant, probably engulfing the earth. This could also correspond to the beginning of the big crunch that would
bring our universe to an end. There is no scientific theory beyond science-fiction imaginings, to suggest the
possibility of the universe then starting up again to continue any eternally fluctuating process. Among the
cosmic accidents which the atheists ask us to accept is that in a universe of exploding stars, thermonuclear fire,
supernovas, astral catastrophe and deadly radiation, our little earth has survived by mere chance and produced
the felicitous combination of the extraordinary complex of factors conducive to life, from which, less than 2
million years ago, the strangest flower of all became the jewel in nature’s crown, the mystery of conscious
thought, associated with but mysteriously detached from the human brain, and including the power of reason as
well as all the emotions and intuitions of the human person, as far a cry from the computer as a goldfinch from a
lump of lard or a Venus flytrap from a galvanised bucket. In this connection the Marxist scientists at least are
ahead of the most rabid atheists who insist on the heliocentricity rather than the anthropcentricity of our system,
whereas the Marxists regard man, if not as the physical centre at least as the crowning achievement of the
cosmos. Engels said that the triumphal arrival of man was Nature becoming conscious of itself, which is
identical to the idea of the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin. The atheists are naturally frightened of this because
giving prime place to man is getting dangerously close to the idea of God, as analysed by Teilhard, which is
why Monod, a sympathiser with Marxism in other matters, categorically rejects it in this.
Cosmogenesis and hominisation have, furthermore, been reached in a stunningly-short time against the loaded
dice of increasing improbability and the destructive pull of entropy. Jacques Monod believed that the arrival of
man was simply because his number, to use Monod’s own, unscientific words, ‘came up in a Monte Carlo
gamble’. Here he is only a step ahead of Jean-Paul Sartre, who said that if reason proved the existence of God
— a strange conditional clause by Sartre, since reason had been proving the existence of God for 2,000 years,
from the Greeks to Descartes — then we should abandon reason, a piece of incoherence that goes a considerable
distance in explaining Sartre’s popularity in his lifetime. This is the last refuge of the closed mind and the
primary problem of the atheist.
Einstein argued that ‘God does not play dice with the universe’, meaning that what looks like dice in any narrow
specialist’s analysis may merely be a typically divine touch of humour quietly concealing the master plan of
design under the appearance of haphazard chance, as if to say, ‘Why can’t I play dice with my cosmos if I want
to, so long as I make it come out right in the end?’
A Soviet scientist, Katchik Stambolstian, in an interview with the Moscow bulletin Glasnost in January 1989,
said that, having received an education in atheism, he was an atheist until the age of 40 when he was forced to
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accept the existence of a Creator by studying the cell. Indeed, it is now being said among scientists that ‘a little
knowledge leads away from God but a lot of knowledge leads back to God’.
New light has been thrown on the existence of God through René Girard’s argument from scientific
anthropology that the New Testament shows that Christ’s revolutionary revelation is a powerful pointer to his
divinity because it is a revelation that could only have been made by a person who owed nothing to mimetic
rivalry and violence, who was able to utterly transcend what had previously transcended man, who came from
outside the human context.
The question of the existence or otherwise of God cannot be fully elucidated without a serious examination of
the science of Teilhard de Chardin, beginning with his difficult opus dealing with evolutionary creation, The
Phenomenon of Man, which works its way through the evolutionary process from the basic nature of matter and
energy via the laws of growth, the early earth, the advent of life, the arrival of man, the deployment of the
thinking envelope around the earth, the perception of spacetime, the confluence of thought, the convergence of
the personal towards the Omega point and the axes of belief leading to the christian phenomenon.
Finally, no analysis of the problem is complete without a study of Karl Rahner, perhaps the greatest theologian
of our time. Part of his strength lies in the fact that he does not fall back on the argument from certain protestant
apologists, impressed by Luther’s burning of the works of Aquinas and dismissing human reason as a prostitute,
that we can only arrive at faith in God by studying the bible. This amounts to saying that to obtain the faith one
must already have the faith, because it is utopian to expect modern man to read the scriptures properly unless he
is a believer. Rahner, on the contrary, is a realist with his feet firmly planted on this earth and takes modern man
as his point of departure. Man, he said, can avoid the ultimate question by burying his head in the sand,
indulging in feverish activity to forget his anguish; he can admit the question and dismiss it as being impossible
to answer; or he can take the lazy way out and declare that the cosmos and all existence is an absurdity (an
attitude which can open the door at a time of crisis to drink, drugs or other form of self destruction).
Rahner then proceeds to open another door, taking the honest atheist through what must be admitted is a
difficult course of reasoning but is blinding in the inevitability by which it leads to God, where of course the
student is still free to reject the obvious, and many will do so, for it is one thing to have intellectual proof but
quite another to have the humility of saying one was wrong or the courage to face the consequences.
One is tempted to go on and on with this fascinating subject of cosmogenesis, but I must return to my starting
point and indicate a few lines of approach for your research into the reliability of the New Testament writings as
a pointer to the phenomenon of the man called Khristos by his early followers. The essentials of their message
have come down to us in the form of a collection of writings which scholarship dates back to the period
extending from the middle to the end of the 1st century. The importance of these texts in the context of your
subject derives particularly from the fundamental errors which have led the so-called christian West into its
present cul-de-sac, away from the message of the New Testament.
There is no subject in the whole gamut of man’s interests that has been the object of such massive, world-wide,
critical scholarship for so long as is the case with the New Testament. As everybody knows, there are whole
libraries of works on the subject. The least critical is Fundamentalism which accepts the letter of the bible the
way the Muslims accept the koran, setting it up as an idol. Historically, the springtime of christianity saw its
most vigorous growth against fierce persecution during the period when it had no canonised New Testament to
lean on. Its growth was phenomenal qualitatively and quantitatively for the 3 centuries when it could rely only
on oral tradition, scattered ‘Sayings of the Lord’, a few letters by its early leaders, anecdotes and summary
reports which were gradually compounded into the New Testament Greek, a language that was foreign to the
founder and cannot always reflect his thinking faithfully.
Christianity’s most vigorous development of all was during the early decades when it fanned out all around the
Mediterranean with very scarce written references, distributed to only some of the communities at a time of
slow and difficult communication when the Mediterranean was closed to traffic during the winter months. At
that time it was the force of the spirit that was at work among the communities as they met for their invigorating
celebrations. In the Nazi concentration camps, Polish and Bavarian catholics similarly celebrated the Eucharist,
without altars, sacred vessels, vestments or other paraphernalia, using bread from the prison rations, and without
even the bible to fall back upon. It is tempting to argue whether christianity might not be stronger today if
restored to such community vigour without the intellectualised study of a book. It is significant that Christ
himself never wrote anything, except once, and then symbolically, in the sand. Neitszche, criticising the christians, said: ‘Your works, your actions, should unceasingly render the bible superfluous; a new bible should
continually flow from you’. God does not side-step man. When he set his scientific laws in motion they had
inevitably to lead to man and to man as a social being co-operating with others. Equally inevitably, this thinking
creature had to become a co-creator. His thinking back through the ages has to enter the process, from the Karl
Marx who said that man created himself through his work, all the way back to the Greeks and beyond. We in
turn cannot side-step 3,000 years of thought and take hold of the bible alone as the Fundamentalists do.
The Fundamentalists, a powerful political force in the
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United States, the United Kingdom and South Africa, take refuge in the bible as a document dictated by God
and literally accurate in every detail, notwithstanding its manifold errors and contradictions, its Old Testament
depiction of a warmongering Jehovah, a divinity of vengeance, avid for sacrifice (notwithstanding the prophets’
denunciation of this error) and its New Testament collection of reports, letters, anecdotes and ‘words of the
Lord’, again with factual errors and divergences compounded by difficulties in translation of words and
expressions first from a semitic to a non-semitic language and then into our modern languages, incapable of the
subtleties of Greek. We shall be examining Fundamentalist error in greater detail in a separate chapter.
The New Testament was originally written from verbal reports by men who were clearly stunned and
overwhelmed by the incomprehensible events which had obviously taken them unawares. They tried in their
halting human manner, as John put it in his first epistle, to describe ‘that which we have heard, that which we
have seen with our eyes, that which we contemplated, and our hands touched....’
At the other extreme are the anti-christian fanatics behind the scenes in the West, who, contrary to the
accumulated evidence and all objectivity, without facing the facts of scholarship, insinuate that the New
Testament is a mythical creation built on no factual foundations, when the opposite is manifest. As the Anglican
authority, Dr John Robinson, pointed out in his Can We Trust the New Testament?, of all the ancient writings
none is so authenticated as the new Testament. In the case of classical Greek and Latin writings, never thrown in
doubt, it is common that only two or three manuscript copies are extant and the time separating them from the
original is sometimes up to a thousand years. This is not so with the New Testament, in the case of which there
are fragments of manuscript copies which are relatively close to the originals and further on, of course, complete
manuscripts are numerous.
Brief references by the Jewish historian Josephus, the Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius, as well as Talmudic references, are enough to refute the notion, if refutation were necessary, that Christ never existed. There
are internal documentary references besides, as for example a letter of Ireneus, bishop of Lyons in the 2nd
century, referring to his early teacher, Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna in Asia Minor, who was martyred by burning
in 155 AD at the age of 86 and who had personally known ‘John the disciple of the Lord’. Such traditional
foundations were the ‘raison d’etre’ of the early church before the new Testament came to be canonised.
Historians tell us that at least one of the books has the marks of history more than any other writing of the time,
The Acts of the Apostles, written with a sense of almost clinical observation by the doctor that Luke was.
History apart, the New Testament is now being read and debated in every language of the world and shaping the
lives of millions, as christianity — even in the midst of its errors, as we shall see — has shaped the whole
civilisation of Europe for nearly 2,000 years. Whether we like it or not, we now have to consider christianity and
the New Testament on their merits, as a more overwhelming fact of existence than the Empire State Building.
The bible is far and away the best seller of all time and is now reported as being purchased in Japan, for
example, at the rate of several million copies annually. In addition to the phenomenon of christianity and the
New Testament, the real power-house of a now burgeoning movement is no doubt the Spirit of the Living
Christ, but it is beyond the scope of your doctoral dissertation. So we must confine ourselves to the two tangible
entities, the New Testament and christianity itself. The latter, for all its numerical feebleness, its accumulated
error and its historical deviations, is at once —notwithstanding, or, more accurately, because of, the massive
criticism and self-criticism to which it is subjected — the most world-wide and most vigorous of all man’s
institutions, pleading for justice, peace and the dignity of man, the same institution that lifted Europe out of the
Dark Ages after Rome’s collapse, that built the unique medieval civilisation, and that finally, collapsing into
decline in the 14th and 15th centuries, triggered the Reformation, the CounterReformation and the renewal that
is now taking shape in myriad forms, new communities, new thinking, ecumenism, and that ~justice, mercy and
faith’ which its founder inspired. At the same time it is going back again to the New Testament in renewed
critical research and it is perhaps significant that one of the most revolutionary new researchers
is a layman, René Girard.
It is with the bible open in our hands, says Girard, that we have betrayed the message of the bible. He shows
through rigorous scientific analysis in the field of anthropology that it is no longer merely a book from which
the pious can draw inspiration but the most revolutionary anthropology ever revealed to man in relation to the
vital issues of our time:
poverty, money, exploitation, violence, the scapegoat mechanism, the will to power, war and peace, the arms
race, the futile hope of putting an end to violence by one last act of violence, the human relations problem of
interdividual psychology, mimetic desire and the complex ‘scandal’ syndrome (which has nothing in common
with the definition of ‘scandal’ in terms of traditional piety). They are matters of life and death for humanity,
now arrived at the most critical crossroads in its history, when it holds in its hands unprecedented means of
destruction and simultaneously faces a planetary sacrificial crisis of megaproportions.
In the cosmic drama now beginning to unfold, whether we are Jews or Gentiles, believers or atheists, we are
faced with the option to grasp the revelation or perish. It is not a theoretical option, for God respects our liberty
and without the ultimate logic of that liberty, the liberty to destroy ourselves, it would be an ersatz thing by
which a God of Truth made a mockery both of Himself and of us. It can be argued that God will hardly allow
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His cosmos to fail, but since time is non-existent for Him He is not in a hurry and if we destroy ourselves the
survivors will pick up the remnants again as they did in Hiroshima. We have large numbers of specialists, says
Girard, studying the world’s wisdom of all ages to find out where we are going while largely overlooking the
greatest revelation ever given to man. And Teilhard de Chardin, also examining the gospel message from a
scientific point of view, said that ‘He touched one of the most fundamental structural laws of the universe.
Christ’s message, and Christ Himself, were not subversive in the little superficial sense of us human
revolutionaries, who would merely replace one class with another, one Establishment with a different
Establishment and bolster The System by having it operated by a more energetic group of neophytes. Christ’s
message, on the contrary, would bring The System crashing down by what René Girard refers to as ‘a
subversive and explosive truth’. In Chesterton’s words it was ‘a blow that broke the back of history’. If ever
allowed full sway it would break the back of history again. Girard shows that it has indirectly governed history
for 2,000 years through the process of concealment by which the message was sealed up in the pagan tomb — in
many ways the splendid pagan tomb — of Western civilisation. To find the message the tomb has to be broken
open by the same hand by which it was closed, the hand of Western man, through a coming man-made
apocalypse, ‘to release in all its ultimate finality ... the stunning coherence of its logic’.
Reading the modern lay exegetes like Girard, one is reminded again of Chesterton’s remark that in writing The
Everlasting Man he depended on those who were more learned, supporting his argument from a different field,
that of history, where he applauded H G Wells for asserting ‘the reasonable right of the amateur to do what he
can with the facts which the specialists provide’. Such reliance on specialist scholarship will help to prevent you
from falling into the Fundamentalist trap of individual interpretation where it is said that the Spirit inspires but
where it is not easy to distinguish between the Spirit and the subjective imagination, as witness the 300
protestant churches with opposing interpretations. Truth cannot be so divided. The founder of christianity
launched 1 church, not 300, and pleaded passionately for unity in his dying testament. At the other extreme is
the Vatican demanding submission to centralised interpretation in Rome, which, as we shall see, has led to
manifold error in the past and to what leading catholic theologians such as Hans Kung have shown to be
continuing error in the present, leading to renewed error under John Paul II.
It will be easy enough for you to find a representative selection of literature from the various churches on
current trends within their own institutions. If, in addition, you were to go to Sunday services in churches of
different denominations you would obtain further information and a feeling for the nature of their message and
its effect or non-effect on their congregations. Hence, in the space left to me in this letter I shall confine myself
to the New Testament document itself, emphasising that I am not a theologian and that anything I say should be
taken as an inducement to study rather than dogma. In any case, as Hans Kung has pointed out, christian truth
emerges not from an individual but from community thinking in communion with all the thinking around the
world, past and present. The branch that breaks away cannot but break up.
As everybody knows, the earliest christian writings were the letters by Paul of Tarsus, beginning some 20 years
after the events and ending with Paul’s beheading in Rome in the early 60s. The origin and compilation of the
synoptic gospels is more complex and they are therefore more suitable material for this controversial chapter of
your thesis. The main hypotheses are the two-source and the four-source ones developed by Holtzmann, Weiss,
Streeter, Aland and others. They are constantly being refined as deepening research throws further light on the
sources.
