Fevers of Rebellion
Manor, F.S.
"Fevers of Rebellion" Muggeridge: Well, only a bit of it—it bled. She was cutting his hair for him. Like all these harridans who gathered around Lawrence, an atrocious woman. And so that's all I really know about him. In...
...In 1339, Bologna struggled to separate from Milan, and so it went on all over Italy, with a rebellious faction within a city achieving separation and a reversal of alliances at the expense of the ruling faction...
...Already, Quebec maintains a substantial embassy in Paris...
...One belief, more than any other, is responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the altars of the great historical ideals —justice or progress or happiness of future generations, or the sacred mission or emancipation of a nation or race or class," Prof...
...the Karens from Thailand and Burma...
...Like a candle wasting...
...The term has now been codified in the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines ideology as "a systematic scheme of ideas, usually relating to politics or society, or to the conduct of a class or group, and regarded as justifying actions, especially one that is held implicitly or adopted as a whole and maintained regardless of the course of events...
...Nolte: What is that...
...In 428 B.C., Mitylene and Lesbos, Athens' allies upon an equal footing and paying no tribute to Athens, revolted against the Athenian imperial power...
...Nolte: Have you never sacrificed sense for a melodious phrase...
...It was thus in Mussolini's Italy where, in "redeemed" South Tyrol, Italian was forced upon the German-speaking minority...
...The children will know no English to break out of the ghetto...
...Today the same idea continues to inflame the hearts of the Palestinians, the Irish Republican Provos, the Kurds...
...As a mid-19th-century British historian, George Grote, wrote, the revolts of the allies against the Athenian empire "were revolts of instinct much more than consequences of oppression...
...The cities were thus prey to perpetual intrigues, armaments, leagues, corruption, and treason...
...The Anschluss, Guernica—all the names At which those poets thrilled or were afraid For me mean schools and schoolmasters and games...
...Much was heard about Arab terrorism, and there were Palestinians in refugee camps, but nobody then spoke of a "Palestinian homeland...
...Nolte: I knew that...
...What we witness here is a fissile clannishness of "us" and "them," yet the "us" need not be derived from a "common tie of blood relationship" as postulated by the German ideologues who inspired Germany's "war of liberation" against Napoleon...
...The interim SALT agreement of 1972 established a distinct Soviet advantage in missile throw-weight, expected to be four-to-one in 1980...
...And in the process some-one is betrayed...
...Like the sign of Cain on our foreheads, ideology disfigures mankind's countenance, a sign that no cool reason or logical enlightenment can wash away...
...The child's mental capacity will be fully occupied in trying to master this foreign tongue, which few will learn properly anyhow...
...With the end of the British mandate in 1948, the Palestinians more or less vanished, the West Bank having been annexed by Jordan and the Gaza Strip being under Egyptian rule...
...One could thus begin with the Old Testament: After all, it was biblical Israel that separated from Judah and we still have to live with the consequences...
...Most authorities argue that separatism is the misshapen offspring of 19th-century nationalism...
...Arafat can wave at customs officers a diplomatic passport issued by his own foreign office...
...With all respect...
...3) How well-behaved these small peoples were was vividly described by General Tasker Bliss, an aide to President Woodrow Wilson during the Versailles Peace Conference: "If I ever had any illusions, they are dispelled...
...or one that wishes to link the land it inhabits with a country with which it professes to have a close kinship...
...How many even to a technical school...
...Where the nine Canadian provinces (the equivalents of states in the U.S...
...Thus, the irrationality of ideology, "a prescriptive doctrine that is not subject to argument," has been duly enshrined in the code of the English langauge...
...Meanwhile, new separatist movements arise, such as that of the Palestinians, an entity artificially created by the British in 1918, F.S...
...If the Soviets were to launch a preemptive assault in Central Europe, conventional NATO forces alone would be unable to stop it...
...In Quebec, children of parents whose mother tongue is not English—largely Italians, Greeks, and Portuguese—must attend French schools whatever the wishes of the parents...
