Notes on a Month of Militancy by Mark Fisher

2010

What we’ve grown accustomed to is a split between leftist political commitments and the most vibrant, experimental dance music. No doubt this is an aspect of capitalist realism, and it’s no accident that I referred to Simon’s piece on hardstep in Capitalist Realism. In fact, it might well have been the case that the central concept of the book was triggered by Simon’s commentary on ‘keeping it real’ there:

“ In hip-hop, ‘real’; has two meanings. First, it means authentic, uncompromised music that refuses to sell out to the music industry and soften its message for crossover. ‘Real’ also signifies that the music reflects a ‘reality’ constituted by late capitalist economic instability, institutionalized racism, and increased surveillance and harassment of youth by the police.’ Real’ means the death of the social: it means corporations who respond to increased profits not by raising pay or improving benefits but by what the Americans call downsizing (the laying–off of the permanent workforce in order to create a floating  employment pool of part-time and freelance workers without benefits or job security).

‘Real’ is the neo-Medieval scenario; you could compare downsizing to enclosure, where the aristocracy threw the peasants off the land and reduced them to a vagabond underclass. Like gangsta rap, Jungle reflects a Medieval paranoiascape of robber barons, pirate corporations, conspiracies, and covert operations. Hence the popularity as a source of samples and song titles of martial arts films and gangsta movies like The Godfather, Reservoir Dogs, Goodfellas, Pulp Fiction whose universe revolves around concepts of righteous violence and blood-honor that o predate the liberal, social democratic era. […]

The pervasive sense of slipping into a new Dark Age, of an insidious breakdown of the social contract, generates anxieties that are repressed but resurface in unlikely ways and places. Resistance doesn’t necessarily take the ‘logical’; form of collective activism (union, left-wing politics): it can be so distorted and imaginatively impoverished by the conditions of capitalism itself, that it expresses itself as, say, the proto-fascist, anti-corporate nostalgia of of America’s right-wing militias, or as a sort of hyper-individualistic survivalism.

In hip-hop and, increasingly, Jungle, the response is a ‘realism’ that accepts a socially-constructed reality as natural. To ‘get real’ is to confront a state-of-nature where dog eats dog, where you are either a winner or a loser, and where most will be losers. There’s a cold rage seething in the Jungle, but it’s expressed within the terms of an anti-capitalist yet non-socialist politics, and expressed defensively: as a determination that the underground will not be co-opted by the mainstream.” [1]

At Day X1 I heard the predictable “Killing in the Name” [2] and the even more predictable “Sound of the Police”[3], alongside The Beatles, Madness, and – depressingly- The Libertines- and, most jarringly, “Another Brick Wall ( hearing “we don’t need another education” as we shuffled out of the kettle made for a suitably incongruous experience).[4]

But a video that Jeremy shot on Thursday suggests a possible convergence between post-nuum music and politics. [5] It is my belief that the UK music culture of the next decade will emerge from a  stew of sound and affect in the kettles these past few weeks. Paul Mason dismissed the idea that the demo was exclusively populated by ‘Lacan-reading hipsters from Spitalfields}- but of course (we) Lacan-reading hipsters were also there, alongside the “bainlieue-style youth from Croydon, Peckam, the council estates of Islington.” In other words, this brought together working-class culture and Bohemia in something like the same way that art schools – so crucial to UK pop-art culture since the Fifties - used to. But with very good reasons from its own point of view- neoliberal policy has been hostile to this proletarian-bohemian cultural circuit. While Further Education and new universities have o precisely tried to make theory such as Lacan available to the working class culture- while also trying to engage with everything vibrant coming out of working-class culture – the policy has been to re-cement rigid class and cultural distinctions: philosophy for the bourgeoisie; “vocational’ courses for the masses.

pages 478-9








[1] Simon Reynolds, “Slipping into Darkness”, Wire, No 48, June 1996

[2] Rage Against the Machine : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWXazVhlyxQ

[3] KRS-One 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZrAYxWPN6c

[4] they were protesting higher school fees.

[5] ‘Nuum refers to the hardcore continuum or linear progression of hardcore (punk) music said to have imploded in 2001/2. ’continuum’ refers to evolving political/cultural contexts within which the music itself was produced

War Journals by Ernst Junger

Isaiah Berlin’s account of his conversations with Boris Pasternak provides a ‘nutshell’ summary of Ernst Junger’s view of the war in precisely the same period of time:

In 1945 he (Pasternak) still had hopes of a great renewal of Russian life as a result of the cleansing storm that the war had seemed to him to be – a storm as transforming, in its own terrible fashion, as the Revolution itself, a vast cataclysm beyond our puny mortal categories. Such vast mutation cannot, he held, be judged. One must think and think about them, and seek to understand as much of them as one can, all one’s life; they are beyond good and evil, acceptance and rejection, doubt or assent; they must be accepted as elemental changes, earthquakes, tidal waves, transforming events which are beyond all ethical and historical categories. So, too, the dark nightmare of betrayals, purges, massacres of the innocents, followed by an appalling war, seemed to him a necessary prelude to some inevitable, unheard-of victory of the spirit.

In several instances Junger recalls surreal dreams of utter destruction- including himself and members of his family- and notes that they have boosted his morale. What better explanation of the determination of the Germans to fight to the bitterest end, despite the folly of their belief that if only Hitler could be removed the Allies would accept a peace that would leave their nation in tact and without having to pay any steeper price than the prosecution of the Nazis themselves, all others having ‘innocently’ pursued legitimate though largely mythological nationalist ends.


Later, Pasternak came to regret such sentiments, at least to the extent that any suggestion that he had at any time colluded with the Soviet regime provoked him to expression of the most intense anger and denial and insisted in the most self-destructive manner in publishing Doctor Zhivago in the West, though others made provisions to preserve the manuscript even in the event of a nuclear war. Did Ernst Junger come to regret his sentiments, beyond what was necessary to preserve his own skin?

Junger denounced the Nazis as ‘cannibals’ and pitied the Jews- ‘one must always pity the persecuted’ he writes, but it is not clear that his  aristocratic version of the supremacy of the State would have been any more tolerant of opposition than Hitler’s; perhaps just a ‘kinder and gentler’ approach to the mass of ‘inferior souls’ that came into his view.

Current reviews of his memoirs tout Junger as a proponent ‘the humanities’ in the midst of the greatest barbarities- ‘light shines even in the darkest abyss’- This was undoubtedly the view of the Wehrmacht’s ‘Junker’ command. They protected him from the Nazis and made sure he could not be connected to their plots to kill Hitler. Indeed,  large parts of his memoir consist of demonstrating his own sensitive and superior aesthetic: his attention to the changes of season, the beauty and profusion of flowers that come into his view, the particular, detailed attention he gives to the form and variety of beetles that he endlessly observes and collects. His openness to the many writers and graphic artists he encounters in Paris, not-withstanding that it is only very late in his memoir- long after he was convinced that Germany would lose the war- that he begins to sense that such connections could have serious consequences for them after the war.

He browses the many book markets of Paris, taking advantage of the rock bottom prices occasioned by the austerity imposed by the occupation but sometimes it is difficult to discern whether the pleasure he takes in them is more in ‘the rare edition’, the tactile feel of a luxurious cover, the quality of the paper, clarity of print than in the actual content of the works of such authors as Leon Bloy or Vasilly Rozanov. He writes that he has been reading this or that author but often, it seems, in a quite desultory fashion, a ‘good way to pass the idle  ‘off-duty hours’  of his time in Paris. Of his duties he says next nothing except that he had a meeting with one official or another. A snippet here and there discloses his general attitude and behavior but he conceals the particulars his many extramarital affairs. Apparently he made no effort after the war to correct the self-protecting lack of candor or distracting strategies of his original compositions.It is a vulgar and distressing book none-the-less.