An important aspect to bear in mind concerns the contradictions and factual inaccuracies found particularly in
the synoptic gospels. This is sometimes tendentiously used as evidence against the historical value of the
gospels when, in fact, the opposite is the case: these inaccuracies and contradictions are further evidence of
genuineness, of the absence of any concerted master plan or of limited source material that might indicate
misguided illumination or even a hoax. The gospels have all the variegated marks of truth. They are also in
accord with the prophecies which foretold of the Messiah many hundreds of years in advance. Isaias for
example, some 7 centuries before Christ, pointed out that Galilee, afflicted by the Assyrians, ‘Galilee of the
Gentiles’, would be glorified by the coming of the Messiah: ‘For a child is born to us and a son is given to us ...
and his name shall be called “Wonderful, Counsellor, God of the Mighty, the Father of the world to come, the
Prince of Peace” ... And there shall come forth a shoot out of the root of Jesse, and a flower shall rise up out of
his root. And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him ... he shall judge the poor with justice’. And Micheas:
‘And thou, Bethlehem Ephrata, art little among the thousands of Juda: out of thee shall he come forth unto me
who is to be the ruler in Israel.... And the remnant of Jacob shall be among the Gentiles in the midst of many
peoples....’ etc. etc. down to the most specific details, with the result that towards the end of the BC era, the
expectation of the coming of the Messiah became so urgent that every pious Jewish girl was hoping to be his
mother.
The New Testament was compiled by 6 or 7 people using a perhaps larger number of other writers of various
‘Sayings of the Lord’, anecdotes and comments, without any overall coordination, and sometimes, in Paul’s
letters, for example, with criticism of some of the brethren bordering almost on bitterness, but bitterness in
defence of the truth. For the writers were anything but a namby-pamby group of pious sentimentalists; they were
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vigorous defenders of the facts, who unhesitatingly criticised those whom they considered to be in breach of
them.
One of the criticisms sometimes levelled against the New Testament is that it was composed by people who
were swept off their feet by the experience they had had of a charismatic personality and that they wrote up their
material out of their heads to suit their thesis, putting ‘post hoc’ words in the mouth of a man who never uttered
them and attempting to give added veracity to their story by making the events concord with Old Testament
prophecies. This problem has been dealt with by, among others, Professor Joachim Jeremias of the University of
Gottingen, an Aramaic scholar63. Through careful analysis of Greek and Aramaic words, phrases and modes of
thought, he shows that the words attributed to Christ could not have been composed ‘post hoc’ by the authors of
the Greek New Testament, but could only have been used by an Aramaic-speaking Jew in Palestine.
Neither could the Old Testament be the source of the revolutionary words and deeds attributed to Christ. ‘No
man ever spoke like this man.’ In the simplest language, mostly with one- and two-syllable words, enlightened
by imagery taken from the most familiar things in life, he is unique in the whole history of the founding fathers
of great movements. It is virtually impossible that the words attributed to him could have been the product of a
synthesis compiled from other authors. They come straight from the mouth of a man: clear, short-cut sentences,
puzzling or even enigmatic, but always straight from the shoulder, striking home to the heart, prompt and direct,
their poetic imagery of a special literary quality which is hardly of this world. Instead of abstract sentences and
general propositions, he uses simple, pungent metaphors of great realism, often with a sharp touch of irony,
humour or trenchant wit. One has the impression that ‘Here is a man’. He has to be approached as one might
approach a unique, poetic figure rather than in the heavy-handed, intellectualised manner of the Fundamentalists. The man counts more than the message, or rather man and message are one. Like the greatest poetry, it is
inexhaustible.
He opened his mission with an implied attack on the selfishness inherent in the accumulation of wealth and
power, and ended it in a head-on collision with religion and violence. This collision aroused the priest-led mob
fury which drove him to Calvary, significantly outside the walls of the Holy City which he could thus no longer
contaminate.
Hearing of the strange things that were happening at the beginning, John the Baptist from his prison had sent
two emissaries to ask him whether he was the expected Messiah or should they wait for another.
One is reduced to speculation as to what these two men might have been talking about as they wended their way
along the dusty roads through Judea and Samaria to Galilee to seek out this new prophet who was already
stirring the crowds with his words, his deeds and his strange ways. Could this really be the Messiah long
promised by the prophets? Had Israel’s great day finally dawned? Would he be the powerful leader, the
descendant of David, who would challenge Roman power and ‘free my people Israel’? Might he call down fire
and brimstone from heaven, enter the Temple in glory, penetrate perhaps even the Holy of Holies reserved for
the High Priest, organise extraordinary religious ceremonies, perform the ritual sacrifice with unaccustomed
splendour, enthrone the hierarchy or Sanhedrin with new authority, denounce infidels and sinners, demand the
rigorous application of God’s law and renewed respect for the Sabbath....?
When they finally reached him and apparently spent some time following and observing, they put the question
that was their order of mission. And all they got in reply was:
Go and tell John what you have seen and heard — the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the dead
rise again and good news is brought to the poor.
The priest, and the Levite from the priestly caste, who passed the injured man by without rendering assistance,
are henceforth compared unfavourably with the Samaritan, member of the half-caste race detested by trueblooded Jews, who reached out to lift the fallen: ‘Go and do thou in like manner’. At the last supper, during His
final public activity before His death, Christ solemnly and dramatically adopts what was then the dress and duty
of the slave, saying, ‘I have given you an example that you may do likewise’, ‘to set the downtrodden free’.
When even one innocent is made to suffer, the destruction of the system is under way. It will be bad enough
here below, but it is nothing compared with the hereafter, where Christ formally declared He would personally
identify Himself with the victims of poverty and oppression, while the rich would be sent empty-handed away,
for it is ‘easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of
heaven’:
‘Depart from me you accursed into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and
you gave me not to eat, thirsty and you gave me not to drink, a stranger and you received me not, naked and you
did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you visited me not.’
Apart from the sobering suggestion that it is thus Christ whom we have placed behind prison bars by the system
which drives men to anti-social deeds, the whole passage is shocking in its implications, equivalent in modern
terms to a presiding judge in a life-or-death case making a prior announcement that he would not be neutral at
the trial, that he would descend from his judge’s bench, take his stand among the victims and personally
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denounce their exploiters in the dock before sentencing them to death. Critics may perhaps say this is not a just
judge; it is not in human terms. It is the justice of God which is love personified and which drives Him to this
excess of love on the side of those whom we deprive of love. No individualistic salvation by any ‘faith alone’
formula, no ‘cheap protestant grace’, to use the words of the protestant theologian Bonhoeffer, can eliminate
these terrible passages which are in accord with the whole spirit of Christ.
He was no sentimental softy giving His blessing to anything and everything. He was the man who not only
ordered devils to be silent but commanded the sick and the sinners to get up and stand on their own feet. He
made common cause with them not to approve them or to leave them permanently dependent but to help them
out of their condition. We are sometimes embarrassed by the apparent dichotomy of thought and practice
between our professed love of the poor and our repugnance to share their lot. We need not be embarrassed: it is
because they are usually not pleasant companions that we should want to lift them up.
In his parables Christ applauds the publican’s change of mind, commends the prostitute’s broken-hearted
repentence, celebrates the return of the prodigal son, rejoices over the lost sheep that was found. His criticism of
the closed hearts and hands of the rich and powerful cannot be used to point to a new scapegoat. The poor and
the oppressed can also be fiercely attached to money and power, though they at least have the excuse of being
hungry for what they cannot have, unlike the rich and the powerful who already have too much. The latter, too,
need to be liberated. Similarly, those who are bogged down in the morass of pleasure or dissipation, which
disintegrates the individual, must also be set free and helped to recover their self-respect and moral energy, not
only with the liberating assurance, ‘Thy sins are forgiven thee’, but also with the manly command, ‘Go thy way
and sin no more. This is the radical liberation of the individual and society from the shackles that bind, the selflove that destroys and all that isolates from the exciting fellowship of the whole community of man in its rich
diversity.
The community is not a melting pot producing an amorphous mass of functionally and fictionally equal
individuals whereby liberty, equality and fraternity are trivialised. In societies where equality is greatest there is
great envy of the least stepping out of the ranks. In Christ’s revelation all men are of equal dignity and the prime
minister is not superior in value to the ploughman, only different, performing a different function in the same
Mystical Body, which is not a swarm, a mob or an ant-hill but an organic community like the human body
which was constantly used as a model during the Middle Ages. In pagan political philosophy, the polity, the
people or the state were understood physically as a body, like the expression ‘a body of men’. What was
radically new among the early christians was that they considered themselves organically one in the Body of
Christ. Furthermore, since personal value judgements and comparisons are excluded, everyone becomes the
incomparable. A woman is no more equal to a man than a man is to a woman; they are both unique and
different. Similarly, christian fraternity does not imply a universal back-thumping, hail-fellow-well-met attitude:
true fraternity requires a certain distance and discretion that respects the sacred person of the other as well as his
liberty. And when liberty is used to bind ourselves in the chains of self-indulgence it becomes an ersatz liberty.
Henceforth, there is no such thing as a ‘Chosen People’. Every individual person, every group, every culture,
every nation, becomes intensified through co-operation with every other, uplifted by the rise of spirit in creative
activity. The causes and consequences of self-seeking pride, greed, lust, hate, gluttony, envy and sloth are to be
torn up by the roots, out of the heart, because they are the destruction of man, whose welfare is the new norm.
Dividing the world into two kingdoms as Luther did and being saved at death by some ‘faith alone’ magic,
allowing the individual to pursue his private interests here below with apparent impunity, is not in the spirit of
Scripture. The heart’s attachment to money or power is replaced by dedication to the common good. As the
omnipotent God ‘hath come not to be served but to serve’, so ‘whoever would be first among you shall be your
slave’. This is the new recipe for leadership. It is also the recipe for freedom. Never before or since has there
been such a radical demonstration of liberty. Where we human beings like to grab hold of the liberty of others to
dominate them in one or another of our subtle ways, Christ went around distributing liberty, being reticent even
in the use of His omnipotence for fear of stunning us into submission.
Both pagan and Jewish society, like our own now again, were reared in a tradition of self defence rather than
other defence, to the point that this was and still is unconscious second nature of which we are barely aware; it is
a permanent source of social and personal anguish in the face of the law and of others. Here again Christ stood
the world on its head, teaching that the solution of our self-centred anguish lies in concern for The Other
dispelling fear, restoring social justice and fraternity,opening the way to a total renewal of society, and not
leaving man alone to do it. The God who had been sacred, above the clouds, receiving obeisance and sacrifice
through the summit of the politico-religious Establishment, the God who, so to speak, had been in the Royal
Box at the world’s spectacle, suddenly leaped into the arena and took his stand among the victims.
Marx’s revolution pales before this one.
It also pales in its attitude to religion.
One can be against religion for a variety of reasons. Some oppose it because it stands up with a different voice
against the ambient consensus, some because they see it as stifling liberty, some because it promotes liberty
against state authoritarianism, some because it is the opium of the poor, some because it defends the poor
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against triumphal capitalism, some because it bolsters capitalism against communism, some because it exhalts
the individual, some because it prefers the community over the individual, some because its moral demands
would limit their hedonism, some because it promotes immorality by offering repetitive forgiveness. To Christ it
was, at least in its sacrificial form, an insult to God and the chopping-block on which He fell before the religious
Establishment to whom His presence was the cause of that ‘devilish confusion’ which in the ancient pagan
ritual, from which the Jews never fully liberated themselves, had preceded the sacrifice and the institution of a
religious cult around the victim, made sacred by the seeming success of the sacrifice (= to make sacred) in
restoring peace, notwithstanding his previous guilt for the decomposition of society. Pagan sacrifice was an
attempt to expel an evil divinity from malignant immanence to beneficent transcendence. Christ was the reversal
of this ancient practice, calling for justice and mercy and faith to replace sacrifice and bringing transcendence
into immanence.
The modern connotation of ‘scapegoat’ is a purely christian notion. While the Jews had replaced the human
victims in pagan religion by animals, sinners were still designated as really responsible for the breakdown of
society, related to the violent streak in Jehovah, as in the pagan religions there was a violent streak in the Greek
Logos. Christ revealed that God was Love personified, that he required no sacrifice and that the old sacrificial
victims were innocent. He, the new victim, was proved innocent Himself. Apart from the fact that nobody
doubts that from a purely human point of view He was the most perfect man who ever existed, in the context of
the accusation at the time the secular power in the person of Pilate, clearly demonstrating an objectiveness that
would be the envy of a modern judge, after a trial that must be considered long in relation to the clarity of the
charge, declared that He was without guilt. Then mob law took over and forced Pilate to draw back from
liberating Him. Although the execution has been glorified by all the churches as a sacrifice to God, it was
nothing but the raw, cold-blooded murder of an innocent man. He did indeed offer His life, not however to
continue but to break the ancient cycle of human violence and sacrificial offering to an Aztec-type molloch
hungry for adoration and thirsty for blood. To René Girard, considering the Johannine Logos as demanding the
blood of no less a person than His own son, making Him a molloch who will stop at nothing in his revenge, is a
caricature. Regarding Calvary as a vertical sacrifice to appease an angry God is the blasphemy that has been
partly responsible for our ‘christian’ violence, in which we assimilate God anthropomorphically to the violence
that is purely human.
Instead of being another vertical sacrificial offering to placate a pagan molloch or an angry Jehovah, Calvary
was a horizontal sacrifice in which Christ stood in for our victims. It had not been enough for Him to preach that
God was love and that violence belonged to man alone; it was not enough for Him to prove it in His daily life
and activity; since we ‘have ears to hear but hear not’, ‘eyes to see but see not’ and are ‘slow to understand’, He
was forced to go the whole distance, accept our violence against Him and take our crimes upon Himself as our
victim to reveal the depth of our depravity and the truth of His message, of which Calvary was the spectacular
acting out to its ultimate logic. As Girard states, henceforth all our victims, as victims, are innocent. The allinnocent one stood in their place and identifies Himself with them.
The Epistle to the Hebrews, which you quoted in your last letter, has been interpreted by the churches as
evidence that Calvary was a sacrifice to God. The Fundamentalists continue to use it in combination with the
Old Testament sacrificial law and the Apocalypse to buttress their belief in an angry God and a coming
Armageddon, after which the goodies will be destined to live in peace with the Lord in the New Jerusalem and
the baddies will be destroyed off the face of the earth. There could well be an Armageddon on the way but if
there is it will be our own making and God will turn away His gaze in horror as He turned it away from Calvary.
First of all the Epistle to the Hebrews is not a Pauline epistle, a fact which already reduces its authority. By the
end of the 4th century its reading was abandoned in the Western churches, and even the Eastern churches mostly
agreed that it was not penned by Paul. On the other hand, it was used by various heretical and schismatic sects,
including the Arians. It was rehabilitated by Augustine and further approved at the Reformation. The author,
whoever he may have been, in his effort to be all things to all men and to appeal to the Jews with a view to their
conversion, almost falls over backwards discussing sacrifice, which held such a primordial place in their
religion combined with the multitude of taboos they had developed to placate their violence-prone Jehovah.
Even so, reading the Epistle in the spirit of the New Testament rather than the letter, sacrifice can here be taken
partly in the metaphorical sense of Christ ending all sacrifice and the priesthood necessary for it through His
taking their place, partly in the sense of the Johannine God sacrificing Himself in the cause of the truth He had
preached, the truth that God was love and that violence was purely human, and partly, as interpreted by M B
Eddy, that Christ sacrificed His human flesh to become transformed to Spirit and regain His pure divinity.
