To Die For

I note from an article in the British press that South Park, the cartoon sitcom created by Matt Stone and Trey Parker, may have been the cause of the recent attempted bombing in New York. Why? Because it allegedly insulted the Prophet Mohammed.

In the two hundredth episode of the show all the leaders of the world’s religions appear except Mohammed, revealed to have a superpower beyond all others: that no one should ever be allowed to criticise him. This immediately prompted warnings by an extremist Muslim website, saying that what Parker and Stone were doing was stupid, that they were likely to end up like Theo van Gogh.

Now, I haven’t seen the episode in question so I can offer no comment on the content. What I can say is that South Park is my favourite cartoon show by far because it takes absolutely no hostages; it’s irreverent, anarchic, wildly offensive and as politically incorrect as one can imagine. That is precisely why I love it so, that and because it’s outrageously distasteful as well as being hugely funny.

Perhaps some here might know it but if you don’t and if you are at all sensitive, if you are easily offended, then do please stay away! But if you like your humour on the wilder shores, if you like humour to challenge all preconceptions, icons and shibboleths, you will love it. South Park does not just offend Muslims - it offends everybody, which is the whole point. My favourite character by far is Eric Cartman, a foul-mouthed, fat, intriguing, wonderful little bigot, forever teasing his friends Kyle for being Jewish and Kenny for being poor.

Yes, Judaism has been a target, as has Christianity (an ineffectual Jesus is one of the shows recurring characters), homosexuality, feminism, global warming (the Al Gore episode with ManBearPig is particularly good), fat people, thin people, Scientologists, clairvoyants and every other cause, fashionable or otherwise, not forgetting Barbara Streisand, against whom the creators seem to have a particular animus.

Quite simply, South Park is enough to give the likes of Nanny Hattie Harperson apoplexy. In one episode when the children are shocked by their teacher’s sexual preferences – he is a homosexual who happens also to practice bestiality – their parents immediately send them to Tolerance Camp, where Nazi-style guards force them to draw pictures of people of all colours and creeds holding hands beneath a rainbow Hattie, take note!

As far as I am concerned Parker and Stone are creative geniuses. Because most of their targets are fashionable causes generally of the left, some have suggested that they are conservatives. No, they are too right-wing for that, too libertarian; quite a lot like me! Commenting on the supposed political overtones of the show Stone said “I hate conservatives but I really hate fucking liberals”. Well, yes, Matt, I know exactly how you feel, at least on the second part!

South Park really is a show to die for, I sincerely hope not literally.

The Birth of the State

I've always considered it slightly strange that the nation state, nationalism itself, seems to have arisen with such historical suddenness, a little like Pallas Athena from the head of Zeus, with no roots or genealogy; a bastard creation, it might be said, of the Industrial and the French Revolutions. But the First French Republic, the prototype of the modern nation state, had to draw into the past for its own sources of inspiration; to the republican communes of Medieval Europe, and back through them to the forms of patriotism, solidarity and civic pride found in Republican Rome and the ancient Greek polis.

There is also a second tradition, no less important, of the seventeenth-century Protestant commonwealths; of England, of Scotland, of the Netherlands and of the Swiss city states, whose people, like new Israelites, were considered to be united by God's Covenant. It was this sense of uniqueness, of being the chosen and the elect, which gave rise to the desire for ever closer forms of unity and identity, the very earliest forms of religious and cultural nationalism. It was these revolutionary principles, of civic identity and religious ideology, which helped overturn the established hierarchies of trans-national empires, of the church and of the state.

So it was that by the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth century that the nation was already taking shape; a community united by a common language, demarcated territories, a dominant set of religious beliefs, a centralised bureaucracy and a uniform legal code. This was the framework that gave rise to nationalism; in covenants, in civic-republics and in new forms of popular sovereignty. As far as I am concerned the first evidence of nationalism as a shared sentiment in the modern sense comes with the Dutch Revolt against the Spanish Empire: a war of the 'elect'; a war of shared loyalties and a common identity; a war against a foreign oppressor. The primary focus of loyalty was no longer a kings, princes or lords in the medieval sense, but much more abstract concepts, focused on a unique sense of national and religious mission

Vive Henri Quatre!