There is much to be said for this ‘eye-witness’ account of the War and occupation in this memoir. One sees the decimation of helpless civilian populations caused by the allied bombing campaigns, the rains of shrapnel from anti-aircraft, the ruin of many ancient edifices, life on the precipice of annihilation and the indifference to humanity that engenders. I could make more of this book if I examined the life of its author before and after the war in more detail than is provided in the introduction. To what extent did the Allies themselves ‘figure’ the war in the same way Junger and Pasternak did: as a natural cataclysm preluding some inevitable, subsequently unheard-of victory of the human spirit?

What is Liberalism by Domenico Losurdo

Some Embarrassing Questions


The usual answer to this question admits no doubt: liberalism is the tradition of thought whose central concern is the liberty of the individual, which is ignored or ridden roughshod over by the organicist  philosophies of various kinds. But if that is the case, how should we situate John C. Calhoun? This eminent statesman, vice president of the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, burst into an impassioned ode to individual liberty, which, appealing to Locke, he vigorously defended against any abuse of power and any unwarranted interference by the state. And that is not all. Along with ‘absolute governments’ and the ‘concentrations of power’, he unstintingly criticized and condemned fanaticism and the spirit of ‘crusade’, to which he opposed ‘compromise’ as the guiding principle of genuine ‘constitutional governments’. With equal eloquence Calhoun defended minority rights. It was not only a question of guaranteeing the alteration of various parties in government through suffrage: unduly extensive power was unacceptable in any event, even if of limited duration and tempered by the promise or prospect of a periodic reversal of the roles in the relationship between governors and the governed. Unquestionably, we seem to have all the characteristics of the most mature and attractive liberal thought. On the other hand, however, disdaining the half-measures and timidity or fear of those who restricted themselves to accepting it as a necessary ‘evil’, Calhoun declared slavery to be ‘a positive good’ that civilization could not possibly renounce. . . . So is Calhoun a liberal?

No doubts on this score were harbored by Lord Acton, a prominent figure in liberalism in the second half of the nineteenth century, an advisor and friend of William Gladstone. In Acton’s view, Calhoun was a champion of the cause of the struggle against any form of absolutism, including ‘democratic absolutism’; the arguments he employed were ‘the very perfection of political truth’. In short, we are dealing with one of the major authors and great minds in the liberal tradition and pantheon.

The question we have poised does not only emerge from reconstructing the history of the United States. Prestigious scholars of the French Revolution, of firm liberal persuasion, have no hesitation in defining as ‘liberal’ those figures and circles that had the merit of opposing the Jacobin diversion, but who were firmly committed to the defense of colonial slavery. The reference is to Pierre-Victor Malouet and members of the Massiac Club, who were all plantation owners and slaveholders. Is it possible to be a liberal and a slaveholder at the same time? Such was not the opinion of John Stuart Mill, judging at least from his polemic against the ‘soi-disant’, British liberals (among them, perhaps, Acton and Gladstone), who, during the American Civil War, rallied en masse to a ‘furious pro-Southern partisanship’, or at any rate viewed the Union and Lincoln coolly and malevolently.[1.]

We face a dilemma. If we answer the question formulated above in the affirmative, we can no longer maintain the traditional (and edifying) image of liberalism as the thought and volition of liberty. If, on the other hand, we answer in the negative, we find ourselves confronting a new problem: why should we continue to dignify John Locke with the title of father of liberalism? Locke regarded slavery in the colonies as self-evident and indisputable and personally contributed to the legal formalization of the institution in Carolinas, however vigorous his  denunciations of the political ‘slavery’ that absolute monarchy sought to impose were. . . .

Now let us take a contemporary of Locke’s. Andrew Fletcher was a ‘champion of liberty’; and, at the same time, ‘a champion of slavery. Politically he professed to be a republican on principle and culturally was ‘a Scottish prophet of the Enlightenment’. Jefferson defined him as a ‘patriot’, whose merit was to have expressed the ‘political principles’ characteristic of ‘the purest periods of the British Constitution’- and those that subsequently caught on a prospered in America. Expressing positions rather similar to Fletcher’s was his contemporary James Burgh, who also enjoyed the respect of republican circles a la Jefferson, and was mentioned favorably by Thomas Paine in the most celebrated opuscule of the American Revolution (Common Sense).

Fletcher and Burgh are virtually forgotten today, and no one seems to want to include them among the exponents of the liberal tradition. The fact is that, in underlining the necessity of slavery, they were thinking primarily not of blacks in the colonies, but of the ‘vagrants’, the beggars, the odious ,incorrigible rabble of the metropolis. Liberal England presents us with another case. Francis Hutchinson, a moral philosopher of some significance (he was the ‘never to be forgotten’ master of Adam Smith), who, on the one hand expressed criticisms and reservations about slavery to which blacks were indiscriminately subjected. On the other hand, he stressed that, especially dealing with the ‘lower conditions’ of society, slavery could be a ‘useful punishment’: it should be the ‘ordinary punishment of idle vagrants as, after proper admonitions and trials of temporary servitude, cannot be engaged to support themselves and families by any useful labor.’ Were Fletcher, Burgh and Hutchinson liberals?

In analyzing the relationship that the three liberal revolutions (Dutch, British and American) developed on the one hand with blacks, and on the other with the Irish, Indians and natives, it is misleading to start out from the presupposition of an homogeneous historical time unmarked by fractures and flowing in unilinear fashion. Clearly predating Locke and Washington, and a contemporary of Grotius, was Montaigne in whom we find a memorable self-critical reflection on the West’s colonial expansion that we would seek in vain in them. ‘Every man calls barbarous anything he is not accustomed to.’ People took their own country as a model ‘There we always find the perfect religion, the perfect polity, the most developed and perfect way of doing anything!’ Going back further, we encounter Las Casa and his critique of the arguments employed to de-humanize the Indian ‘barbarians’. . .

Recourse to vulgar historicism to ‘explain’ or to repress the surprising tangle of freedom and oppression that characterizes the three liberal revolutions we have referred to is fruitless. The paradox persists and awaits a genuine, less comforting explanation.


To render it explicable, the paradox must first be expounded in all its radicalism. Slavery is not something that persisted despite the success of the three liberal revolutions. On the contrary, it experienced its maximum development following that success. The total slave population in the Americas reached about 330,000 in 1700, nearly three million by 1800, an finally peaked at over six million in the 1850s. Contributing decisively to the rise of an institution synonymous with the absolute power of man over man was the liberal world. In the mid-eighteenth century, it was Great Britain that possessed the largest number of slaves (878,000). Although its empire was far more extensive, Spain came well behind. Second position was held by Portugal, which possessed 700,000 slaves and was in fact a kind of semi-colony of Great Britain: much of the gold extracted by Brazilian slaves ended up in London. Hence there is no doubt that absolutely pre-eminent in this field was the country at the head of the liberal movement, which had wrested primacy from the Glorious Revolution onward. ‘No nation in Europe has plunged so deeply into this guilt as Great Britain.’ ( Pitt the Younger, House of Commons, April, 1792). In John Wesley’s view, ‘American slavery was ‘the vilest that ever saw the sun. ’James Madison, slave-owner and liberal, observed that ‘the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man- power based on mere distinction of color- was imposed  in the most enlightened period of time’ .  .  .