While we had to await Girard to uncover the anthropoligical foundation of our violence-religion syndrome,
other scholars and theologians had already dealt with religion from different standpoints. Karl Barth argued that
Christ’s revelation was the abolition of religion, Dietrich Bonhoeffer that religion was an inanity and Harvey
Cox that religion should be replaced by Revelation operating in the secular world. More recently, Hans Kung
has attacked the priesthood which is the essential keystone of organised religion. This is not to say that
Revelation could be successfully continued without the Eucharistic community meeting in communion with the
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world-wide community to receive the Word and the organic existentialist Presence, as distinct from a religious
community operating in the realm of the sacred, of a God ‘out there’ as was practised at its best by the Jews.
The latter could not pronounce the name of Yahweh; God’s Law was kept in a tabernacle honoured by a burning
lamp, the way some Roman catholics honour the consecrated host; the Holy of Holies in the Temple could be
entered only by the High Priest who was God’s vicar on earth like the pagan pontiff to the Romans, the pope to
many catholics or the bible to the Fundamentalists. All of which excludes the existentialist presence in the inner
man, the heart, the Temple of the Spirit. The biblical use of the word ‘heaven ‘is an Aramaic term denoting the
world of Spirit, and ‘ascended into heaven’ and ‘descended into hell’ is pedagogical imagery.
Girard points out that Christ’s blistering attack on the representatives of Jewish religion includes us too. We too
have neglected ‘the weightier things, justice and mercy and faith’ advocated by Christ in the course of His
attack, which rose to a crescendo in the following passage:
Woe to you Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites; because you build the sepulchres of the prophets and adorn the
tombs of the just, saying, ‘Had we lived in the days of our fathers we would not have been their partners in
shedding the blood of the prophets’; so that you bear witness against yourselves that you are sons of those who
slew the prophets. Fill up for yourselves the measure of your fathers. You serpents, brood of vipers, how are you
to flee from the judgement of hell? When I send forth to you prophets and wise men and scribes, some you shall
slay and crucify and some you shall scourge in your synagogues and hunt from city to city, that upon you there
may come all the just blood shed upon the earth.
Christ is here attacking not just the Jews but all of us self-righteous hypocrites. He knew that the Pharisees he
was speaking to had not themselves killed the prophets, no more than we christians laid our violent hands on
Christ. He said they were the sons of the murderers. It is not a case of hereditary transmission but of spiritual
and intellectual solidarity through the lie of repudiation. The sons are attempting to evacuate far from them the
crimes of their fathers, unaware that the fathers behaved likewise in trying to cleanse themselves of violence and
this all the way back to the beginning. This was the Revelation that had been ‘hidden since the foundation of the
world’. The sons remain prisoners of the same mental structure engendered by the founding murder in the myth
of Cain and Abel, the way we are prisoners of the idea of one last ‘war to end all wars’. This is the great lie and
Christ unites lies, murder and Satan in His sweeping condemnation. We ‘adorn the tombs of the just’ killed in
our wars, and thus, Pilate like, we seek to wash our hands. ‘Had we lived in the days of our fathers’ we would
not have been partners in shedding innocent blood. Anthropologically, to René Girard, man, the unwhole man,
is a denial of his violence. The tombs we build to the just to hide our guilt are replicas of ourselves. ‘Woe to you
Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites; because you are like whited sepulchres which appear beautiful without but
within are full of dead bones and of all uncleanness. So you also appear to men just without, but within you are
full of hypocrisy and iniquity.’ We hide our guilt and it festers within us. Worse still, we sometimes use rite and
ritual and religion in a vain attempt to evacuate the guilt by satisfying an anthropomorphic caricature of the God
to whom we relate the violence that is in ourselves.
The murder on Calvary was a murder from which the Father turned away in revulsion: ‘My God, my God, why
hast thou abandoned me?’ He had abandoned this scene of unprecedented horror. If we condemn the Jews rather
than ourselves for the murder we are repeating the same crime for which we blame them. By a spacetime
coincidence they were in the front row at the tragedy but we are all in the audience applauding the ‘sacrifice’
and pretending to be weeping for it. ‘Do not weep for me but weep for yourselves and your children.’ Similarly,
as the Jews, following the pagans, organised an institutional evacuation of Yahweh even in the very process
designed to hold him — the Temple, the Arc, the Holy of Holies, the Sacrifice and the Law — so we have
imprisoned Christ in our churches, our sabbath and our Law and we are back at Golgotha, outside the walls of
the City, in Luther’s second kingdom or in front of the Roman catholic tabernacle. The entombment is ended
and the disillusioned People of God are walking away from Jerusalem on the road to Emmaus.
In his To Have Or To Be, Eric Fromm says that in the beginning God was the highest value a human being
could experience in himself on the basis of the vital importance of being more. In the context of the modern
consumer society, of having more, even God has been turned into an idol, which the prophets defined as an
object which we made ourselves and into which we project our power which impoverishes us. Submitting to an
object of our own creation, we try to make contact with ourselves in alienated form, which is little better than
submitting to any idol, political doctrine or whatever, as a false crutch to help us to cope with life.
The million-year-old expulsion of the divine is thus continued, religious sects can run rampant and the victims
of state violence have their mouths shut the way Christ, in Girard’s words, had to have his mouth shut. This is
the essence of Calvary, which Dante in the Divine Comedy was not far wrong in representing as Satan nailed to
the cross. It was the Satanic lie about sacrifice and self-righteousness and divine violence that Christ destroyed
on the cross. It is the Revelation and the power to redeem man from his violence and create a world of peace
based on ‘justice and mercy and faith’, beginning with the poor and the oppressed.
In Girard’s analysis, the apocalypse signifies the violent decomposition of society by the hand of man, not by
the hand of God. Interpreting this as divine vengeance is similar to the way we like to interpret passages from
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the gospel to console ourselves in our hidden love of violence and of a violent God made in our image. Girard
discusses a typical example of this Fundamentalism in the parable of the proprietor of the vineyard. Our
fundamentalism takes literally the mysterious versions given by Luke and Mark, where either the original
writers or the copiers slipped into confusion in trying to simplify the passage; Matthew’s more explicit account
is in keeping with the whole spirit of the Gospel and must be preferred. God’s word cannot contradict itself. To
choose Luke or Mark in this parable in preference to Matthew would be to accept such a contradiction. Here, the
proprietor of the vineyard will according to Christ’s hearers but not to Christ himself, ‘bring the evil men to an
evil end’. This pedagogical strategy, frequently used by Christ allows his hearers and us to condemn ourselves
out of our own mouths to show our perversity. There is no such violence in God. If we are determined to destroy
ourselves here or hereafter, it is not God’s doing: He merely respects our freedom of choice while offering an
alternative. If we reject Him and His message society cannot but disintegrate in violence. God is not merely not
the author of violence, but it is He, in the person of His Son, who met violence head on with a view to its
elimination from society by thus revealing it in its most diabolical nature, in the murder of Innocence and Love
Personified — in other words in Deicide.
In relation to the military ethos, it is important to remember that the early christian church had two rules about
military matters: If a christian joined the army he was excommunicated; if a soldier wanted to become a
christian he was admitted on giving an undertaking never to kill, at a time when there was plenty of opportunity
in the army for patrol work, road building, organising supplies and the like, not requiring the act of killing,
which was against Christ’s radical invitation to love. Under the emperors Diocletian and Maximian, the main
cause of the brutal persecution of the christians was that they could not be counted upon for the army. They
were pacifists who made their conquests through love.
We now live in a world where there has never been so much talk of love, perhaps because it is a commodity that
is lacking in the midst of material abundance. Our pop-culture, magazines, women’s weeklies, cinema blurbs
and movies spew it out from all sides. People are told to marry for love, and not for love — again — of money.
Marriages break down because love has evaporated or a new love entered the picture. Children are told to love
their parents and the latter are advised that family success depends on their love for their children. Marriage
counsellors and family clinics speak incessantly above love. And still it seems wanting in our society.
We see its reverse side in the hatred of life manifested through the rising suicide rate and drug and drink
addiction, in the violence and assassinations that make light of others’ lives and in the glorified warmongering
that barely hides its hatred for those of other socio-economic beliefs, other races or other religions. The survival
of society, of the family and even of the individual person may now depend on it. The piling up of weapons of
mass destruction and of hand guns for the home, and the social Darwinism that drives us to the acquisition of an
ever greater share of the world’s cake are leading deeper and deeper into a darkening tunnel. The sexologists tell
us to find love in sex, notwithstanding the evidence that physical sex is self-seeking and therefore, by definition,
the opposite of love. And all the while, notwithstanding this inundation with ‘love’, hatred continues to mount,
as evidenced by the soaring divorce rate, the broken families, the wife battering, the child abuse, the suicides,
the drugs and the daily violence in our streets. The experts tell us that one of the factors in the mounting suicide
rate among young people is either lack of family love or its obverse equivalent, a possessive, narcissistic ‘love’
which is really love of self. Freud believed that the command to love was a source of neurosis and anguish
because it demanded something unnatural. Freud would have it: ‘Love your neighbour in the way he loves you’,
a reflection of the Jewish order of ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’.
One of the channels into which ‘love’ is sometimes directed is paternalistic philanthropy, which has been
exposed for the hypocrisy it is by Jacques Barzun, among others. Anders Nygren goes further and describes the
confusion between ‘love’ and altruism, sympathy and other features of worldly wisdom. Max Scheler, quoted by
Nygren, believed modern philanthropy and humanitarianism to be founded on resentment, and Nietzsche
considered it useless to found philanthropy on the quality of its recipients. In the ultimate analysis, all these
things are forms of self-interest. We have already discussed the activities of some of the American philanthropic
foundations in promoting imperialism and exploitation of Third World poor.
A recent woman author, Sunnie Mann, has had the honesty to express openly what perhaps many people may
feel at heart: ‘I prefer animals to humans. An animal is dependent on you when it’s ill. It’s always grateful and it
never answers back’. It is a chilling statement. Marx also rejected love and the slogan of the League of the Just,
forerunner of the Communist League, that ‘All Men Are Brothers’, adding that there were plenty of men whose
brother he did not want to be. This was both a philosophical and a revolutionary weakness on his part. As I
indicated even with regard to Hitler, one can love a man while hating what he does, nay, more than that, seeing a
man caught in the clutches of evil can add revolutionary fire to the desire to change the system that produced
him. Picture him being your own brother. This was the attitude of the first christians.
Is there normally, however, some impossible character in the christian command to turn the other cheek, to love
one’s enemies and to do good to those who hate you? I cannot pretend to be able to answer this question, but it
is rapidly becoming a matter of life and death for society. It is examined in Anders Nygren’s 3-volume
masterpiece Eros and Agape (which is unfortunately out of print).
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Modern languages are mainly confined to one word to cover the three expressions of antiquity discussed by
Nygren, Greek ‘Eros’ and ‘Agape’ and Augustine’s ‘Caritas’, all three against the background of Jewish
‘Nomos’ or Law. The divine ‘Agape’ from which real love issues had no rational foundation. It is spontaneous,
unmotivated and creative. It runs counter to the natural state of man based on egoism, which is the ultimate
cause of his perversion, his love of power, possessions and pleasure. When this self-destructive love is turned
around and directed towards the neighbour the natural perversity of the will is surmounted not by changing selflove to self-hatred but by its transmutation to a greater love. As Bultmann pointed out, man has to learn to
triumph over his natural self-love.
One of Teilhard’s themes in relating cosmogenesis to Revelation is that differentiation unifies and union
differentiates. He saw God as divine Union and creatures as a multiplicity undergoing union. To create is to
condense, to concentrate, to organise, to unify. To be more is to be better united with a greater number of
elements, not superficially or tangentially but radically centre to centre. Non-being is pure multiplicity, the
antipode of unity. Creative unification is accompanied by growth in both freedom and interiority. Matter that is
pulverised descends and becomes increasingly sterile; as it is unified it is the great mother pregnant with spirit
moving in an ascending direction. The direction of descent and impoverishing egoism is the direction of dissipation. Followed in the upward direction all creatures become luminous with spirit; followed downwards they
become opaque and demonic. The primacy of spirit over matter is the primacy of the future over the past.
Sooner or later science will have to come to grips with the thing called ‘love’ and try to work towards a
scientific definition. Though nuclear physicists have so far avoided the term itself, what they are finding in the
‘vacuum’ at the heart of matter bears a striking resemblance to what Teilhard examined as the essence of love,
namely passionate love, what Christ may have been referring to in his statement, ‘I have come to spread fire
upon the earth and how I long to see it lighted’. Teilhard said that when man succeeds in putting his finger upon
this pulse he will have discovered fire for the second time.
Teilhardian love is a vital form of energy. The tangential energy of matter is constant but reversible according to
the laws of thermodynamics, ie, while the amount of energy in the umverse remains constant the amount of
usable energy is constantly decreasing under the effects of entropy, moving towards a state of equilibrium in
multiplicity. The radial energy of life and love runs in the opposite direction, in blatant defiance of entropy.
Arms, militarisation, war, exploitation and having more rather than being more are all expressions of entropy,
which leads to death. Man has a tendency to fragment the world into multiple islands either of selfaggrandisement or of dissipation in self-centred pleasure-seeking. With regard to the latter Teilhard says:
‘Leaving aside, if you will, every trace of sentimentality and any hint of virtuous scandal, let us look quite
objectively, in our role as biologists or engineers, at our metropolises at night.... How much energy, do you
think, is lost in a single night that might have been converted into a new spirit of the earth?’
It is not a trivial matter that there was a powerful moral ethic in Marxism. Oppression, alienation and dissipation
operate in a vicious circle, the crushing of the poor under exploitative systems encouraging them to seek solace
in dissipation and the dissipation helping the Establishment to better subdue the masses. In the dissipation
syndrome unconsciously promoted by the media, sex, football and ‘spectatorism’ have become the new opium
of the people. When oppression was at its worst in Latin America, the football industry was promoted on a
massive scale.
Here it will be useful for you to examine the twin aspects of liberation theology in Latin America, both the
sociopolitical aspect and the moral aspect seeking to reduce dissipation, self-indulgence and self-destruction. It
is a doctrine propounded not by one or two eccentrics but by a large number of theologians all over the
continent, including Leonardo Boff, Vincent Cosmao, Gustavo Gutierrez, Jon Sobrino, Jose Miguel Bonino,
Ronaldo Munoz, Pablo Richard, Juan Carlos Scannone, Juan Luis Segundo, Paul Vidales, R A Alves, Hugo
Assmann, Clodovis Boff, Joseph Comblin, Enrique Dussel, Ignacio Ellacuria, Segundo Gallilea, Ernesto
Cardenal and others. It has now become too powerful a current to be stopped by the power of arms though it has
been denounced as Marxist by the Western politico-religious Establishment and its media. You must therefore
go to the source and read some of these authors for yourself. You will find no atheistic Marxism in them. At
most you will find —as in the letter to the Provincials of Latin American Jesuits from Pedro Arrupe, Superior of
the Order, of 8 December, 1980, before he was silenced by the reactionary John Paul II
— some use made of certain Marxist socio-economic principles as an analytical methodology concerning the
relationship between capital, labour and production, and their effect on the all-important human factor vis-a-vis
the accumulation of capital in liberal economics. This is a minimum, frowned upon by the Western
Establishment, necessary to understand the world in which we live. Such use of Marxist principles is not
exclusive; liberation theology also uses Revelation, as well as the social sciences as a basis for rationalising
theology.