The March of Henry IV, or Vive Henri Quatre, was the anthem of France before the Revolution of 1789 and again after the restoration of the monarchy in 1814/1815. Named after the first of the Bourbon kings, for me it’s the most inspiring of all the royal anthems. I first came across it when I saw Sergei Bondarchuk’s epic film version of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, where it is sung by one of the captive French officers. It really is lovely.

Vive Henri quatre
Vive ce Roi vaillant
Ce diable à quatre
A le triple talent
De boire de battre
Et d'être un vers galant
De boire de battre
Et d'être un vers galant

Au diable guerres
Rancunes et partis
Commes nos pères
Chantons en vrais amis

Au choc des verres
Les roses et les lys
Au choc des verres
Les roses et les lys

Chantons l'antienne
Qu'on chant'ra dans mille ans
Que Dieu maintienne
En paix ses descendants

Jusqu'à c'e qu'on prenne
La lune avec les dents
Jusqu'à c'e qu'on prenne
La lune avec les dents

Vive la France
Vive le roi Henri
Qu'à Reims on danse
Disant comme à Paris

Vive la France
Vive le roi Henri
Vive la France
Vive le roi Henri

The Spirit of Hegel

The Master-slave dialectic is one of the central arguments of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit. A dense and difficult thesis, it aids understanding if one substitutes ‘individuals’ for the author’s somewhat perplexing usage of 'self-consciousnesses'. Looking at it from this perspective, then, the idea to hold on to is that each individual requires another to establish full self-awareness. What is required from the other is acknowledgement or recognition. The integrity of my self-consciousness (not, I stress, to be mistaken with 'embarrassment' in strict English usage) is threatened by the existence of another who refuses to acknowledge me as a person.

It is this mutual relationship that is complicated in the relationship between master and slave, a relationship of domination and dependence; it is the division, in other words, between the ruler and the ruled. In this relationship the master would seem to have everything: he has both the subservience of the slave and the fruits of his labour. But what of his need for acknowledgement? The master acknowledges the slave, true, but it is the acknowledgement only of a 'thing', not an independent consciousness. In this unequal relationship the master has failed to achieve the acknowledgement he requires. The slave, too, lacks adequate acknowledgment; but he transforms and shapes the external world by his labour. He achieves permanence in labour, not the merely temporary gratification of the master. In this process he becomes aware of his own consciousness; for he has created before him something meaningful and objective. In this he discovers the nature of his own mind.

His argument starts to become just a shade, just a shade, less abstruse as the Phenomenology starts to deal with real historical situations. There is a discussion of Stoicism, a philosophy that could embrace the master in the shape of Marcus Aurelius, on the one hand, and the slave in the shape of Epictetus, on the other. It is in Stoicism that the slave, who has achieved self-awareness in work, can achieve a more complete type of freedom in withdrawal from the immediate conditions of existence into deeper forms of consciousness. In other words, the Stoic in chains is free because the chains no longer matter to him.

The problem here is that thought, cut off from the real world, is ultimately barren of any real substance; so the spirit moves on, through successive stages of existence and experience. If you intend to read the Phenomenology, or are reading it, there are huge passages here that you could quite happily skip, though there is an interesting discussion of forms of society based on laissez-faire economics, where Hegel's critique comes very close to that of Karl Marx. Just remember that the central idea to keep hold of is that the mind or the spirit, if you prefer, is moving towards ever higher forms of consciousness, with freedom as the ultimate goal. The French Revolution, then, becomes the climax of history, the stage where the mind achieves a state of absolute freedom.

So, there you have it: history is simply the arena in which the spirit achieves full consciousness of itself. The whole thing is highly abstract, almost impossibly so. There were those like Marx who were to turn Hegel's wordy speculations in a much more historically concrete direction, in concepts like alienation and class-struggle.

What do I think? What can I say other than to offer you the following observations of a far greater thinker that dear old Georg;

If I were to say that the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage, I should be quite right.