...What better could you have done...
...However, in 1967, following the Six-Day War, a band of determined men created a spurious nation and a genuine terrorist organization, and today hardly a day passes without the issue of a future Palestinian state being discussed by statesmen, international organizations, and the media...
...He, at least, had the charms of Coppet to enjoy, the prospect of Lake Leman, and the charms of Madame de Stael...
...Somewhere, there was a piece of land occupied by others but rightfully belonging to the Germans (the Sudeten, for instance), to the Slovaks, the Poles, the Lithuanians, and so on, and so on...
...What chance will these children have on this English-speaking continent...
...One year later, Seymour Martin Lipset, again in Encounter, wrote about "Ideology & No End...
...Hans Kohn writes that very soon after its birth, "Nationalism became the self-centred demand for one's own emancipation, not the promise of a universal emancipation...
...the third was himself, and he had forgotten all about it...
...have legislatures, Quebec, like Paris, has a National Assembly (with capital letters...
...At present, American strategic arms policy aims at "parity" with the Soviet Union through Strategic Arms Limitation Talks...
...And all their feats quite strictly fabulous...
...Manor is senior editorial writer for the Winnipeg Free Press...
...The envoys spoke of their islands' security, but no doubt one of the prime motives of the islands' secession was their distinct dialect...
...The picture shows two English rustics discussing a passerby: "Who's 'im, Bill...
...In 1232, Verona "separated" from Milan, which headed the Guelph (pro-papal) League...
...perhaps, I was more guilty than others...
...Nolte: In what instance were you doing the second-rate...
...How many will make it to a university...
...What, The American Spectator December 1977 15 however, is most ominous for the future of North America is the havoc the social and political maladjustment of the leaders of the Parti Quebecois may wreak upon Canada...
...adinfinitum...
...In the backward parts of Europe and even (where better things might have been expected) in Germany, the sentiment of nationality so far outweighs the love of liberty that the people are willing to abet their rulers in crushing the liberty and independence of any people not of their race or language...
...How much does such a craving for status influence the determination of the leaders of the Parti Quebecois to break up Canada...
...4. Herbert Hoover, The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson (1958...
...Such historical-political exercise turned into a proving ground for SchleswigHolstein's Young Guard that was later to unfurl the banner of liberalism...
...You waste time whenyou do or say second-rate things when first-rate things are available...
...Ireland, Cyprus (the slogan of enosis, i.e., union with Greece, was resurrected by the late Archbishop Makarios in mid-July, shortly before his death), South Tyrol, or the Somali-inhabited parts of Ethiopia are examples that readily come to mind...
...Manor Fevers of Rebellion Craving self-determination and status, Irishmen murder their fellow Irishmen, Basques slaughter Basques, Arabs massacre Israeli athletes, and South Moluccans hijack Dutch trains...
...In the dark abyss of the night, I sometimes wonder what on earth you could have done with your life, better than you have done, and are doing...
...In Brussels, government snoopers eavesdrop on family conversations to ascertain whether the family truly speaks French at home, and thus whether its children are entitled to attend French schools...
...the Nagas want to secede from India...
...Isaiah Berlin writes in one of his essays...
...Ideology, officially pronounced dead more than once, forever rises again, like an evil Manichaean phoenix, to cast its baleful influence upon the history of mankind...
...Somewhere there always is a minority that wishes to separate and lead an independent existence...
...How proud were the nationalist ideologues of the late 1920s and 1930s: "They flattered the vanity of nations, they have fed full the arrogance with which each nation flings its superiority in the face of its neighbors...
...The vogue expression was "irredentism," a term coined in late 19th-century Italy and coming from terra irredenta, unredeemed land...
...When it was over, we believed with Sir Lewis Namier that national feeling was at long last recognized for the obsession it is...
...the Meo hill tribes from Laos and Cambodia...
...2. Hans Kohn, The Age of Nationalism (1962...
...For NATO, the implications of this shift in the strategic balance are profound...