The Elusive Liberalism of de Tocqueville’s America

But now let us pass over both populations of colonial origin and the poorest strata of the white population, who were denied not only political rights, but also ‘modern liberty’. Let us focus exclusively on the dominant class – i.e. white, male property owners. Did full civil and political equality obtain in this milieu? There are reasons to doubt it. One thinks of the ‘three-fifths’ constitutional provision on the basis of which, in calculating the number of seats due the southern states, partial account was also taken of the number of slaves. Far from being a negligible detail, this clause played a significant role in the history of the United States: ‘four southern voters ended up exercising more power than ten northern voters. Thus is explained the “Virginia dynasty' that long succeeded in holding the country’s presidency. This is why Jefferson was branded the ‘black president’ by his opponents: he arrived in power thanks to the inclusion in the electoral result of blacks who remained his slaves. On the eve of the Civil War, Lincoln proclaimed polemically: “It is a truth that cannot be denied, that in all the free  States no white man is the equal of the white man of the slave States". This thesis was repeated in 1864 by a French liberal (Edouard Laboulaye):

Because you have slaves, you will be allowed to elect a representative with ten thousand votes, while the Yankees of the North, who live off their own labor, will require thirty thousand votes. The conclusion for the folks of the South is that they constitute a particular, superior race, that they are great lords. The aristocratic spirit has been developed and strengthened by the Constitution. .  . .

From Constant onward, modern or liberal liberty has been described and celebrated as the undisturbed enjoyment of private property. But slave-owners were in fact subject to a whole series of public obligations. There can be no doubt that the Glorious Revolution and then the American Revolution consecrated the self-government of a civil society composed of, and hegemonized by, slave-owners, who were more determined than ever not to tolerate interference by central political power and the Church. But it would be mistaken to equate the self-government of civil society, now freed from those fetters, with the free movement of the individuals composing it.

“While the colonial slave codes see at first sight to have been to discipline Negros, to deny them freedoms available to other Americans, a very slight shift  in perspective shows the codes in a different light. Principally, the law told the white man, not the Negro; the codes were for the eyes and ears of the slave-owners (sometimes the laws required the publication of the code in the newspaper and that clergymen read it to their congregations). It was the white man who was required to punish his runaways, prevent assemblages of slaves, enforce the curfews, sit on special courts, and ride the patrols.” [2.]

In crisis situations the duty of vigilance made itself ever more strongly felt. We have seen a ‘military service’ of whites patrolling day and night in Richmond in 1831. In such cases, observed Gustave de Beaumont during his journey in de Tocqueville’s company, ‘society arms itself with all its rigors and mobilizes all social forces, seeking in every possible way to encourage informing and control; in South Carolina, along with the fugitive slave the death penalty awaited any person who has helped him escape.’ Significant too were the the results of the passage of laws on fugitive slaves in 1850. Subject to punishment was not only the citizen who sought to hide or help the black pursued or sought by his legitimate owners, but also those who did not collaborate in his capture. This was a legal provision which (as its critics put it) sought to ‘compel every freeborn American to become a man-hunter.’

As well as slave-owners, slave society ended up affecting the white community as a whole. Precisely because, in addition to being chattels, black slaves were also the enemy within, abolitionists were immediately suspected of treason, thus become the target of a series of more or less harsh repressive measures. Severe restrictions were placed on the press: in 1800 the slave revolt in Virginia was often ignored by southern newspapers; there was the danger of spreading the contagion further. In 1863 the president of the United States permitted the postmaster general to block the circulation of all publications critical of the institution of slavery. Rounding off the gag placed on abolitionists, the House of Representatives adopted a resolution banning the examination of anti-slavery petitions.

In the South violence against abolitionists took the form of a pogrom that did not hesitate to torture and physically eliminate traitors and their supporters, with complete impunity. The situation in the South in the years preceding the Civil War was described as follows, in a letter written by Joel R.Poinsett at the end of 1850:

 We are both heartily sick of this atmosphere redolent of insane violence .  .  . there is a strong party averse to violent men and violent measures, but they are frightened into submission – afraid even to exchange opinions with others who think like them, lest they should be betrayed.

In fact, the contemporary historian who cites this testimony concludes that with recourse to lynching, violence and threats of every kind, the South succeeded in silencing not only the opposition, but also any mild dissent. In addition to abolitionists, those who wanted to distance themselves from the pitiless witch-hunt felt threatened, and were threatened. They were impelled by terror into ‘holding one’s tongue, killing one’s doubts, burying one’s reservations.’ There is no doubt about it, the terroristic power wielded by slave-owners over their blacks also ended up affecting, on a lasting basis, members and fractions of the dominant race and class . . .[ And lasted more than a century after the abolition of slavery itself] . . .

Has liberalism definitively left behind the dialectic of emancipation and dis-emancipation, with the dangers of regression and restoration implicit in it? Or is this dialectic still alive and well, thanks to the malleability peculiar to this current of thought?

However difficult such an operation might be be for those committed to overcoming liberalism’s exclusion causes, to take up the legacy of this intellectual tradition is an absolutely unavoidable task. On the other hand, liberalism’s merits are too significant and too necessary to credit it with other, completely imaginary ones. Among the latter is the alleged spontaneous capacity for self-correction often attributed to it. If one starts from such a proposition, the tragedy of peoples subjected to slavery or semi-slavery, or deported, decimated and destroyed, becomes utterly inexplicable. This was a tragedy which, far from being impeded or prevented by the liberal world, developed in close connection to it. Unfounded on a historiographical level, the habitual hagiography is also an insult to the memory of the victims. Only in opposition to the pervasive repressions and transfigurations is the book now ended presented as a ‘counter-history’: bidding farewell to hagiography is the precondition for landing on the firm ground of history.

[1]When he turned his attention to the colonies, however, Mill justified the West’s ‘despotism’ over ‘races’ that were still ‘under age’, and who were obliged to observe an ‘absolute obedience’ in order to be set on the path of progress. This formulation would not have displeased Calhoun, who likewise legitimized slavery by reference to the backwardness and nonage of populations of African origin.. In Mill’s view, ‘any means’ were licit for those who took on the task of educating ‘savage tribes’; ‘slavery’ was sometimes a mandatory stage for inducing them to work and making them useful to civilization and progress.

[2] Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black, N.Y., Norton, 1977, p. 108.

A Fading Shadow by Antonio Munoz Molina

[ The presentations in this Blog try to avoid the handiworks of the reviewers’ arts, the cliché’s of praise or blame, aesthetic theory, political dogma; the inevitable comparisons to  another or the author’s previous works; attempts to establish the work in a hierarchy of interest and achievement. I just want to let the author’s words speak for themselves, however useless one or two brief passages may be to any effort to convey the full scope of the work from which it has been taken. Sufficient and necessary to say in this case, however, I have read few books where the notion ‘the humanities’ was ever represented better.

 This book is about James Earl Ray- the man who murdered Martin Luther King Jr.- and, for a large part of the novel- about the nine days the man spent in Lisbon, on the run from the law, his money and options inexorably dissipating- an imagining of Ray’s confrontation with the seals of his fate. It is also about the author’s own struggles as an aspiring author, the blockages incurred by his day job and the burdens of a young wife and growing family when he too had once tried to escape to Lisbon.  But it is  about much more than that.]


Gradually, in another future life, I began to realize that beauty, harmony, symmetry, are properties or spontaneous consequences of natural processes that exist without the need for an organizing intelligence, just as natural selection operates without an ultimate purpose, and certainly without a Supreme Being determining its laws in advance. The symmetry of a leaf or a tree or a body is self-organizing, a virtue of the instructions encoded in its DNA. The sinuous curves of a river or the ramifications of a delta draw themselves on a plane like the veins of a hand or a wave retreating from the sand. The highest aspiration of literature is not to improve an amorphous matter of real events through fiction, but to imitate the unpremeditated, yet vigorous, order of reality, to create a scale model of its forms and processes. Emily Dickinson once wrote, “Nature is a haunted house – but Art – a house that tries to be haunted.”