Further, if I were to say that this summus philosophus [...] scribbled nonsense quite unlike any mortal before him, so that whoever could read his most eulogized work, the so-called Phenomenology of the Mind, without feeling as if he were in a madhouse, would qualify as an inmate for Bedlam, I should be no less right. On the Basis of Morality

Stay clear of the madhouse!

Go Home and Prepare for Government

I wrote this piece for another website but I'm adding it here, dedicated to my friend Adam, in thanks for his appreciation. :-)

There is a famous moment in Liberal Party history –perhaps some people reading this will remember it? –when David Steel, a former leader, roused the troops at the end of his conference speech, telling them to loud applause that they should “go back to their constituencies and prepare for government.”

This was a time when David Owen and the Social Democrats, fellow travellers with the Liberals in pre-merger days, were on the up and up; this was a time when the Labour Party was in disarray; it was a time when Margaret Thatcher was facing some of her toughest challenges. It was 1981. What happened? The Falklands happened, the general election of 1983 happened, Margaret Thatcher cruised to one of her greatest victories, and poor David Dee and David Dum never got their snouts anywhere near the trough of office.

It’s been something of a burden the party has had to carry over the years, a stick to beat the poor dears with, an indication of just how pompously self-inflated they could become, what a joke they are, this ‘David Steel moment’. So, no matter what their present expectations, one is unlikely to hear Nick Clegg or any senior member of his party offer such a stupid hostage to fortune. But, hold on just a moment; have I’ve got news for you – this campaign has produced its very own David Steel moment, and appropriately enough it comes from Scotland.

There Alistair Carmichael, the party’s Scottish affairs spokesman, said that it was “increasingly likely” that the Liberal Democrats would either be the largest party in a coalition or they would win an outright majority, and all on the basis of a telly debate!

The Lib Dems are surfing on the top of the wave; they are the irresistible force, moving forward by rapid stages. Their time has come; they’re set to win their first election since 1910. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls – go home and prepare for government!

Everybody loves a winner
So nobody loved me;
'Lady Peaceful,' 'Lady Happy,'
That's what I long to be
All the odds are in my favour
Something's bound to begin
It's got to happen, happen sometime
Maybe this time I'll win

In the Grip of the Bear

I suppose most people’s understanding of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 has been shaped by a reading of Tolstoy’s War and Peace; I know that mine has. It’s one of the great epics of national consciousness, a true patriotic hymn.

But it only tells a partial story because Tolstoy had little interest in what happened after what was left of the Grande Armée was chased across the Neman in December of that remarkable year. It’s thanks to Russia, thanks to Tsar Alexander, that Europe was liberated from the hands of Napoleon, from the rapacious imperialism of a man who must count as the modern world’s first dictator, the first Little Corporal.

The full story of the War of 1812 to 1814, the story of Russia’s part in this struggle, is ably told in Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace by Dominic Lieven, a wide-ranging, deeply researched and wonderfully written history. This is a book that gives the lie to some of the old myths, notably the French contention that Russia owed her victory not to its national spirit, its determination to resist a foreign invader with all of the means at its disposal, but to the severity of its weather. No, the Russians were superior to the French in so many ways, in the quality of their armed forces, particularly the cavalry. Mention should also be made of the excellence of the intelligence service as well as the skilful way in which the game of international diplomacy was played.

The reason that Napoleon failed so spectacularly during the invasion of 1812 itself is really quite simple: with his usual arrogance and conceit he thought he was the hunter when in reality he was the hunted. He was looking for a quick victory, after which Alexander would be obliged to make peace. But Alexander, under the guidance of Mikhail Barclay de Tolly, his war minister, aimed at destroying Napoleon by drawing him ever deeper into Russia, extending ever further his lines of communication, while harassing his army by defensive bites followed by all-out attack.

