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...
...To list them all would probably fill a greater part of this magazine...
...Marine Corps, works for the United States Industrial Council in Nashville, Tennessee...
...Thus, old issues find no solution, while new ones are constantly being added...
...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...
...The Anschluss, Guernica—all the names At which those poets thrilled or were afraid For me mean schools and schoolmasters and games...
...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...
...Most authorities argue that separatism is the misshapen offspring of 19th-century nationalism...
...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...
...Plus ca change...
...They are being condemned by the Quebec nationalists to a life as second-class citizens...
...Muggeridge: Well, I'm sure I don't have to say to you that that line comes from Shakespeare's sonnets...
...The vogue expression was "irredentism," a term coined in late 19th-century Italy and coming from terra irredenta, unredeemed land...
...4. Herbert Hoover, The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson (1958...
...8. Donald Davie, Remembering the 'Thirties (1973...
...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...
...Such historical-political exercise turned into a proving ground for SchleswigHolstein's Young Guard that was later to unfurl the banner of liberalism...
...in Iraq, the Kurds are fighting a desperate guerrilla war...
...F.S...
...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...
...A united Europe was being built...
...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...
...Nolte: In what instance were you doing the second-rate...
...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...
...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...
...It is a narrow-minded clannishness succinctly The American Spectator December 1977 13 parodied in a Punch cartoon of 1854...
...In journalism, for instance, there is an inevitable pursuit of the second-rate...
...have legislatures, Quebec, like Paris, has a National Assembly (with capital letters...
...But I don't think much of the lines...
...it was called Decline of Ideology...
...This, however, is to take too short a view of history...
...or in Polish above and Ukranian below...
...However, an illustration from ancient Greek history will do...
...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...
...whereupon the latter would rally and expel the rebels, and the whole process would begin again da capo...
...6. Julien Benda, The Betrayal of the Intellectuals (1927...
...the Ibos from Nigeria...
...hence, bombs at airports...
...Nor are the Quebecois alone in their outrageous educational policies...
...It represents a peculiar fragmentation of common humanity, a built-in defect of the human psyche...
...2) This has eluded most exponents of nationalism, whether they were humanitarians, such as Thomas G. Masaryk, or shrewd politicians, such as Theodore Roosevelt...
...The envoys spoke of their islands' security, but no doubt one of the prime motives of the islands' secession was their distinct dialect...
...A stranger...
...At present, American strategic arms policy aims at "parity" with the Soviet Union through Strategic Arms Limitation Talks...
...et l'on offre au peuple en masse l'holocauste du peuple en detail (One sacrifices real beings to an abstract being...
...Today the same idea continues to inflame the hearts of the Palestinians, the Irish Republican Provos, the Kurds...
...And in the process some-one is betrayed...
...And these were the chronicles of time that had been consumed...
...At home the child spoke Italian, Greek, Portuguese, or some other foreign tongue...
...It means consumed...
...In light of it, however, it doesn't surprise me to find in those lines an appalling sentimentality...
...the Karens from Thailand and Burma...
...and the gaps are widening still...
...How many will make it to a university...
...the third was himself, and he had forgotten all about it...
...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...
...If the Soviets were to launch a preemptive assault in Central Europe, conventional NATO forces alone would be unable to stop it...
...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...
...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...
...What better could you have done...
...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...
...Why do you call it Chronicles of Wasted Time...
...The medieval internecine wars between Italian city-states are particularly apt examples of the irrationality of separatist sentiments...
...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...
...Nolte: Your memoirs, which I am delighted by, are entitled Chronicles of Wasted Time...
...They will not know a French that is as good as that of the native French-speakers...
...The picture shows two English rustics discussing a passerby: "Who's 'im, Bill...
...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...
...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 cities were thus prey to perpetual intrigues, armaments, leagues, corruption, and treason...
...One of the elements of the new outlook," Prof...
...There would be an end to all ideology," Engels prophesied in 1886...
...3. Hans Kohn, op...
...and on and on...
...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...
...Dreams of empires, commonwealths, and supranational bodies have all foundered on the rocks of man's innate parochialism...
...Manor is senior editorial writer for the Winnipeg Free Press...
...You waste time whenyou do or say second-rate things when first-rate things are available...
...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...
...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...
...adinfinitum...
...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...
...Soviets' ; but a change in American nuclear policy makes these widening gaps quite frightening...
...I. Otto Brandt, Geschichte Schleswig-Holsteins (1966...
...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...
...the Meo hill tribes from Laos and Cambodia...
...In 1955, Prof...
...What chance will these children have on this English-speaking continent...
...And now, the same destructive nationalisms are back in fashion...
...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...
...Mitylenean envoys then travelled to Sparta to appeal for help "in the spirit of Hellenic patriotism...
...Nolte: But one cannot always say first-rate things...
...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...
...1) By mid-19th century, the majority of European continental Liberals had grown more nationalistic than liberal...
...Muggeridge: Oh, in hundreds of ways...
...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: What is that...
...It has always been instinct, never reason...
...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...
...Of course, NATO force levels in Europe have never equalled the Edward J. Walsh, who served as a First Lieutenant in the U.S...
...How much does such a craving for status influence the determination of the leaders of the Parti Quebecois to break up Canada...
...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...
...Already, Quebec maintains a substantial embassy in Paris...
...For 28 years NATO governments have basked in the shadow of the American strategic umbrella, disdaining the grim proximity of huge Soviet armies...
...Where the nine Canadian provinces (the equivalents of states in the U.S...
...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...
...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...
...In 1968, Funk & Wagnalls of New York published a collection of essays on The End of Ideology Debate...
...Nolte: That's an error that any fine writer would make...