...and on and on...
...A mere 35 years ago—the span of a single generation—millions were slaughtered for the great historical ideal of a thousand-year Reich...
...Status and ideology thus become inextricably mixed, but it is ideology that bestows a mantle of sham respectability upon nationalism, old and new...
...Kissinger maintained that the greater accuracy of American MIRV'd (multiple independently-targeted reentry vehicle) missiles made up for the throw-weight difference, the Soviets have achieved significant breakthroughs in MIRV technology since 1972...
...In journalism, for instance, there is an inevitable pursuit of the second-rate...
...That strategic superiority, however, has been considerably reduced since the Cuban missile crisis...
...They will not know a French that is as good as that of the native French-speakers...
...The medieval internecine wars between Italian city-states are particularly apt examples of the irrationality of separatist sentiments...
...Nowadays, Lake Leman is polluted, and the spiritual descendants of Madame de Stael have joined Women's Lib...
...4) The lofty, liberating ideal of the nineteenth century, the liberating romantic nationalism, ended in the exaggerated and distorted form of Fascism—"as the culmination and bankruptcy of the mystical patriotism which animated the national movements of the time...
...1) By mid-19th century, the majority of European continental Liberals had grown more nationalistic than liberal...
...Nothing has changed since those days...
...Muggeridge: It is an error, but the point is that insofar as one has chosen the second-rate, and there's a great deal of choosing of second-rateness in life, perhaps particularly today, time was wasted...
...Arafat complained that he had to travel on Libyan, Algerian, and other passports, an intolerable situation...
...so suffice it to say that they threaten the existence of Canada, Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and, given half a chance, the Soviet Union...
...F.S...
...It was thus in 19th-century Hungary, which as soon as it was placed—in 1867—on an equal footing with Austria, began to 14 The American Spectator December 1977 oppress its non-Magyar minorities...
...In 1843, Germans expounding Liberal doctrines in Schleswig-Holstein "stood for the 'living right' to freedom of every nation, and condemned as obsolete the 'historical right' (i.e., of supranational kingdoms...
...The child-nations that we are creating have fangs and claws in their very cradles and before they can walk they are screaming for knives to - cut the throats of those in the neighboring cradles...
...and though Mr...
...Since its establishment in 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has ably carried out its mission of deterring war with the Soviet Union and its allies, and keeping their vast armies from advancing westward across the Elbe...
...in 1971, another collection of essays, published in Chicago, indicated by a question mark the growing skepticism about the true state of the official corpse...
...Or, to put it in contemporary terms, their inhabitants, who spoke an Aeolic dialect, seceded...
...6) Today this ideological nationalism has been revived in the garb of separatism to bring back the horrors pithily summed up a generation ago by the late Sir Lewis Namier, the one-time dean of British historians: National feeling was hailed in 1848 as a great and noble force which was to regenerate Europe, and it is denounced today as an obsession which has brought ruin upon her...but from the outset it was the expression of social and political maladjustment, and has since been at least as much the vehicle as the source of destructive passions...
...And now, the same destructive nationalisms are back in fashion...
...Prof...
...Nolte: But one cannot always say first-rate things...
...One wonders what the gospel of separatism will bring to North America: Fundamentally, there is little ideological difference between the urbane, civilized, and educated Rene Levesque, the separatist premier of Quebec, and the nomads, armed by the Soviet Union, who in the name of the Polisario separatist movement roam the Sahara desert and shoot up their opponents...
...Isaiah Berlin writes, "is the notion that answers to problems exist not in rational solutions, but in the removal of the problems themselves by means other than thought and argument...
...5. Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (1969...
...In those days one did not speak of separatism...
...There is a separatist movement in almost every country of Asia and Africa: In Lebanon such movements have wrecked what 18 months ago was a highly prosperous country...
...7) While it may seem unlikely that the present-day destructive passions of the Breton and Corsican separatists will succeed in breaking up France, it is less unlikely that the Scots and the Irish will conspire to break up Britain, or that Belgium will fall apart...