By comparison with the speculative theology developed in the quiet libraries and seminaries of the West, the
irruption of the massive flock of newly-conscious poor into the christian community, following the liberating
Vatican II concept of the People of God, constituted a spiritual awakening for the ministers of the Word who
shared the lives of these poor in the shantytowns of Latin America. Reminiscent of the flock of the poor, the
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sick and the hungry that surrounded Christ on the roads of Palestine, they taught the theologians, on the latters’
own admission, more about Christ and His message than they had learned from their books. Christ was no
theologian discoursing academically about the nature of God and the process of man’s liberation from sickness,
oppression and dissipation. He spoke of the Father from personal experience the way the liberation theologians
speak of the Christ they have met in the poor. This was the Christ who personally launched the liberation
process, for which He paid the heaviest price. The liberation theologians are also paying a price, in terms of
their sacrifice of the comfortable living which the world awards to those who compromise themselves with The
System, and in terms of the harassment and risk of assasssination to which they are subjected. This theology
derives from the harsh experience of everyday living, in contact with the Spirit of Christ wearing a human face
in the shantytowns, poles apart from, say, the comfortable philosophical abstraction of ‘the Great Architect of
the Universe’ dear to the Masonic Establishment. It is perfectly natural that the powerful of the world prefer a
deity made to their own image and likeness rather than a blood-spattered ‘man of sorrows’.
The theologians of liberation experienced an overwhelming personal encounter with the Living Christ. Faith in
Him and the awful plight of the poor were mutually enlightening. They almost felt, in the words of scripture,
that if they remained silent the very stones would cry out.
So these men cry out.
What?
They cry out Christ’s liberating good news, so that ‘the poor have the Gospel preached to them’. And the poor
do what James Connolly told the poor of Dublin to do prior to 1916; they rise off their knees. Then the capitalist
class strikes back, killing the leaders of the people, grabbing the land of the small farmers who are driven into
the shantytowns the way they were driven into the slums in Puritan England. These victims are multiplying
Christ’s revelation of the brutality of The System and, like Him, they must ‘have their mouths shut’ by the same
politico-religious Establishment that engineered His silencing.
This is not to say that 19th century Marxism is going to be the solution for 21st century problems. Christ and
Marx are converging. I know from personal experience that true Marxists are people of unfathomable sincerity,
good will and dedication to the poor, the exploited and the underprivileged. So are true christians. Marxists,
however, have tended to put all their eggs in one basket, traditionalist christians in another. The former place
their faith in socio-economic liberation, forgetting that the wealthiest class are spiritually and emotionally
enslaved. The latter put emphasis on spiritual liberation, unmindful of Christ’s example and of the fact that it is
difficult to be spiritually free in the midst of disease, death and poverty. When the twain shall meet the deathknell of The System will have sounded.
Christ’s followers are increasingly abandoning religious paternalism, crossing the divide separating the
hierarchical churches from the people and taking up the cudgels on behalf of the downtrodden. If Marxists were
to take the final revolutionary step and ‘put on Christ’ while remaining rightly hostile to the institutionalised
churches supporting the Establishment, to religion as an opium of the people and to capitalist-imperialism and
all its works and pomps, then we might witness the accomplishment of the peaceful revolution which was
inaugurated by the first Christians in their Assemblies of the People and the fulfilment of Christ’s promise to
have the good news of their liberation brought to the poor.
As Eric Fromm pointed out in relation to Freudianism, any
theory which does not change ‘is, by this very fact, no longer
the same as the original theory of the master; it is a fossilized repetition and by being a repetition it is actually a
deformation’. In the present context this amounts to saying that received ideas are the enemy of all personal and
social liberation. Here, Eric Fromm takes the argument a vital step further in discussing Spinoza and Leibnitz,
who explained how we have the illusion of freedom because we are somewhat conscious of our desires while
remaining unaware of their motivations. The problem of freedom of choice, says Fromm, echoing Spinoza and
Leibnitz, cannot be understood until we realise that unconscious forces determine us while leaving us with the
happy illusion that our choice is a free one. It is not necessary to add further to previous remarks about what
these ‘unconscious forces’ are and how they are all the more insidious and subtle for belonging to ‘democratic’
capitalism and its media, but Marxists also have to face the fact that they are perhaps unconsciously prisoners of
a 19th century theory. Christians and Marxists must both return to their roots for inspiration but both must
reinterpret their master’s teaching in terms of the approaching 21st century.
Throughout these letters I have followed a purely factual path that seems to be leading towards a world
revolution. A christian cannot wish for a violent one. It is not yet inevitable. Fatalism, the ‘fatum’ or destiny,
was one of the constituents of pagan religion destroyed by the power of Christ. As Girard shows, the
opportunity for the Word is never so great as when all seems lost. He compares our situation today, when we are
all in one way or another walking away from the Living Christ, to that of the disciples on the road to Emmaus
walking away from the Jerusalem where their dream lay buried, unaware that the dream was not dead but
sleeping and that it was about to burst over the world in a new dawn. You will be discussing some of the
practical implications in your last chapter.
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Before coming to that, however, you propose to provide clarification towards the construction of the future by
examining the errors of the past and attempting to diagnose what happened to christendom that we converted the
liberating message of Christ into an exploitative system governed by our hunger for money, our lust for power
and our will for violence, smoothed over with self-righteousness. However, the christians down the centuries
who strayed away from the essential message of the New Testament did so mostly in good faith and often
demonstrated self-sacrificing endeavour of which we with our hedonism seem incapable. To argue along any
other lines would be to restore the violence of thought which has to be eliminated. Not ascribing guilt to the
‘guilty’ also liberates criticism from its hesitations and enables us to fulfil the christian precept by which we can
never be harsh enough with evil and never soft enough with the evil-doer.
Having thus cleared the air of any reason for hesitation, I
can now follow you into considering our problem by
discussing your question:
What went wrong with the liberating message which Christ launched on the world through a simple fraternity of
simple men, that we in the so-called Christian West, in our centuries of world dominion, have converted it into a
mechanism of state-sponsored exploitation, warmongering and violence which produce massive alienation and
counter-violence?
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10 -
WHAT WENT WRONG?
What went wrong, as Anders Nygren put it, was what usually goes wrong when the second generation succeeds
the first and the epigones who receive a radically-new heritage are unable to conserve it in its original purity and
it becomes adulterated with what preceded and what surrounds it. The early christians lived by oral tradition.
Although Paul’s letters were mostly written between 50 and 60AD) they were naturally not available to all the
communities in an age of difficult communication and laborious hand copying (which produced its own
mistakes). The synoptic gospels were not composed until the period between the 60s and 80s and St John’s until
the end of the century. The original Aramaic words of Christ also gave rise to difficulty in translation into a nonsemitic language, Greek. The widely-scattered communities could not have frequent discussion to confront their
respective developments, particularly since the Mediterranean was closed to traffic in the winter. Each was relatively isolated in culturally and religiously hostile territory surrounded by ancient modes. As for Scriptural
authority, Paul Ricoeur has said that it can be proved through linguistic analysis and practical references that
some of the statements attributed by the evangelists to Christ could not have been spoken by Him in Aramaic
against the Palestinian background, but originated with later, Greek-speaking communities. And Pascal said that
it was possible to correct Scripture, though only in the light of Scripture.
Before we begin to cast self-righteous stones at those who subsequently led christendom into error, it would be
good to bear in mind what has been suggested by René Girard, that Christ’s revelation was so revolutionary and
subversive that it stood no chance of taking root in the short term and that the christian leaders may have
consciously or subconsciously allowed an attentuation of the message as a protective envelope which is only
now entering its final stage of decomposition, to reveal the full truth. The ‘error’ may perhaps have been a
strategy based on an understanding that infinite patience was required with the revolutionary revelation.
Some authorities believe that the letter to the Church in Corinth, supposedly written in 96AD, was in reality
written later and attributed to Clement of Rome either to boost the bishop of Rome or to buttress the doctrines
entering christendom. As Nygren shows, the letter confuses the three basic kinds of love: the individualistic,
self-centred escapism of Greek Eros straining after the old pagan divinity beyond the clouds; the related Lawloving, God-fearing Nomos of the Jews; and the unmotivated Agape of Christ present in those who receive His
Word. The letter is charged with quotations from the Old Testament, and the offering of sacrifice and gifts
agreeable to God slips insidiously into the text. From the Greeks, the writer is influenced by the love which rises
upwards towards the divinity rather than the Agape which is received. To compare this letter with the New
Testament is to become aware of a yawning gap and to be convinced that whoever the author may have been
hardly had a copy of the gospel writings or Paul’s letters but was relying largely on the Old Testament
impregnated with New Testament notions, as well as ideas from the ambient Greek culture.
In the 2nd and succeeding centuries, the term ekklesia or assembly of the people of God began to take on the
sense of a hierarchical institution, and patriarchs and bishops to become the successors of the apostles. The
latter, according to Hans Kung and others, had no real successors. These men who had been the Lord’s personal
companions for some 2 ½ years, wandered the roads with Him, watched His every expression, witnessed His
miracles, heard and saw things that are only sketchily outlined in the gospels, intuitively came to grasp aspects
of His thought never expressed in words, communed existentially with His person, received the Eucharistic
bread and wine from His hands at the Last Supper, watched His passion and crucifixion, were thunderstruck by
His resurrection and their sudden seizure by the Spirit and were possessed of the power of healing like their
Master — these men were unique. Henceforth, it would be the ekklesia, the assembly of the people of God, who
would constitute the new order. Christ founded no church in the modern meaning of the term, left no High Priest
such as the one who presided over the Jewish church or the Pontifex Maximus, Head of the pagan College of
Priests in Rome, which the Emperor was. He left no liturgical ceremony. The New Testament makes it clear that
sacrificial religion and its concomitant, the priesthood, were abolished.
But the early christians were mostly Jews and had a deep traditional attachment to the Old Testament at a time
when the New was not yet established in ‘book’ form. The second and succeeding generation began to
incorporate fragments of Christ’s Agape in the framework of Jewish Nomos, by which love of God and man
was channelled through the Law. The folly of Calvary, the omnipotent God, Creator of the cosmos, hanging
dead on a cross, was too much for their hearers and they sought written support for this scandal in the Old Testament prophets, simultaneously, though partly unwittingly, strengthening their attachment to the former
religion. Instead of seeing Jewish Nomos as a dark background or foil against which Christ’s Agape would
shine all the more brightly in contrast, the latter became diluted with the former. Instead of Christ’s Agape
breaking a one-way passage from God to man, the Law restored the two-way current and its inherent confusion.
Having been liberated by Christ, man began to fall back on himself again, and once this worm got into the new
fruit there would be no limit to its ravages, as the subsequent 19 centuries were to show.
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A parallel development occurred in relation to the all-pervasive element of Greek Eros, which was such a
powerful cultural and religious factor that even the great writings of defenders of Christ’s Agape such as
Marcion, Irenaeus, Ignatius of Antioch and Justin the Martyr, posthumously became contaminated by the
prevailing thinking, to the point that even Origene misinterpreted a sentence from Ignatius in which he mistook
Ignatius’s common Eros, or desire for material things, for Divine Eros or desire for God. Justin the Martyr had
not only examined Eros and Agape theoretically but he also experienced them in his own life, trying the way of
Eros with his whole soul before declaring that not only did it not lead to God but it led directly away from Him.
Justin was an implacable enemy of the Greek idea of the immortality of the soul separate from the body, and an
equally implacable defender of Christ’s exaltation of the resurrection of the body, linked with the temporary
mortality of both soul and body. As Origene misinterpreted Ignatius, Justin was misinterpreted in his statement
that Christ was ‘the new Law’, a term which he used figuratively, indicating that Christ replaced the Law the
way Christ’s death was metaphorically ‘the new Sacrifice’ in the sense that it took the place of sacrifice.
Associated with the idea of man as God’s image and likeness and the body as the Temple of the Holy Spirit,
against the Manicheism of the Greeks, there was also the Judeo-christian teaching that the whole material world
is God’s good creation and must be taken care of by man. Any other view of the world is an offence to the
Creator.
Even before Alexander the Great, the Greeks had close spiritual ties through Asia Minor and Persia with the
Orient, whence the West was later to become infected with Manicheism. A basic element in the original,
oriental Upanishads was the myth of a divinely-originated soul exiled in an evil body pending its return to
Nirvana. As we shall see under a later chapter, the Old Testament of the Jews is a mixture of truth, which came
particularly from the prophets, half-truths, fallacy and myths collected from the surrounding cultures of Egypt
and Mesopotamia, the latter being an intimate part of Asia. There is a linkage between the three myths of the
good soul in the evil body, the fall of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel, and original sin becoming ‘an inherited
constituent’ of the human being. They have never been fully eradicated from pagan, Jewish or christian
thinking. Even an atheist and modernist like Freud adapted and incorporated them into his Totem and Taboo.
They are further compounded with the blasphemy of ascribing violence to a God who expelled Adam and Eve
from the garden and who is hungry for adoration and thirsty for blood sacrifice, activities by which fallen man
tries to repair the sin which he believed he inherited from Adam and Eve.
These myths are in reality an escapist attempt to eject unbearable evil from the self partly through religious
ritual and partly by retrospectively casting it back on mythical ‘first parents’. This original effort to evacuate
guilt from the unquiet conscience cannot in turn be evacuated from the unquiet modern conscience (as
described, for example, by Restak) on the basis that it is a question either for the faraway scholasticism of
history or the modern abstractions of church theologians, relating in either case to a flawed sense of the
hereafter. On the contrary it concerns the concrete world of the here-and-now, the problem of individual and
social responsibility in making our day-to-day world a livable place or a hell on earth. It concerns our
responsibility for democracy, nuclear arms, the exploitation of the Third World, the plight of the poor in our
own world and the new plague of self-indulgence (drink, drugs, Aids or whatever).
A third source of contamination of the early church, in addition to the Jewish and Greek sources, was Roman
jurisprudence allied with Jewish law. By the time of Gregory of Nyssa (331—395AD) and Augustine (353—
430), confusion was complete and the church ultimately rubber-stamped its approval of the very notions Christ
came to destroy. Eros and Agape were finally incorporated by Augustine into the single process of Caritas. This
was to govern the church’s thinking until Luther blew his trumpet, and was to partly return in humanist form
with the Enlightenment of the 18th century.
Against the background of the above brief summary of the doctrinal decline that contaminated the church during
the centuries leading up to Augustine, who was to remain the great guide until Aquinas and beyond, brief
mention must now be made of the triumphal entry of the church into the politico-religious Establishment of
Constantine and the place that the bishop of Rome began to take in its doctrinal government.
The leaders of the church left the privacy of people’s homes where the community met, penetrated the pagan
temples, donned the chasuble or paenula which the pagan priests used when sacrificing and ‘baptised’ pagan rite
and ritual. In the pre-Constantinian church no distinctive dress was worn by ‘the elders’ of the church (the
episcopoi or overseers, the theologians of the word and the deacons who took care of material matters).
Henceforth, in addition to the paenula or chasuble used at the sacrificial mass, the clergy were endowed with
what had been the symbol of office of the pagan priests, the pallium or stole. The elaboration of other vestments
followed and the clergy, like their pagan predecessors, became a caste apart and the ‘duo genera christianorum’,
attributed to St Jerome, took shape. The word ‘Kleros’ came to signify a kind of elect of God and their shaven
heads indicated detachment from the world in the manner of oriental monks. A priest of lower rank and lower
culture was commonly appointed to minister to the lower classes.
These first centuries saw the old Jewish religion, compounded with pagan elements, reborn under a christian
epithet and Calvary converted to an Old Testament-style sacrifice to a faraway God. This required a priest or
‘sacerdos’ to render the sacrificial ceremony a sacred and mysterious ritual by contrast with Christ’s simplicity
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in making the Eucharist part of an ordinary supper. ‘The cup of blessing which we bless’ became a gold and
silver chalice set apart as a sacred object. This was ‘the sacrifice of the Mass’, which did not, however, become
a daily religious service until the 17th and 18th centuries, when the post-Reformation Roman church retreated
from the workaday world. The pagan idea of ‘sacramentum’ had been introduced in the 3rd century and
proliferated throughout the Middle Ages. The number of official sacraments varied according to time and place
and was finally reduced to 7 by the 12th century bishop, Peter Lombard, before being further reduced by Luther
first to 3 and then to 2, baptism and the eucharist, the only ones which have scriptural sanction in the view of
protestantism.