                               .   .    .    .    .    .    .    .

The novel simplifies life. It simplifies it and it tames it. It begets its own fever, especially when you intuit its end. I don’t want to watch films, or listen to music that isn’t spirituals, songs from the civil rights movement, and jazz from the time. I don’t ant to write articles, or give lectures, or plan trips, or see exhibits. All I need is a wooden desk and a laptop. If the laptop crashes or its battery dies, I would continue in a notebook. I don’t read anything that doesn’t have to do with my writing.

The novel subjects life to its own limits and at the same time opens it up to an exploration of depths that are within and without you and that only you were meant to discover. You are writing even when you don’t write. Narrative imagination does not feed on what it has invented; it feeds ion the past. Every minor or trivial event that one experiences or discovers in the course of an investigation can be valuable or even decisive for a novel, occupying a minimal but precise place within it, like an uneven cobblestone in a sidewalk in Lisbon.

I barely read the newspaper. I don’t bother to open magazines or packages with books. I have deleted myself without difficulty, and to great relief, from social networks. I’m exercising my right to an ancient form of solitude, disconnected from everything; dedicating my time to one thing, and doing so because that’s what I desire, for pleasure, the satisfaction of the process in and of itself; free, for now, from all the anxiety that is sure to come, the uncertainty of the result, the fear of hostile review, the emptiness or silence that will overcome me when the book is published and I wait to hear from the first unknown readers.

The Internet is the gateway to a vast archive where every day I discover new information that feeds my writing. Admirers from all over the world write to Ray asking for his autograph. A firefighter said he could not remember the shot but he did remember the rattling of the windows. Ray wrote over four hundred letters during his time in prison and they are preserved in the archives of Boston University. The store clerk who sold him binoculars around 4:15 on April 4 was surprised to see him in a suit and with a loose tie. At the Canadian embassy in London, the person who helped him fill out the passport application [there was a typo-error on the one he got in Toronto] said he held the pen and the forms as if he could not read or write.

When he was about to pay for something, he took money directly out of his pockets, instead of wallet. Several female witnesses not with displeasure the excessive amounts of hair pomade he wore. After the shot, King’s face looked as if it had been torn from front to back. At the jail in Memphis, he sang in the shower when he was in a good mood. The gush of blood from the wound reached the door of the room. Among other things that Ray left in the boardinghouse in Atlanta were maps of the southeastern United States, Texas, Oklahoma, Mexico, Louisiana, Los Angeles, California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Birmingham.

Some people said he looked like an insurance agent, a door-to-door salesman, a preacher. In King’s pockets, at the time of his death, there were two ten dollar bills, a five, three ones, forty-five cents in change, a silver pen, various business cards and an appointment book for the year 1968 with black covers.

The novel has developed on its own with the unlimited richness of reality and the blank spaces I haven’t been tempted to fill, spaces in the shadows that cannot be illuminated, mostly because it has been too long, most of the witnesses have died, and the memory is quite fragile.

The novel is what I write and also the room where I work. The novel is the fine-point that ran out of ink one day when I wrote for five or six hours without stopping and filled an entire notebook. The novel is made of everything I know and everything I don’t know, and with the sensation of groping my way through this story but never finding a precise narrative outline. In 1977 James Earl Ray escaped from prison and remained on the run for fifty hours, chased by hundreds of armed officers, dogs, helicopters with searchlights, through a forest in the mountains of Tennessee. They found him hiding in a ditch, cold and starved, crouching under a layer of branches in an area infested with snakes.

The novel writes itself while I type away at the computer and also while I sit quietly and pensively with both hands on the edge of the table. It writes itself now as I travel on Tram 28 to meet with you at a pub you found on the corner of a sloping street, near the Bicas Elevator and the viewpoint of Santa Catarina. After dinner, we’re going to Caios de Sodre to see the lights of the bars and peek inside those doorways and stairways where he would have disappeared with women in tight skirts and high heels echoing on the stone steps.

Where does a story begin, where does it end? Don Quixote learns that Gines de Pasamonte, one of the criminals he released with great folly, is writing his autobiography. Don Quixote asked him if he has finished it, and Gines responds  "How can it be finished, when my life is not yet finished?” We have been apart all afternoon and I’m dying to see you. Perhaps from the sidewalk, I will catch a glimpse of your face before you notice. To love the face is to love the soul.

Tram 28 rises and falls like a sailboat on the rolling waves of Lisbon’s hills. Alone in her room at the Lorraine Motel, her eyes wide open in the dark, stunned by the unreality of pain, hearing the sounds of police sirens and fire trucks in the distance, Memphis in flames, Georgia Davis notices a sound above her ceiling, a rubbing, a scraping. She comes out of her room and stands in the empty parking lot under the red, blue and yellow of the motel sign. On the second floor, in front of room 306, custodians work quietly, scrubbing with sponges and rags the wall, the door, the floor to erase traces of blood.

The Press and the Law by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Journalists’ fly-by-night trade, as long as it lasts, is to outdo one another in snooping, conjecturing, and snatching whatever they can. Every encounter I had with the media in my first days in the West filled me with bewilderment; I was taken aback. An ill-defined feeling of resistance to their cheap tricks arose within me: my book about the perishing of millions had just burst onto the scene, and they were snipping a some puny weeds. Of course it was ungrateful on my part: was not the Western media, whatever its short-comings, the force that had offered me a pedestal to the world, rescuing me from persecution? Then again, they did not do this on their own: I was the one who waged the battle. The KGB knew full well that if they threw me in chains even more of my writing would be printed, which would backfire on them. It was, however, due to its penchant for sensationalism that the Western saved me, and fueled by the same penchant it was now demanding I make statements.

 I wrestled with a writer’s protective instinct, which had realized, even before my mind had, the danger of becoming a blatherer. I had been carried to the West on such a sweeping wave  that I could now talk endlessly, repeating myself in every which way, straying from the gift of writing. Political passion, of course, is embedded deep within me, and yet it comes after literature, it ranks lower. And if in our unfortunate land so many resourceful and active people had not perished, with physicists and mathematicians having to take up sociology and poets having to take up political oratory, I would have remained within the bounds of literature.

And here I clashed with the Western media. In its frenzied rampages it watched and stalked and photographed my every move. I had not bowed before the formidable Soviet Dragon – was I now to bow and scrape before these journalists of the West? Were they to ensnare me with glory? I did not need it! I had not clung to Khrushchev’s orbit even for a week, nor would I cling to theirs. All these methods disgusted me. “You are worse than the KGB!” My words instantly resounded throughout the world. So from my first days in the West I did much to ruin my relationship to the press; a conflict that was to continue for many years to come.

The Italian journalists informed me that they would be delighted to come to Zurich, that it would be no trouble whatsoever. They rented a banquet hall for the occasion at a nearby hotel. We went there at the appointed day and were quite taken aback: there were more than thirty of them, so energetic and lively; so engaged, their eyes fiery, their words passionate. The speech I had prepared, however, was much too complicated. I was still trapped in the flight between two worlds, not having yet acquired points of reference or an understanding of intellectual expectations; but I was already being besieged by the triumphant Western materialism that was eclipsing all spirituality. Consequently, I had prepared a speech for the Italian journalists that was like trying to push water uphill, a speech that far overshot the mark. While I sought to soar upward, I neglected to layout the basic questions. The eyes of the poor journalists glazed over at these abstruse heights, and after the ceremony a young journalist came up to me and said almost tearfully: “There is nothing you have just said that I can transmit to my readers. Could you perhaps say something more clear?”