It’s all here, all the great battles, not just the Borodino of War and Peace, but those of the two year campaign that came after, climaxing in Leipzig, the Battle of the Nations, followed by the advance on Paris itself. Alexander himself, that complex and contradictory man, is depicted in a far more nuanced way as a skilful strategist and diplomat, one who managed to rally Prussia and Austria as the Russian army moved westwards, careful to show that this was an act of liberation, careful to keep his armies under strict control, retaining discipline to the end.

We in the west owe so much to Great Russia. It’s a pity there was not a better understanding of that simple truth.

The Golden Boy

While I can admire the skill, the intelligence and the sheer power of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, the poets of the Great War, I have serious reservations when it comes to the influence they exerted.

Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth is perhaps among the greatest of the last century, expressing in simple words the gap between a noble ideal and the ugly reality of war. But it and others contributed to the pacifism of the 1930s, a movement that objectively aided the enemies of England, a movement that left her psychologically and practically unprepared for war, almost to the point of no recovery. For this reason, and for others, the poet of that generation that I admire the most is Rupert Brooke, that golden, beautiful boy, for the simple patriotism of poems like The Soldier, or the lyrical beauty of The Old Vicarage, Granchester, recalling a gentle England of long ago,

Just now the lilac is in bloom,
All before my little room;
And in my flower-beds, I think,
Smile the carnation and the pink;
And down the borders, well I know,
The poppy and the pansy blow . . .
Oh! there the chestnuts, summer through,
Beside the river make for you
A tunnel of green gloom, and sleep
Deeply above; and green and deep
The stream mysterious glides beneath,
Green as a dream and deep as death.
— Oh, damn! I know it! and I know
How the May fields all golden show,
And when the day is young and sweet,
Gild gloriously the bare feet
That run to bathe . . .
'Du lieber Gott!'

Here am I, sweating, sick, and hot,
And there the shadowed waters fresh
Lean up to embrace the naked flesh.
Temperamentvoll German Jews
Drink beer around; — and THERE the dews
Are soft beneath a morn of gold.
Here tulips bloom as they are told;
Unkempt about those hedges blows
An English unofficial rose;
And there the unregulated sun
Slopes down to rest when day is done,
And wakes a vague unpunctual star,
A slippered Hesper; and there are
Meads towards Haslingfield and Coton
Where das Betreten's not verboten.

ειθε γενοιμην . . . would I were
In Grantchester, in Grantchester! —
Some, it may be, can get in touch
With Nature there, or Earth, or such.
And clever modern men have seen
A Faun a-peeping through the green,
And felt the Classics were not dead,
To glimpse a Naiad's reedy head,
Or hear the Goat-foot piping low: . . .
But these are things I do not know.
I only know that you may lie
Day long and watch the Cambridge sky,
And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass,
Hear the cool lapse of hours pass,
Until the centuries blend and blur
In Grantchester, in Grantchester. . . .
Still in the dawnlit waters cool
His ghostly Lordship swims his pool,
And tries the strokes, essays the tricks,
Long learnt on Hellespont, or Styx.
Dan Chaucer hears his river still
Chatter beneath a phantom mill.
Tennyson notes, with studious eye,
How Cambridge waters hurry by . . .
And in that garden, black and white,
Creep whispers through the grass all night;
And spectral dance, before the dawn,
A hundred Vicars down the lawn;
Curates, long dust, will come and go
On lissom, clerical, printless toe;
And oft between the boughs is seen
The sly shade of a Rural Dean . . .
Till, at a shiver in the skies,
Vanishing with Satanic cries,
The prim ecclesiastic rout
Leaves but a startled sleeper-out,
Grey heavens, the first bird's drowsy calls,
The falling house that never falls.