...and the gaps are widening still...
...Muggeridge: The first-rate is simply any single thing in one's life, any single relationship in one's life, that truly aspires after what is perfect...
...in Iraq, the Kurds are fighting a desperate guerrilla war...
...This craving for self-determination, the desire to be maitres chez nous, is invariably informed with an equally irresistible craving for status...
...This summer, the Indians and Eskimos of Northern Canada met to discuss the creation of an independent native state in Canada's Arctic...
...From Engels' scornful concept of ideology as false consciousness, ideology has become the proud badge of self-righteousness, whether sported by nationalists, Marxists, or present-day separatists...
...Muggeridge: Please...
...In recent years, however, in the face of ominous expansion and modernization of Soviet and Warsaw Pact conventional forces and the rapidly increasing sophistication of the Soviet strategic nuclear arsenal, it has become unclear whether NATO can still protect Western Europe...
...Deterrence, based on the still-plausible assumption of Soviet reluctance to risk nuclear holocaust, is now the subject of intense debate among Western military experts, who ask: Will they come...
...Muggeridge: No, but what I mean is that you deliberately or for interested motives relate yourself to the second-rate when the first-rate is accessible...
...I was a child during the First World War, a European civil war waged in the name of similar pernicious nationalism...
...Nolte: There you go, you see...
...and as to Spain and the Basques, anything may happen...
...Muggeridge: Oh, in hundreds of ways...
...Muggeridge: Well, I'm sure I don't have to say to you that that line comes from Shakespeare's sonnets...
...Mitylenean envoys then travelled to Sparta to appeal for help "in the spirit of Hellenic patriotism...
...The Quebecois, who in a self-deprecating demagoguery call themselves "white Negroes," are willfully creating an undereducated foreign proletariat, a new class of Helots to serve their French masters in humble, non-competitive positions...
...This, however, is to take too short a view of history...
...It is a narrow-minded clannishness succinctly The American Spectator December 1977 13 parodied in a Punch cartoon of 1854...
...At home the child spoke Italian, Greek, Portuguese, or some other foreign tongue...
...Plus ca change...
...It has always been instinct, never reason...
...when the Ottoman heritage was carved up by Britain and France...
...Even Shakespeare, after all, limped at times...
...To this day a Roman or a Milanese who buys a holiday home in an Italian village is always referred to as forestiere, a foreigner (etymologically: a barbarian who emerged from the unfriendly forest...
...the Ibos from Nigeria...
...Eave 'arf a brick at 'im...
...It was Theodore Roosevelt, rather than Woodrow Wilson, who argued that "The Austro-Hungarian and the Turkish Empire must be broken up if we intend to make the world even moderately safe for democracy...
...Of course, NATO force levels in Europe have never equalled the Edward J. Walsh, who served as a First Lieutenant in the U.S...
...It represents a peculiar fragmentation of common humanity, a built-in defect of the human psyche...
...Muggeridge: Well, touché, touch...
...Muggeridge: "Wasted" in that sense, of course, does not carry —and again I don't have to say this to you—precisely the same meaning as "wasted" does today...
...Nolte: Let me ask you one further question...
...As Jacob Burckhardt wrote in his classical work, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, in the 14th-century Italian republics and tyrannies we detect for the first time "the modern political spirit of Europe, surrendered freely to its own instincts [italics added], often displaying the worst features of unbridled egoism, outraging every right, and killing every germ of a healthier culture...
...Often the clannish cohesion against all outsiders arises fortuitously out of shared experience, as in an army platoon, or even a tank crew...
...You are connecting whom he knew with what he said...
...Edward J. Walsh The Next European War If the Soviets were to launch a preemptive assault in Central Europe, conventional NATO forces would be unable to stop it...
...Nor are the Quebecois alone in their outrageous educational policies...
...I. Otto Brandt, Geschichte Schleswig-Holsteins (1966...
...Marine Corps, works for the United States Industrial Council in Nashville, Tennessee...