What was strange was that the speech I gave came up against a wall of deafness and a sea of silence, as if my words had been neither uttered nor heard. Four years later I was to gather these same thoughts under the same rubric in my commencement address at Harvard, where my words resounded throughout America and the entire world. In the Western world the place where something is spoken or printed has a very diverse effect: something that is printed or said in the most refined European countries, such as France or England, has difficulty reaching the United States, while everything said in America, for some reason, resonates throughout the whole world. It is what physicists call an anisotropic medium.

 I invariably compared the people here in the West to the people back at home, and felt sad and puzzled by the Western world. Was it that people in the West were worse than people back in Russia? Of course not. But when the only demands on human nature are legal ones, the bar is much lower than the bar of nobleness and honor (those concepts having in any case almost vanished now), and so many loopholes open up for unscrupulousness and cunning. What the law compels us to do is far too little for humaneness: a higher law should be placed in our hearts too. I simply could not get used to the cold wind of litigation in the West.

I wanted that autumn, in my fervor, to state publicly that the whole system of book publishing and book-selling in the West did not foster the development of a spiritual culture. In past centuries writers wrote for a small circle of connoisseurs who in turn guided artistic taste, and high literature was created. But today publishers have their eye on mass sales, which so often entails indiscriminate tastes; publishers make gifts to booksellers to please them; authors, in turn, depend upon the mercy of their publishing houses. It is sales that dictate the direction of literature. But great literature cannot appear in such circumstances; there is no point even in getting one’s hopes up; it will not happen, despite unlimited ‘freedoms.’ Freedom alone is not yet independence, is not yet excellence. But I refrained from speaking out. Surely not all publishers were like this. ( And I was later to see they indeed were not all of that kind. There were publishers who did keep a moral compass.)

The world is an immense place and there are many paths to take, yet one’s own path is singular, narrow, and harried. Time, which saturates everything, flows on majestically, yet one’s own time is so brief, so insufficient.

Silence and solitude: without them I cannot manage. It was a great task for me to turn away from my work and drag my soul into this fleeting and fast-flowing political battle, initially by forcing myself, and then at full speed. The most difficult thing is overcoming one’s inertia, changing direction; once one is in motion, heading in the direction one has chosen, much less effort is needed. So I spent the whole feast of the Trinity, four days, working on my two (first) speeches in the U.S. and both were beginning to crystalize; the first basically about the Soviet Union as a state, the second about Communism as such.

Then a Russian émigré from the Senate staff, Victor Rediay, a wiry and energetic man from Poltava with a darkish complexion, drove me to Washington by car. It was a drive of many hours and as we were talking he gave me a taste of the seething and bilious tangles and intrigues of Washington’s inner circles, which turned out to be more sinister and heartless than I had pictured. The country was not being run by responsive and humane men but by cynical politicians. Whom among them could I hope to convinced, to sway? And to what end?

I was not in the least nervous – not that I expected to be, judging by my previous speeches; yet I had never experienced anything like this before. I felt as if I were standing on international heights, my words resounding and lasting. Released from the task of having to remember what I had to say, I now found the necessary freedom for every utterance and movement. I caught my audience off guard with my ‘Proletarians of all countries, unite!, as if a Soviet agitator has somehow appeared in their midst, but it was the announcement of Soviet prison-camp inmates reaching out to American trade unions .  .  . I believe that in all their fifty-eight years no one had lashed the Bolsheviks as harshly as I did with the two speeches I gave in Washington and New York.

Though I  came to the United States a year after my initial invitation, with the attention on me no longer so heated, the timing was still good. It is true that many people were stunned by my harsh tone, and television stations did not carry my speech, even though up on the balcony the cameras were rolling without pause. An angry big-city newspaper called my speech foolish, but others compared the two speeches I gave with Churchill’s Fulton speech (about Stalin’s ‘Iron Curtain’),. And I must say without undue modesty, that I agreed then with that assessment. A few years had to pass, as they now have, for me to leaf through those speeches and for me to be surprised at my confidence back then. As a result often great changes within me, I would not give such speeches today: I no longer see America as a close, faithful, and staunch ally in our quest for liberation as I had felt in those days. Today (1978) I would not be able to say this to an American public. It was all about how the different peoples of the world can understand one another despite their different experiences, and how their experience can be transmitted verbally. When I had given my Nobel Prize speech, I had thought that this was possible, and still believed it when I spoke before the Senate, but already six months to a year later I had lost all hope. In my speech I roused my listeners to strive for the international consciousness of a great people (all the while knowing that today’s politicians were far from being up to the task, and that the American electoral system, with its manic fanfare and powerful financial intervention, blocks the rise any one great and independent.

England encountered all my insolent statements with invariable politeness, and did not even show any anger when I stated with irony that, current events being what they are, Uganda was rising to be of greater importance than Britain. The British accepted my words and listened – but would any good come of it? The incorrigible vice of the world, to which any concept of the hierarchy of ideas is alien, lies in that no one person’s voice, no one person’s strength, can be remembered or acted upon,  everything passes by, shimmering and flickering, into a new diversity. A kaleidoscope.

 A leading Canadian television commentator lectured me that I presumed to judge the experience of the world from the viewpoint of my own limited Soviet and prison-camp experience. Indeed, how true! Life and death, imprisonment and hunger, the cultivation of the soul despite captivity of the body: how very limited that is compared to the bright world of political parties, yesterday’s numbers on the stock exchange, amusements without end, and exotic foreign travel.

The case of Stern against me ( that I had wrongly accused them of collaborating with the KGB) was the first time ,but I was to notice it in the future too: in legal clashes there is a physical sensation of tension in the upper chest, the tensing of muscles one feels in hand-to-hand combat, in this case a pointless tensing of muscles, since this is a combat of souls. It is not a combat for which souls are suited: it is too low for them, and therefore a degrading encounter. (And then there is a long-term effect, an emptiness in the chest). Legal battles are a profanation of the soul, an ulceration. As the world has entered a legal era, gradually replacing man’s conscience with law, the spiritual level of the world has sunk. The legal world! Nothing but chicanery! The Western court system is drowned in a litigious quagmire, choked by the letter of the law, the thread of its spirit lost, this affording crooks and swindlers the advantage. Not to  mention that a court case can drag on for months, even years, which works in these peoples’ favor.

On January 1, 1977 I went back to work. I spent all my waking hours without distractions: nothing but the February Revolution. It now seem strange to recall; that it was not too long ago, two years ago, a year ago- that I had been trying to rally Eastern Europe into a liberation movement, to rouse Western Europe and America to defend themselves and America to defend  themselves. Now I wanted nothing to happen in my life, no external events, nothing to be entered into my personal calendar- a sign of a happy life. If I were to work like this for three or four years, I would have a result in hand. I wanted to work until the entire experience of my lived life would be exhausted and I felt the need to get up and go into order to renew my perspective.

What use to me had been those positions on which I had taken such a strong stand here in the West, with people seeming to listen to me? All this was without real benefit, and my soul had not embraced it. I came to see more and more that the political West, the West of the media, and, of course, the Western business world, were not our allies – or were too dangerous to have as allies in restoring Russia. Looking back it is amazing that the unanimous support that had sustained me in my battle against the Soviet Dragon – the support the Western press and Western society, and even from within the Soviet Union – that incredible and unjustified groundswell that lifted me, had been triggered by a mutual lack of understanding. I, in fact, suited the all-powerful opinion of the Western political and intellectual elite as little as I did the Soviet rulers, or indeed the Soviet pseudo-intellectuals.

All the deadlines of history keep being pushed back, too slow for me and my constant, impatient forging ahead. Here in the West I could have fallen deep into despair had I not my work. Mountains of work, for years to come. You have to perform your duty first – and only then make your demands of History.
  