God! I will pack, and take a train,
And get me to England once again!
For England's the one land, I know,
Where men with Splendid Hearts may go;
And Cambridgeshire, of all England,
The shire for Men who Understand;
And of THAT district I prefer
The lovely hamlet Grantchester.
For Cambridge people rarely smile,
Being urban, squat, and packed with guile;
And Royston men in the far South
Are black and fierce and strange of mouth;
At Over they fling oaths at one,
And worse than oaths at Trumpington,
And Ditton girls are mean and dirty,
And there's none in Harston under thirty,
And folks in Shelford and those parts
Have twisted lips and twisted hearts,
And Barton men make Cockney rhymes,
And Coton's full of nameless crimes,
And things are done you'd not believe
At Madingley on Christmas Eve.
Strong men have run for miles and miles,
When one from Cherry Hinton smiles;
Strong men have blanched, and shot their wives,
Rather than send them to St. Ives;
Strong men have cried like babes, bydam,
To hear what happened at Babraham.
But Grantchester! ah, Grantchester!
There's peace and holy quiet there,
Great clouds along pacific skies,
And men and women with straight eyes,
Lithe children lovelier than a dream,
A bosky wood, a slumbrous stream,
And little kindly winds that creep
Round twilight corners, half asleep.
In Grantchester their skins are white;
They bathe by day, they bathe by night;
The women there do all they ought;
The men observe the Rules of Thought.
They love the Good; they worship Truth;
They laugh uproariously in youth;
(And when they get to feeling old,
They up and shoot themselves, I'm told) . . .

Ah God! to see the branches stir
Across the moon at Grantchester!
To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten
Unforgettable, unforgotten
River-smell, and hear the breeze
Sobbing in the little trees.
Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand
Still guardians of that holy land?
The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream,
The yet unacademic stream?
Is dawn a secret shy and cold
Anadyomene, silver-gold?
And sunset still a golden sea
From Haslingfield to Madingley?
And after, ere the night is born,
Do hares come out about the corn?
Oh, is the water sweet and cool,
Gentle and brown, above the pool?
And laughs the immortal river still
Under the mill, under the mill?
Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain? . . . oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?

The Good Man of Nanking; an Eastern Schindler

Watching City of Life and Death has drawn to my attention the life and career of John Rabe, a German businessman and member of the Nazi Party, who did his best to protect Chinese civilians during the Nanking Massacre. He was instrumental in setting up the Nanking Safety Zone helped to save thousands from the indiscriminate slaughter by the Japanese Army, in what must count as one of the most loathsome acts in that country’s history. Rabe’s conduct enjoys the same moral and practical significance as that of Oscar Schindler in Europe.

Rabe, who had worked in China for many years, explained his reasons for setting up the Safety Zone in simple ethical terms;

…there is a question of morality here…I cannot bring myself for now to betray the trust these people have put in me, and it is touching to see how they believe in me.

While the occupation underway, Rabe effectively used his status as a citizen of a power friendly to Japan, as well as his membership of the Nazi Party, to delay the killings sufficiently to allow thousands of refugees to escape to the Safety Zone, established in embassy district and the city’s university. The Japanese had previously agreed not to attack these areas on the understanding that they were free of Chinese troops. By his actions he is estimated to have saved the lives of up to 250,000 civilians, which makes his achievement if anything more startling than that of Schindler.

On his return to Germany in February 1938 he took with him a large number of documents detailing the things he had witnessed. He also wrote to Hitler asking him to exert his influence to stop the Japanese indulging in any future actions of this kind. His letter was never delivered. Instead he was arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo, only released after the intervention of Siemens, the company he worked for. Although he was allowed to keep the evidence he had accumulated he was forbidden from lecturing or writing on the subject.

Rabe died in January 1950. Prior to this the poverty and hunger of his family among the chaos of post-war Germany was ameliorated by the Chinese government, which sent him monthly food and money parcels in thanks for his actions. In 1997, sixty years after the Massacre, his tombstone was moved from Berlin to Nanking, where it was installed in a place of honour at the massacre memorial site.

Death in the City

City of Life and Death, directed by Lu Chuan, is a remarkable and powerful piece of film-making. It deals with what is perhaps one of the most emotive subjects in Chinese history – the Rape of Nanking.

In December 1937 Nanking, then capital of China, fell to the Japanese, following the outbreak earlier that year of the Sino-Japanese war. In the following weeks the Japanese murdered thousands of prisoners of war and civilians, as well as raping thousands of women, sometimes to death.