Following the Lateran grant by the Emperor, retrospective documents are believed by some — but this is only
conjecture
— to have been forged to show the pre-eminence of the bishop of Rome all the way back to Clement and his
inheritance of the supposed ‘See of Peter’. In any case there certainly was to be a forgery later, in the 8th
century, titled The Donation of Constantine, purporting to be the granting to Pope Sylvester I and his successors
of spiritual and temporal rulership over the Western world.
The problem of the bishop of Rome claiming infallibility and Petrine succession has been examined by Hans
Kung, D W O’Connor and others, but perhaps most exhaustively by Cullmann.
The first question that arises, which has not yet been fully elucidated by the linguistic sciences, was what were
likely to have been the precise words, if any in this case, used by Christ in the original Aramaic dialogue, what
did they mean and what may have been added during the 4 centuries leading to the canonisation of the gospels.
One of the defects of Martin Luther, as of the protestant Fundamentalists today, is that he, like them, refused to
face the fact accepted by modern biblical scholarship that we can use the bible to correct the bible. If Peter was
given the supreme dogmatic power claimed by the popes down the centuries, it seems strange that he had to
submit to Paul on an absolutely fundamental matter at the first Council of Jerusalem.
A second question is whether Peter and the other Apostles, who had the unique privilege of being Christ’s
personal companions and being endowed, like Him, with the power of healing, which was subsequently lost by
the church leaders, had any successors. Hans Kung and others maintained they had not. A third question,
assuming Peter was given doctrinal supremacy and assuming he had successors, is who these successors should
be, the bishops of Jerusalem, Antioch, Corinth, Rome or elsewhere.
The famous passage in which Christ asked the Apostles whom they thought He was, followed by Peter’s great
confession of faith, is given in all the synoptic gospels, but the controversial piece giving the ‘power of the
keys’ to Peter is found only in Matthew. Without indulging in the pure speculation of some that this passage
could have been added much later by a copyist in the Roman catholic church, which would groundlessly open
the door to rejecting everything in the bible that does not suit one’s own particular penchant and render
interpretation purely subjective and therefore useless, another approach to the problem has been adopted by
some modern exegetes (as, for example, in the Traduction Oecumenique de Ia Bible).
This proceeds as follows: The way of thinking, the writing style, the vocabulary and practical references in
Matthew make it virtually impossible for the original source of this gospel to have been composed in Palestine.
Style and content, however, show that it was written by an educated Jew, thoroughly versed in Jewish law and
scripture. Furthermore, the fact that the author does not find it necessary to explain the complex practices of
Judaism to which he frequently refers indicates that it was probably written for a community of Jews converted
to Christ. Other evidence points to the possibility, as seems suggested by Ignatius of Antioch at the beginning of
the 2nd century, that the community in question may have been the church at Antioch. There are also some
indications that the community at Antioch may well have been founded by Peter. Finally, Matthew’s gospel
seems not to have been written until the 80s of the 1st century. All these considerations, some experts argue,
point towards possible authorship by a successor, and, no doubt, admirer, of the extraordinary personality that
Peter was, who had undoubtedly held a special place for Christ and had been first spokesman of the founding
church in Jerusalem. The ultimate deduction, however, could be equally claimed by both sides to the argument:
on the one hand, the admirer and successor wished to give added strength to his community by arguing that such
a striking statement had been made to their founder by Christ himself; or, on the other side, the statement to
Peter is all the more authentic for having been perhaps reported to the community at Antioch by the very
witness to whom it was confided.
Having examined the context and content of Matthew in its Introduction to this gospel, the Traduction
Oecumenique de Ia Bible (Societe Biblique Française), by a distinguished catholic-protestant commission, says:
In addressing his community, Matthew is not too concerned about reporting the words of the time of Jesus to the
letter; he identifies himself so well with the voice of his community, of which he is the expression, that it is
difficult to see the eyewitness in him. Instead, therefore, of looking to him for a reconstruction of past history,
one should read in him the gospel of Matthew’s community.
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All this, by the way, is a singular comment on the protestant tendency to idolise the book of the bible as the
infallible word of God, when it in fact contains a considerable amount of error of detail, when there were
probably other writings which were lost and when, in any case, at the time of a powerful oral tradition, not
everything was written. The bible is thus only a partial account of what Christ said and did — sufficient,
however, when taken in the spirit, with the aid of the Spirit and human scholarship, to constitute an adequate
reflection of God’s message to mankind.
Returning to the key problem of Christ’s commission to Peter, it is clear that having held a special place among
Christ’s chosen Apostles and having been the main spokesman for the church in Jerusalem in its early days, he
then disappeared and James became the leader there. His itinerary is henceforth extremely vague, virtually
unknown. Cullmann shows that he probably never set foot in Rome. The excavations conducted by Pius XII
beneath St Peter’s Basilica provided no satisfactory evidence. Even on the assumption that Peter, as claimed by
the papacy, was the doctrinal authority, as distinct from early witness and spokesman, of the young church in
Jerusalem, and assuming, further, contrary to the views of some theologians, that he did indeed have successors,
why were these not the bishops of Jerusalem, where he is certain to have presided, or of one of the other
churches deemed to have been associated with him, such as Antioch or Corinth?
The truth of Christ’s ruling, if accurately reported, that Peter was to be the foundation stone, is perhaps more
likely to be found in his disappearance, which would be the true role of a foundation stone as the building rises.
Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science, offers a somewhat parallel explanation: When Simon Bar-Jona
declares Christ to be the Son of the Living God, as reported by the synoptic gospels, Christ calls him blessed
and says that it was not ‘flesh and blood’, ie human reasoning, but the Father alone who revealed it to him. He
then gives Simon a new, spiritual name, Peter, and declares that He will found His church not on the mortal
man, son of the Jewish Jona, but on the immortal God-power which inspired Peter’s confession of faith and
would henceforth enable him to heal sickness as his Master had done; as the New Testament is a reflection,
enlightenment and enlargement of the Old, this episode mirrors the all-too-mortal and muscular Jacob wrestling
with Spirit, being conquered by it and having his name changed to the spiritual entity Israel (which, incidentally,
the modern materialist state of Israel, as claimed by some Jewish rabbin, has destroyed by erecting a mortal
fantasy on an immortal idea). With the coming of the Holy Spirit and Peter’s disappearance, this God-power
would no longer be centred in one man but become diffused through the ekklesia or Mystical Body, which
accords with the teaching of Hans Kung and others that infallibility belongs to the whole worldwide christian
community, not to any segment of it and still less to any individual.
In this matter, the Roman catholic church is not the only one at fault. The non-catholic churches are no less
erroneous in giving authority to human powers, as, for example, in the case of the Anglican church, vesting
theocratic, if not theological, power in parliament, the prime minister and the monarchy, or the Calvinistic
churches making an idol of the bible. If Christ has given no doctrinal authority to the pope, for a thousand times
greater reason He gave none to Henry VIII, Martin Luther, John Calvin or the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Neither did he give a bible to the individual to make the best of it or to distinguish between his subjective
imagination and the Holy Spirit in trying to interpret it.
According to St Paul, Christ was the unique Head of the Mystical Body of the new ekklesia or community of the
People of God. The mission of Peter and the apostles was to bear witness to Him alone and, as Kung pointed
out, to provide an apostleship of service rather than dogmatism. Part of Christ’s revolution was to make the
People of God supreme with Him, through Him and in Him. This has been advocated down the centuries by
many authorities including Marcellus of Padua, William of Ockham, Nogaret, Langenstein in Vienna, Conrad
de Gelnhausen, Gerson, Chancellor of the University of Paris, Wycliff and others towards the close of the
Middle Ages. All these men claimed that a pope, a bishop or a church council could err, as history has
abundantly shown, but that the Mystical Body of Christ possessed by the Spirit could never err. When it meets
in community and in communion with the whole People of God to receive the Living Word, this is the visible
church, the original ekklesia. This term is used throughout the New Testament to signify the individual local
community in communion with all the other communities. It never signifies one centralised, hierarchical
authority under a single visible head.
It is of interest to note in relation to Peter’s disappearance that the first known list of the writings of the New
Testament, dating from about 200AD and known as the Canon of Muratori does not contain the Epistles of
Peter (nor the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Epistle of James and the third of John).
All this is not to say that there is not a crying need for christian unity after 5 centuries of division and strife,
from which the wounds are not yet healed. The renowned protestant pastor, Willen Visser’t Hooft, echoed the
feelings of all genuine christians when he said before he died in 1985: ‘A sceptical world, as well as the millions
of members of our churches, will not really take us seriously until the World Council of Churches and the
Roman catholic church speak and act together in Christ’s name to give new hope to a world threatened by
absurdity, self-destruction, violence and poverty’. With the failure of the movement towards unity at the top, it
is becoming more likely that, as in other matters, the impulse and momentum will have to come from the People
of God, with christians of different denominations or none intermarrying freely without seeking permission
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from church authorities and participating in the eucharistic community of their choice without reference to
historical origins. These two developments will be related to the fact that the idea of a ‘sacrament of marriage’ is
a purely human invention, however solemn and sacred marriage should be as a basic cell of society, and to the
fact that it is the community rather than a priest which is the true celebrant of the Eucharist.
In non-dogmatic communities there would be no fear of deviation. Community unity in theological diversity
would be primordial. New creativity and dynamism would develop, catholicism would find a new liberalism
blowing through it and churches of the Anglican communion would be able to free themselves from their servile
obedience to the state. It would not be an anarchic development but would be based on an ecumenically worked
out formula in ethics, to which all individual and community members would submit under pain of
excommunication by the community as in the early church.
It is indicative of the desire for communion that a powerful protestant movement, the worldwide Church of God,
with headquarters in Passadena, California and its European base in England, has been promoting a key role for
the Vatican in the context of European unity. In view of all this goodwill and unprecedented opportunity to be
seized, it is a tragedy for our times that John Paul II is such a conservative reactionary in matters relating to the
priesthood, the sacraments, pilgrimages and the religious rite and ritual that is rooted in an amalgam of
paganism, ancient Greek philosophy and Jewish Law. Large numbers of people throughout the world who are
genuinely searching for the truth are being deprived of great wisdom written by outstanding Roman catholic
clergy and prelates who are rejected by many simply because as catholic clergy and prelates they carry or seem
to carry the approval of a reactionary pope. The Roman catholic church, however, is not the only one that is
dragging its feet. The persistence of 300 separate protestant churches is evidence to the contrary, and in 1988 we
witnessed a typical outburst of obscurantist sectarianism when the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland
expelled its most distinguished Elder, the Lord Chancellor of the Realm, because he had gone to the funeral of a
catholic friend.
To return to our consideration of the early church, an important turning point was reached with the Council of
Nicea in 325AD, where the episcopate thought it had found a friend in high places but in fact it was bound hand
and foot to the Emperor who presided in person. The worst result of this was not in the Latin church, where the
struggle between the religious and the secular arms was to continue, but in the institutions in the Eastern
Empire, where Constantine reigned for the latter part of his life, and the disastrous theocracy or Caesaro-papism
of the Orthodox church, which finally culminated in the Kremlin where the pendulum was to swing in the 20th
century to the opposite extreme of the dictatorship of an atheistic ideology and the secular Messiah.
The Doctor of the Church who was its guide for 1,000 years, and destined to continue into protestantism, though
partly rejected by Luther, Augustine passed through three phases in his life, a Manichean phase, a neo-Platonist
phase and a christian phase, but the imprint of the former two never completely left him. His synthesis of Eros,
Nomos and Agape in his new concept of Caritas was an expression of this contamination. The grace of God
which was so important to him still left man with the duty to ascend to meet it rather than to receive it passively.
Egoism must not be abolished but must come to coincide with the grace of God. Love of self is added to the two
commandments of Agape. Unmotivated love of neighbour is non-existent. At its best it is motivated by the selfcentred desire to gain God’s love.
After Augustine, a new work appeared on the scene attributed to a disciple of St Paul, Denis, or Dionysius the
Areopagite. It was discovered much later that these writings were forgeries by an author from the Eastern or
Orthodox church, probably in Alexandria, who thus became known as the Pseudo-Dionysius. The great
civilising work of the Irish missionaries on the continent from the 6th to the 9th century, through which they
were instrumental in pulling the Europeans out of the bog of the Dark Ages, had its obverse side in the
religiosity which they also helped to promote and which, in its pronounced clericalism, included the new
sacrament of individual auricular confession. The propagation in the Western or Latin church of the doctrines of
the Pseudo-Dionysius was also largely the work of an Irishman, Johannes Scotus Erigena (Ireland being then
known as ‘Scotia’). As head of the Court School of King Charles the Bald in France, he had very powerful
influence, though the Council of Valence condemned his ‘pultes Scotorum’ or Irish porridge as an invention of
the devil. He was again condemned by the Council of Sens, by Pope Honorius III and by Gregory XIII. His
condemnation by high authority may not have been entirely for the purest of theological motives, since he was
an ardent opponent of subservience to authority. But he was also a typically-catholic defender of reason in
matters of faith and thereby came in for the same criticism as Aquinas did from protestantism. However, his
skilful reproduction of Greek speculation caused ravages in christian thinking for several centuries and
contributed to the distrust of material things which eventually penetrated the church and made men look
increasingly to the hereafter for escapism. This was further accentuated by the crisis that struck Europe in the
14th and 15th centuries, the Great Schism, the Anglo-French wars and the disaster of the Black Death that
terrified the people and laid whole towns waste across the continent. Church, heaven and religion became a
refuge. The idea of hell and heaven was expressed at its sublimest by Dante, who raised poetry to a level never
surpassed. But he symbolised the conversion of Christ’s Agape into a new Eros. Conversely, while the
protestant churches were to become the protagonists of Agape, they also scattered artistic and architectural
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mediocrity everywhere, as the Roman church had become the promoter of the beauty which spread a bejewelled
tapestry across Europe.
The glory of the Renaissance was based partly on the idea of man as divinity, brought to the fore in the Platonist
Academy of Florence by Marsilio Ficino, who, not insignificantly, was a catholic priest. In his Epistle to Man he
produced perhaps the most perfect paean of praise of the human species ever composed. He proclaimed the
adoration of the human divinity, and every sinew and shape, every form and colour in every church in Rome reechoed the new doctrine. It was an expression of Latin superbia rooted in Greek Eros.