.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

“Today I sometimes think back to how confident I was only five years ago about the undisputed superiority of samizdat publications as opposed to official Soviet literature: even the samizdat Khronika Tekushchikh Sobytii (Chronicle of Current Events) seemed to me more significant in what it achieved than the state-controlled Novy Mir. But here in the West, “in total freedom,” there are already half a dozen magazines in Russian that are free from any oppression, and one would think that there would be nothing keeping them from rising to a level of excellence: nobody is repressing them, so why are they not rising? But not a single one of these pretentious magazines can come close to the cultural and aesthetic level of Novy Mir in its day, despite its having been assailed and fettered by censorship. None of these magazines have achieved the calm, dignified, and deep discourse that Novy Mir managed despite its having been shackled with such rigid confines.  And much of the national and popular spirit of Russia managed to prevail in Novy Mir, something that one does not find in magazines of the Third Emigration that, at best, distance themselves categorically from the vital problems of Russia. In my final Soviet years, fueled by my fiery battle against the regime, I overestimated both the samizdat and the dissident movement: I tended to consider these the central current of social thought and action, but it turned out to be a significant rivulet that was in no way connected with the core of life in the country. With their connections to the West, the dissidents disseminated information from their own circles rather than anything having to do with the people as a whole. In those years, with our offensive against the Soviet powers – saying we had no enemies except the Communist regime – we all seemed to  be a part of a single stream with a homogeneous historical consciousness. But I overestimated my own proximity to this ‘democratic movement,’ part of the reason being a legacy of the pre-revolutionary ideology of ‘liberation’ from which in those days I had still not managed to free myself. Furthermore, these dissidents were brave, self-sacrificing individuals without self-serving or hidden agendas. It truly admired them, particularly, of course, the 1968 protest in Red Square against the occupation of Czechoslovakia.

But in truth we had sprung from different roots, expressed different aspirations, and had nothing in common but the time and place of action. The line of my struggle had started a good deal earlier than theirs, and my dogged battle against the Bolsheviks was to continue into the future, towards greater clashes, greater demands than their flimsy slogans such as “Respect your own constitution.’ (One has to admit, however, that even though some of these dissidents did not want to see Communism fall apart, they did a fine job under mining its authority.)

The Real Day by Yuri Slezkine

Few apocalyptic millenarians live to see the promised apocalypse, let alone the millennium. Isaiah, Jesus, Muhammad, Karl Marx, and most of their followers did not.

But some did. Indeed, most definitions of ‘revolution’ – at least ‘real’ or ‘great’ revolutions, such as the Puritan, French, Russian, Chinese and Iranian ones – refer to regime changes in which apocalyptic millenarians come to power and contribute substantially to the destruction of the old order. ‘Revolutions,’ in most contexts, are political and social transformations that affect the nature of the sacred and attempt to bridge the Axial gap separating the real from the ideal. As Edmund Burke wrote in 1791:

There have been many internal revolutions in the government of countries .  .  . The present revolution in France seems to me to be quite of another character and description: and to bear little resemblance or analogy to any of those which have been brought about in Europe, upon principles merely political. It is a revolution of doctrine and theoretic dogma. It has much greater resemblance to those changes which have been made on religious grounds in which the spirit of proselytism makes an essential part.

The last revolution of doctrine and theory which has happened in Europe is the Reformation . .  . The principle of the Reformation was such as, by its essence, could not be local or confined to the country in which it had its origin.

According to Crane Brinton, revolution is the assumption of power by the ‘delirious’ idealists who expect realization of ‘heavenly perfection’. According to Martin Malia, it is a political transformation ‘perceived as the passage from a corrupt old world to a virtuous new one.’ And according to S. N. Eisenstadt, it is ‘the combination of change of regime with the crystallization of new cosmologies.” Great revolutions (as opposed to Burke’s internal ones) are ‘very similar to the institutionalization of the Great Religions and of the great Axial Civilizations.” They are the best of times, they are the worst of times; everyone goes direct to heaven, everyone goes direct the other way.

Revolution, in other words, is a mirror image of Reformation – or perhaps Revolution and Reformation are reflections of the same thing in different mirrors. The first refers to political reform that affects the cosmology; the second refers to cosmological reform that affects politics. The view that revolutions aspire to the creation of an entirely new world while reformations attempt to return to the purity of the original source is difficult to hold onto: Thomas Muntzer and the Munster Anabaptists were trying to bring about the fulfillment of a prophesy that had not yet been fulfilled. They believed that the way to perfection lay through the restoration of the Jesus sect, but they had no doubt that what they were building was ‘’a new heaven and a new earth,’ not the old Garden of Eden. The new Jerusalem was to prelapsarian innocence what the kingdom of freedom was to ‘primitive communism.’ All reformations (as oppose to theological or ritual reforms) are revolutions insofar as they assume that ‘it is not enough to change some of these Laws, and so to reform them’. All revolutions are ‘revolutions of the saints’ insofar as they are serious about ‘insatiable utopias.’ As Thomas Case told the House of Commons in 1641:

 “Reformation must be Universal. All the wives, with such that are born of them. There must not be a wife or a child dispensed withal, in this public Reformation .  .  .Reform all places, all persons, all callings. Reform the Benches of Judgments, the inferior Magistrates .  . .Reform the Church, go into the Temple . . .overthrow the tables of these Money- changers, whip them that buy and sell .  . . Reform the Universities, . . .Reform the Cities, reform the Countries, reform inferior schools of learning, reform the Sabbath, reform the Ordinances, the worship of God, etc.

There was more to reform; there was nothing that did not need reforming. They had everything before them; they had nothing before them. They were all going direct to heaven, they were all going direct the other way. The key to salvation was firmness:

“You have more work to do than I can speak .  .  . Give leave only to present to you the Epitome and compendium of your great work, summed up by our Savior, Mathew 15:13. Every plant which my heavenly Father hath not planted, shall be rooted up. Behold here a double Universality of number and extent.

Every plant, be what it will, though it be never so like a flower, though it seems as beautiful as a Lilly, which Solomon in all his robes could not outshine. Every plant, whether it be a thing, or person, order or ornament, whether in Church, or in Commonwealth, where ever, what ever, if not planted of God, you must look to it, not to prune it only, or slip it, or cut it . . .but pulled up . . .not broken off, then it may grow, and sprout again, but pulled up by the very roots. If it be not a plant of God’s planting, what do’s it in the Garden: out with it, root and branch, every plant, and every whit of every plant.

And just as Jesus explained the meaning of the Parable of the Weeds (“the weeds are the sons of the evil one, ”who will be thrown “into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth’) so did Thomas Case, to the same effect. The Puritan Reformation ,like the one that Jesus launched, had little to do with forgiveness.

“I know men will cry out, Mercy, Mercy, but oh no mercy against poor souls; such mercy will be but foul murder . . .Shew no mercy therefore, to pull guilt and blood upon your own heads; now the guilt is theirs, if you let them go, you will translate their guilt upon your own souls. You remember what the prophet told Arab, I Kings 20:42 Because thou hast let go out of thy hand, a man whom I appointed to utter destruction, therefore thy life shall; go for his life, and thy people for his people.”

 .                   .                           .                         .                                .

All millenarians practice self-monitoring and mutual surveillance with the purpose of identifying and punishing heterodoxy. What makes them both more anxious and more hopeful than other besieged fortresses is that the current set of enemies is going to be the last one ‘ The Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials and to hold the unrighteous for punishment on the day of judgment.

 The fact that it happened before is the best guarantee that it will never- after the coming day of judgment – happen again. The unrighteous are like animals , “born only to be caught and destroyed” and ‘like animals they too will perish”- this time for good.