The exact number of people caught up in this atrocity has never been established with any precision, though the Chinese authorities estimate it at 300,000, not that much greater than the 260,000 given by the International Military Tribunal of the Far East. In Japan, where the episode is bound up in issues of national pride, the figures have been revised sharply downwards.

Clearly numbers are important, though just as important, if not more so, is an understanding that something dreadful happened in this city not excused by quibbling over figures. The only logical position would to reject the history altogether, as indeed have some on Japan's nationalist fringes, their version of Holocaust denial.

In part the movie offers a kind of perspective on the events, that of Kadokawa, a young sergeant in the Imperial Japanese Army, who is both caught up in the violence and bewildered by it, an altogether admirable performance by Hideo Naikaizumi. It does not in any sense detract from the horror; if anything it heightens it, that these crimes are our crimes, not those of monsters or aliens.

But it’s on this point that the movie has proved most controversial. Shortly after it was released in China in April of last year many were shocked enough by the humanised depiction of a Japanese soldier that calls went out to have it deleted from the history of Chinese cinema. Lu even received a number of death threats on his official blog.

Although City of Life and Death continued to have the support of the authorities, it was not included in the official list of films celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, or the Chinese version of the British Academy Awards. Even so this stark and honest movie has been praised outside China, recently winning the prize for best movie at the Asian Film Awards. Whether it is ever screened in Japan remains open to question.

The Mountains look on Marathon

This August marks the anniversary of the Battle of Marathon, fought exactly 2,500 years ago on the plains of Attica. It was a victory for a small Athenian army over a Persian host, said by Herodotus to be carried to Greece in six hundred triremes. Plutarch and Puasania, later historians, were to estimate the number of Persians at 300,000, clearly a wild exaggeration. Even so, the victory was incredibly significant. For once I do think it possible to say that Marathon was indeed one of the decisive battles of world history.

Darius, emperor of the Persians, had been angered that the Athenians had given help to Ionian rebels on what is now the western coast of Turkey. Although the rebellion had been crushed he was still determined on a major reprisal against the Greeks. The size of the force he sent makes it clear that he was determined on something more systematic than a mere punitive raid, evidenced by attacks on both Naxos and Euboea.

No sooner had the Persians landed at Marathon, just twenty-five miles to the north of Athens, the city set about mustering all the soldiers that it could find, a mere 10,000 according to the ancient sources. A runner by the name of Pheidippides was sent south to ask for help from the Spartans, some one hundred and forty miles from Athens. But they were in the middle of one of their religious festivals, saying that it would be another ten days before their forces could be mustered. Pheidippides at once ran back with the news.

As always number can be a liability in battle as much as an advantage. The Persian host, as big as it was, could only bring a fraction of its power to bear, because the Greeks had blocked the narrow passes that lead south from the plain of Marathon to Athens. Seizing the initiative, and deciding to break the deadlock, Militiades, one of the two generals in command of a joint Athenian and Plataean force, decided to attack, surprising the Persians not just with the boldness of the move, but the ferocity of his citizen soldiers. Herodotus says that they ran into battle.

No sooner were the weak Persian flanks broken than the Greeks turned on the centre. In confusion the Persians broke, hurrying back to the ships, many drowning in the marshes adjacent to the coast. Once embarked what was left of the Persian host sailed south to Athens, only to find the Greeks ready for them in full battle array, the army having marched south from Marathon. Not willing to risk a second encounter the Persians sailed for home.

Marathon is still remembered today in the long-distance Olympic running event. This supposedly commemorates Pheidippides running to Athens with news of the victory, after which he promptly dropped dead! But the only running that he did according to Herodotus, the closest source we have to the battle, was to Sparta and back. It is not until three centuries later that the story of a single runner from Marathon was set down, and not until 180AD was the runner named by Lucian as Pheidippides, an event eventually commemorated by Robert Browning in a poem of the same name.

The words about Marathon that moves me most come from Byron’s The Isles of Greece, written shortly before the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in 1821;

The mountains look on Marathon---
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dream'd that Greece might yet be free
For, standing on the Persians' grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.