The Europe of the Renaissance, however, also had its poor, and while princes and popes were living it up, the
lower classes were paying their pittances to buy indulgences. God again became not the active agent present in
the christian community but a bearded figure above the clouds, entering the good and the bad deeds of lowly
creatures in ‘the book of life’. He was replaced by religion, which is an attempt to reach a god who does not
exist by means that lead diametrically away from God as the Greek and Roman religions and to a lesser extent
the Jewish religion had been doing until the Saviour was born. The life of the humble people of Europe thus
became governed by religious rules and regulations reminiscent of the Pharisees. After the Black Death had
swept Europe like a tornado they were accompanied by fright in the face of life and death such as Europe had
not witnessed since the Dark Ages. The terrified young Luther would be a product of this panic. The people
became gripped in an apocalyptic climate and flight into the unreal, as the material world became an evil thing
to be despised. Since the Greeks these notions had almost always come in from the Orient, whence a tragic
irony of fate now also brought the Plague. It was the end of the great Middle Ages which, for all its doctrinal
error, had rebuilt Europe from the ruins of Rome, carved out prosperous farms from the forest jungle, carried
through the first industrial revolution, covered Europe with beautiful cities and established the great seats of
learning known as the universities. After centuries of dynamic activity in God’s creation, the river of progress
stopped, stagnated and turned men’s minds pessimistically to the vanity and futility of all things, and religious
‘fire insurance’ for the next world became the benchmark of life. The ‘Babylonian captivity’ in sacerdotalism,
sacramentalism and sacrificialism reached its climax and the key to this spiritual dungeon was held firmly by
the pope, the ‘Pontifex Maximus”, replacing the former Emperor’s role of High Priest. Violence, sadism and
moral collapse accompanied the religiosity of the times. Aristotle declined and Plato was resurrected. Statues
which had been an architectural decoration and a means of instruction when the people were illiterate became
detached and an object of devotion. Following the corrupt papal period known as ‘The Rule of the Harlots’, the
Renaissance popes were the last straw, lovers of letters and the arts but far from the Word of Christ in either
their doctrines or their daily lives. Rome became the most beautiful city in the world but also the one where
debauchery, nepotism and corruption were rampant at the heart of the church. The sensuous Alexander Borgia
was succeeded, after a month of the ailing Pius III, by the warmongering Julius II, followed by the lover of art,
festivity and theatre, Leo X, who hastened with the construction of the planned Basilica of St Peter, symbol,
perhaps, of the pride that preceded the fall. It was an undertaking which required a lot of money ... and ... a lot of
indulgences. None of these popes was aware that they were preparing the ground for the fiercest storm that ever
struck christendom.
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11 -
A VOICE CRYING IN THE WILDERNESS
It was 31 October, 1517. The crowds were streaming into the little university town of Wittenberg for the annual
celebrations marking the Feast of All Saints and the display of the great collection of relics of which the Castle
church boasted. Nailed to the door of the church was a large sheet of paper carrying 95 propositions challenging
abuses in the preaching of indulgences. They were mild enough and careful to exonerate the pope. But
revolutions, traced back to their real source, almost always show the first shots to be puny compared with the
subsequent conflagration. While pope and prince, emperor and bishop were controlling the ebb and flow of a
whole continent’s affairs, here on the door of an insignificant church in an out-of-the-way town was a set of
theses which were destined to produce the great upheaval. They were almost fawning in their acknowledgement
of papal power, eg: ‘Thesis 9 — the Holy Spirit, acting in the person of the pope, manifests grace to us; ...
Thesis 42 —christians should be taught that the pope does not at all intend that the purchase of indulgences
should be understood as in any way comparable with works of mercy;
Thesis 56— the treasures of the church, out of which the pope dispenses indulgences, are not sufficiently
spoken of or known among the people of Christ; ... Thesis 61 — for it is clear that the power of the pope
suffices, by itself, for the remission of penalties and reserved cases; ... Thesis 69 —bishops and parish priests, in
duty bound, must receive the commissaries of the papal indulgences with all reverence;
Thesis 73 — ... the pope rightly excommunicates those who make any plans to the detriment of the trade in
indulgences’.
But the snowball was launched from the top of the hill and its devastating course would become implacable as
the centuries rolled on.
Martin Luther was already 34 years of age, a brilliant scholastic, well versed in Greek, Latin and Hebrew, a
renowned scriptural exegete and a man of powerful intellect. In addition, as a celibate monk he possessed and
was possessed by psychic energy accumulated over a period of 12 years since 2 July, 1505 when, terrified on
being struck to the ground in a thunderstorm while walking from Mansfeld to Erfurt, he suddenly decided, with
that impetuous nature of his, to become a monk and 2 weeks later knocked on the door of the Augustinians.
Even before that, the energy of frustration, suffering and anguish had been building up in the adolescent from a
series of accidents, illnesses and family problems partly generated by an authoritarian father. He also suffered
from the horror of death that was widespread.
Revolutions need a dynamo and human dynamos can be fuelled, inter alia, by suffering. This man’s was
compounded by metaphysical anguish, due largely to the overwhelming sense of sin and guilt which, like his
spiritual father Augustine, he almost palpably felt in the depths of his being, like the publican at the back of the
Temple, like the prostitute washing Christ’s feet with her tears and drying them with her hair. Luther did not go
to Christ as she did: he went to confession, sometimes several times a day, to unburden himself of his
culpability. In fairness it must be added that, on Luther’s own admission, his confessor tried to explain to him
that it was not God who was angry with him but that it was he, Martin Luther, who was angry with God.
He was obsessed by what he saw as the frightening command to ‘love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart,
thy whole soul and thy whole mind’, an impossible order at a time when man had fallen between two stools,
having lost both the proud certainty of the Pharisees and the humble reception of Christ’s Agape. Far from being
the reassuring thing it was later to become for Martin, the justice of God was a terrifying thought. In this
context, the problems raised by the 95 propositions nailed to the church door would soon be overwhelmed in the
swelling tempest that was about to engulf Europe. In such situations the Establishment always thinks it can
restore order by minor surgery and the remark attributed to Marie Antoinette, ‘Let them eat cake’, was hardly
more flippant than Leo X's ‘Exsurge Domine’ of June 1520 calling on the Lord to put down the wild boar that
had broken into His vineyard. It would not take long to prove that the wild boar would not be so easily put
down.
Luther was not the god he has been made out to be by his more fanatical followers, and his own impetuousness
was partly to blame for the irreparable rift he produced in the seamless robe and for the religious divisions and
tensions which began on that fateful day in 1517. But the Roman church also added insult to injury and
continued to pile error upon error, taking its stand primarily on obedience irrespective of truth. Finally, with
Germany in disarray, Scandinavia and England gone over to the new religion, France and Central Europe under
attack and the church threatened everywhere, Rome convened the Council of Trent and in a first great elan of
theological revision broadly approved Luther’s teaching before the adjournment which gave an opportunity for
the ‘horse trading’ that resulted in rejection of Luther and the swing of the pendulum to the CounterReformation. This purified the Roman catholic church of its debauchery and corruption but returned it with a
vengeance to the old Eros, Nomos, rite and ritual, as the way to heaven, instead of the Agape brought by Christ.
As Burckhardt said, the Reformation shattered christendom but saved the papacy, as one austere pope after
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another replaced the corrupt popes of the Renaissance. On the protestant side, the slogan ‘saved by faith’ soon
had the word ‘alone’ insidiously added, taking the sting out of the good works which the Epistle of St James
saw as evidence that faith was not dead and which are demanded from end to end of Christ’s gospel. It opened
the door ever so slightly to what would later become protestant complacency in spiritual matters for all but the
best theologians and keenest christians.
In the context of Luther’s laudable effort to correct the crying abuses of the Roman catholic church, the tragedy
lay in the fact that both sides became equally responsible for the disruption. The church stood on its pretentious
claim to absolute obedience even in the face of its blatant errors and Luther increasingly stood on his
determination to win at any cost. And thus, against the proud concept of Rome, the mad monk of Wittenberg
opened the sluice gate and let in the flood. Notwithstanding the impressive if futile metaphor of the funnel
through which God’s love would flow through ‘the saved’ and thus spread from the sheep to the goats, the
doctrine of the lonely soul face to face with its Maker, saved by faith alone, was to become a recipe to let the
world go to hell since the believer was, anyway, going to heaven. This cut-price passport to paradise is no
longer credible. It is tiresome to find even today, 4 ½ centuries after Luther, that protestantism, still clinging to
Luther’s individualistic ‘solus cum solo’ formula in its fear of the judgement and its desperation to find
justification, continues its Fundamentalist obsession with selected passages from Paul in support of subjective
dogma against the whole thrust of the New Testament in its entirety, as it is equally tiresome to observe the
pope and the Vatican make empty gestures towards protestantism while ignoring the great truths it revealed. But
the ruthlessness that arose from the protestant accent on faith, instead of on the sweeping all-inclusive love that
Christ preached incessantly as the unique sign of the christian; predestination and worldly success as a sign of
salvation; the two kingdoms; the power to be soon conferred on princes and tyrants of the stamp of Henry VIII,
Cromwell, Calvin and others; the invitation to violence and bloodshed, pronounced in horrific terms by Luther
himself — were all dangerous steps on the slippery slope that led the West down its 500 years of escalating
exploitation and violence to today’s planetary impasse. Catholicism has had its share in this, first through its
refusal to discuss doctrine with Luther and then through the Council of Trent and its retreat into religion.
When one finally renounces one’s ancestral inheritance of ‘catholic’ or ‘protestant’, stands firmly at the
crossroads and tries impartially to examine the various currents in some depth, it is impossible to take sides. But
since both love and hate are blind, catholics have been inclined to idealise the Roman catholic church as
protestants have the protestant churches, each side tending to look upon the other, at least up to recently, as
almost the incarnation of evil and error. However, as criticism of the Roman church must exonerate outstanding
catholic exegetes and saintly men and women, so criticism of Luther, Henry VIII, Calvin and other Reformers
does not take from the admiration due to brilliant protestant theologians particularly of the 20th century, or from
the merits of great protestant men of God. What we are considering is the general body politic and the effect
which certain individuals and doctrines have had upon it.
Luther’s great period was from 1517 to 1525. The turning point came with the Peasants’ Rebellion and his
invitation to the princes ‘to stab, kill and strangle’ as they would a dog that had run mad, remarks which some of
his followers tried to impute to an impetuous outburst but which he himself categorically refused to retract.
Erasmus feared such an outcome from the start and attributed it to the violence of Reformation thinking.
Protestantism henceforth was to swing heavily to the side of the Establishment and The System even more than
the pope and the Vatican have done. In Britain, for example, even to this day, measures approved by the
Anglican Church’s General Synod have to be endorsed by both houses of parliament before they can receive the
royal assent and become law. Such measures are historically rooted in Luther’s throwing in his weight with ‘the
princes of this world’ and the blessing Calvin was to give to theocracy.
To understand Luther’s bias in these matters one has to go back to the deep psychological turbulence in his
character, a problem that has been analysed by one of the 20th century’s leading psychologists and thinkers, Eric
Fromm64.
Although any psychoanalytical consideration of Luther is usually condemned roundly by his admirers, Fromm’s
treatment is valuable in rising above petty personal weaknesses, to reach out to a global politico-religious
analysis that stretches across the centuries and pertinently probes our own philosophies as rooted in Luther, who
was in many ways a kind of 16th century Ian Paisley. Fromm points out that Luther was a typical representative
of the authoritarian character. Having been brought up by an unusually severe father in a family with an
alcoholic background and having experienced little love or security as a child, his personality was torn by a
constant ambivalence towards authority. Perhaps this helps to explain that although he had a clear case in
rationalising his attack on the papacy he was never, to his dying breath, able to come to terms with his fierce
personal hatred of the pope, of Thomas Aquinas and of all who opposed him, whom he equated with the devil in
person, as it was the devil who drove the peasants to revolt against the princes. Luther’s language was
frequently crude, eg: ‘If the Tiber one day throws up a frightful animal with an ass’s head, the chest and belly of
a woman, an elephant’s hoof for a right hand, fish scales on its legs and a dragon’s head on its arse it would
signify God’s enormous anger with the pope’. He described priests as pigs with a human head and monks as a
plague of hooded locusts. He addressed Henry VIII as ‘a pig, an ass, a dunghill ... a lying buffoon dressed in
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king’s clothes’ ... etc. etc. Shortly before he died he wrote a diatribe against Zwingli and other Reformers (who
had dared to oppose him about the Real Presence) ‘wherever they may be found, and I wish to glorify myself for
this condemnation before the Tribunal of my God’. He referred to the highly cultivated Erasmus — of all men
— as an epicurean swine and ignoramus whose thinking was a mixture of glue and mud, dirt and sewage. His
attack on the Jews in his Shem Hemaphoras of 1543 is outrageous in its obscenity.
The Jews, he said, had drunk and eaten of a mixture of Judas’s .... (two unprintable four-letter words) ... Those
who allowed themselves to be robbed and raped by these swine could not but ...‘ One hesitates here to repeat
Luther’s foul outburst. In case you might think that all this is abstract history of no importance, it should be
remembered that Hitler had another of Luther’s pamphlets, Against the Jews and their Lies, reprinted and
distributed by the million. In this, among other contemptible scurilities, Luther ordered christians to burn every
synagogue and destroy this race of vipers from off the face of the earth. In his writings about ‘the monsters’ of
his time one is reminded of nothing so much as the paintings which Goya dredged up from the foul depths of the
subconscious. On occasion he ardently desired the final showdown and the end of the world, ie the early
destruction of God’s good creation, somewhat as the most extreme of the apocalyptic Fundamentalists are
itching for Armageddon today.
In Luther as in the Fundamentalists there is a strong thread of self-righteousness, which almost always accompanies a deep-seated, subconscious self-loathing and lack of a true ‘joie de vivre’. When Luther’s daughter
Margarita was ill he wrote to a friend in April 1544: ‘I would not be angry against the Lord if he took her away
from this satanical time and century and I would hope that I and mine would be swept away quickly because I
am eager to see the day which will put an end to the fury of satan and his ilk, ‘his ilk’ being those who disagreed
with him, who included the great humanist, Erasmus, as shown in Luther’s The Bonded Will. It is of interest to
note here that the data show that protestant tombs of the 16th century tended to carry apocalyptic themes such as
the ‘danse macabre’, which were practically non-existent in Italy and Spain. The dark forests of the north bred
hobgoblins in men’s minds. The Renaissance, on the other hand, was not the satanic evil that some
Fundamentalists believe it to have been.
Fromm’s examination shows a Luther who was simultaneously filled with an extreme feeling of aloneness and
powerlessness and a passion to dominate. Tortured by doubts as only the lonely, compulsive character can be,
he hated others as well as himself and had an intense desire to be loved and to submit to the very authority he
hated. He carried this dichotomy to his relation with God, in regard to whom he managed to walk the tight rope
of balancing love with fearful submission. This conflict may be traceable to the contradiction inherent in the
erroneous doctrine of a God of infinite love, compassion and forgiveness requiring the horrendous murder of his
son because he had been offended. Fromm’s critique is not based on any selection of particular ideas but on a
study of the whole of Luther’s and Calvin’s system as well as an analysis of the catholic doctrine that preceded
the Reformation.
Catholic doctrine had always taught that man’s nature, though corrupted by sin, innately strives for the good,
that his share in the determination of his fate gave him strength and dignity, that his own efforts aided by the
grace of God and the sacraments of the church are of avail for his salvation and that man’s will is free to desire
the good. This was the fundamental issue that brought Luther into his great clash with Erasmus, maintaining
‘the bonded will’ against the free will defended by the latter, by Aquinas and by the catholic theologians on the
whole, who reconciled predestination with good works because, as Aquinas put it, ‘through these means
predestination is most certainly fulfilled.’ Human freedom would be only a pseudo freedom if man were not free
to refuse the grace offered to him by God, a possibility allowed by Christ when He said that this, the sin against
the Holy Spirit, could not be ‘forgiven’, ie cancelled out by a God who directs cosmogenesis but will not force
the individual into compliance. Through his free will man can realise the full potential of his individual self and
this self-fulfilment will be a constituent of eternal bliss (in Teilhard’s analysis). The symbolic myth of Adam
and Eve, interpreted in the light of Christ’s revelations, explains the reverse form of self-glorification as a
withdrawal from God, alienation from nature and the individuation that henceforth would become the crossing
of the desert before the rediscovery of community.