The Bolsheviks lived in such a besieged fortress. The Revolution and Civil War involved the use of ‘concentrated violence’ against easily classifiable enemies from the top of Bukharin’s list ( ‘parasitic strata,’ unproductive administrative aristocracy,’ bourgeois entrepreneurs as organizers and directors,’ ‘skilled bureaucrats’ and their properly uniformed and color-coded defenders. The purges of the 1920s confronted the revolutionaries’ great disappointment ( as Pete did in his Second Epistle, whose main subject was the apparent non-fulfillment of the prophesy). The third and final battle was the Stalin revolution against the remaining targets from Bukharin’s list, including ‘technical intelligentsia,’ ‘well-off peasantry,’ ‘middle and, in part, petty urban bourgeoisie,’ and ‘clergy, even the unskilled kind.’ The Seventeenth Party Congress of 1934  had then proclaimed victory, provisionally pardoned the doubters, and inaugurated the reign of the saints.

There were no open enemies left. One of the most important and least discussed consequences of the proclamation of victory in 1934 was the assumption that most Soviets were now ‘non-Party Communists.’ There was no act of collective baptism accompanied by the expulsion of nominal unbelievers, as in the case of the Munster Anabaptists or fully ‘reconquered Spain, but the outcome was the same: all subjects were by definition believers, and all the remaining corruption was a matter of heresy and apostasy, not enemy resistance. The Party’s main instrument of maintaining internal cohesion was no longer concentrated violence but the ‘transverse section of the soul’ ( as the administrative director of the State New Theater put it, apropos of The Other Side of the Heart). Bukharin called it ‘coercive discipline’: ‘the less voluntary inner discipline there is . . .the greater the coercion. Even the proletarian avant-garde, consolidated in the party of insurrection, must establish such coercive self-discipline in its own ranks; it is not strongly felt by many elements of this avant-garde because it coincides with internal motives, but it exists nonetheless.’ Since 1920, when he wrote this, Bukharin had experienced several occasions on which to feel it; now in the wake of the victory celebration that he had joined as part of the ‘supply train’, every Soviet citizens was ,theoretically, in  his position.

How effective were coercive discipline and self-discipline? On the one hand, family apartments were filling up with nephews and tablecloths; Don Quixotes were being replaced by Sancho Panzas; and Izrail Veitser was marrying Natalia Stats and buying himself a suit. On the other- and much more consequentially, according to Arosev’s diary- a combination of schooling, newspaper reading, and ‘work on the self’ was producing  such ‘non-Party Bolsheviks’ as Volodia Ivanov and Lyova Fedotov [self-sacrificing communist youth]. Socialism was a matter of time, and time was apparently elusive but ultimately predictable. As Peter wrote in that same epistle ‘do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.’

The same was true of history, which took its time while economic and social preconditions sorted themselves out and Volodia  Ivanov and Lyova Fedotov ‘worked on themselves.’ The enemy was still at the gate. And hen-and-rooster problems continued to get in the way, but, in the annus mirabilis of 1934, most signs seemed to indicate that the Bolsheviks were going to heed Peter’s warning and be steadfast and patient lest they be led away with the error of the wicked. And then, on December 1, the telephone rang.

There are two reasons why the assassination of a prominent but undistinguished Party official resulted in a vast moral panic that changed everything.[1.]

The first was domestic. The House of Government was as much a besieged fortress inside the Soviet Union as the Soviet Union was in the wider world. The assumption that most Soviets were now converts to communism implied that some open enemies were now hidden; that coercive discipline might require additional scrutiny; and that Fedor Kaverin’s production of The Other Side of the Heart  (which had suggested that friend and foe might be twin brothers) may have been correct, after all. At the same time, Party officials were as much under siege in their House of Government apartments as the House of Government was inside the Soviet Union. Hens and roosters were doing what hens and roosters do – at a pace that the builders of eternal houses could only dream of. The saints were reigning over a swamp.

The second reason was international. The Soviet Union had always been  a besieged fortress, but just as victory was being proclaimed at the Seventeenth Party Congress, an effective metaphor was becoming a geopolitical reality. In the east, Japan had occupied Manchuria and approached the Soviet border. In the west, the birthplace of Marxism and Russia’s traditional model and antipode had been taken over by a hostile apocalyptic sect. Fascism, long seen by the Bolsheviks as the ultimate expression of capitalist aggression, as a modern version of nativist ressentment of the Old Testament variety. The scorned chosen tribes of a degraded Europe were to rise up against Babylon and restore their wholeness, one a a time. Some were trying, with varying degrees of conviction, but only in Germany would the movement reach millenarian proportions, takeover the state, proclaim the third and final Reich, and set out to fulfill its own prophesy by preparing for one final battle.. What Edom and the ‘tall Sabeans’ had been to biblical Hebrews and what white people were to Enoch Mgijima’s and Ras Tafari’s Israelites, the international Jewry was to the German Fuhrer. As Hitler would say to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, “Should the international Jewry of finance succeed, both within and beyond Europe, in plunging mankind into yet another world war, then the result will not be a bolshevization of the earth and the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”

Like the Bolsheviks (but unlike most millenarians), Hitler was in a position to bring about what he has prophesized. Like the Bolsheviks (and many other millenarians), he led his people against an enemy whose power was largely esoteric. It was the same enemy- but whereas the Bolsheviks thought of it as a class, the Nazis thought of it as a tribe. Each considered the other a blind instrument in the service of Babylon. Both followed Marx, but Hitler did not know it (and the Bolsheviks did not know it about Hitler and did not usually read Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and “On the Jewish Question.” The final battle (Endkampf, or the poselednii i reshitel’nyi boui of the ‘Internationale’) would reveal who was the beast and who treaded the wine-press of divine wrath. The key victory was draining the swamp.

The search for Kirov’s assassins started at the top and aimed at the fallen angels . . . .and spread outwards, from the former leaders of the world revolution to vaguely defined social and ethnic categories consisting of anonymous, interchangeable individuals. After the February-March plenum of 1937, the people’s commissars were given one month to draw up detailed plans for the ‘liquidation of the consequences of the destructive work of saboteurs, spies and wreckers’ . . .there was no longer such a thing as a mistake, accident, or natural disaster. According to the campaign’s logic, any deviation from virtue– not only in human thought and deed, but in the world at large- was the result of deliberate sabotage by well-organized agents of evil.

Most orthodox Bolsheviks felt guilty by virtue of being Bolsheviks, everyone at some time or the other had had doubts about the Communist point of view and expressed them. Everyone had made slips and mistakes that could be regarded as crimes from the point of view of the system. They were all guilty of ‘gentry-estate self-satisfaction’, of allowing the swamp back into the House of Government, of being surrounded by beds, maids, carpets, nephews, and mothers-in-laws, they could see the blurring of the line between one’s own pocket and the state and a return of the bourgeois attitude to one’s material well-being. But  most of all, they were guilty of inner doubt and impure thoughts. The Bolshevik conception f sin was identical to Augustine’s (‘a thought, words and deed against the Eternal Law)’. When it came to crimes against the Party, which stood for eternal law, thoughts were not radically different from words, and words were not radically different from deeds. And when it came to the Party’s Inquisition, sins were not radically different from crimes.

 Witch hunts begin abruptly, as violent reactions to particular events, and die down gradually, for no apparent reason. Participants have difficulty remembering and explaining what has happened an try to avoid talking or thinking about it . . . Having woken up after the orgy, the last act of Stalin and the surviving members of the inner circle was  to get rid of those who administered it.


The Russian Orthodox, unlike the Russian Jews and Old Believers, had never known a Reformation or Counter-reformation and had never been taught how to deal with a Big Father who was always watching (and could never be bribed, flattered or evaded); how to think of salvation as a matter of ceaseless self-improvement (as opposed to happy accident, deathbed repentance, or the sudden descent of collective grace); or how to forestall censorship with self-censorship, police surveillance with mutual denunciation, and state repression with voluntary obedience.