...That this intolerant, destructive nationalism receives warm support from our contemporary liberal chic may sound incongruous, yet the attitude has deep roots in the history of liberalism...
...The Western world was about to reach a peak of affluence...
...3. Hans Kohn, op...
...Muggeridge: That's true, that's true...
...One of the elements of the new outlook," Prof...
...8. Donald Davie, Remembering the 'Thirties (1973...
...L'on immure a retre abstract les titres reels...
...A stranger...
...A few months ago, Yassir Arafat told David Frost that the Palestinians must have their own state because he had no passport of his own...
...For 28 years NATO governments have basked in the shadow of the American strategic umbrella, disdaining the grim proximity of huge Soviet armies...
...There would be an end to all ideology," Engels prophesied in 1886...
...The dismal procession of human folly never ends...
...Dreams of empires, commonwealths, and supranational bodies have all foundered on the rocks of man's innate parochialism...
...Edward Shils, writing in Encounter, authoritatively pronounced "the end of ideology...
...Traditionally, America's overwhelming strategic power provided the Atlantic Alliance with a credible challenge to Soviet ambitions and compensated for its relative weakness in conventional forces...
...The ideologues still have not drunk enough of their victims' blood...
...But I do think, as a matter of fact, that I did waste quite a lot of time, as almost anybody who looks back on his life must feel...
...it was called Decline of Ideology...
...But mostly, the minorities wish to become independent and join the United Nations, preferably as veto-wielding powers...
...Not so long ago a French-speaking, Quebec provincial cabinet minister was first kidnapped and then murdered by Quebec separatists...
...However, an illustration from ancient Greek history will do...
...Nolte: Your memoirs, which I am delighted by, are entitled Chronicles of Wasted Time...
...Some 45 years ago, as a young reporter, I toured Greek camps housing refugees from Asia Minor, an entire Greek population expelled by Kemal Pasha from homes they had inhabited for more than 2,500 years...
...Would NATO governments then resort to nuclear weapons or opt for life under Soviet domination...
...Only three people had ever understood the Schleswig-Holstein question, Viscount Palmerston, old and gouty, said apropos of yet another separatist imbroglio that from 1850 until 1864 convulsed Europe: One was the Prince-Consort and he was dead...
...In 1968, Funk & Wagnalls of New York published a collection of essays on The End of Ideology Debate...
...They are being condemned by the Quebec nationalists to a life as second-class citizens...
...Indeed, where separatism and nationalism are concerned, anything goes...
...or in Polish above and Ukranian below...
...whereupon the latter would rally and expel the rebels, and the whole process would begin again da capo...
...5) The romanticism of the Vaterland born in Germany out of the Napoleonic Wars, and of patria propagated by Italy's Risorgimento, first degenerated into...
...a Fascism that unleashed the Second World War, and has now been resurrected in the guise of mindless terrorism...
...Thus, old issues find no solution, while new ones are constantly being added...
...7. Lewis Namier, Vanished Supremacies (1956...
...2) This has eluded most exponents of nationalism, whether they were humanitarians, such as Thomas G. Masaryk, or shrewd politicians, such as Theodore Roosevelt...
...or the hijacking of Dutch trains, the peak of irrationality since there is no conceivable way whereby the Dutch could help the South Moluccans to obtain their independence...
...Nolte: That's an error that any fine writer would make...
...hence, bombs at airports...
...The latter has now largely gone out of fashion...
...In light of it, however, it doesn't surprise me to find in those lines an appalling sentimentality...
...In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, every city-state in central and northern Italy contained a faction that sought alliances to achieve power and expel the opposing party...
...Some such dictum could be applied to every separatist movement now afflicting our world...
...6. Julien Benda, The Betrayal of the Intellectuals (1927...
...Throughout my adolescence and young manhood I was haunted by petty national hatreds, by the "hereditary enmity" between the French and the Germans, the Hungarians and the Slovaks, the Poles and the Czechs, the Serbs and the Bulgars, the Romanians and the Russians—most of these irrational hatreds then compounded by an equally irrational and virulent anti-Semitism...