Luther introduced the concept of the subjective individual face to face with God, a notion which, according to
Fromm, is inseparably connected with the ideas of puritanism. Man’s depravity and lack of freedom in relation
to it is a fundamental doctrine in Luther. The struggle for man’s soul is not between a free man and God but
between God and Satan, who ‘contend which shall have it and hold it’, as Luther said in The Bonded Will,
replying to Erasmus. ‘God-ward man has no “free will”, but is a captive, slave and servant either to the will of
God or to the will of Satan.’ Luther’s faith was an indubitable, subjective experience —uninfluenced by pope,
confessor or the people of God — one’s own conviction of being seized by Christ rather than by the devil. The
compulsive quest for certainty, says Fromm, such as we find in Luther, is not the expression of genuine faith but
is rooted in the need to conquer unbearable doubt. He sees a parallel between this psychological problem in
Luther and that present in many people today who try to find certainty by becoming an instrument in the hands
of a strong power outside the self.
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Psychologically, faith has two entirely different meanings: the expression of an inner relatedness to mankind
and affirmation of life; or a reaction against fundamental doubt rooted in the isolation of the individual and his
negative attitude towards life and the world, as in Luther’s case. The former attitude is certainly closer to Christ,
as it also is to Teilhard de Chardin, his virtually organic view of the Mystical Body and his presentation of the
noosphere as the present great phase in evolution. Fromm argues, as Teilhard does, that there is only one
possible solution for the relation of individualised man with the world: his active solidarity with all men and his
spontaneous activity, love and work, which unite him again with the world and with society, not by primary ties
but in the freely-chosen action of the independent individual. How to reconcile this with today’s massive denial
of work to the unemployed is a matter which we shall discuss in a separate letter.
Luther sent the works of Aquinas up in flames, declaring reason a prostitute in relation to God. This irrational
certainty sprang partly from Luther’s earlier irrational doubt. The latter, according to Fromm, cannot disappear
as long as man has not progressed from negative freedom to positive freedom. Modern attempts to silence
doubt, the compulsive striving for success, the belief in unlimited knowledge of facts or the submission to a
leader who assumes responsibility for ‘certainty’ cannot do more than eliminate the awareness of doubt. Doubt
itself will not disappear as long as man does not overcome his isolation and find a meaningful place in society
and the ongoing world. It would be futile to preach religious resignation to the poor or to people thrown on the
scrapheap by unemployment; it would be another form of the opium of the people. Perhaps here we can find the
basic weakness in Luther, the gratuitous nature of the world as a kind of testing-ground for the salvation of the
individual in the only kingdom that mattered, the kingdom of God, leaving the kingdom of the world to Caesar
and all his works and pomps.
We now know that there are indeed two kingdoms, the good and the bad, the oppressive and the oppressed, the
kingdom of power and the kingdom of weakness, the king-dom of war and the kingdom of peace, the kingdom
of the Mystical Body and the kingdom of individualism, the kingdom of the law and the kingdom of love, the
kingdom that husbands and the kingdom that destroys, the kingdom that gathers and the kingdom that disperses,
the kingdom of life and the kingdom of death, the uplifting kingdom of spiritual energy and the reverse kingdom
of entropy, the kingdom of sadness and the kingdom of joy, the kingdom of slavery and the kingdom of liberty,
the kingdom of the light and the kingdom of darkness.
The collapse of the Mystical Body, the decline in its spiritual vigour and the downward pull into matter were
partly encouraged by the fact that, as Fromm points out, the individual who lost his sense of pride and dignity in
working out his own destiny, taken from him by Luther, is psychologically prepared to lose the feeling that was
characteristic of medieval thinking, namely, that man, his spiritual welfare and his spiritual aims were the
purpose of life: he was prepared to accept a role in which his life became a means to purposes outside himself,
those of economic productivity and the accumulation of capital, a good enough aim if the whole man
participated but a disastrous one for a half man assured of salvation by faith alone irrespective of how he might
pursue the aim. Although Luther would have abhorred the idea that man’s life should become a means to
economic ends, his emphasis on the nothingness of the individual paved the way for a development in which
man not only was to obey secular authorities but had to subordinate his life to the ends of economic
achievements and sacrifice himself to ‘higher’ powers.
Calvin’s theology, which came largely to govern the Anglo-Saxon world and thence virtually the entire West,
carried Luther’s teachings a step further: religion related to worldly success and the latter as a sign of salvation.
Paradoxically, Calvin preached that only he who despised this world and himself, inter alia through a fearsome
application of the old pharisaical law, can hope to be among the predestined elect. But eventually their worldly
success came to be seen as a sign of their salvation by people terrified by the thought of the predestination
designed by Jehovah. Although the princes were eager to jump into the breach for the power and property that
suddenly became available, both Luther and Calvin appealed particularly to the conservative middle class who
were by nature worried, threatened as they were by the early manifestations of upper-class capitalism even
before its great surge in Puritan England. Although Johannes Fugger, who had settled at Augsburg in 1368, was
merely a master-weaver, his sons made an enormous expansion of the business, married into the greatest
families and were ennobled by the Emperor Maximillian who mortgaged to them the Lordship of Weissenhorn.
They were among the links between the mild capitalism invented by the Italians and the ferocious form of it
which broke out later in England. This is only by-the-way, to indicate the bewilderment of the middle class to
whom Luther and Calvin appealed and to whom the new theology offered a combination of submission and
security. Calvin, more specifically than Luther, preached the terrible doctrine that God had predetermined from
all eternity who were to be damned and who saved. Man had no free will in this matter and there was absolutely
nothing he could do about it. His hands were firmly tied by God, his will bonded. All who disbelieved this
dogma of predestination were denounced by Calvin as barking dogs and by Luther as men who put God in the
dock. Predestination was simply God being God, showing his unlimited power. It was Yahweh gone berserk.
And it was in blatant contradiction to the entire new Testament, a throwback to the Old Law challenged by
Christ and a rejection of Christ’s solidarity with the poor, the sinners and the oppressed.
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On this slippery slope there was but a small step back to the Old Testament Law of loving ‘the brethren’, ‘the
saved’, ‘the just’, the ‘law-abiding’, those whose worldly success showed that God was with them, and hating
‘sinners’, the baddies who did not belong to the politico-religious Establishment, whose poverty proved that
they were the outcast —social Darwinism and the might to maintain it. The commonest and the most despicable
way to make a travesty of Christ is to use Him as an insurance for this life and the hereafter, for which He
revealed the reply that would be made at the judgement: ‘I never knew you; depart from my sight’. Fragile man,
frightened for his success here and hereafter has forever been tempted to lean on a facile divine contract such as
the formula, ‘Saved by faith alone.
Eric Fromm argues that the Lutheran-Calvinistic doctrine of predestination found its most vigorous modern
revival in Nazi Germany, but Fromm was writing before an even more modern Fundamentalism began to bare
its teeth in South Africa, the American Bible Belt and elsewhere, whose full flowering has not yet been seen but
which some writers foresee as the beginning of a new Fascism triggered by the old ‘devilish confusion’ and the
need for new-found certainty in a world of doubt and turbulence. The Lutheran-Calvinist doctrine carries the
seed of the superiority of the elect which is fundamental to Fascism: Men are born unequal; like the poor
peasants of 1525, the lower orders, the Blacks etc. are broadly destined to remain at the bottom of the pile and
those who break out and join the elite are the exceptions that prove the rule. The greatest single factor in the
solidarity of the whole human family, the equality of man’s fate, is abolished. This represents a deep contempt
and hatred for other human beings, the same hatred, says Fromm, with which they endowed God. Together with
the hidden anxiety that one might not belong to God’s elect, it fuels protestant activism in the world, an activism
that had its source not so much in the advertised desire to do good to others but in the desperate need to escape
from uncertainty into ‘workaholism’, prompted by anxiety, overcoming the deep panic of spiritual
powerlessness by an all-absorbing drive into frantic activity, a well known characteristic of compulsive
neurotics. It tends to be further extrapolated into warmongering and the intention to exterminate the baddies
from the face of the earth so as ‘to live at peace with the Lord in the New Jerusalem’.
Fromm’s discussion shows that the medieval attitude to work — and, one might add, to warmongering — was
different from that which developed in the post-Reformation era. Medieval man worked to secure his livelihood;
modern man works for the market. In the Middle Ages, there was no urge to work beyond what was necessary
for a livelihood or for the pleasure of realising productive or creative capacity, as in the building of the
architectural jewel that is the great stone tapestry of Romanesque, Gothic and Baroque. Post-Reformation man,
by contrast, set to money-making with a neurotic compulsiveness that knows no bounds, and it is not surprising
that little money or effort was wasted creating gratuitous beauty, which was replaced by shoddiness,
megalomania and functionalism. Man became his own slave driver. At the same time the capitalistic rat race
which followed developed envy and hostility towards one’s fellow-men and competitors, particularly those who
rose higher on the ladder of prestige and power, combined with the ambiguity of deriving vicarious pleasure
observing the antics of the powerful, voting for them in elections and submitting to their commands even while
criticising them. This is a special feature of the middle classes. The proletariat hate the rich who exploit them
and they want to overthrow them, encouraged by a handful of middle-class leaders. But the vast bulk of the
bourgeoisie fawn on those above and long to join them. Their hostility must therefore be repressed. Such
repressed hostility can pervade the whole personality. ‘Luther and Calvin portray this all-pervading hostility’,
says Fromm; they ‘belonged to the ranks of the greatest haters among the leading figures of history’, appealing
to a class which is itself driven by an intense, repressed hostility.
Fromm points out that Calvin’s picture of a despotic God who wants unrestricted power over men and their
submission and humiliation is a projection of the middle class’s own hostility and envy. It is accompanied by
that moral indignation ‘which has invariably been characteristic for the lower middle class from Luther’s time to
Hitler’s.... In the later development of Calvinism warnings against friendliness towards the stranger, a cruel
attitude towards the poor and a general atmosphere of suspiciousness often appeared’. Another constituent of
this syndrome is self-hatred, which further accentuates the moralising and duty-bound conscience, as distinct
from the genuine, love-inspired conscience of the integrated personality. This pathological conscience becomes
a slave-driver towards both the self and others. Genuine humility and sense of duty towards others are often
replaced by self-righteous hostility combined with capitulation before the brutality of the secular power in
maintaining a world of law and order against the rebellious rabble, as in 1525 and subsequently. According to
the Lutheran-Calvinist doctrine of the bonded will and predestined salvation for an elite, the masses must have
sense hammered into them. On the other hand, if they fully accepted their powerlessness and evilness and
considered their whole life as an atonement for their sins, they could overcome their uncertainty with regard to
the hereafter and could hope to belong to the slice of humanity whom God had decided to save. Roman
catholicism is frequently used as a religious refuge by worried people but Eric Fromm shows that protestantism
also ‘was the answer to the human needs of the frightened, uprooted and isolated individual who had to orient
and to relate himself to a new world’. Without these traits, he says, and the compulsion to work and to make
one’s life a tool for the purposes of an extrapersonal power, modern capitalism would have been unthinkable.
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Space does not allow for further discussion of Fromm’s extrapolation of the Lutheran-Calvinist doctrine into our
modern world, but I would encourage you to read him for yourself by referring to one detail regarding the
present-day conflict between the individual and The System. Most Establishment people take the present
structure of society so much for granted that to them the individual who is not well-adapted tends to be
dismissed simply as a misfit, when, in fact, the geniuses who have always made radical change in society have
almost always been misfits. Even in relation to the neurotic individual, Fromm says that the person who is
supposed to be normal because he is well adapted ‘is often less healthy than the neurotic person in terms of
human values. Often he is well adapted only at the expense of having given up his self in order to become more
or less the person he believes he is expected to be. All genuine individuality and spontaneity may have been
lost. On the other hand, the neurotic person can be characterised as somebody who was not ready to surrender
completely in the battle for his self.’ Similarly, R D Laing argued that psychotic people were engaged in a
search for change, growth and transcendence, whereas the supposedly sane were crippled, half-dead automatons.
Hilaire Belloc said that the prime product of the Reformation was the isolation of the soul, which produced a
loss of corporate substance and released in society a furious new accession of force. For, the breakup of any
stable system, in physics as in society, makes actual a prodigious reserve of potential energy running riot,
transforming the power that held things together into a power driving each component separately: the effect of
an explosion. The isolation of the soul compels it to strong vagaries and to seek consolation in the artificial
warmth of the crowd, to dissipate energy, to destroy things or peddle things, or to worship a new idol in some
strange religious sect, political party or news medium. According to Belloc, capitalism arose directly from this
isolation, which permitted unlimited competition and gave licence to greed. The many who are dispossessed can
only exist upon doles meted out by the possessors. The latter have taken control of the state — hence the great
national debts and hence the draining of wealth from foreign lands.
Such a system destroys the true conception of private property, and simultaneously creates a demand for relief
through the denial of the principle of ownership and recourse to the inhuman system of state socialism. Belloc
calls for secure and well-divided private property.
Having already briefly considered Henry VIII and now Martin Luther, we must now turn in greater detail to the
third founding father of capitalism and the modern West, John Calvin.
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12 -
THEOCRACY AND TYRANNY
Once the ebullient Augustinian of Wittenberg had crashed his way into history, a host of men followed. The
princes were eager for a share of the spoils in terms of both power and wealth. The Latin-speaking medieval
civilisation was finally shipwrecked after listing for 2 centuries, and the modern nation-state was born, which
welded linguistic and geographical units together in aggressive alliance compounded with the explosive
constituent of conflicting religions. The way was open towards our horrific modern wars for the myth of the
nation-state which became sacralised by transfer from a church that had more or less succeeded in retaining its
spiritual transcendence for 15 centuries. After Luther and the German princes, Henry VIII rushed into the breach
followed by lesser men. John de Leyde proclaimed himself the Messiah, King of Sion, and outdid Henry in at
least one activity — he married 16 wives; Philip de Hesse demanded bigamy; the Anabaptist fanatics ran riot
and threatened to reduce Germany, Holland and eastern France to anarchy. Luther’s right-hand man,
Melanchton, wrote: ‘Look at this evangelical society, adultery, drunkenness, gambling, vice and every
ignominy.... The waters of the Elbe would not suffice for tears to weep over the woes of the Reformation’. In
France, ‘the pope and all his vermin of cardinals, bishops, monks and priests’ were denounced as liars, violent
rebellion broke loose, and the state was threatened with destruction. The king struck back, supported by the
Sorbonne. An edict of 29 January, 1535, prescribed the suppression of the heretics. Among those fleeing from
Paris, heading eastwards, was one whose name was to resound around the West for generations to come and
whose doctrines were to inspire the Anglo-Saxon Establishment down to our own day — John Calvin.
As described by Daniel Rops, Calvin was a cold, resolute, ascetic Frenchman, given to violent outbursts of
temper like Henry VIII but with a dedicated heart and a will of steel. He was a loner, an intellectual and an
introvert who disliked any blaze of publicity. ‘I have always liked the shadows’, he said of himself. Unlike
Luther, he had nothing of Germanic romanticism, nothing but implacable French logic, a kind of precursor, in
the religious sphere, of Descartes in the philosophic. Where Luther was the prophet crying in the wilderness,
Calvin would be the doctrinaire thinker who would produce a corpus of theology to rival catholic scholasticism.
From Paris he arrived in Strasbourg and thence in Basle, one of the beacon cities of the Reformation and of an
intellectual calibre that appealed to Calvin’s mental brilliance. Having returned for a while to France, he decided
to head again to the area where the Reformation beckoned, this time to Geneva, which, henceforth, with
interludes elsewhere, would be his home base, whence he would systematically launch his universalist doctrine.