...Nolte: Let me ask you one further question...
...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...
...Prof...
...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...
...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...
...For NATO, the implications of this shift in the strategic balance are profound...
...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...
...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...
...a Fascism that unleashed the Second World War, and has now been resurrected in the guise of mindless terrorism...
...The interim SALT agreement of 1972 established a distinct Soviet advantage in missile throw-weight, expected to be four-to-one in 1980...
...Nolte: Have you never sacrificed sense for a melodious phrase...
...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...
...The difficulty of mastering this medium of instruction will cause a substantial percentage of the immigrants' children to drop out of school altogether...
...Muggeridge: That's true, that's true...
...5. Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (1969...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...perhaps, I was more guilty than others...
...Or, to put it in contemporary terms, their inhabitants, who spoke an Aeolic dialect, seceded...
...Arafat can wave at customs officers a diplomatic passport issued by his own foreign office...
...and one offers to the mass of people the holocaust of individual people), wrote Benjamin Constant...
...How many more lives are to be sacrificed so that Mr...
...A mere 35 years ago—the span of a single generation—millions were slaughtered for the great historical ideal of a thousand-year Reich...
...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...
...Isaiah Berlin writes in one of his essays...
...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...
...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...
...This craving for self-determination, the desire to be maitres chez nous, is invariably informed with an equally irresistible craving for status...
...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...
...And all their feats quite strictly fabulous...
...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...
...And now, instead of English, which is an easy language to master, the child is forced to learn French, a difficult language...
...Last year, I toured camps on Cyprus housing Greek refugees expelled by the Turks from homes they had inhabited even longer...
...The dismal procession of human folly never ends...
...Somewhere there always is a minority that wishes to separate and lead an independent existence...
...Arafat complained that he had to travel on Libyan, Algerian, and other passports, an intolerable situation...
...It was thus in Mussolini's Italy where, in "redeemed" South Tyrol, Italian was forced upon the German-speaking minority...
...How many even to a technical school...
...The latter has now largely gone out of fashion...
...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...
...Indeed, where separatism and nationalism are concerned, anything goes...
...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...
...Status and ideology thus become inextricably mixed, but it is ideology that bestows a mantle of sham respectability upon nationalism, old and new...
...In those days one did not speak of separatism...
...another was a German professor and he had gone mad...
...Nothing has changed since those days...
...Muggeridge: Please...
...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...
...It dawns upon the veterans after all That what for them were agonies, for us Are high-brow thrillers, though historical...
...the Nagas want to secede from India...
...2. Hans Kohn, The Age of Nationalism (1962...
...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...
...Eave 'arf a brick at 'im...
...7. Lewis Namier, Vanished Supremacies (1956...
...or one that wishes to link the land it inhabits with a country with which it professes to have a close kinship...
...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...
...Nolte: I knew that...
...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...
...You are connecting whom he knew with what he said...
...L'on immure a retre abstract les titres reels...
...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...
...The Western world was about to reach a peak of affluence...
...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...
...The children will know no English to break out of the ghetto...
...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...
...Some such dictum could be applied to every separatist movement now afflicting our world...
...That strategic superiority, however, has been considerably reduced since the Cuban missile crisis...
...I was a child during the First World War, a European civil war waged in the name of similar pernicious nationalism...
...Edward Shils, writing in Encounter, authoritatively pronounced "the end of ideology...
...Much was heard about Arab terrorism, and there were Palestinians in refugee camps, but nobody then spoke of a "Palestinian homeland...
...He, at least, had the charms of Coppet to enjoy, the prospect of Lake Leman, and the charms of Madame de Stael...
...The child's mental capacity will be fully occupied in trying to master this foreign tongue, which few will learn properly anyhow...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Meanwhile, new separatist movements arise, such as that of the Palestinians, an entity artificially created by the British in 1918, F.S...
...With all respect...
...Often the clannish cohesion against all outsiders arises fortuitously out of shared experience, as in an army platoon, or even a tank crew...
...Not so long ago a French-speaking, Quebec provincial cabinet minister was first kidnapped and then murdered by Quebec separatists...
...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...
...Could we stop them...
...and though Mr...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Would NATO governments then resort to nuclear weapons or opt for life under Soviet domination...
...Moreover, the way the SALT agreements have come out, even "parity" may be chimerical...
...Nolte: Then give me an example of the first-rate...
...One year later, Seymour Martin Lipset, again in Encounter, wrote about "Ideology & No End...
...This summer, the Indians and Eskimos of Northern Canada met to discuss the creation of an independent native state in Canada's Arctic...
...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...
...In 1232, Verona "separated" from Milan, which headed the Guelph (pro-papal) League...
...But mostly, the minorities wish to become independent and join the United Nations, preferably as veto-wielding powers...
...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...
...The ideologues still have not drunk enough of their victims' blood...
...when the Ottoman heritage was carved up by Britain and France...
...Like a candle wasting...
...When it was over, we believed with Sir Lewis Namier that national feeling was at long last recognized for the obsession it is...
...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...
...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...
...Muggeridge: Well, touché, touch...
...Even Shakespeare, after all, limped at times...
...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...
...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...
...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 Tamils from Ceylon...
...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...
...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...
...There has to be because journalism is for today, and what is for today predominantly consists of the second-rate...
...Nolte: There you go, you see...
...and as to Spain and the Basques, anything may happen...
...Yet, officially dead, it would not lie down...
...Nowadays, Lake Leman is polluted, and the spiritual descendants of Madame de Stael have joined Women's Lib...
...8) The young are betrayed, and so are we...
...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...
...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...
...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...
Vol. 11 • December 1977 • No. 2