...Although that umbrella still protects them, the lately-recognized sophistication, mobility, and depth of Warsaw Pact conventional forces make war 16 The American Spectator December 1977...
...Moreover, the way the SALT agreements have come out, even "parity" may be chimerical...
...Nolte: Then give me an example of the first-rate...
...But I don't think much of the lines...
...Soviets' ; but a change in American nuclear policy makes these widening gaps quite frightening...
...Ideology is a tricky word: It was first coined by Friedrich Engels who defined it as "the elaboration of false consciousness," which, he wrote, was bound to disappear...
...et l'on offre au peuple en masse l'holocauste du peuple en detail (One sacrifices real beings to an abstract being...
...And now, instead of English, which is an easy language to master, the child is forced to learn French, a difficult language...
...Muggeridge: What is perfect is what fulfills in the highest degree man's destiny as a citizen of what Augustine called the City of God, not just as a sojourner in the Earthly City, which he rightly says disappears along with the earth itself, and which you say is the story of man...
...and one offers to the mass of people the holocaust of individual people), wrote Benjamin Constant...
...To list them all would probably fill a greater part of this magazine...
...But let us bow to the academics and their theory that we are dealing here with a modern phenomenon, a nationalism begat by the French Revolution...
...It is a phrase I like very much, and I was really saying almost what Proust said—A la recherche du temps perdu—that it was wasted time, time that had gone, that had been consumed...
...Could we stop them...
...Why do you call it Chronicles of Wasted Time...
...And these were the chronicles of time that had been consumed...
...The disparities in conventional forces now stand at 20,000 Soviet tanks to NATO's 7,000, 18,000 Soviet heavy artillery pieces to NATO's 6,000, and 920,000 readily available Soviet combat troops to NATO's 630,000...
...and in 1237, at the battle of Cortenuova, Milan and its allies, the cities of Alessandria, Como, Crema, Vercelli, Piacenza, and Novara, were defeated by the Ghibelline (pro-empire) forces led by Verona, Vicenza, and Padua...
...Indeed, wherever the separatists, or irredentists, or whatever the fashionable term for ultra-nationalists may be, have achieved their aim, their first step has always been to set up foreign embassies and unprofitable national airlines...
...How many more lives are to be sacrificed so that Mr...
...I have grown up amidst this nationalist ferment at a time when people killed one another over the life-anddeath issue of a street-name: whether it should be in Czech above and in German below, or vice versa (or in Italian above and German below...
...In 1955, Prof...
...A united Europe was being built...
...It means consumed...
...8) The young are betrayed, and so are we...
...There has to be because journalism is for today, and what is for today predominantly consists of the second-rate...
...It continued to rear its ugly head—as in the 1960s with the rise of the New Left —but the wishful thinking about its imminent demise continued...
...To "remove the problem" Irishmen murder their fellow Irishmen, Basques murder their fellow Basques, Arabs massacre Israeli athletes or supermarket shoppers, and Iraqis wipe out Kurdish villages...
...Yet, officially dead, it would not lie down...
...Last year, I toured camps on Cyprus housing Greek refugees expelled by the Turks from homes they had inhabited even longer...
...John Stuart Mill wrote in the Westminster Review of April, 1849 that "nationalism makes men indifferent to the rights and interests of any portion of the human species save that which is called by the same name and speaks the same language as themselves...
...another was a German professor and he had gone mad...
...The difficulty of mastering this medium of instruction will cause a substantial percentage of the immigrants' children to drop out of school altogether...
...It dawns upon the veterans after all That what for them were agonies, for us Are high-brow thrillers, though historical...
...Only in this way can we remove the menace of German aggression which has become the haunting night-mare for all civilisations, especially in the case of the small well-behaved liberty-loving peoples...
...the Tamils from Ceylon...
Vol. 11 • December 1977 • No. 2