Luther had sent Aquinas up in flames; a protestant Aquinas was now born and reason would be placed at the
service of the faith. But there was to be a further powerful factor in his methodology, the imposition of the law
of God by force. He launched his career with a document titled, ‘Articles of ecclesiastical discipline’. Discipline
was his password ever after, discipline of self and discipline of others. It is not surprising that his favourite book
was the Old Testament, where he found a readymade corpus of ecclesiastical law, of do’s and don’ts, of taboos
and restrictions ordained by Jehovah himself.
The ‘walk softly but carry a big stick’ slogan might be considered a politico-economic echo in the modern world
of Calvin’s theology several centuries earlier, when he mixed politics and religion in a firm alliance. When the
Great Council of Geneva issued an edict in 1538 preventing preachers from interfering in politics, Calvin struck.
On Easter Sunday he mounted his pulpit almost in the manner of an early Paisley and excommunicated the
whole city. ‘If we served man’, he shouted, ‘we would have little recompense; but we serve a greater master and
He will know how to reward us.’ But be was obliged to leave Geneva temporarily.
In Zurich he beat his breast in public penance for fear God would hold him to account for the lost souls of
Geneva. Called to Strasbourg by Bucer, he hesitated until Bucer reminded him of Jonas being swallowed by a
whale for refusing the call of God. The idea of being swallowed by a whale terrified the gaunt intellectual and
he yielded. Becoming famous for his fierce sermons and his strong writings, he was beseeched by the Genevese,
grown repentant in turn, to come back to them. He arrived on 13 September, 1541, having in the meantime
greatly deepened his thinking and expanded his writings. What was their main thrust?
Where Luther sometimes wrote with feeling about children, flowers and birds as well as the doings of men,
Calvin shows little sign of humanity or love for sinners and treats children as little pieces of filth. His powerful
prose hammered home the message of an angry, all powerful God and his divine edicts. He delighted more in
the intellectual company of God than he did in the miserable company of men, and from this divine
intellectualism he produced a complete body of doctrine to be implemented with all the rigour of the law. It was
built on three pillars. The filth of the sinner is the first. Man is a monkey, a fierce, untamable beast, a stinking
heap of corruption. He is attracted necessarily by evil because he is not free, bound as he is by the implacable
law of God who predestined some for salvation and the rest for the eternal fires of hell: that, the doctrine of
predestination, was the second pillar. The third was salvation by faith alone. It was Luther all over again, but
Luther driven to a logical and terrifying conclusion in the Old Testament. God is everything, man is nothing.
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As it is hardly imaginable that Calvinism today, in Northern Ireland, in South Africa or in the United States,
would produce a new Renaissance in the arts, so Calvin’s thinking was as far removed from the human glories
of Gothic and Baroque, of Sixtine ceiling or the poetry of Dante as it is possible to get. God is in complete
control of life and death. Man can do nothing that was not planned by Him from all eternity. And those who
would be damned forever would be so treated according to the strictest law of justice, for they merited nothing
better. To save some is a divine act of the most gratuitous and undeserved mercy. Man’s duty is to submit; he
has no rights, not even the right to complain about eternal damnation. God made hell and He made some men to
people it, and this omnipotence increased his glory. Only those who believe and apply the Law may be entitled
to feel saved, and those who are damned must blame themselves. Worldly success as a sign of salvation is
spelled out in the Old Testament. Man is so utterly corrupt that his filth must be prevented from spreading,
through the severity of the law imposed by the politico-religious authorities in which the church would ensure
that the state strictly applied its sanctions.
And so, when Calvin returned to Geneva he told the citizenry that he came with a sceptre rather than tenderness.
This was the new Israel, the reign of God was proclaimed and John Calvin was His vicar on earth. Whatever
about its being the reign of God, it certainly was a reign of terror. Police and informers were an essential part of
the repression exercised against those who transgressed God’s law, or, rather, John Calvin’s idea of God’s law.
And many transgressed who saw him as an oppressor, to the point that he was frequently weighed down with
depression in his lonesome position as God’s minister for justice. The civil government was muzzled and power
taken out of the hands of the People’s Assembly, which was considered too democratic. A member of the city
council who criticised Calvin was castigated by him and Calvin proclaimed that he would not mount the pulpit
until he received an apology. The man, Pierre Ameaux, was paraded through the streets in shirtsleeves and bared
head, a torch in his hand, pleading for God’s — and presumably Calvin’s — mercy. The daughter of a city
magistrate was accused of being fond of dancing, replied with insults and was thrown into jail. A free thinker,
Jacques Gruet, was tortured and beheaded, another banished. Many people were burned at the stake including
the famous Michel Servet. Dancers, drinkers, card-players and readers of forbidden books were imprisoned.
Women who made up their hair or wore fashionable shoes were fined. To say that the pope was a decent fellow,
to pray at the tomb of a dead relative or to fall asleep during Calvin’s interminable sermons was to risk summary
justice. A woman was exiled after being heard to say, ‘The teaching of Christ is sufficient for us’. Children were
punished for the smallest infractions of their religious duty. Old Testament names were imposed on the people
to replace the popish names of saints.
On the credit side, Calvin organised hospitals and homes, introduced wool and silk industries which brought
prosperity, imposed strict price controls in favour of the poor and regulated food quality and house security. All
dictatorships have this positive quality, arising from their love of order and their desire to regulate everything.
The Genevese finally became obedient, and prisoners about to be executed were frequently heard to thank God
and their judges for thus giving them hope of salvation. Calvin founded a university in the city but forbade the
teaching of science as diabolical curiosity in relation to God’s creation.
From Geneva, the founder of Calvinism sent missionaries all over Europe and organised a written service to
spread his doctrine. Two of his most successful mission fields were Holland and Scotland, which were destined,
through the British and Dutch empires, to play a great part in making Calvinism the world religion that
Lutheranism never became, particularly in South Africa and in the all-important continent of North America
where its fierce discipline, hard work and absence of hedonism soon made it, allied with the Judaism to which it
was closely related, the primary pillar of the WASP Establishment and its controlling Freemason Order. One of
its characteristics was the Old Testament one of despising sinners, the baddies, and seeing them in the poor and
the outcast. To be last at the banqueting table where Christ chose his elect is not a Calvinist virtue.
In his account of Calvinism, Daniel Rops quotes the writer Charles Peguy: ‘Everything begins with mysticism
and ends with politics’, mysticism here being that generous, spiritual elan which drives the inner man and
propels him to serve an ideal in abnegation, abandon and sacrifice without calculation or self-interest. Politics is
the exact opposite: the less conscious will to make self-interest — of the individual, the group or the party —
prevail, behind a façade of altruistic rhetoric. To Peguy, politics was a force of decadence and when politics is
everywhere, as described by Bertrand de Juvenel, then we have decadence everywhere. Against the decadent
background of 15th and 16th century christendom, in which the prelates were often rich and corrupt and the
lower clergy ignorant and superstitious, there was a formidable grandeur and noble ideal behind the
Reformation:
to be possessed by a feeling of true christian liberty, sustained by faith and nourished by the Word of God
himself received through the bible; to have no intermediary between the soul and God, no pope and no priest,
but to prostrate the self before His face and then to go out into the world to reorganize it for Him. That was the
ideal. But what happened to this noble ideal? Less than 10 years after that resounding day of 1 November, 1517
when the cry of christian liberty went out, the whole perspective was radically altered. There were still
innumerable souls who were carried forward by the new-found fervour, but at the heart of the movement the
politicians had charged in through the breach and Luther became a prisoner of the prince. All across northern
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Europe, the princes and kings took up the sword to impose the new religion on peoples who, for a few short
years, had felt the breath of freedom blowing across the world. Between the rise of Luther in 1517 and the death
of Calvin in 1564, the die was cast. Henceforth the clash of arms would decide the outcome everywhere and
regulate the sharing of the spoils. The antagonism between personal interests was loosed and for over 100 years
Europe would run red with blood in the name of the same God, the Prince of Peace.
During the Middle Ages in the Latin World — it was not so in Orthodoxy — there had been a healthy tension
between the secular and ecclesiastical powers. This was now shattered and either the church was to become
prisoner of the state as in England, Scandinavia and large parts of Germany and central Europe, or the state was
to become prisoner of the church as in Calvin’s Geneva and the early colonies in the United States. From 1525
onwards, Luther had given the princes the power to restore order. They more than took him at his word and
frequently created disorder in order to impose their order. Caesar became pope. Or rather, all the Caesars
became popes. Albert of Brandeburg took possession of the properties of the Teutonic Knights of whom he was
Grand Master and thus established what was to become the hereditary kingdom of Prussia. Many authorities see
here the taproot of Prussia’s 4 centuries of aggressive militarism, combined with the aggressive imperialism of
all Europe after Henry Viii’s seizure of power and property from the church and his founding of aggressive
capitalism. The despoliation of the church was a healthy thing for it, but its replacement by an obedient
Anglican theocracy was a disaster, supported from Geneva. In 1548 Calvin wrote to Somerset telling him that
the troubles of England arose not from lack of preaching but from failure to enforce it. ‘Holiness’ was to be
imposed by the sword. As R H Tawney pointed out, this was accompanied by the burning of 150 heretics in 60
years, an operation which, together with beheading, hanging, drawing, quartering and submission to the rack,
dwarfed the excesses of the Roman catholic church, which contributed to its own downfall by making martyrs
of a number of heretics in Scotland. Thus was completed the shredding of the seamless robe and the
assassination of that Mystical Body which was elegantly and accurately described by John Donne: ‘Any man’s
death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell
tolls; it tolls for thee.’
Donne was speaking of ordinary death. What might he say of the 4 centuries of suicidal slaughter in which
Europe now became engaged? It was not even limited to Europe. In the United States, the Puritans, in the words
of Julien Green, set about establishing the kingdom of God ‘at the point of their muskets’. In the subsequent
expropriation and slaughter of the Indians, ‘children of the devil’, the saints of God considered the dealings of
Israel with Gedeon an appropriate precedent. The foundations were thus laid for the new US ethics to eventually
become not the established religion but something much more insidious, the religion of the Establishment in
which Fundamentalism is now playing an increasing role, particularly since Watergate, the defeat in Vietnam
and the socio-economic crisis. It is this violent Fundamentalism which is at the bottom of the effort to talk us
into an Old Testament style Armageddon, with its goodies and baddies, and its violence attributed to God and
the scapegoat mechanism whereby communists, coloured peoples and sinners are destined if possible for
elimination to allow the goodies to live at peace with the Lord in the New Jerusalem.
Following the Vietnam humiliation and the Watergate affair, the Fundamentalists put their hopes, and more
specifically their money, on the ‘born again’ christian, Jimmy Carter. When he failed to restore America’s
greatness they switched their bets and joined forces with the powerful right, big business and the arms
manufacturers, to support the farther-out Fundamentalist, Ronald Reagan, who was duly elected head of an
administration richly endowed with Fundamentalists, many of whom, like himself and his secretary of defence,
firmly believed in Armageddon. Addressing a Fundamentalist gathering on 25 November, 1982, he showed the
confusion between American Messianism and Fundamentalism, a dangerous amalgam. It is supported by a
similar philosophy in South Africa and more secretively among the Establishment in the United Kingdom, particularly Northern Ireland. Whence is its inspiration and its violence?
While Fundamentalism can be traced back all the way to Calvin and even to Luther, and while the word itself
did not come into existence until 1910, it received a boost of life in the 1830’s with the millenarian movement,
when the United States was set alight by a New York farmer, William Miller, who proclaimed that Christ was
coming back to earth for the judgement in 1843. The fact that He dismally failed to come up to expectation and
did not appear brought a temporary decline in the movement. It was rekindled in reaction to Darwin’s exposition
of evolution, that the Fundamentalists saw as a contradiction of the bible, which to them ranks in supreme
precedence over all churches, over the christian communities, over the People of God, over inspiration by the
Spirit, even over God himself because He can be approached only from the doorway of the bible. It has been
said that ‘the devil can quote scripture for his purposes’; in any case the Fundamentalists certainly can.
In point of fact, as we have already said and as everybody knows, christianity did not begin with the bible at all.
It was born at the first Pentecost when those listening to the Apostles heard, not the voice of God, much less a
reading of His message, but the voice of men speaking — to the listeners’ ears — in a great variety of human
tongues, who then went forth to found the new communities, the ekklesia or assemblies of the people with their
eucharistic gatherings, their ‘love feasts’, their oral discussion of the Good News and the joyful singing of
hymns of praise, all in their own languages. As François Marty has pointed out65, it was a reflection of the
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Tower of Babel symbol, where God intervened to replace the single language, the language of efficiency,
centralisation and dictatorship which makes good cogs for the wheel, with a rich variety of tongues which
creates freemen. The language of the bible as interpreted by the Fundamentalists is a single language and every
word counts.
As christianity progressed around the Mediterranean and the scattered communities were helped by a number of
letters, written anecdotes and ‘Sayings of the Lord’, they remained basically communities functioning by oral
tradition. Some 4 centuries elapsed before the writings were canonised and even then not completely. They do
not contain the words of Christ but summaries translated into Greek. Such translation would be considered a
sacrilege by the two semitic races rooted in the Old Testament and therefore likely to be knowledgeable in the
matter, namely the Jews and the Arabs. Anybody who has been involved in translation work even in our own
Indo-European languages with their common roots and structures will applaud the Italian saying ‘Traduttore,
traditore’ — the translator is a traitor. Both Christ Himself and His disciples were excellent communicators who
respected the spirit of their hearers and used the imagery that would be understood by them but not to be taken
literally 2,000 years later. The 3 temptations of Christ, for example, express 3 major ongoing threats to the
welfare of man — Materialism, Power, and Religion offered instead of the Agape received — but nobody could
be so naive, except perhaps the Fundamentalists, as to believe that Christ was led up to a promontory by some
kind of wily old creature with horns and a cloven hoof.
The real problem with the Fundamentalists may well be their lack of a divine sense of humour compounded
with what Eric Fromm describes as Luther’s fear of freedom. It could be the fear of what a Holy Spirit on the
loose might do, the way Christ 2,000 years ago undermined the magnificent politico-religious system which the
Jews had laboriously constructed during the previous 1,000 years. The Holy Spirit is even more dangerous in
that He is not a tangible Being who can be hanged on a gibbet.
A return to the terrifying law and order of the Old Testament seems to the Fundamentalists to provide security.
Unfortunately, its composition and origin is extremely vague and what is taken by the Fundamentalists as direct
dictation by God, as the Koran is to the Muslims, is partly a collection of myths from the pagan cultures of
Mesopotamia and Egypt.
The Old Testament has two well-known strands: the liberal, suffering, prophetic strand, to which Christ frequently referred but which can only be interpreted in the light of His Revelation; and the strand of violence, sectarianism and sacrificial religion which appeals to the Fundamentalists and which is rooted in the ambient pagan
cultures of Old Testament times. It is not without significance to the Fundamentalists in today’s context that the
Jews originally occupied Palestine by conquest, as they were to do again between 1918 and 1948. The refuge of
the peoples of the area in time of severe drought was Egypt, where the wandering Jews also betook themselves
following a famine. They were received hospitably until their numbers were apparently threatening the security
of Egypt’s eastern frontier and the persecution began which triggered the Exodus under Moses. The miraculous
account of the passage of the shallow water at the northern end of the Red Sea is no doubt a fable, as it was a
regular caravan route. Driven back by the Canaanites on their first invasion attempt from the West, they
eventually succeeded by an eastern roundabout and gained a foothold in Transjordan, where Moses died. Joshua
took up the gauntlet, crossed the Jordan, stormed Jericho and conducted a series of lightening raids to capture
major c