Bolshevism, in other words, was Russia’s Reformation: an attempt to transform peasants into Soviets, and Soviets into self-monitoring, morally vigilant modern subjects. The means were familiar –confessions, denunciations, excommunications, and self-criticism sessions accompanied by regular tooth-brushing, ear-washing and hair-combing –but the results were not comparable. In  the House of Government and in certain well-drained parts of the Swamp, there were plenty of people who felt permanently guilty and worked tirelessly on themselves, but, by the time the children of the Revolution had become parents themselves, there was little doubt that most Russians still drew a rigid line between themselves and authority and still thought of discipline as something imposed from the outside. The Bolshevik Reformation was not a popular movement: it was a massive missionary campaign mounted by a sect that proved strong enough to conquer an empire but not resourceful enough to either convert the barbarians or reproduce itself at home. In the meantime, the founder’s children  had moved from the romance of those embarking on a new quest to the irony of those who had seen it all before. This is true of all human lifetimes (senile romanticism is almost as unappealing as infantile irony), but not all historical ages (some of which take centuries to complete). The Soviet Age did not last beyond one human lifetime.

[1.] Scapegoats are sacrificed everywhere, all the time: symbolically (in myths, films, tales, and temples) and in the flesh. Some societies succeed in limiting sacrificial offerings to special occasions; others have to improvise acts of atonement in response to unexpected catastrophes. Sects, or ‘faith-based groups radically opposed to a corrupt world,’ are besieged fortresses by definition. Millenarian sects, or sects living on the eve of the apocalypse, are in the grip of a permanent moral panic. The more intense the expectation, the more implacable the enemies; the more implacable the enemies, the greater the need for internal cohesion; the greater the need for internal cohesion, the more urgent the search for scapegoats.

Calvinism and the Disciplinary Revolution by Philip S. Gorski

Writing some twenty years ago, Gerald Helman and Steven Ratner decried  ‘a disturbing new phenomena: ‘the failed nation-state’ characterized by ‘civil, strife, government breakdown, and economic privation’. In truth, it is the successful nation-state that is really new, but the ‘failed states’ concept caught on quickly. In 2005 Foreign Affairs even began publishing a ‘failed states index,’ an annual ranking of all members of the United Nations sorted into five discrete categories: ‘critical’, ‘in danger’, ‘borderline’, ‘stable’ and ‘most stable.’ Interestingly, the last category is exclusively populated by small European states (e.g., Sweden and Belgium) and settler colonies (e.g., New Zealand and Australia). Meanwhile, no Western states appear in the bottom three  categories. Why are so many of the ‘strong states’ European states and their off-springs? Today, the canonical answer in historical sociology, comparative politics and international relations is what is colloquially known as the ‘Tilly thesis’: “war makes the state, and the state makes war.” By now, this war-centric or bellicist account of state formation has migrated out of academic discourse and into the received wisdom of the chattering classes. So much so, in fact, that some commentators now argue that the best remedy for ‘state failure’ is to ‘give war a chance,’ to simply allow the Darwinian logic to play itself  without any outside ‘interference’ (Luttwak, 1999). Should hard-headed policy makers heed this tough-love line? They should only if a strong version of the Tilly thesis actually holds for western Europe.  Unfortunately for Tilly – and fortunately for Africa- it does not .  .  . I argue that the bellicist model operates with an inadequate model of the  state itself, which blinds us to other important effects that the reformation movement had on early modern politics.  In the conclusion I seek to give war its due – but only its due.


Since Max Weber, social scientists have generally traced the historical impact of Calvinism to John Calvin’s theology, especially as expressed in his doctrine of predestination and its importance for economic action. I offer a somewhat different interpretation of Calvinism as doctrine, movement and ideology.

Weber stressed how Calvin’s doctrine of the ‘calling’ harnessed the ideal interest of the believer to work and accumulation. But he did not emphasize to the same degree the way in which Calvin’s doctrine of ‘justification’ channeled the individual’s energy into a refashioning of the self. Justification, according to Calvin, was a process through which ‘by God’s Spirit we are regenerated into a new spiritual nature’, able to live in perfect obedience to God’s law as revealed in the Bible. Growing faith, Calvin believed, was manifested in the attainment of ‘voluntary’ and ‘inward’ obedience. One might say that Calvinist ‘this-worldly asceticism’ consisted not only of a ‘work ethic’ but an ethic of self-discipline. In order to maintain self-discipline, the Calvinists employed a wide variety of techniques, many of them derived from long-standing monastic practices. These included regular devotional readings, frequent prayer, and moral logbooks or journals. Yet why would anyone voluntarily adhere to such a harsh creed? Part of the answer no doubt lied in purely religious needs and interests. But self-discipline also contained a status claim – that is, a claim to moral superiority. While this claim likely exercised a general attraction , it had a particularly strong ‘affinity’ to the interests of political elites, whether bourgeois or aristocratic, for self-discipline could buttress or even replace birth as a sign of fitness to rule. The Calvinist ethic was therefore suited not only to justifying the economic activities of a nascent economic class but also to legitimizing the domination of rising political elites.  

It should be emphasized that Calvin devoted most of his life not to theology but to building the Reformed church. Indeed, it might be argued that his magnum opus was not the Institutes but rather his Ecclesiastical Ordinances, which served as the charter for the Geneva church and the blueprint  for Reformed churches through-out Europe. The Ordinances prescribed a decentralized, federalistic organization, leaving considerable autonomy to the individual congregations. Churches were represented by their pastors in regional gatherings (classes or presbyteries). The classes, in turn, sent delegates to regional and national synods that met when matters of wider concern were to be discussed. While the clergy dominated the regional and national organizations. The laity bore considerable responsibility within each church. Lay elders were charged with maintaining ‘discipline’ – that is, with supervising the morals (both public and private) of the congregation. To this end, they might interview church members several times a year before communion and administer appropriate reprimands or punishments if necessary. Moreover, because the elders most often came from the social elite, disciplinary actions often carried the threat of social sanctions as well. In sum, the Reformed church exerted a continuous, quasi-monastic control over the daily lives of its members through surveillance mechanisms, which, moreover, functioned independently of sacerdotal authority or hierocratic organization. Effective church discipline depended entirely on the diligence of the laity. Again, it may be asked why anyone would submit themselves to this unrelenting surveillance. No doubt purely religious motivations were important but the disciplinary strategies inherent in the organization of the Reformed churches may have themselves exercised and independent appeal to institution-building elites - and even for those in the popular classes who valued order.

As Weber pointed out, the Calvinists themselves were strong proponents of social and political reform. This was evident  in the Ecclesiastical Ordinances  , which provided for the election of deacons whose task was to uphold public order and morality, in particular by managing the charitable undertakings of the congregation- such as hospitals, orphanages, poorhouses, and so on. Ordinary  church members were also generally expected to support these efforts with their money and time. The reformist spirit of Calvinism was also manifest on the ideological level. Calvin had cautiously articulated the vision of a ‘godly commonwealth’, modeled on the polity of the ancient Jews, in which religious and secular leaders would cooperate in effecting a radical Christianization of society. Adapting to historical circumstance, Calvin’s followers refashioned his ideas into a revolutionary defense of traditional privileges and communal liberty which packed considerable appeal among traditional urban and landed elites whose power was threatened by the encroachment of the Crown. Calvin’s political thought therefore provided an intellectual and religious basis for republican theories of government. Thus, in contrast to earlier ascetic reform movements, Calvinism’s ethic contained a strong social component. 

To summarize, what gave Calvinism its revolutionary potential was that it conjoined (1) an ethic of self-discipline with (2) potent organizational strategies and (3) a world-changing vision of a godly commonwealth.